“I got a wife and kids. Oh, that reminds me, they’re probably wondering where I went.” – Larry With its phony kidnapping and pointless police chase, “Burns, Baby Burns” does not have what you’d call a great ending. The story didn’t really have anywhere to go, so they had Larry explain that he had to go back to his home planet, turned up some music, and had Homer tell Marge (standing in for the audience), “It doesn’t have to make sense.” In other words, the admittedly nonsensical dance party was the Season 8 writers at least having the courtesy to acknowledge that they had backed themselves into a corner. No such admissions or winks are likely to be forthcoming from Zombie Simpsons. But that didn’t stop them from using the same ending in an even more nonsensical way. Not only does music start playing for some reason, it continues to play while we see the previously murderous funeral home directors dance along with the people they were just trying to kill. Even that wasn’t enough weirdness however, as that head shaking scene pulls back to reveal Mrs. Glick and Jesus dancing as well. On the one hand, it makes sense in a “whatever, no one is going to care or remember anyway” kind of way. On the other hand, it’s pretty insulting to the audience. It’s one thing to be apathetic toward your fans, it’s another to brag about it. [Note: We had Dave only briefly before he mysteriously vanished on us. A subsequent e-mail turned up a picture of a gaping hole in his ceiling. Leaky pipes are a bitch.] Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we get started? Mad Jon: Let’s Charlie Sweatpants: Like so much of Zombie Simpsons, this one gets worse and worse the more I think about it. The first time I saw it, I thought it wasn’t too awful by their standards, more or less because it had a couple of decent background jokes. Dave: I don’t remember much Robot bears Mad Jon: I can see that. It was also my initial reaction Charlie Sweatpants: But the more I think about even those, the less they seem to matter and the more it dawns on me just how awful both plots were, how wasted Jane Lynch was, how many many MANY times they had people appear and disappear. Mad Jon: Again, agreed. The more I think about it, the more I can only picture Homer begging or having something physically affect him. Or Marge in a variety show type comic relief appearance, or replayed joke/ideas that were shadows of their formal selves. Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, what was with Marge in the shower? Dave: It was post-modern humor, duh. Charlie Sweatpants: It was post-something. Mad Jon: And seriously, Jane Lynch is a funny individual, I will actually sit through occasional Glee episodes just to hear a few of her derogatory comments. Dave: Kidding. I don’t know what the fuck was going on with that. Mad Jon: I…
Tag: Replaceable You
Compare & Contrast: Martin Prince
“You’re killing me, fish. Never have I seen a greater or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me! I do not care who kills who. To catch a fish, to kill a bull, to make love to a woman, to live!” – Martin Prince There was a great deal of nostalgia laden fan service in the (presumably) non-ironically titled “Replaceable You”, which means that there are a great deal of things that could be compared and contrasted. The nerds made an utterly pointless appearance, Homer got an assistant, and Mrs. Glick was apparently killed off while Dr. Nick came back to life and spoke. (Was that the first time he’s spoken since the movie?) There was also a rivalry between Bart and Lisa for the science fair, which was stupid, shallow and a blatant act of repetition. But something simpler gets at the deeper problems with Zombie Simpsons, and that something is good old Martin Prince. Like many of the less flashy supporting characters in Zombie Simpsons, it’s hard to pin down exactly when the light went out of Martin’s eyes. The family and more major characters like Flanders and Burns get enough screen time that you can follow their devolution more or less as it happened. Others, like Patty, Selma, and Miss Hoover, have basically fallen off the show, so when they do make their infrequent appearances it’s a lot more jarring. Such is the case with Martin. Like so many others, Martin has become more of a prop than a character. Instead of acting like anything resembling a ten-year-old, even a very smart one, Martin spends most of his time sitting in the background or delivering the occasional semi-clever one liner that would be more at home on something like The Big Bang Theory. That’s where you get setup-beat-punchline sitcom garbage like this: Martin: Good shot. Bart: Not really. I was trying to bounce it off your left testy. Martin: Testis, my friend. Bart: Ugh. That’s not how people talk, that’s how sitcom writers make people talk. It’s basically a late night monologue that happens to be between two people. (And that’s ignoring the way Martin makes his entrance by conveniently hanging from a tree outside of the Simpsons’ kitchen window. It’s the standard Zombie Simpsons need to have characters appear precisely when needed with no regard to whether or not they’d actually be there. By comparison, in “Bart Gets an F”, they strike up their conversation after Martin overhears the twins messing with Bart on the school bus.) Since Martin is now very less than human, that kind of cheap, formulaic cornball is the only way they can think to make him even resemble funny. Zombie Simpsons can’t generate any genuine humor from him without that crutch, so once they run out of things for him and Bart to parrot at one another, he basically goes silent. That is not an exaggeration. Martin is in the episode all the way to the dance…
Swarming with Magic Robots
“See all that stuff in there, Homer? That’s why your robot never worked.” – Marge Simpson The chalkboard gag for Zombie Simpsons this week read “It’s November 6th – – How come we’re not airing a Halloween Show?”. Unfortunately for us, I think they may have actually been confused about it. How else to explain having what passed for the main plot revolve around switching magic robots from good to evil and back again? That wouldn’t have been out of place in a Treehouse of Horror episode and it felt more than a little strange in a normal one. What I think was the B-plot didn’t fare much better. It involved a lot of screaming, Burns getting punted like a football, and an emergency flashback to wind things up after they got lost halfway through the third act. As if to further highlight how empty the whole thing was, they animated Jane Lynch into a character that looks just like she does. Having done so many celebrities as themselves for so long, they may have done that purely out of habit. As usual, the episode was packed with weird out of character moments, people appearing and disappearing at random, and all the other classic Zombie Simpsons problems. They even managed to screw up some of their fan service, including the nerds but having them sound nothing like themselves. Unusually, there were a couple of decent backgrounds and sign jokes, but not remotely enough to make it feel like the episode is anything other than boring. After all, when your episode contains clunkers like “A free movie screening? Of course I can go!” and “with none of the poop”, you’ve got problems that a sight gag or two cannot even begin to solve. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are remarkably similar to last week’s failure. Just 7.97 million people were hard up enough for entertainment last night to watch this thing. Through four weeks Zombie Simpsons is averaging just 7.50 million viewers. Through four episodes last year (including the Halloween show) that number was 7.82. That’s partly the result of one really bad number, but last year at this time Zombie Simpsons was routinely going above eight million viewers and even punched into nine a couple of times. They’re significantly below that at the moment and showing no signs of improving.
Sunday Preview: “Replaceable You”
Dave’s photoshop job. Prepare to not laugh at Jane Lynch: Bart’s science fair project, a mechanical baby seal, outshines Lisa’s brainy asteroid model and becomes a popular pet among the retirement home patrons. Meanwhile, Homer gets a new and eager assistant Roz (guest voiced by Glee’s Jane Lynch), but when Homer quickly loses his job to her and discovers her evil past, he and Flanders team up to reveal her true dark colors. Somewhere, Eugene Fisk weeps.