“Hey Mom, Dad’s in a mental institution.” – Bart Simpson “Oh my god, mother was right.” – Marge Simpson
Tag: Stark Raving Dad
Quote of the Day
“Bart! I asked you to watch your sister!” – Marge Simpson “I tried to stop her, but she overpowered me.” – Bart Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Everything changes when you hit the big One-Oh. Your legs start to go, candy doesn’t taste as good anymore . . .” – Bart Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Bart . . . Bart . . . Hey, Bart . . .” – Lisa Simpson “Lisa, it’s six-am. Something’s wrong? Dad died!” – Bart Simpson “No, no, he’s fine.” – Lisa Simpson “Well, whaddya? I’m relieved.” – Bart Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Please, feel free to express yourselves. In these sessions, we want you to feel relaxed and uninhibited.” – Nurse at New Bedlam Rest Home for the Emotionally Interesting
Quote of the Day
“Your father really needs your help. You don’t want him to get a lobotomy, do you?” – Leon Kompowsky “Hmm, lobotomy…” – Bart’s Brain “That’s alright, son.” – Lobotomy Homer “Well, there’s probably a downside I don’t see.” – Bart Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday, overlooked middle child. Happy birthday to me.” – Lisa Simpson Happy birthday Yeardley Smith!
Quote of the Day
“Homer, please, no one’s going to notice if you wear a pink shirt to work.” – Marge Simpson “Wait a minute, go back! Zoom in!” – C.M. Burns
Quote of the Day
“Forget it, pal. There’s only one way out of here and it ain’t pretty.” – Not Jack Nicholson “What’s that?” – Homer Simpson “Dating the nurse.” – Not Jack Nicholson
Quote of the Day
“Bart, in the split-second before he died, I bet Scratchy appreciated his birthday present. You see how this relates to us?” – Lisa Simpson “Hey, you want that once a year empty gesture? You got it, sis.” – Bart Simpson
Behind Us Forever: The Wreck of the Relationship
“Smithers, I seem to recall you had a penchant for bell bottomed trousers, back in ’79.” – C.M. Burns “Sir, that was my costume from the plant production of HMS Pinafore.” – Mr. Smithers “Oh, yes, of course. Your spirited hornpipe stole the show as I recall.” – C.M. Burns Another week, another forgettable episode from Zombie Simpsons. Homer and Bart get into a fight about broccoli, then end up on a father-son sailing ship. Along the way, Homer gets scurvy, is thrown overboard a couple of times, vomits, and gets attacked by an octopus. Meanwhile, in the B-plot, Marge runs Homer’s fantasy football team. Both suffer from montages, expository dialogue, expository voice-overs, and the usual range of problems. – A long couch gag ends with Scratchy’s blood splattered on the TV. That was odd. – And we open with repetitive shots to some guy’s nuts. Who says the writing sucks? – Bart and Milhouse watching a red band trailer would be a lot better if they didn’t stop to explain everything as they were doing it. – The setup was a bit of a stretch, but Marge getting her mammogram search blocked was okay. – Homer and Marge are having another one of their expository conversations, but this one is in the bathroom. – This broccoli thing just goes on and on and on. Ate up a lot of time, though, so there’s that. – Homer takes a call from Lenny about his fantasy football draft. Does this make any sense as dialogue with Lenny?: Lenny: Homer, where are you? Our fantasy football draft is about to start. Homer: Today’s our draft! I’ve gotta pick a good fantasy team. When I lost last year they made me do something so humiliating….Jebus loves Tebow. No, no it does not. – Homer and Bart both get kidnapped in the middle of the night because how else could they get out on a boat? This show doesn’t just take bad shortcuts. It takes bad and unnecessary shortcuts. – Guh, this guy is a waste of Nick Offerman’s talents. – Trunks of life jackets just appeared out of nowhere. One-year-olds have a better grasp of object permanence than this writing staff. It’s astonishing. – Hey, the B-plot just showed up. Marge helpfully explains that she’s getting messages from Homer’s fantasy league. Sure glad she told us that or we’d never have figured it out. – The trash talking that so upsets Marge isn’t even funny. It’s just lame: “Homer, your quarterback is garbage”. Ooh, cutting! – Homer just got scurvy for some reason. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but it did happen. – Montage! (Though maybe HMS Pinafore isn’t the kind of thing they should be reminding us of.) – Homer’s now telling us how Bart’s feeling. That’s a twist. – Homer just puked for some reason. – There are way too many useless lines for me to quote them all, but this is fairly typical: Homer: Wait a minute.…
Quote of the Day
“To make a tired point, which one of us is truly crazy?” – Leon Kompowski “Not me, I got this!” – Homer Simpson
Compare & Contrast: Involuntary Commitment
"Sir! I’m so sorry my grocer committed you. We’ll never shop there again." – Mr. Smithers Like the practice of medicine in general, the treatment of mental illness has a longstanding history of cruelty, incompetence and abuse. People have undergone everything from lifetime confinement and mind changing drug regimes to electric shocks and lobotomies because of pseudo-scientific theories that often had (and have) more to do with the ignorance and prevailing prejudices of the people administering the "treatments" than they do with making the patients better. On top of that is the frightful prospect of a mentally healthy person becoming trapped in that system and subject to its tender mercies, a fear that has driven fiction of all kinds for more than a century. Serious drama, horror schlock, dark comedy and more have long used that and related ideas to provoke and entertain. Some, obviously, work better than others, and there’s no way to guarantee success; but you can guarantee failure by using that powerful, well explored, and deeply rooted concept as a quick and haphazard plot twist to clean up a half-formed story and the flimsy character at its core. In a nutshell, that’s what happened to "Diggs", a Zombie Simpsons episode so ill conceived that they couldn’t even bring themselves to put a pun in the title. You want to do an episode about a lonely boy who’s a one kid falconry club at Springfield Elementary? Fine. Weirder shit than that has happened at Springfield Elementary. You further want to reveal that said lonely boy is actually seriously mentally ill? Okay, that’s a bit heavy for a shamelessly stupid show like Zombie Simpsons, but isn’t necessarily a problem. Oh, you want to have the kid be involuntarily committed, have Bart find out, have Bart’s parents react with horror that he even knows such places exist, have Lisa(!) go along with it unquestioningly, then have the kid leave for a day to wrap up the plot before biking happily back to a life at the mental institute he clearly doesn’t want to be in? Those are gonna cause problems. To see just a few of them, take a quick look at the dinner scene where Bart has printed out (yeah, I know, ignore it) the name of the mental hospital where Diggs is being taken. Bart can read. He can certainly understand the words "Psychiatric Hospital" on the page he printed. He hands it to Marge and this is what happens: Marge: If this is what I think it is, it’s not a place we should ever ever take a little boy. Bart: Then why is Diggs there? Homer: Because it’s his home forever. Marge’s reaction is bizarre in a couple of ways. First, she’s just accepting that some kid is being permanently taken to a mental hospital? That’s very un-Marge. Moreover, what’s with the weirdly callous and fearful attitude? Even if we spot them her acquiescence in this, the Marge we know and love would reassure Bart, tell…
Quote of the Day
“Mr. Simpson, after talking to your wife, we believe you’re no threat to yourself or others.” – New Bedlam Psychiatrist “That’s the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me. Could I have it in writing, please?” – Homer Simpson “Of course.” – New Bedlam Psychiatrist
Quote of the Day
“I could call ’em for you.” – Leon Kompowski “Oh, great. And try to put a good face on this. Tell ’em this one of those places where rich women lose weight.” – Homer Simpson
Compare & Contrast: Megastar Guest Voices
“We want Michael! We want Michael! We want Michael!” – Crowd “Here he is, here’s the guy want to see!” – Homer Simpson “He’s three hundred pounds!” – Apu Nahasapeemapetilon “He’s white!” – Woman in Crowd “He’s dressed without flair!” – Moe “Boooo! Boo!” – Crowd It would take an awful lot of words just to catalog, to say nothing of exploring or explaining, the myriad of mistakes that comprise “Lisa Goes Gaga”. The episode had it all: bizarre and comedy free flights of fancy, unvarnished celebrity marketing, excruciatingly bad exposition, magic powers, characters acting bizarrely out of type (Lisa, Skinner, there were a lot), pointless and unrelated scenes, and, to top it all off, the entire thing may or may not have been the dream of some anonymous backup dancer. But all of those problems cascaded from one central failing, the inability of Zombie Simpsons to handle the very famous. Whether or not you are a fan of her songs or of the outsize public persona to which her music is only tangentially connected, Lady Gaga is undeniably one of the most famous and discussed people on planet Earth here in 2012. She’s enormously popular with her fans, of course, but she’s also reached that rare level of fame where literally anything she does is news to the celebrity press, and her statements and actions frequently push beyond the paparazzi ghetto and into regular news. Even a passing familiarity with popular culture requires you to at least know who she is. This is Wikipedia’s list of Season 23’s guest stars: Aron Ralston, Jane Lynch, Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Tim Heidecker, Gordon Ramsay, Eric Wareheim, Neil Gaiman, Andy García, Kevin Michael Richardson, John Slattery, Matthew Weiner, Kevin Dillon, Janeane Garofalo, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Dana Gould, Ted Nugent, Armie Hammer, David Letterman, The Tiger Lillies, Jeremy Irons, Michael Cera, Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, Julian Assange, Kelsey Grammer, Alison Krauss and Union Station, Jackie Mason, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Shepard Fairey, Nicholas McKaig, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne, Glenn Close, Brent Spiner, Kevin Michael Richardson, Steve Coogan, Treat Williams, Bryan Cranston, Eric Idle There are a lot of recognizable names on that list, but in terms of raw fame, none of them are even in the same league with the one time Stefani Germanotta. Parts assigned to a bunch of television chefs, or a talk show host, or even some well known movie star are basically interchangeable. There are, after all, quite a few television chefs, and if Jeremy Irons doesn’t want to be the talking bar rag, there are plenty of other respectable British actors with great voices out there. There is only one Lady Gaga. That yawning fame gap means that you have to do something special for her. Just having her show up as somebody’s girlfriend or rival won’t fly. Even more importantly, it’s a fantastic opportunity. Someone who draws that much attention from that many places opens up a nearly unlimited array of potential subjects and stories. Zombie…
Quote of the Day
“Aw, she looks sad.” – Leon Kompowsky “That’s cause she knows you’re looking at her.” – Bart Simpson “Although I’m aware you’re looking at me, I would look exactly the same even if you weren’t.” – Lisa Simpson [Initially scheduled this for pm instead of am. Whoops.]
Quote of the Day
“We call this guy The Chief. He’s been here in 1968, never says a word, never moves a muscle.” – Leon Kompowsky “Hey, Chief.” – Homer Simpson “Hello. Well, it’s about time somebody reach out to me.” – The Chief Happy 20th anniversary to “Stark Raving Dad”! Original airdate: 19 September 1991.
Reading Digest: You Guys Are Giving the Internet a Bad Reputation Edition
“This is what Michael Jackson looks like! You look like a big, fat mental patient.” – Bart Simpson “You’d be amazed how often I hear that.” – Leon Kompowsky The pop culture internet had a minor conniption this week when one of the world’s least reputable news sources, TMZ, reported as a “bombshell” (their word) that Michael Jackson hadn’t done the singing in “Stark Raving Dad”. This is something you can find out by reading just the introduction to the Wikipedia article for that episode. You don’t even need to scroll down, it’s right there at the top; but if you do scroll down, you’ll see a heavily footnoted section dedicated to just that as well as a photo spread titled “The three voices of Leon Kompowsky”. And yet it was reported as news by such august outfits as The Houston Chronicle and Kaplan Test Prep Daily, as well as theoretically internet savvy outlets like television blog Warming Glow (which is named for a Simpsons reference) and music website Consequence of Sound. To repeat, this information was in the Wikipedia article with footnotes and pictures. Stop and take a breath before you click publish, okay? Of course, that’s not all we have. There’s also some information on everyone’s favorite three hundred pound president, several people who want to see the show ended, some excellent usage, and a review of that porn movie. Enjoy. It Was All Yellow: Reviewing the Simpsons Porn Parody – Smooth Charlie’s Click of the Week is this surprisingly positive, tongue-in-various cheeks review of the Simpsons porn movie. I particularly like this: However, the guy voicing Homer/playing Homer’s penis does a phenomenal Homer impression. To the point where for the first ten minutes I thought they might be using actual audio from the show. Then I realized that even in 22 seasons they would have had trouble finding a suitable response to “You like the way I suck your cock, Homey?” 520 – Taftography, or: a Conventional Portrait of the Candidate – A political cartoon featuring the face of William Howard Taft as the floor plan for the 1908 Republican Party convention. It opens with the Mediocre Presidents song despite the fact that he isn’t mentioned in it, but that counts as excellent usage nonetheless. There’s also some kinda awesome Taft quotes. I could almost see this one being a Simpsons line: I have come to the conclusion that the major part of the work of a President is to increase the gate receipts of expositions and fairs and bring tourists to town. The Simpsons’ latest season – A review of Season 22, which, while far more forgiving of Zombie Simpsons than I am, does contain this: In fact, I’m starting to think that whether or not you enjoy The Simpsons at this point depends on how bothered you are that the show keeps trotting out similar storylines to earlier episodes’. I’m certain that most of the storylines in series 22 could be compared to old episodes (sometimes…
Quote of the Day
“Marge, I can’t wear a pink shirt to work, everybody wears white shirts. I’m not popular enough to be different.” – Homer Simpson