“With rum running hoodlums in the catbird seat, Springfield sent for the one man who could clean up the town and shoot the gangsters: Rex Banner.” – Narrator Who Is Not Walter Winchell These days there are more teevee cop stereotypes than you can shake a nightstick at. There are the gruff loners who play by their own rules, but they get results, damn it. There are the emotionally haunted forensics experts. There are the (always model pretty) lady detectives who are just as tough as the boys. In the subset of federal teevee cops, we’ve got everything from savvy military investigators and yet more forensic experts to the ever reliable, order barking modern super-agent. Epitomized by Kiefer Sutherland, he’s tough, he’s ultra-competent, he’s had way too much coffee, and he likes yelling orders into cell phones. That, in a nutshell, was Will Arnett’s character in “Steal This Episode”. Set the clock back to a time before cell phones and SWAT teams, and those same upright federal crusaders with haircuts you could set your watch to were still there, they were just less excitable. In place of Sutherland’s unrestrained id, there was Robert Stack, battling crime week after week in gangster ridden Chicago. And that, in a similar nutshell, was Dave Thomas’s Rex Banner in “Homer vs. the Eighteenth Amendment”. Both characters are hard charging, rule crazy feds, but that’s about where the similarities stop. Like the Capital City Goofball or Race Banyon before him, Rex Banner is the kind of one-off satirical archetype at which The Simpsons excelled. His clipped speech and complete lack of humor are instantly recognizable even if you’ve never seen Robert Stack wear a fedora. The same way that you don’t need to know the name of a single square shouldered astronaut or giant fuzzy mascot to get Banyon and the Goofball, you don’t need to know a single teevee cop to understand that Banner is a ramrod straight G-man from the old school. Banner’s dialogue matches his posture. He speaks in short sentences that are nevertheless laced with old time slang worthy of an untouchable 1920s prohi: “Listen, rummy, I’m gonna say it plain and simple: where’d you pinch the hooch? Is some blind tiger jerking suds on the side?” “Open up, curly, this is a raid!” “Don’t crack wise with me, tubby.” “It’s not up to us to choose which laws we want to obey. If it were, I’d kill everyone who looked at me cockeyed.” There he is, a minor character never to return, who nevertheless becomes a full, if batshit crazy, human in just a few minutes of screen time. Compare that to the grossly underwritten and underthought agent in “Steal This Episode”. I’d call him by his name, but they didn’t bother to give him one. Other characters only address him three times: once as “sir”, once as “hotshot”, and one final time at the end when Lisa just walks up to him in court and starts talking. Just as damning is the fact…
Tag: Steal This Episode
Behind Us Forever: Steal This Episode
“Come on, Milhouse, you have to do this. If not for yourself, then for the movie going public, and for the foreign markets that more important than ever nowadays, and finally, for me, the Mickster.” – Mickey Rooney“No.” – Milhouse van Houten“Alright, I tried.” – Mickey Rooney I’m on record as saying that the “travel” episodes tend to be the least unwatchable. They still can’t tell a story for shit, the dialogue remains hamfisted and expository, and nothing makes sense even within individual scenes, but giving them a fresh topic usually does result in a couple of decent laughs. “Steal This Episode” was basically that, except instead of traveling somewhere, Zombie Simpsons turned its cataract clouded eye towards movie downloading. It lent itself to some decent jabs at the entertainment industry for a while until, as they always do, things went haywire with prison bus crashes, Swedish consulates, weird courtroom drama, and the almost obligatory crush of self voiced celebrities. – This Radioactive Man spoiler thing got tiresome quickly. It’s fun to make fun of absurd comic movie plot twists and all, but it probably shouldn’t take the first five minutes of the episode to do so. – “Joke?” on the church sign may be the laziest thing ever put there. It’s like a script note that never got looked at. – So, Bart hasn’t seen the movie even though he was sitting at Krusty Burger with Milhouse getting the toy thirty seconds earlier? I guess they didn’t specifically say he saw it, but they have intra-episode continuity problems so often that they don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. – “Hey, they tricked us, that’s a commercial.” Just once this season I’d like to get through an episode where what I just saw isn’t explicitly explained to me immediately after. This is the ninth episode, so there’s probably about thirteen to go. I don’t like my chances. – The FOX logo with the NASCAR thing keeping people from finding out how to download stuff was funny. The callback was weak, but at least it was brief. – Steady stream of animated misfires was good, too. – But the FBI angle is getting worn out already. – The Star Wars crawl was pretty good even if things are starting to spin out of control. – And the FBI thing has officially disintegrated with earplugs, blinders and all kinds of screaming. The whole thing is pointless filler. – “It’s probably someone I would never suspect, never suspect. Your moans of sympathy are all I have! Whoever did this to me will be haunted by unbearable guilt forever . . . forever.” – This kind of intentionally silly exposition could be funny if it were a) done better and b) not done every other damn scene. – Someone thought prisoners talking like entertainment industry insiders was very funny. You know, up until the pointless bus crash. – And now we’re at the dinner table for more of Expository Guilt Theater:…
Sunday Preview: Steal This Episode
Homer becomes annoyed with movie theaters, so Bart teaches him how to download movies illegally. Homer is delighted with his discovery of free movies until he’s caught for piracy. Lots of guest stars tonight, including Judd Apatow, Leslie Man, Seth Rogan, Will Arnet, and several more. Which I guess is as good of a group as any to use in an episode about a topic that was actually a topic several years back.