“Wait, come back! You can’t do this to me! I’m Charles Montgomery Burns!” – C.M. Burns As an audience member, there are few things more satisfying that a good defeat of a wretched villain. Unfortunately, that also means when things go wrong, when the villain is bland or the ending is weak, it is correspondingly unsatisfying. At the end of the “The Book Job”, Homer and his improbable posse use what Lisa describes as an idea from “every movie ever” to stymie a book publisher who, despite what the music would have you believe, isn’t all that evil. I say “stymie” instead of “defeat” because it isn’t at all clear that what he’s doing is evil or that he’d be in any way displeased with the results; and I say “book publisher” instead of his name because he’s so bland he didn’t get a name. By contrast, at the end of “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”, Marge permanently defeats Mr. Burns’ run for governor with nothing more than her wits and the three eyed fish that was in the first scene. For a really enjoyable villain defeat, you need to have a proper villain do terrible things so that people really want to see him lose, which Zombie Simpsons naturally doesn’t. The nameless book publisher doesn’t commit any crimes, hurts no one, and hardly seems all that evil. What is his offense, exactly? Editing a book that was deliberately made to be crappy and formulaic? Only on Zombie Simpsons could rewriting mass produced schlock be considered a sin. The only evil thing about this guy are his fashion accessories. Mr. Burns, one of television’s great villains, hardly needs describing, so let’s just concentrate on what he’s trying to do in “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”. After his plant miserably fails an inspection, he’s faced with a hefty but by no means ruinous repair bill. Instead of spending money on fixing the plant, his response is to purchase the governor’s office so he can continue running his business in a manner that will one day render the planet uninhabitable. The Simpsons being The Simpsons, it’s played for laughs, but when you think about what he’s trying to do it’s truly despicable. The other guy just wants to sell a few books that, while low brow, don’t harm anyone and actually seem to make quite a few people happy. Beyond his lack of evil though, the bad guy in “The Book Job” doesn’t actually get defeated. At the end we see that the book, trolls and all, is quite popular. The bookstore has given it lots of shelf space, and kids and geeks are reading it avidly. Since all he wants to do is make money selling books, and he doesn’t care at all whether the book is about trolls or vampires, he’s actually won. The million dollars he paid to Homer’s goofy gang of the suddenly hyper-competent is a…
Tag: The Book Job
Crazy Noises: The Book Job
“It’s not your fault, Homer, it’s those lousy writers. They make me madder than a, um. . . yak in heat.” – Marge Simpson As part of our tireless efforts to demonstrate the many ways Zombie Simpsons fails to entertain, Season 23 will be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that can only be produced by people typing short messages at one another. More dedicated or modern individuals might use Twitter for this, but that’s got graphics and short links and little windows that pop up when you put your cursor over things. The only kind of on-line communications we like are the kind that could once be done at 2400 baud. So disable your call waiting, plug in your modem, and join us for another year of Crazy Noises. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (shockingly enough, not on “pastiche”). In comments and on Twitter there have been more generous appraisals of “The Book Job” than is usual for Zombie Simpsons, as well as some eye rolling at my typically harsh appraisal of it. And while I don’t want to speak for anyone else, I do think I understand that. “The Book Job” had a bit more life to it than most Zombie Simpsons episodes, but I’m also of the opinion that most of that was the same kind of cheap pandering that we got last week, the only difference is that it was fiction books in place of video games and celebrity chefs. In other words, the package here is a little shinier than usual, but there’s still a turd under the wrapper. Consider this exchange near the end between the gang and Neil Gaiman (who, let us not forget, is voicing himself and just showed up out of thin air): Patty: How could they do this to our book? Skinner: It was the singular vision of seven people. Moe: No way! Gaiman: What you’re feeling is called ‘pride of authorship’. You thought you only cared about money, but you actually care more about what you’ve created together. Homer: British Fonzie is right, our story is actually more important than money. This is them literally restating the plot and telling us (not showing us, but telling us) how they’re feeling and why they’re feeling it. This is exactly the kind of hacktacular crap they were mocking in “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” when Marge says that those lousy writers make her feel madder than “a yak in heat”. Or, to grab from another show for a moment, this is what the Robot Devil was talking about when he told Fry his opera sucked because “You can’t just have your characters announce how they feel!”. And that is far from the only example. Here’s the scene where they plot out their book: Patty: The heroes are all orphans. Skinner: And they’re set in a place kids relate to, say, a school, but it’s actually magic. Frink: And, the protagonist always discovers that he…
Nobody Cares About Reading
“Okay, we’ve got the secret vigilante handshake, now we need codenames. I’ll be Cue Ball, Skinner can be Eight Ball, Barney will be Twelve Ball, and, Moe, you can be Cue Ball.” – Homer Simpson “You’re an idiot.” – Moe The last two episodes of Zombie Simpsons have seen the entire opening, couch gag and all, dropped completely. They’ve also featured Matt Selman’s name before Al Jean’s in the customary spot for the show runner. Not coincidentally, the last two episodes have also seen the show impressively manage to get even further away from what once made it great. At this point I don’t think the writing staff thinks of this as anything but a sketch show. This week it was Homer running around with the kids, last week it was Marge, but it almost doesn’t matter since most of the cast is now barely recognizable as human, much less the characters they used to be. For example, Homer and Bart used to not like Patty, but here they leap right in to including her in their little scheme. There isn’t so much as a nod to anything of what we know about the Simpsons universe, all that matters to Zombie Simpsons is making sure that we understand that Homer is standing in for George Clooney and Patty is Julia Roberts. Once they have that established, the rest of it plays out like a less entertaining version of the Family Guy–Star Wars mashups. Just like the Oceans Integers movies, everyone’s slick and cool and well dressed, only now they’re yellow! Just like the original, there are lots of double crosses and fake outs and everyone is winking at the camera. It’s so stylish and urbane that it thinks those are the only two things that matter. That’s how you get multiple flashbacks, an action montage, and a mistaken belief that those title cards were so funny that we needed a dozen of them. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are worse than ever. Just 5.74 million people watched Zombie Simpsons instead of reading a book last night. That isn’t just a bad number, that is a catastrophe. It’s tied for the 10th lowest number of all time, and is the lowest ever for the fall half of the season. Season 22, the lowest rated season in the show’s history, didn’t have a number that bad until February.
Sunday Preview: The Book Job
There’s no bloody image this week because we respect Neil Gaiman even when he momentarily discards his love of good storytelling and voices himself on Zombie Simpsons. The episode itself, however, is going to suck and suck hard: Lisa becomes disheartened when she learns the shocking truth behind the ‘tween lit’ industry and her beloved fantasy novel characters. But Homer decides to cash in on the craze and forms a team to group-write the next ‘tween lit’ hit, with the king of fantasy, Neil Gaiman (guest-voicing as himself), lending his expertise to the effort. After catching the eye of a slick industry publisher (guest-voice Andy Garcia) at the Springfield Book Fair, the team gets an advanced copy of their work and discovers that the corporate lit business is a bigger operation than they imagined. Cheap formulaic culture failing to make fun of other cheap formulaic culture? You couldn’t cut that irony with a fucking lightsaber.