“And did I mention that the monster is a 10-year old boy? Quite a twist, huh? Bet you didn’t see that one coming.” – Narrator The brain searingly awful third act of this monstrosity is based off of a short lived 1960s British television program called The Prisoner. It’s a sort of lamented cult classic for nerds and geeks of an older vintage than me. Had I, or any of my friends or family, heard of The Prisoner when “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” was first broadcast we might not have been quite so bewildered by the whole island kidnapping thing. Mind you that wouldn’t have made it funny, but it might have cut down on the out and out confusion. Much of the commentary during the third act of this dismal spectacle focused on how faithful the animation was to the original, how well it replicated the “dreamlike” feeling of the original show. Never having seen The Prisoner I can’t really speak to that, but it reminded me of something I’ve noticed before. Namely, that at some point Zombie Simpsons stopped satirizing well known pop culture scenes and started simply replicating them. The way the commentators were talking made it abundantly clear that duplication, far more than comedy, was on their minds. Nine guys on this one. 2:00: Laughing about the fact that this is the third or fourth time that Homer has bought his first computer. 3:00: “So I tied an onion to my belt”-level pointlessness on a story about the couch gag. 6:01: “We probably should’ve followed up on this Bart plot.” 6:05: That sentence above is followed by one of the longest silences yet. I’ve listened to a lot of these commentaries lately and it really breaks down into about three main categories: 1) long silences where no one thinks to say anything, 2) laughing at mediocrity, and 3) stories that barely relate to the episode and don’t go anywhere. 7:00: Matt Selman plugs his blog at Time.com. 7:30: Tom Gammill plugs his comic strip at Gocomics. 8:15: More with the long silence. 9:15: Still more or less silent from the above, there was a brief interlude to talk about an upcoming joke, but it didn’t last long. 10:30: Someone points out that they have three signs outside the power plant on the establishing shot and not one of them is a joke. Does this count as awareness of how thin Zombie Simpsons is? 11:00: Long silence broken by snickering at the continued existence of terrorists followed by another long silence. They sound almost as bored with this one as I am. 12:00: Comment that breaks the silence: Is that really what the Pulitzer Prize looks like? Yes, and that old guy really is the head of the Qwik-E-Mart. 13:00: Still awfully quiet. 14:06: Regretting the joke about Rod and Todd not getting flu shots. I’m aware of all the damage that anti-vaccine nutjobs have caused, but Flanders is the exact kind of dimwitted, well meaning…
An ongoing ramble by Charlie Sweatpants . .