“I’m here for my free birthday sundae.” – Bart Simpson “Eat it and get out.” – Phineas Q. Butterfat Clerk 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 (especially on “Jeeves”). It wasn’t worth doing an entire post about, but there was one scene in “The D’oh-cial Network” that I thought perfectly illustrated the gaping philosophical and humor differences between The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons. During that extended bunch of set pieces at the mall, Homer takes a gift card into “Cinnabun”. Note that, per standard Zombie Simpsons operating procedure, this is just a slight misspelling of a real place, not an actual parody. I hope they got some complimentary pastries in exchange for that kind of free advertising. Once inside, Homer walks up to the Squeaky Voiced Teen, hands him the card, and tells him to just start rolling the giant confection into his mouth. The kid complies, drawing the blinds and closing down the entire store while Homer sucks this thing down. I never get service like this when I redeem a gift card. Set aside the fact that The Simpsons did this exact thing with the Ironic Punishment Division in “Treehouse of Horror IV”, it’s also eerily reminiscent of Bart’s free birthday sundae in “Radio Bart”. Both scenes have the character come in and expect free goodies. What makes it eerie is the way you almost couldn’t draw up a better example of the world spanning differences between the philosophy and humor of The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons. Zombie Simpsons has Homer go to a thinly veiled real store and get treated like a VIP. Not only does he get exactly what he asks for, but the clerk even closes the store so he can gorge himself in private. (Remember, this is the man who once exhorted his wife to not be ashamed while he was being used as a freak show attraction for an all you can eat seafood buffet.) The only joke is that Homer is fat. The Simpsons has Bart go to a store they made up whole cloth. It isn’t an advertisement for a real chain, it’s a rather mean satire about the fake nostalgia and dishonest advertising real ice cream stores employ. Everything implied or stated is either misleading or an outright lie. That’s funny. When Bart gets there, he isn’t treated like a…
Tag: The D’oh-cial Network
Compare & Contrast: Simpson Kid Causes Mass Hysteria
“In the spirit of the occasion, I must tell you what I think. You two screwed up royal!” – Mayor Quimby “You know, I really don’t feel like being blamed.” – Bandstand Guy Going all the way back to Season 1, The Simpsons had a knack for telling big and even outrageous stories in a way that that made sense within an episode and in the sometimes strange universe of the show. Whether it was Homer’s safety crusade in “Homer’s Odyssey”, Marge’s campaign against cartoon violence in “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge”, or Lisa’s anti-corruption protest in “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington”, the show knew how to put its characters (and therefore its satire, humor and cynical perspective) into places that ordinary people (and shows) were unlikely ever to tread. Walking the line between making things too unbelievable to be recognizable and too cliched to have any impact required a fine touch, and The Simpsons excelled at it. A great example of that comes in Season 5’s “Bart’s Inner Child”, where Marge’s fears that she’s a stick in the mud, Bart’s unchecked id, and the self help woo of Brad Goodman gradually combine into a disastrous town festival. A very bad example of that came this week with Season 23’s “The D’oh-cial Network”, where Lisa’s desire to have friends somehow spun itself into a fad that turned Springfield into a chaotic wasteland overnight. Both episodes wrap things up with chaos that gets blamed on one of the Simpson kids, and from a strictly “could this happen in real life?” perspective, both stories are far fetched. But you don’t notice or care in The Simpsons because the entire episode builds smoothly to its conclusion, which is not inexplicably out of scale with what’s already happened. By contrast, in Zombie Simpsons, the conclusion is vastly more cataclysmic, comes out of nowhere, and has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story or the original problem that got things started. Once the town falls for Brad Goodman’s easy answers in “Bart’s Inner Child”, we see the normally staid and responsible characters begin acting more like Bart. In order, Brockman, Lovejoy, and Krabappel embrace his consequence free outlook on life, and it’s no coincidence that it’s those three characters that we see doing so. All of them are usually buttoned down and boring. So when we see Patty, Selma, Willie and Skinner (all similarly responsible characters) behaving like Bart at the “Do What You Feel” festival, it isn’t a surprise. Furthermore, it’s Willie’s newfound embrace of not doing his job – specifically oiling the Ferris wheel – that leads to the episode’s moment of maximum chaos: the runaway wheel and the escaped zoo animals. Nothing that happens is overtly physically impossible (wheels do roll, after all), and every action that leads to that moment has built on the others. Compare that carefully constructed moment to the town wide destruction in “The D’oh-cial Network”. After some scenes from a mall, Lisa wants to…
When a Movie Template Goes Nowhere
“Now I finally have time to do what I’ve always wanted, write the great American novel. Mine is about a futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques. I call it, ‘Billy and the Cloneasaurus”. – Seymour Skinner “Oh, you have got be kidding, sir. First, you think of an idea that has already been done, and then you give it a title that nobody could possibly like! Didn’t you think this through?” – Apu Nahasapeemapetilon If I wasn’t so inured to the relentless mediocrity of Zombie Simpsons, I might find an episode like “The D’oh-cial Network” disappointing. There are a lot of big ideas at play, everything from distracted driving to potential social isolation resulting from only communicating with other people on-line. Those are things that people debate and have moral panics over, and a show with the resources of Zombie Simpsons could be hilarious and say a lot by making fun of them with wit and intelligence. But I am inured to the relentless mediocrity of Zombie Simpsons. So I’m not the least bit surprised that they want me to fawn over an episode because it’s got the same plot and musical cues as The Social Network, while at the same time expecting me to turn off my brain to the point that I’m supposed to buy Reverend Lovejoy never having encountered the problem of cell phones in church, Lisa never having a computer before this, and no one in Springfield ever having used a social networking site. The nonsense piled up thick and fast, and I’m not sure there was a single scene that didn’t suffer from one or more crippling problems with story, believability, character, or childish levels of social understanding. To take just one example of an irresponsibly blown comedy opportunity, Lisa designs a social network to help her make friends with other kids, and later in the episode is surprised to learn that adults are also using it. Does the episode explore in any way shape or form the problems Facebook has had as the parents and grandparents of its original users began signing up? Not at all. Does the episode make fun of any of the bizarre situations that can arise from knowing someone better on-line than you do in real life? Nah. How about the still unsettled etiquette and rules concerning interactions between teachers and students on social media? Nada. Zombie Simpsons didn’t look at Facebook and social networking generally and think, “here’s a huge change in the way people live their lives we can play around with”. The potential topics and stories there are practically infinite, and Zombie Simpsons ran the other way. They watched a movie and thought, “we can substitute some of our characters for their characters, and if we add in some car crashes we’ll be good to go”. Naturally, they were wrong about that part too, as they had not one, not two, but three blatant filler moments at the end. First,…
Sunday Preview: The D’oh-cial Network
Image photoshopped by Dave. Just a year after they had Mark Zuckerberg on for his moment of free public relations help, and six years after Time magazine embarrassed itself with its “You” cover, Zombie Simpsons has decided to revisit the idea of social networks. (They’re very in right now.) Despite all that lead time, it’s going to be just as shallow and poorly thought through as you’d expect: As the mastermind and creator of the online social networking phenomenon SpringFace, Lisa is called to trial when Springfield’s obsession with the site becomes chaotic and dysfunctional. Lisa recounts her story and explains that she created the site after realizing she had no real friends. But as SpringFace expands and Springfield’s fixation with the site causes mass hysteria, Lisa begins to realize that adding thousands of friends online did not compare to having real friendships. But wait, there’s more! Wasn’t there some other stuff in that movie? Indeed there was: Later, Patty and Selma compete against the Winklevoss Twins in the rowing event at the 2012 Olympic Games. Societal breakdown, legal trouble for an eight-year-old, and competitive, co-ed rowing. This is gonna be weird.