“Hey, Mel, bring me another nicotine patch! Uh, I think there’s some space on my butt.” – Krusty the Klown
Tag: The Front
Makeup Quote of the Day
“It’s so sad that Krusty is ashamed of his roots.” – Lisa Simpson “Marge, it happened again.” – Homer Simpson “What are you gonna change your name to when you grow up?” – Bart Simpson “Lois Sandborne.” – Lisa Simpson “Steve Bennett.” – Bart Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Hello, Dondelinger.” – Old Homer Simpson “Simpson, is that a plunger stuck on your head?” – Old Dondelinger “D’oh!” – Old Homer Simpson
Makeup Quote of the Day Part Deux
“Third notice . . . Final notice . . . Some guys are coming?” – Marge Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Welcome to Remedial Science 1A. My wife recently passed away, I thought teaching might ease my loneliness.” – Dondelinger “Will this be on the test?” – Homer Simpson “No!” – Dondelinger “Oh.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Hello, Principal Dondelinger.” – Marge Simpson “Oh, Marge Bouvier, it’s so good to see you. Sorry, sir, we’re not letting vagrants sleep in the gym tonight. But we will be putting some scraps by the back door.” – Principal Dondelinger
Quote of the Day
“So, this patch steadily releases nicotine into my body, eliminating my need for cigarettes!” – Krusty the Klown
Quote of the Day
“Maybe he just didn’t take us seriously cause we’re kids. Let’s put a grown-up’s name on it.” – Lisa Simpson “How about Grampa? He’s pretty out of it. He let those guys use his checkbook for a whole year.” – Bart Simpson
So Long, Sam Simon
“You’re a comedy writer? My God, you’re so old!” – Roger Meyers Jr. “I want my check!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Haha, you’re a writer alright!” – Roger Meyers Jr. Sam Simon, one of the three godfathers of The Simpsons, died today at the age of 59. It was almost exactly two years ago that he announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer, and from that moment until his death today he handled it with grace, generosity, and, befitting Simon, a lot of humor. They gave him three-to-six months; he lasted nearly two and a half years, laughing about it all the way. The tributes to him are pouring in from people who knew him and those who just knew his work. I’ll only say this, the show he did so much to create treated life and death with a mirthful contempt that resonated with hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. He’s gone, but he’ll still be making people smile for a long time to come. Sayonara, Sam.
Reading Digest: High School Matt Groening Edition
“Ah, my high school yearbook. You handsome devil . . . ‘I can’t believe I ate the whole thing’.” – Homer Simpsonr This week we’ve got two links to pictures of Groening, one from just a few years ago, and one from way back when he was a squeaky voiced teen. In addition to that, we’ve got a lot of cool YouTube this week (including a couple of clever Simpsons/Lego ones), some excellent usage, a couple of good lists, and a True Detective/Simpsons drawing from a kid. Enjoy. A tale of two Springfields – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this article about a bar that may or may not be the inspiration for Moe’s. The link is worth the click just for the gawky pictures of high school Matt Groening. LEGO® CUUSOO | The Simpsons | Kwik-E-Mart – Cool fan made Kwik-E-Mart, complete with squishee machine. Simpsons: Evil Monk – This is a site with a bunch of comics that updates daily. There are a lot of Simpsons ones, and the McBain part at the link is quite funny. The Simpsons’ Couch Gag in Lego Form | Graphic Policy – It’s the opening with heads and bodies mismatched from the Lego movie and the Simpsons Lego set. Cool: Lego The Simpsons Short Film 60 Subscribers Special – On a similar theme, this came from our old friend Friz: It could use better audio clip selection (happy to help!), but if they made a longer one I’d probably watch it. LiveGaelic.com Video: St. Judes Recreate Classic Simpsons Moment – While I’m embedding YouTube videos, here’s some Irish people doing a hell of a live-action recreation of the garbage man song: Watch This: ‘The Simpsons’ Couch Gag à la Française – Those episodes this week were awful, but the Chomet opening was pretty cool. What ‘The Simpsons’ Have Taught Us About Life – Great list: 5.) AURORA BORREALIS CAN LOCALIZE ENTIRELY WITHIN YOUR KITCHEN! Couple of good .gifs, too. The 8 Best Simpsons References In Hip-Hop – Fantastic list with a lot of great rhymes, especially the song at #1. Harriet M. Welsch, Scout Finch, and How to Be a Good Bad American Girl – Excellent references in The New Yorker about Lisa invoking both To Kill a Mockingbird and Harriet the Spy as meta-invocation of American girlhood. The Simpsons: Krabappel of my eye – A nice encomium for Marcia Wallace. 8 Classic Episodes from The Simpsons, season 4 (and 14 memorable ones!) – Some love for Season 4. Want secure software? Listen to Marge Simpson – Excellent usage: When it comes to sourcing our security software, the great analyst Marge Simpson was right: “We can’t afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy” — whether that philosophy is about being designed by Apple in California, or many eyes, or freedom, or whatever hand-waving feelpinions people might proffer. No, we don’t need a philosophy so much as need need science — or, more accurately, engineering. Ay Caramba! Sawtelle Shop Black Market…
Quote of the Day
“Hey, Mel, bring me another nicotine patch. Uh, I think there’s some space on my butt.” – Krusty the Klown
O’Brien, Jean, Reiss, Kogen and Martin
“Cartoons have writers?” – Bart Simpson “Enh, sort of.” – Lisa Simpson The 81 minute roundtable discussion Conan O’Brien hosted with Al Jean, Mike Reiss, Jay Kogen, and Jeff Martin is now live on O’Brien’s website. (I couldn’t get the embedding to work here on WordPress.) I must warn you: it is very addictive. I started it thinking I’d watch a few minutes and then come back to it tonight when I had more time. Nope. Watched it straight through my lunch. As a Simpsons fan, it’s a must-see. They talk about the origins of the show, joke about specific memories and episodes, and generally just crack each other up. It’s funny from start to finish, and at one point O’Brien puts this picture up: Clockwise from lower left: John Swartzwelder, David M. Stern, Mike Reiss, Conan O’Brien, Jeff Martin, Jon Vitti, Matt Groening, George Meyer, Al Jean (facing away from camera). Jean joked that this was a Potemkin village photo in that they brought in all the cutouts and cleaned the place up. There’s a lot of great stuff in here, but for now just let me note that at the 28:00 minute mark, Kogen says, “I remember when the show was at it’s, well, it’s still at it’s height.” Heh. Caught himself midsentence.
Quote of the Day
“Alright, brain, you don’t like me and I don’t like you. But let’s just do this and I can get back to killing you with beer.” – Homer Simpson “It’s a deal.” – Homer’s Brain Happy 20th anniversary to “The Front”! Original airdate 15 April 1993.
Quote of the Day
“Abe, tell ’em about your amazing life.” – Roger Meyers Jr. “I spent forty years as a night watchman at a cranberry silo.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Wow!” – Roger Meyers Jr.
Quote of the Day
Image captured from the website of Brides magazine (the successor to Modern Bride). “When I read your magazine, I don’t see one wrinkled face or single toothless grin. For shame. To the sickos at ‘Modern Bride’ magazine.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
Crazy Noises: Homer Scissorhands
“Homer, what are you doing?” – Marge Simpson “I wanted to surprise you with a kinky summer ’do. How many husbands would do that for their wives?” – Homer Simpson “None, they’d have more sense than that.” – Marge Simpson In our ongoing mission to bring you only the shallowest and laziest analysis of Zombie Simpsons, we’re keeping up our Crazy Noises series for Season 22. Since a podcast is so 2004, and video would require a flag, a fern and some folding chairs from the garage, we’ve elected to use the technology that brought the word “emoticon” to the masses: the chatroom. Star Trek image macros are strictly forbidden, unless you have a really good reason why Captain Picard is better than Captain Kirk. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (surprisingly enough, not on “Esquilax”). Matthew brought this up in comments on Tuesday, but the idea of Homer as a hairdresser is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for ideas and/or jobs he hasn’t had yet. There’s the whole “instant professional” thing, but even setting that aside, we’ve already seen Homer attempt – and fail at – cutting women’s hair, and in a salon no less. I try not to care about inter-episode continuity, I really do. After all, this is a comedy where each episode is its own self contained story. It’s not like 30 Rock or Arrested Development where there are subplots and overarching stories that unfold over many weeks. There you need things to make sense from one episode to the next, here you don’t. And it’s just not fair to expect the writers to labor under years of accumulated personal developments and backstories when the show was never designed to evolve like that. But when Zombie Simpsons does shit like this, when they show Homer wildly succeed at things we’ve already seen him spectacularly botch, they do make it hard. Just for good measure: Mad Jon: Well, are you guys ready to get this going? Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, let’s do it. As we seem to like to start with the couch gag recently, was that some kind of record? For length, I mean. Mad Jon: It may have been. It was quite over the top. Also there wasn’t a TV in the exhibit for them to watch. So all that for nothing. Dave: It sure felt that way. Mad Jon: I wasn’t even sure if it was a new one or not. Charlie Sweatpants: I think it was new, I kept being surprised when they found new ways to stretch it out. Mad Jon: I wasn’t going to be surprised either way Dave: It was also humorless and not really all that clever. That they kept it going was quite a feat. Charlie Sweatpants: Someone’s been the museum recently. Mad Jon: Or broken into one. Maybe those t-shirts aren’t selling like they used to. Charlie Sweatpants: Always possible. Speaking of going on too long, I thought the idea of Milhouse…
Meta and Morbid
“The guy’s so high he doesn’t even know that’s Dave!” – Homer Simpson “Homer? Homer?” – Bobby Mindich “Homer’s not here, man.” – Homer Simpson “Okay, very good.” – Bobby Mindich No sooner do we poke fun at Zombie Simpsons for its complete reliance on jamming the same few characters into any situation than they have Chong audition every third person in Springfield to replace Cheech. There are about five hundred different things they could’ve done there: they could’ve invented new acts, pulled some other old ones out of retirement, created thinly veiled jabs at comedians who’ve long since faded from view and gone batshit crazy (paging Mr. Gallagher). But they didn’t do any of that, instead they went with the shallowest and laziest possible option by dragging their usual characters across the stage to do the same tired old things they always do. In this case it was made even more uncomfortable as they nervously tap danced around concepts like stale comedy and being long past your prime. Things started in that vein quickly as Marge (for some reason) convinced Homer to go up on stage (for some other reason) and the crowd (for some final reason) quickly assented. It was all downhill from there, including the above mentioned audition, a couple of parodies that were as lifeless as they were long, and the B-plot that reminded me of nothing so much as when Krusty was trying to improvise comedy with a cracked portrait of Eisenhower. Here, laugh at these random objects! The difference being that when Krusty was doing it, it wasn’t supposed to be funny. It was supposed to show what a desperate hack he was. Hmmm. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are wretchedly atrocious. A piffling 5.45 million viewers wondered if there’s enough weed in all the world to make that funny. That’s the lowest of the season, and the fourth lowest of all time. A few more numbers in this range and we may get our moral victory of seeing Season 22 be the lowest rated ever.
Compare & Contrast: Mocking Awards Shows
“You know the rules, awards for excellence in entertainment are contraband, no Emmys, no Oscars, not even a Golden Globe.” – Prison Guard One of the more revealing ineptitudes of “Angry Dad: The Movie” is the way it fails to copy not one, but two different Simpsons episodes that did the exact same thing it did. (This is particularly stunning coming from a show that loves repeating jokes and unabashedly lives off of fan nostalgia.) Of course, both of those older episodes did things much quicker, and managed to actually mock the kidding-but-serious way awards shows take themselves and their participants. I am speaking of both the Emmys in “Black Widower” and the generic (but Emmy statue lookalike) Annual Cartoon Awards in “The Front” (which are awarded at the Springfield Civic Center the night before it’s closed for roach spraying). In “Black Widower”, Krusty comes out to present the award for “Best Supporting Performer in a Children’s Program”. Right there, the show is already making fun of the uselessness of the Daytime Emmys by creating a nonexistent, but not implausible, category for sidekicks. Taking the whole enterprise one level further into satiric silliness, Krusty reads a list of the enjoyably wacky nominees: Clockwise from top left: Droopy Drawers, Colonel Coward, Pepito (the Biggest Cat in the Whole Wide World), and Suck Up the Vacuum None of those four characters merit too much attention, but each gets his (its?) own little moment of personality. We see the improbably hot companion of Droopy Drawers reassuringly pat him on the hand. Colonel Coward freaks out from nerves just a little bit, and Pepito waves like the good natured mascot he is. Suck Up, who looks more than a little terrifying and can’t possibly be human, is too good to attend this complete sham. The entire thing takes only ten seconds before the main plot resumes. Despite not containing much more content than a vacuum cleaner in Spain, none of the plodding parodies in “Angry Dad: The Movie” move nearly as quickly. It’s not even close: “The Triplets of Belleville” takes about forty seconds. “Persepolis” is also forty seconds. “Toy Story” managed to be only thirty seconds (but certainly felt longer). “Wallace & Gromit” was sixty-five seconds (as in more than a minute!). “Angry Dad” was a comparatively tame twenty seconds. That’s five clips, totaling well over three minutes of screen time, in an episode that’s barely twenty minutes long. And that doesn’t even count Halle Berry’s part. For comparison’s sake, please note that the College Humor video of the McBain clips, which the killjoys at FOX legal have already taken down (shhh, reverse Spanish version), was only slightly longer, and it was from five separate episodes over three seasons. In “The Front” almost the exact same thing – awards show presentation with clips and a celebrity voice – is done in a small fraction of the time. Brooke Shields and Krusty come out so Krusty can read the terrible joke about his hair,…
Quote of the Day
“Bart, are you thinking what I’m thinking?” – Lisa Simpson “Probably not . . . Lie in the snow and count to sixty! . . . Hi-yah! . . . Merry Christmas, suckers!” – Bart Simpson
“Half-Decent Proposal” Makes Baby Jesus Cry
“Oh my god, it’s my old boyfriend, Artie Ziff.” – Marge Simpson “Hello Marge, have you heard? I’m stinking rich. Jealous?” – Artie Ziff “I’ll bet you’d trade it all for one night with my wife.” – Homer Simpson “I would.” – Artie Ziff “Homer!” – Marge Simpson The crazy Act 3 plot swerve was one of the things that finally convinced me to give up on the show ever being good again. Once you get into the double digit seasons, crazier and crazier things began happening at the end of episodes. What had been a bizarre, albeit short and at least slightly self-referential, party ending in Season 8 became fighting rhinos and capturing the Loch Ness Monster in Season 10. By Season 12, the episodes are ending on remote island prisons or with naval ships attacking New York. Here in Season 13 things got even more untethered. There’s the one that ends with Homer as an international smuggler, the one that turns into a Christmas episode with no warning, and the one that ends with Homer and Smithers using the corpse of Mr. Burns as a marionette. Other than being utterly bizarre, the one thing those endings have in common is that they all came straight out of left field and had little to no connection to what was going on in the episode before they happened. “Half-Decent Proposal” does much the same. Just when you think it’s a tale about Marge risking a weekend with her old boyfriend, and with only about three minutes to go, Homer runs away to work on an oil derrick which promptly catches fire, prompting him (and Lenny, who’s also there for some reason) to need to be rescued by helicopter. As an audience member, you’re left scratching your head because it’s jarring as hell and the show never used to do that. Nine people on this one, including Castellaneta, James Lipton, and lone female Lauren MacMullan, who directed this one. 1:20 – The concept of Marge going off with Artie originated with James L. Brooks. 2:00 – The snoring thing came about because one of the writers was keeping his girlfriend up with his snoring. 2:20 – MacMullan is in another room, and hasn’t seen this in forever, but seems to recall that this one ran very long. Apparently we were spared a section in Las Vegas. 3:30 – More banter with MacMullan. She drew one of the act storyboards for this one. 4:40 – MacMullan recalls that Jean wanted a lot of close ups during the Sex and the City bit. Jean then wins the unintentional irony award by saying, “The way the show was, you’d just try to milk the laugh ridiculously.” Pot, this is kettle; kettle, I’d like you to meet pot. 5:05 – General laughter at their own laziness, their word, at calling their HBO parody BHO. 5:40 – A guy Selman went to college with liked this episode. Now you know. 6:30 – Long bit from MacMullan…