“Tonight, Eye on Springfield takes a look at the secret affairs of Kennedy, Eisenhower, Bush and Clinton. Did fooling around on their wives make them great? We’ll find out next, when we play Hail to the Cheat.” – Kent Brockman
Tag: The Last Temptation of Homer
Quote of the Day
“This plant violates every labor law in the book. We found a missing Brazilian soccer team working in your reactor core.” – Department of Labor Agent “That plane crashed on my property!” – C.M. Burns
Old Simpsons References Explained in New Ways
“Who are you?” – Homer Simpson “Homer, I’m your guardian angel. I’ve assumed the form of someone you would recognize and revere, Sir Isaac Newton.” – Guardian Angel “Sir Isa Who-ton?” – Homer Simpson “Oh, very well.” – Guardian Angel “Colonel Klink! Did you ever get my letters?” – Homer Simpson Anyone reading this site has probably had the experience of watching The Simpsons and realizing that something (a scene, a joke, or just a quick image) is a parody while not quite knowing what’s being referenced. Sometimes, even if you do know the source, you don’t know it well enough to understand it completely. There are a lot of ways to look these sorts of things up nowadays, and the episode capsules on SNPP and elsewhere are often informative. But can’t someone else do it? Yes, someone else can. The Springfield Historical Society is a new Simpsons blog that takes old references from the show and explains them using all the video and image tools that weren’t available back when people were swapping text over 1200 baud modems on Usenet. For example, take The Love-Matic Grampa segment from “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase”, sure you know it’s based on bad television concepts of yore, but here you can watch YouTube of My Mother the Car, a mid-60s sitcom starring one of the lesser Van Dykes. His wife sends him out to buy a station wagon and he comes back with an old jalopy inhabited by the spirit of his dead mother. Hilarity ensues (they made thirty episodes of this). Here’s one I’d never noticed before, in “The Way We Was”, teenage Marge stares plaintively into a mirror. Despite the fact that I’ve seen the Norman Rockwell painting on which it’s based, I never put two and two together. Here they’re right next to each other. New posts go up Monday-Wednesday-Friday, and there are already articles on topics ranging from Morganna the Kissing Bandit and Sheriff Lobo to Billy Beer and the execrable Studs. The whole thing is highly recommended.
Quote of the Day
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user GoodNCrazy. “Stop that. I love my wife and family. All I’m gonna use this bed for is sleeping, eating, and maybe building a little fort. That’s it!” – Homer Simpson
Cutting Digital Corners
“Don’t worry, baby, the tube’ll know what to do.” – Homer Simpson I’ve never worked as an animator, nor even been able to draw decently, so feel free to take the following with a grain of salt. Having said that, I’ve sat through every single one of the HD episodes of Zombie Simpsons, and I think all their digital tools have made it increasingly easy for them to cut corners. Take the image below from “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing”: There’s nothing terribly remarkable, it’s just an establishing shot of the school. (You can see Bart’s stupid tractor ride starting in the lower left corner.) Compare it to basically the same shot from “The Last Temptation of Homer”: The things I’m about to point out aren’t a big deal, and my ignorance of the working trade of animation may make the next few dozen sentences completely worthless, but to my eye the hand drawn one looks like it had a lot more care put into it. Specifically, there are three items I noticed upon close inspection: the windows, the flag pole, and the sidewalks. In the Season 22 image, the little bend marks in the windows are barely visible, but the ones you can make out all look the same: two parallel lines of slightly lighter blue to give the glass panes a little more substance than if they were monochrome. In the one from Season 5, the lines in the windows are black (making them much more visible), and no two are the same. The different windows give the drawing a less generic feel, making it easier for you to imagine that each window conceals an actual room. After all, real window panes aren’t perfectly uniform; from the day they’re cut they get scuffed and scratched in different ways. The Zombie Simpsons windows are so perfectly alike that it subtracts the feeling of life from the image, whereas the windows in The Simpsons were all clearly done one by one, giving them a unique feel that makes the whole thing look more like a real building, even if the lines aren’t aligned down to the millimeter. Now look at the flag poles. On the digital one, the flag pole is utterly boring. It’s just two precisely parallel lines that someone has used a fill command to make grey. The hand drawn one has a lot more personality. It doesn’t just disappear into a tuft of grass; it has a base so you can actually see what’s holding it steady. Moreover, the pole itself appears to taper toward the top the way real flag poles do. Someone took the time to draw and inspect it, instead of just plopping it down with a couple of clicks. It’s the sidewalks are where you can really see the difference though. Because while both sidewalks contain mistakes, they are of a vastly different character. I’ve circled portions of each above. First, consider the one from Zombie Simpsons and note the perpendicular lines…
Quote of the Day
Image yoinked from Gothamist. “Well, sir, I won’t bore you with the details of our miraculous escape, but we desperately need a real emergency exit.” – Charlie “Why that’s a fabulous idea. Anything else you’d like, how about real lead in the radiation shields?” – C.M. Burns
“We’re Not Paying You to Talk”
“Examine your scalp for ringworm.” – Spandex Clad Spokeswoman Like most pop stars, Katy Perry’s stock in trade is a meticulously marketed blend of music, fame, and carefully packaged sexuality. Whether you want to have sex with her, have sex the way she does, or condemn both of those desires, there’s something in her songs and public appearances to catch your attention. Being young, white and pretty broadens those appeals about as far as they can go, and she and the people who publicize her are very adept at using that. For evidence of this you need look no further than her first hit, the theatrically bisexual “I Kissed a Girl”. All of which is to say that if you were designing a pop star in a lab and you set the gender to “F”, the result would look a lot like Katy Perry. She’s commercially successful, tabloid ready, and about as famous as possible given that she was completely unknown less than three years ago. In short, she’s as stereotypical a pop star as you are ever likely to see. In the right hands, hilarity could ensue from subverting all the things that make her such an effective pop star. The jokes don’t even need to be on her, they can be at the expense of the corrupt, shallow, profit hungry, titillation chasing media environment that made her famous in the first place. The Simpsons did just that on a couple of occasions, notably “Lisa the Beauty Queen”, “Bart Gets Famous”, and “Homer Badman”. Of course, that’s not what Zombie Simpsons did. Instead, they crammed her into a Muppets takeoff so poorly written and ill conceived as to be embarrassing. The failure here is at least three layers deep. First, and it’s a marker of just how awful the next two are that this only merits the entry level of hell, was the skit itself: a hacktacular hodgepodge of bad ideas and jokes that wouldn’t make it into a Jay Leno monologue. Second, a competent reworking of The Muppet Show would’ve been a great vehicle for a pop star to parody her profession. The original did quite a lot of that with its guest stars, Zombie Simpsons didn’t even try. Finally and worst of all, not only did they fall flat in their attempted humor, in doing so they made themselves eager participants in the same vapid culture they should have been satirizing in the first place. But we’ll get to that in a moment. Image taken from Wikipedia. Before we get to how badly they missed the mark, let’s start by acknowledging that Zombie Simpsons didn’t skimp on the felt budget and got the look of the puppets right. Unfortunately, that was about the only thing they got right, because from there on out it’s not at all clear that they understood what they were doing. What they seemed to think they were doing was parodying The Muppet Show. But The Muppet Show was already a parody, and…
Quote of the Day
“The Burmese melon fly has over a thousand sex partners, and suffers virtually no guilt.” – TV Announcer
Quote of the Day
“Another day, another box of stolen pens.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
“Finally, Bart’s one of us!” – Martin Prince “Excelsior!” – Members of the Refuge of the Damned
Tell Me Again About How the Characters Don’t Age
We’re getting kinda done around here with “Bart Gets a Z”. (Not a moment too soon, as far as I’m concerned.) But there was one final thing I wanted to point out: you cannot keep these characters from aging. Biology won’t let you. “Bart Gets a Z” had a lot of Mrs. Krabappel, who is voiced by Marcia Wallace. But the 2009 version of Mrs. Krabappel’s voice is very different from the one we all grew to love in the 1990s. It’s gotten noticeably deeper and a tad raspier. I noticed a similar thing last year with Lenny (voiced by Harry Shearer) in “Double, Double, Boy in Trouble”. The beginning of that episode is very Lenny heavy and his voice, like Krabappel’s, has gotten significantly lower and less crisp in its pronunciation. It’s getting to a point with both of them where they sound like imitations of themselves, good imitations, to be sure, but not the genuine article. Why is this? Well, Wallace is 66; Shearer is 65; there are very few people whose voices don’t appreciably change between their mid-40s and their mid-60s. That’s not a knock on their work, it’s just the way of the world. Maybe this is more apparent to me on account of I rarely watch Zombie Simpsons and I watch the old ones all the time. But going from one to another, from, say, the Krabappel of “Bart the Lover” (1992) to “Bart Gets a Z” (2009), or the Lenny of “The Last Temptation of Homer” (1993) to “Double, Double, Boy in Trouble” (2008), is really jarring. Remember to bring this up the next time someone tells you they don’t like the first two seasons because the voices don’t sound right. Many of them are further off the mark now than they were then.
Quote of the Day
“Hey, you! Get out of my office!” – Lionel Hutz
Quote of the Day
“Homer, what’s the matter?” – Cherub Lenny “Ain’t you never seen a naked chick riding a clam before?” – Cherub Carl