Book promotion seems to involve taking excepts from the book and repackaging them into headlines as a way to interest people in purchasing the thing. In that vein I wanted to highlight one of my absolute favorite parts of Ortved’s book. (Which you should think about buying, or at least getting from your local library where you can “borrow” books for free.) Harvey Fierstein has solid Simpsons credentials. He was the voice of Karl in Season 2’s “Simpson and Delilah” and Patty and Selma were stunned to learn that he was gay in Season 6’s “A Star Is Burns”. Harvey…
Tag: The Simpsons: An Uncensored Unauthorized History
DHS Book Review: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History
“Marge, I’m bored.” – Homer Simpson “Why don’t you read something?” – Marge Simpson “Because I’m trying to reduce my boredom.” – Homer Simpson In countless discussions with other Simpsons fans over the years the one question that always seems to come up is “Why?”, as in “Why did the show get so bad?” I’ve heard a lot of different theories which always seem to boil down to something overly simple, ‘this guy left’, ‘that guy took over as show runner’, ‘they just ran out of topics/ideas’. The reality, as John Ortved documents exhaustively in his new book “The Simpsons:…
Ortved Publicity Train Keeps Rolling
There’s an entertaining interview with John Ortved at the Arts Beat blog at nytimes.com. (Yes it’s the same blog that thinks it’s Season 20, but it’s a different writer.) Promoting anything involves answering the same questions over and over again and this is no exception so there isn’t too much new content here, but there were two things I wanted to highlight. First this rather grim answer: Q. You make a number of references in the book to the decline in quality of the show. Have you ever heard of Fox or the folks behind the show pulling the plug…
Synergy Works at Conde Nast Too
Yesterday I finished reading our free(!) copy of John Ortved’s new book “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”. Given that I am a long winded bastard and that there’s a lot to cover (for Simpsons fans and loathers of Zombie Simpsons) we’ll probably have some lengthy posts about it coming up. The short verdict is that it’s mostly awesome and was a very fun read. For today though we’re going to take a look at some of the synergistic on-line publicity the book has started to garner. First up is The New Yorker which fills its word count by blathering…
A Good Sign
I don’t know how many of you follow us on Twitter. Jebus knows I wouldn’t, our Twitter feed is just shy of 100% pointless, even by our standards. But its one useful function was getting us a promotional copy of the new Simpsons book by John Ortved, “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History”. I’ve just started reading it, and I’m sure we’ll be doing more with it in the coming weeks, but this sentence on page 7 is very encouraging: Around Season 9, it hit a point where the characters and situations became so exaggerated, the comedy so dispensable, and…