“Ahhhh! Shark-boy!” – Homer Simpson In our continuing mission to bring you only the finest in low class, low brow, and low tech internet Simpsons commentary we’re bringing back our “Crazy Noises” series and applying it to Season 21. Because doing a podcast smacks of effort we’re still using this “chatroom” thing that all the middle schoolers and undercover cops seem to think is so cool. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “environmentalists”). A couple of weeks ago I pointed out how Zombie Simpsons is extremely careless when it comes to staging and continuity, even within a single scene. Characters just appear and disappear based on whether or not they’re needed that instant. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck don’t do this, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck don’t do this, hell, Family Guy doesn’t even do this! The reason they don’t is that it is extremely disorienting to have a constantly changing number of people involved in a scene. Near the swirling mess that passed for the ending of “The Squirt and the Whale” we can see another example of this carelessness. Homer falls into the water and the sharks immediately surround him: Suspenseful! The sharks circle Homer and it’s played for suspense. Whatever. But then they instantly vanish while he has a conversation with Lisa and the environmental props: Is expositive dialogue is a shark repellant? Or maybe their planet needed them. No sharks are around him whatsoever, they just disappear. They don’t go back to the whales, they don’t do anything else, they’re not wanted so they’re not there. Until it comes time for a second installment of “suspense” about sharks circling Homer: Where have I seen this before? Oh yeah, twenty seconds ago. Aaaaaand they’re back. This goes beyond poor or lazy storytelling, or even poor or lazy staging of this single scene. This is “we don’t give a fuck” at it’s purest. Their ending hangs off of Homer being menaced by sharks and saved by a whale. Instead of just leaving the sharks circling Homer while he talked with Lisa and the other two, they got rid of them so they would have an excuse to bring them back for a second dose of “suspense”. They pushed the same feeble emotional trigger twice in one scene. Anyway, here’s some more problems with this episode. Charlie Sweatpants: Okay, so anyone with initial thoughts on this one? Dave: It was a trainwreck Charlie Sweatpants: True. Mad Jon: A lazy trainwreck Charlie Sweatpants: Also true. Dave: They assumed they could tell a Lisa-gets-emotional type story by filling in the blanks Mad Jon: The A and B plot couldn’t even try to run concurrently? Charlie Sweatpants: Good way of putting it. Mad Jon: At least with 2 concurrent plots I can try to be distracted from each one by the other. There was no breathing room here. Charlie Sweatpants: Though, I don’t think that thing with the windmill counts as a plot. Plots have, you know,…
Tag: The Squirt and the Whale
Synergy Confuses Fiction and Reality
“Oh no, Willie didn’t make it, and he crushed our boy.” – Movie Mom “Ugh, what a mess.” – Movie Dad “Oh, I don’t like this new director’s cut.” – Homer Simpson IGN did two things I appreciate with this week’s corporate fanboy ode to Zombie Simpsons: 1) Kept things ridiculously positive – It’s a lot easier to edit out the synergy when I can replace words like “best” with “worst” and leave the underlying sentence structure untouched. 2) Exposed the shallowness of its sycophancy – This is a little more subtle, but I like how the comedy free tear-jerker part of the episode, which accounted for most of the run time, isn’t even mentioned until the fourth of five paragraphs. It also shows up in other things, like the sentence I couldn’t figure out: But this was the right path to take, as moving Bluella the whale proved too daunting for the community. I’ve read that sentence ten times and I still don’t know what it means. I get that IGN is praising Zombie Simpsons, but I can’t figure out for what. I think what IGN’s trying to say is that if the townspeople had saved the whale, then the whale would’ve been saved . . . except that it’s fiction . . . so the townspeople’s actions were chosen by the same people who put the whale on the beach in the first place . . . so the decision to kill the whale couldn’t have anything to do with the townspeople’s actions . . . and now I’m confused again. IGN knows that the whale died because the writers chose to kill it, not because the townspeople failed to save it, right? Anyway, I’ve edited out the synergy. April 26, 2010 – “The Squirt and the Whale” was an absolute gem turd. Like many of the classic Simpsons Zombie Simpsons episodes, it was hilarious boring and heartwarming melodramatic. In a time when many are saying the series has lost its magic, Sunday night’s episode proved that even the old-timers can show you how it’s done once in a while it. The episode was great boring right from the start, beginning with opening credits. Bart’s chalkboard bit was a failed nod to the guys at South Park and their recent controversy with the depiction of Muhammad. “South Park– we’d stand beside you if we weren’t so scared.” Since The Simpsons opened the doors for shows like South Park, it was would’ve been nice to see the camaraderie if they hadn’t screwed it up. Follow that up with a clever and fun romp through the Springfield Shopper as the time wasting couch gag, and we had a few good laughs under our belt decent idea of just how bad it would be before the episode even started. The first act of “The Squirt and the Whale” was as near-perfect wretchedly bad an opening segment the series as seen in many seasons. The trailer for the big-budget space adventure “Tic…
Zombie Simpsons Misses the Point
“And sure, he’s probably so insane with rage that he’d butcher you horribly if he could.” – Homer Simpson Yesterday, it was noted in many, many different places that Zombie Simpsons mentioned the censoring of last week’s South Park in the chalkboard gag: There are two ways to look at this. The first (and this seems to be the dominant on-line opinion) is to see it as a nice gesture from Zombie Simpsons, a show of support for South Park in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. The second (which I’m more inclined to take) is a lot less positive. First, set aside all the other issues at play here, from war and torture to religious extremism and censorship. What happened on South Park was a brave act (at least as brave as one can be making cartoons for a living), the point of which was to demonstrate that fear about showing Mohammed is overblown. The “death threats” that got such wide press came from an obscure website run by a nobody with no connection to anything (scroll down to point 2 in the update here to see what I mean). Everyone pitched a fit except Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who remained quite calm and basically said that they wouldn’t give in to hysteria. The fundamental point they were making (last week and in 2006) is that such fear is unfounded, and that the real problem is the absurd overreaction to empty threats. Yet there’s Zombie Simpsons, declaring themselves “so scared”. I understand that they’re trying to be supportive in a funny way. But what Zombie Simpsons actually did was reinforce and legitimize the overhyped fear that Parker and Stone were explicitly attacking. They could’ve said “South Park-We Support You And Wanted To Say [Bleeeeeeeeeeeep]”, or “South Park-We’d Stand By You If We Thought It Mattered”, or anything that didn’t say that they were afraid. Instead, they bought right into the hysterical framework that South Park was criticizing. Like all Zombie Simpsons, it was well meaning but brainless, and they’d have been better off not saying anything.
Jumping Sharks and Riding Whales
“Now, Henry Winkler, there’s a father. Listen to what he told a close friend, ‘I don’t always keep my cool like the Fonz, but my love for my kids has given me plenty of happy days’.” – Selma Bouvier While Homer was being menaced by sharks this week, I couldn’t help but think of that most damning of cultural epitaphs: jumped the shark. Isn’t falling into the ocean from a magically conjured motorboat, getting hit in the head by a bucket (why a bucket?), and then being saved from sharks by riding a whale at least as bankrupt an idea as having a leather jacketed stunt double on water skies jump over a pen that has stock footage of a shark inside of it? At the very least it’s in the same category. Sadly, Happy Days went on for six more seasons after that fateful episode, let’s hope this one doesn’t take as long. Before that unimaginably boring ending, however, the writers had to reach deep into their bag of tricks to fill that ever more onerous 20 minute minimum. There was a long couch gag, a 45-second montage, a completely pointless dream sequence, and an “action” sequence that finds the cartoon trope of circling shark fins new and exciting. And even that wasn’t enough, so they had to kill some more time by having Homer regurgitate ideas that were too stupid to even be animated. Also, it’s generally not a good idea when the actual event you’re basing a scene on is funnier than your cartoon version. I’d also like to commend the writers for dumping their opening plot line in an unusually abrupt manner, even by Zombie Simpsons standards. The opening segment is often totally unrelated to the rest of the episode, but they don’t usually completely abandon a giant plot conflict (the whole electricity thing). I’m not sure what’s keeping them from dropping all pretense and doing those segmented mini-story episodes every week. The numbers are in and they’re almost identical to last week’s: 5.94 million people tuned in an hour early for Family Guy last night. That ties the number for 11th worst all time. Since the 20th anniversary crap wore off, Season 21 has been down an average of half a million viewers from the same period of Season 20. I’m going to keep saying this until someone listens: the show is getting historically low ratings. The 20th anniversary stuff will save Season 21 from being the least watched ever, but more people than ever are simply ignoring this show.
Sunday Preview: “The Squirt and the Whale”
Happy Sunday, everyone. I’m afraid I have two pieces of bad news. First, there’s new Zombie Simpsons tonight. I know, I know, it hurts. Let’s get the description, courtesy of Simpsons Channel, out of the way: The Simpson family erect a turbine in their back yard. When Homer realizes that some of the power from the turbine is directed for the local electric company, he removes their house from the grid. Meanwhile, a storm appears and Homer and Lisa try to save a 100-foot long whale, brought to shore by the storm. Ha, “erect.” Seems to be a fairly obvious attempt to hop on the Earth Day gravy train (is there one?), because wind power is cool and like, everyone loves whales. I won’t even feign interest here; we all know it’s going to be dreadful, so why play coy? The second piece of bad news is that Photoshop is being a piece of shit, so I can’t bloody up the promo pic per usual practice. Sorry, kind readers. You’ll have to live with an upside down promo pic instead. It’s truly a devastating day for all parties involved.