“It all started on the thirteenth hour of the thirteenth day of the thirteenth month. We were there to discuss the misprinted calendars the school had purchased.” – Marge Simpson “Lousy Smarch weather.” – Homer Simpson
Tag: Treehouse of Horror VI
Quote of the Day
“Can you tell us what it’s like in there?” – Dr. Hibbert “It’s like . . . uh . . . did anyone see the movie Tron?” – Homer Simpson “No.” – Dr. Hibbert “No.” – Lisa Simpson “No.” – Chief Wiggum “No.” – Marge Simpson “No.” – Bart Simpson “No.” – Patty Bouvier “No.” – Chief Wiggum “No.” – Ned Flanders “No.” – Selma Bouvier “No.” – Professor Frink “No.” – Reverend Lovejoy “Yes. . . . I mean, no. No.” – Chief Wiggum
Makeup Quote of the Day
“Good morning, everybody! Panic is gripping Springfield as giant advertising mascots rampage through the city. Perhaps it’s part of some daring new ad campaign, but what new product could justify such carnage? A cleanser, a fat free fudge cake that doesn’t let you down in the flavor department like so many others?” – Kent Brockman
Quote of the Day
“Ah, they’re not so tough.” – Chief Wiggum “Uh, Chief, that wasn’t a monster. That was the captain of the high school basketball team.” – Lou “Yeah, well, uh, he was turning into a monster, though.” – Chief Wiggum
Quote of the Day
“Help! Please help me!” – Groundskeeper Willie “Willie, please, Mr. van Houten has the floor.” – Principal Skinner “I for one would like to see the cafeteria menus in advance, so parents can adjust their dinner menus accordingly. I don’t like the idea of Milhouse having two spaghetti meals in one day.” – Kirk van Houten
Quote of the Day
“What’s going on here? I’m so bulgy. My stomach sticks way out in front and my- ahhhh!” – Homer Simpson Happy 20th Anniversary to “Treehouse of Horror VI”! Original airdate 29 October 1995. And happy birthday to the one, the only Dan Castellaneta!
Reading Digest: Roots Edition
“I am the wondrous wizard of Latin! I am a dervish of declension, and a conjurer of conjugation, with a million hit points and maximum charisma!” – Martin Prince This seems to be the week for rare, higher quality stuff, and while there are fewer links than usual below, what we lack in quantity we make up for in quality. There are three or four that would be a Link of the Week most of the time, including the Latin language link, the six eras of the Simpsons link, the 9 minute video about Homer, and the one about movie plots. And that’s not all! We’ve got the family made out of snow, a great fan painting, a couple of looks at Season 1, and more. Enjoy. Latin on “The Simpsons” – An impressively thorough recounting of the many ways Latin has been used and abused on the show. Also, there could even be a Latin root for cromulent: The most famous coinage on “The Simpsons” is “cromulent,” which has become a perfectly cromulent word meaning “authentic” or “legitimate,” ever since its initial appearance in “Lisa the Iconoclast” (3F13, 1996). I’m sure writer David X. Cohen coined it with no thought for its possible etymology, but given that adjectives ending in “-lent” are usually derived from Latin, I propose an etymology from the Latin word “croma,” a first declension noun defined by the 1982 Oxford Latin Dictionary as a “surveying instrument for taking bearings to fix lines of orientation.” The noun’s diminutive form would notionally be “cromula.” I know no other Latin word with the root “crom-,” and it’s easy to imagine that a small instrument whose purpose is to measure straight, accurate lines could yield an adjective meaning “legitimate” or “authentic.” Watch S2E17 – Homer Simpson – This is a 9 minute video with a talking cardboard box describing the rise and fall of Homer as a character. The premise gets a little wobbly near the end (I only buy one shift in Homer, not two; and I don’t think According to Jim and various other terrible shows influenced Zombie Simpsons much, if at all), but overall it’s very well done and uses big words in addition to simpler ones: “The Homer of today is very different from the Homer the show started out with.” Bristles Babbles #22: The Simpsons Season 1 Review (1989-1990) (SPOILERS) – I got the above link from this thoughtful dissection of Season 1, including this which I’d never noticed before: Yet another slip-up in episode 8 that I managed to catch on to just by being lucky enough to pause at the right moment comes when the chalkboard gag “I DID NOT SEE ELVIS” changes for a frame before it goes off screen to “I WILL NOT WASTE CHALK”, which was the gag from episode 2. It really was just a single frame: Good eye. Season One: In Retrospect | You Don’t Win Friends With Simpsons – And speaking of Season 1, our old friend Noah P has started a rewatch them…
Quote of the Day
“Homer, just give him the donut! Once he has it, that will be the end of all this horror.” – Marge Simpson “Well, okay. If it’ll end horror. . . . Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong all the time?” – Homer Simpson “Sometimes.” – Marge Simpson Happy birthday Dan Castellaneta!
Quote of the Day
“Here comes something!” – Kodos “Remember the story. We’re newlyweds on our way to Earth Capital.” – Kang “Oh, shazbot.” – Kodos Goodbye, Robin Williams.
Quote of the Day
“Homer, where did you get that?” – Marge Simpson “Get what?” – Homer Simpson “That giant donut.” – Marge Simpson “Well, I acquired it legally. You can be sure of that.” – Homer Simpson Happy birthday Dan Castellaneta!
Animation Alley: Treehouse of Horror VI
(this episode directed by Bob Anderson) Matt Groening has talked about how he feels the less lines needed to convey a character or emotion, the better. This show, and to some extent Futurama, has always hinged on simplistic design, but in an incredibly economical way. A great example is Homer with pantyhose on his head here. Two lines on his forehead to represent the stretching, and his nose being pushed down, and that’s it, you perfectly understand what’s happening. The second frame is unrelated to this topic, I just love Lard Lad’s pose as he comes to life with a Godzilla roar. I love the framing of this shot, and throughout the episode, of human size vs. Lard Lad size. This donut is literally as big as the Simpson living room, which begs the question of how the hell Homer got it into the house in the first place. No matter though, he can think of no better way to celebrate than stripping down to his skivvies and chugging a beer. He didn’t even take the pantyhose off all the way. The shot of Homer answering the door is fantastic, with Lard Lad’s stern, angry face taking up nearly the entire doorway. How we just hang on the closed door and just hear the sounds of Lad smashing Flanders’ house, realizing Homer lied to him, then storming back is just great. Also, rather than smash the house for lying, he just rings the doorbell again. Homer opens, and it’s the same shot, but with a little Ned running by in the background screaming. I don’t care what Lou said, this guy is a monster. Look, he’s taller than the buildings! He’s no high schooler, he’s got to be at least twelve feet tall. The small touches really make this show great. Lisa sees the copyright stamp on Lard Lad’s footprint, and we cut to the ad agency, where we see Lisa’s bike parking outside. You didn’t need to put it there, but that extra detail communicates how she got there, and also emphasizes while she’s clearly smarter than the whole damn town in dealing with this horrible situation, she’s still a child needing to rely on her bike. Also, great posters on the wall: “50 Million Cigarette Smokers Can’t Be Wrong!” and “If You Like Ike, You’ll Love Laramie Septic Tanks!” This has got to be my favorite Kang and Kodos cameo. It happens so late, so it’s so wonderfully random. I love their shit eating grins as they try to win over the rolling donut, but to no avail (“Oh, shazbot!”) Our second segment opens seemingly calm and idyllic, but I love how the dream atmosphere is subtly set up with the painterly backgrounds, so you can already tell something is wrong. Then when Santa’s Little Helper gets on his hind legs and starts talking, and Bart does extreme takes like a Tex Avery cartoon, your suspicions are confirmed. Martin dying is one of the most horrifying things in…
Quote of the Day
“Bart, don’t you realize what this means? The next time we fall asleep we could die.” – Lisa Simpson “Enh, welcome to my world.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
Reading Digest: Real Life Simpsons Edition
“Eww, this is the worst place yet.” – Homer Simpson This week we’ve got lots of translations of everyone’s favorite yellow cartoons into the real world. There’s a fantastic rendition of the theme song done solely by one guy with no instruments, there’s maybe the best Patty & Selma costume I’ve ever seen, there’s more Duff beer, and there’s even a car with speed holes. On top of that, there’s quite a bit of fan art, plenty of usage, only one Super Bowl link, a great Zombie Simpsons design, and several people who relate to their lives and loved ones courtesy of the show. Enjoy. Coki Greenway – The First Tee Design I Did – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is an actual Zombie Simpsons print! And it’s enjoyably gruesome. The Simpsons’ Theme Sung By Nick McKaig, if you the series you’ll love this – This was linked and tweeted by a ton of people this week, deservedly so: Excellent. The Best Simpsons Game Ever Is Coming to PS3 – Speaking of news that was everywhere this week, that old Simpsons arcade game is coming to PS3 and Xbox 360 next week. Many people are happy about this. Click through for an awesome – and I mean awesome – Konami ad from when this first came out. The clothes are exactly what trendy people in 1991 thought everyone would be wearing for the rest of the decade. Turns out it was just a late 80s hangover. The Simpsons Patty & Thelma – Obviously that should be Selma not Thelma, but these homemade costumes are amazing. Jub Jub and the MacGyver DVD are the perfect touches. Everythings Coming Up Millhouse … – Sweet fan made Milhouse drawing, because everything you need to know about Milhouse is in his glasses and eyebrows. The guy that did these is getting them screen printed, and you can e-mail him if you want one. Poll: What is your favorite episode from Season 4 of The Simpsons? – Season 4 ended up winning Lenny’s poll last week, so this week she’s asking the equally difficult question of which is the best Season 4 episode. Again, I’m going to wuss out and refuse to answer. Picking one would just make me want to watch all the ones I didn’t pick. Norwood is Springfield – Three locations, a church, a convenience store and a bar, all in a small city, reminds someone of Springfield. This kind of real life familiarity is one of the things Zombie Simpsons has lost with its constant remaking of Springfield into a trendy part of Southern California. 10 Things I Miss about Canada – Heh: 2. The Simpsons in English. Lisa sounds the same in Spanish but Homer sounds like a gruff Mexican General. The Reason I Could Never Live in Kuala Lumpur – More heh: It has a monorail. I’ve had the Monorail Song from the Simpsons going round my head for the past five days. Monorail! Monorail! Monorail! I think…
Reading Digest: Dreams Edition
“Groundskeeper Willie was in my nightmare too, but he got me with hedge clippers.” – Lisa Simpson “He ran his floor buffer over me.” – Nelson Muntz We’ve got a lot of good links this week. There’s two promising new blogs, several people who agree with us, and lots of fan made stuff (including a Mexican Bart figurine). But we’ve also got three – count ’em, three! – people who had the Simpsons in their dreams this week. Good thing you don’t have to pay a royalty for that yet. There’s also some good discussion of older episodes, a cool Flash map of Springfield, plenty of usage, and Zombie Simpsons damaging relations with Pakistan (well, sort of). Enjoy. Clickerbox: The Simpsons Season 2 – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this tour of Season 2 courtesy of someone who wasn’t allowed to watch the show as a kid but has seen many of the later episodes. She’s harsh on some episodes I love, but it’s fascinating to see someone coming at them from a perspective utterly unlike mine. She goes through the whole season, so there’s a lot here. Cartoon Quotes – A new blog featuring, as you may have guessed, daily quotes from cartoons. It’s brand new, and has quotes from several characters ranging from Bugs Bunny to Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but Homer’s on the banner and there have been three Simpsons quotes already. All three of them are dead on correct, so let’s hope he keeps it up. Interactive Map of Springfield – I sort of think I’ve posted this before, but it’s damn cool. Poll: What is your favorite season of The Simpsons? – Lenny says that after much thought she’s got a favorite, but before she reveals it, she wants to know yours. I don’t think I could pick one, I’d just feel all the seasons I didn’t pick staring at me accusatorily. But if you’ve got one, go ahead. Kidrobot and The Simpsons present Matt Groening – There’s going to be a Matt Groening doll. I suppose it was inevitable. Forrest Gump and the Simpsons via YouTube – What if you took the audio from an extended trailer for Forrest Gump and matched to clips from the show? Well, you don’t have to, someone else did and it is fantastic: That is great. The Simpsons Meets Skyrim of the Day – Fus Ro D’oh. 10/18/11 – Even in dreams you can’t escape The Simpsons: We are at our apartment, watching The Simpsons, while we wait to leave for the wedding. The roommate who is getting married points out how the character Lisa has changed in the episode, while my other roommate bakes. Merman Sideshow Bob and Bart by ~Foxiso on deviantART – Fan made drawing of a Sideshow Bob as a merman drowning Bart, the idea for which originally came in a dream. 20th January – Another Simpsons dream: Dream 5! Ohh yeah, we’re getting into the big numbers now! I was in…
Quote of the Day
“Bart, what happened?” – Marge Simpson “Well, we hit a little snag when the universe sort of collapsed on itself. But Dad seemed cautiously optimistic.” – Bart Simpson “Crap!” – Homer Simpson Happy birthday Nancy Cartwright!
Treehouse of Horror VI Script
“Astronomers from Tacoma to Vladivostok have just reported an ionic disturbance in the vicinity of the Van Allen Belt. Scientists are recommending that all necessary precautions be taken.” – Radio Announcer Five years ago, a better than average copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio was sold at auction in Britain for £2.8 million. Part of what made it so attractive to the sort of people who are rich and bored enough to covet such items is the fact that, despite being printed in 1623, it contained notes from fans of the period: Annotations are written throughout in brown ink and include prompts such as “wit”, “love”, or “simile”. Experts said the comments offered a unique insight into contemporary views of Shakespeare because many of today’s famous passages had been overlooked. Instead, lines such as “Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath, / That the rude sea grew ciuil at her song” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, II. 3) are pointed out. It wouldn’t have been nearly as valuable without those annotations. The text of the plays survive in innumerable copies, nobody needs another one. But the notes that may have seemed extraneous at the time are, four centuries later, what distinguishes this copy from all the others. In a marginally similar, if vastly more contemporary, vein, “Treehouse of Horror VI” exists in more places than can be counted. Between television stations, DVD collections, dusty VHS cassettes, retail outlets, some vault at FOX, and the ever changing swarm of people and hardware that sustains BitTorrent, a pristine copy of the completed work seems unlikely to be a valuable find four hundred years from now. On the other hand, the original script, complete with things that were never filmed or aired, is a relative rarity. Fifteen years ago, John Swartzwelder, Steve Tompkins, and David S/X Cohen wrote that script; and somewhere a paper copy of it sits on a library shelf. Thanks to the intrepid efforts of commenter Shane, who found it on that shelf and then sat down and typed out the whole thing*, it won’t rest there in obscurity. Instead, all twenty-seven pages of it are here, on the internet, for your leisurely perusal. I’ve copied the full text after the jump, or you can download a PDF copy (which does a much better job of preserving the original formatting). For the moment I’ll resist posting my thoughts on what was left in and what got cut. This is The Simpsons raw, and if you’re reading this site (and you’re not some dickhead FOX lawyer), you don’t need me to tell you what to think about it. *From his original e-mail: “I didn’t properly transcribe the math symbols in Homer(3) because I’m lazy.” Not a problem.
Reading Digest: Just Don’t Look Edition
“Just don’t look. Just don’t look.” – Paul Anka & Lisa Simpson [Note: The Halloween themed animated .gif above comes courtesy of reader Api who sent it in with the subject line, “The perfect GIF to symbolise what needs to be done with The Simpsons.” Damn right.] This week, the Vatican’s shitty newspaper, with which I’ve had dealings in the past, wrote something dumb about Homer being Catholic. And so, for about the third week in a row, the Simpsons part of the internet was flooded with one boring topic. The number of “Homer? Catholic?” type articles I read and/or skipped over was amazing. In accordance with official Dead Homer Society policy dealing with things this stupid and media whorish, there are no links about it below. What we do have is two reviews of Ortved’s book, some excellent usage, awesome Halloween themed Simpsons nail art, a sweet drawing of Lisa, and a chance for people in Minnesota to meet Mike Reiss. Oh, and there’s a Simpsons art exhibition coming up in the UK. Have I mentioned that we welcome submissions? Enjoy. [Edited to add: don’t forget to vote for your choice of season for tomorrow’s Simpsons marathon.] Loser – It’s not a very Lisa thing to do, but this drawing is great (via). Save Some Room for Laughst This Thanksgiving Night With World Broadcast Premiere of ‘The Simpsons Movie’ – The craptacular movie is about to join Zombie Simpsons on regular FOX. Feh. Attention, Supervillains and Climate Engineers: The U.N. May Soon Forbid You To Block Out the Sun – Even the most improbably far fetched global warming solutions can be used to reference The Simpsons. Simpsons avatar – The vegetarian shirt Apu sells really makes this. Bart: truly, the King of spring fields – I know almost nothing about horseracing in America, and even less about it in Australia. But apparently there’s a guy named Bart who races horses. Anomaly Appraisal: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History – Animation Anomaly reviewed the Ortved book, and linked to us! Hooray. ‘Simpsons’ history suffers from excessive speculation – Another review of the Ortved book, this one from an actual newspaper. The Simpsons Art Exhibition – There’s going to be a month long Simpsons art exhibit in Manchester. This is the Facebook page. Should any of our UK readers find themselves at it, consider snapping some pictures and sending them in. Top 10 Schwingtastic Childhood TV Flashback Tracks – Lots of 90s YouTube here, including Bart’s duet with Leon Kompowski. hour #6: the simpsons, south park, and sex – An interesting essay on the tangled web of concepts that result when people get prosecuted, as a guy in Idaho recently did, for having Simpsons porn. The only thing I’d seriously disagree with is this: In fact, the reason I’m using South Park as an example and not The Simpsons is because South Park actually has a very large porn-fandom. I’ve never looked into the South Park porn-fandom community but, as someone…
Quote of the Day
“Ah, the Miracle Mile, where value wears a neon sombrero and there’s not a single church or library to offend the eye.” – Homer Simpson
Quote of the Day
Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user Casey Serin. “Remember class, the worse you do on this standardized test the more funding the school gets, so don’t knock yourselves out.” – Mrs. Krabappel
Quote of the Day
“Aw, they’re not so tough.” – Chief Wiggum “Uh, Chief, that wasn’t a monster, that was the captain of the high school basketball team.” – Lou “Uh, yeah, well he was turning into a monster though. – Chief Wiggum