“Alright, Collector, stick this in your tweezers: I’m not Xena! I’m an actress, you lunatic!” – Lucy Lawless “Oh, please, I’m not insane. I simply wish to take you back to my lair and make you my bride.” – The Collector
Tag: Treehouse of Horror X
Bonus Quote of the Day
“What I’d like to say is: we’re still looking for the real killers. Anyway, in conclusion, a man cannot be forced to testify against his wife.” – Homer Simpson “Stop winking!” – Marge Simpson Happy Birthday Dan Castellaneta!
Quote of the Day
“But I’m sure that once girls get to know the real you, you’ll get plenty of dates. Next question.” – Lucy Lawless
Behind Us Forever: Mathlete’s Feat
“Oh, my God! Lisa! She’s been crushed, and so have the hopes of our mathletics team.” – Principal Skinner Sorry (again) for the non-existant blogging around here, still been busy. There probably isn’t going to be a Reading Digest today, but on the plus side, Season 26 is over, so I’ve got plenty of time to pretend that I’ll get caught up at some point. On the Harry Shearer front, there has been nothing but silence from both sides so presumably they’re still talking. Read into that whatever you’d like. As for the finale, “Mathlete’s Feat” was bog standard: lots of filler, even more exposition, several magically appearing characters, and a couple of montages. After a rich school beats Springfield Elementary’s mathlete team, the Nerds (from “Homer Goes to College”) buy the school a bunch of computers, that promptly get fried, which leads to a lot of flattering exposition about Waldorf schools, which leads to Bart becoming the captain of the math team (for some reason), which (just one scene later) leads to a rematch with the rich school, which leads to the usual unconnected ending. – Hey, Rick and Morty, that’s better than this. Thank goodness this “couch gag” took over 10% of the episode. – “Good Seats Will Always Be Available” is pretty decent for an opening sign gag. – But things go south fast with a literal drive by appearance from Nelson and twenty-seconds of Homer not laughing at a math joke. – The Nerds are back for a hopefully brief cameo. Oh, and the math competition has a full audience. They didn’t even remember their own sign gag. – Krusty just showed up to apparently host and yell the words “Drug Reference!” at the audience. – Okay, Krusty’s gone. Now we’re on “introductory videos” for each team. Oh, and the rich kids video is directed by a yelling Michael Bay. South Park did that way better a long time ago. Just sayin’. – Lisa’s monologing for some reason. – Homer is explaining Lisa’s emotions. – The Nerds are sticking around. Apparently they went to Springfield Elementary. – Sigh. Skinner just appeared out of nowhere in Miss Hoover’s class, grabbed a film strip projector, and hurled it out the window (breaking it) and causing Willie to scream in pain. Remember when Skinner was funny because he was a buttoned down square and not another zany nutbar? The writing staff doesn’t. – Montage! – The “state of the art digital book burner” was a bit of a stretch, but they did set its temperature to 451F. – And now the computers the Nerds bought have all been fried. That took a while, and involved a lot of exposition and urgent horn music. – Back from commercial and we are literally watching them do nothing. – The teachers now have no electronics and the Nerds have vanished from the plot without so much as a goodbye, so we’re getting their new, non-technical classroom activities exposited to us. Like Nelson reading…
Compare & Contrast: Comic Book Guy As Villain
“Tonight’s episode: Enter . . . The Collector.” – TV Announcer There are basically no characters on the show who haven’t undergone a serious dumbing down in the Zombie Simpsons era (Gil, maybe?). Some of them gradually devolved, others had sudden changes in a single episode; either way, there’s often a moment when you knew that the original version was never coming back. For Comic Book Guy, I’ve always thought that moment came in Season 11 when he materialized out of nowhere to complain about the Simpsons getting a horse again. Homer asks if anyone cares what “this guy” thinks, and the assembled crowd shouts “No!”. He’d been used as a stand-in for the audience before, of course, but that was them dropping all the subtlety and treating this strawman approximation of their audience seriously. They knew people were going to bitch because they were nakedly repeating something, and instead of thinking “maybe we shouldn’t repeat things”, they thought “haters gonna hate”. Comic Book Guy has been a way for the show to paper over its own shoddiness ever since. The difference between the two is on full display when you consider the ways they used him in very similar positions in “Brick Like Me” and as “The Collector” in “Treehouse of Horror X”. (Which aired, incidentally, just a few months before the second horsey episode.) In both cases he’s playing a science fiction bad guy who knows how cliched his actions are, but in one that’s the basis of a wide ranging satire, in the other it’s a contradictory and expository excuse. This is Lego Comic Book Guy’s first line in “Brick Like Me”, right after Homer asks him for the Lego princess set: Lego Comic Book Guy: Ah, always good to meet a fellow AMFoP. Homer: Huh? Lego Comic Book Guy: Adult Male Fan of Princesses. As a punchline, “Adult Male Fan of Princesses” isn’t bad, but to have Lego Comic Book Guy just explain it to the audience doesn’t do it any favors. At least it’s got a punchline, though. In Lego Comic Book Guy’s next scene, after some extended Homer freaking out scenes, he doesn’t even get a line. He just stands there while Homer grabs the toy box to go back to regular Springfield. After that, Homer returns and we get what may be the clunkiest lines in an episode that had an awful lot of them: Lego Comic Book Guy: Okay, apparently our whole world is a fantasy in the mind of an emotionally devastated Homer Simpson. Marge: One of the main questions I have about that is, why? Lego Comic Book Guy: The real Homer fears losing his daughter’s love so he invented this toy world where nothing will ever change. Marge: How can you be sure? Lego Comic Book Guy: I have devoted my life to second rate science fiction. Trust me, that is what we are dealing with here. Homer: So if I don’t find my way out of here, I could be trapped in a…
Reading Digest: Goodbye 2012 Edition
“Man alive, what a stink-o thousand years: blimp wrecks, teenagers . . . then again we had two teevee shows with Andy Griffith!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson For the second week in a row there’s just not much cooking on the internet. But while Simpsons fandom may take it slow from time to time, it never sleeps, and this week we’ve got two links to people saying goodbye to the last year with some very similar Simpsons flair. There’s also a bunch of great fan art, an electronic remix of the theme song, the Prime Minister of Canada’s Twitter aide engaging in some playful banter with Homer Simpson’s Twitter aide, a couple of fine people who agree with us, a foul person who stole an inflatable Homer Santa from a church in Britain, and plenty of other little tidbits of Simpsons fandom. Enjoy. Me and my friends bro tat! Click for the best… – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this set of three matching Hank Scorpio tattoos on the legs of three friends. It’s also a great choice of Scorpio image, with his shit eating grin right after he tells Homer that he didn’t even hand over his coat. Fantastic. (via @DailySimpsons) No Matter How Bad It Gets, I Can’t Quit Homer Simpson – I respectfully disagree: I had an argument recently with a few fellow Simpsons fans—the kind that refuse to watch any episode that aired after the Clinton administration. They love this show as much as I do—the best episodes are in their bones—and yet they gave up on it over a decade ago. I’ve never been one of those. Just like Marge Simpson, I stuck by the old warhorse, through bad years and worse years and the years where they thought it was a good idea to have Lady Gaga guest star. Yes, the show is better now than it was a decade ago. The author goes on to praise some of the episodes from this season, but I’m still not buying it. This is just a rendition on the perpetually misguided “it’s getting better” argument that is one of the last refuges of Zombie Simpsons defenders. It wasn’t true three years ago, and it isn’t true now. Who Watches the Simpsons? by *TonyDennison on deviantART – Great drawing of the Simpsons as the Watchmen. Lisa as Ozymandias with Snowball II as Bubastis is a great touch, as is the bloodstain on the donut in the title. (Thanks to reader Robert K for sending this in!) Moe -The Simpsons by ~serushins on deviantART – Manga style drawing of Moe with an awesomely angry/grumpy/spiteful look on his face. (Thanks again to Robert K!) The 2012 End of The World…In 10 Words – This is the end . . . of high prices. The Simpsons – Cool fan made papercraft Kang and Kodos. (Also, “Homie Brown”.) A Fresh Start – I can’t believe I didn’t see this in more places, but while I usually find Comic Book…
Crazy Noises: Treehouse of Horror X
“Bart, just let me drop and save yourself!” – Clobber Girl “What do you think I’ve been trying to do?” – Stretch Dude For the fourth summer in a row, we here at the Dead Homer Society will be spending some time discussing twelve year old Simpsons episodes. This year we’re doing Season 11. Why Season 11? Because we’ve done Seasons 8, 9 and 10 already, and it’s time to take an unflinching look at the end of the show. Since Skype and podcasts didn’t exist in 1999, and we want to discuss these episodes the way the internet intended, we’re sticking with the UTF-8 world of chat rooms and instant messaging. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “inadvertently”). Today’s episode is 1104, “Treehouse of Horror X”. Yesterday was 1103, “Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner?”. Charlie Sweatpants: Ready to move on to Halloween? Mad Jon: Let’s. Charlie Sweatpants: Shall we just do these in the order in which the appeared, or shall we do them in terms of quality? Mad Jon: Order they appeared. Unless you guys disagree. Charlie Sweatpants: Fine by me. Dave: Order they appeared please. Charlie Sweatpants: I ask because I’m of the opinion that one of these is vastly better than the other two. Mad Jon: I really have a hard time ranking THOH skits by quality, at least within the same episode. Charlie Sweatpants: But if we’re going by order, then let us discuss Dead Flanders. Mad Jon: Ok. Charlie Sweatpants: This is not the one I think is good. There’s way too much Homer acting overly dumb, characters not making any sense (even within this Halloween sketch), and then there’s a lot of off voice Maude Flanders, which just bugs me no end. Dave: Yeah. It was pretty irritating to watch through and through. Mad Jon: I was hoping this wasn’t your top skit. As a THOH bit, it’s pretty standard, but I just don’t see enough of the family in this one as they are. It is just them being panicked and scared. The plot is very THOH, but since, as Charlie pointed out with Homer’s overacting, nobody is themselves, I sort of just wait for it to end. Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah. Like Homer’s long ass whispering scene to Flanders corpse. Mad Jon: Exactly. Dave: I’d nearly forgotten. Charlie Sweatpants: There’s just no need for it. Ditto all those long scenes where people stare at them accusingly and Homer and Flanders’s corpse on the roof. The whole thing is just a few minutes long, they shouldn’t need that much filler. Mad Jon: Well put. Dave: So we agree this was pretty weak. Charlie Sweatpants: Very week. Mad Jon: I feel the second weakest, but that is till pretty week. Charlie Sweatpants: The only scene in this one I really like is Homer’s description of all the cliched horror locations. Mad Jon: There is that. Charlie Sweatpants: Of course, a couple years after this, "South Park"…