“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to appear in a tortilla in Mexico.” – God As part of our tireless efforts to demonstrate the many ways Zombie Simpsons fails to entertain, Season 23 will be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that can only be produced by people typing short messages at one another. More dedicated or modern individuals might use Twitter for this, but that’s got graphics and short links and little windows that pop up when you put your cursor over things. The only kind of on-line communications we like are the kind that could once be done at 2400 baud. So disable your call waiting, plug in your modem, and join us for another year of Crazy Noises. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “irrelevantly”, but not for many of our guest’s British variations.). In our longer than usual conversation below we touch briefly on the animation, and while I don’t want to make too big a deal out of this, I think it’s worth a couple of pictures. Specifically, take a look at the shoddier treatment the divine gets in Zombie Simpsons than it did in The Simpsons. Here’s how God looked in “Treehouse of Horror XXII”: And here’s how God looked in Season 4: Instead of those often odd looking shadows HD Zombie Simpsons is so fond of, we get a fantastically better looking robe and that awesome glowing effect. In Season 4 God looks like a god, in Season 23, God looks like a headless schmuck in a bathrobe. Here’s Satan in “Treehouse of Horror XXII”: And here’s Satan in “Treehouse of Horror IV”: Scarier, yes? Better animated, yeah? Okay, I’m cheating a little bit there because that’s Satan when he’s pissed off. Here he is in more conversational forms, from “Treehouse of Horror IV” and “Bart Gets Hit By a Car”: I stand by “scarier” and “better animated”. Not only do these Satans actually match the character model, but they keep with the best traditions of Satan-as-a-character. He isn’t nearly as menacing when he’s some huge, muscular Fabio of the Netherworld as he is when he’s just a little guy, offering you a deal. The one from Zombie Simpsons looks like the cheap cartoon you’d see on a pair of plastic devil horns, the ones from The Simpsons look like a guy who really does want to see you burn forever. Note: Our old friend Stephen “Friz” Frizzle stayed up late and joined us all the way from England. Friz: Good evening sir. Good morning sir. It passed midnight when I was speaking so that was technically accurate. Charlie Sweatpants: Ha. I love it when technology actually works. Mad Jon: Very nice Charlie Sweatpants: Friz, thanks for joining us here tonight/this morning. Friz: You all look lovely this evening. Have you decreased in mass? Shall we go in order of segments, or just attack it from all sides? Mad Jon: Normally I would say attack wherever,…
Tag: Treehouse of Horror XXII
Compare & Contrast: Halloween vs. Bad & Baseless Storytelling
“Fine, then you tell one scarier.” – Lisa Simpson “Flashlight please.” – Bart Simpson Ever since its beginning, the Treehouse of Horror series has depended on parodying, satirizing, and outright stealing from movies, television shows, and other stories. When The Simpsons was still itself that meant taking familiar ideas, themes and stories and remaking them in the style, language and irony of Springfield. That sounds simple, but it’s an extremely delicate process. They had to inject enough original ideas and twists to keep things from feeling stale or rehashed, while at the same time not changing the original source material so much that it became unrecognizable. On top of that, they needed to tell a coherent story that didn’t require any knowledge of the source material from the viewer. Oh, and the whole thing had to take place in just a few minutes of screen time. This is harder than it looks. That intricate, multi-step dance is why the Treehouse of Horror series is so rightly famous. The Shining is two and a half hours long, but they got all of the major scenes and most of the ideas into seven minutes and worked jokes and humor into every piece of dialogue. Those classic episodes of The Twilight Zone take twenty minutes or more, but The Simpsons retold them in a third of the time and made them hilarious. They chopped “The Raven” down to five minutes, preserved the mood, the unrelenting bleakness, and the bottomless despair of the ending . . . and made it funny. As Zombie Simpsons has so often demonstrated, that isn’t easy to do, and screwing it up even a little can spoil the entire thing. The craftsmanship and cultural span of those episodes is stunning, but they all have three things in common. The first is incredibly strong source material. The second was a remaking of that material into something that is recognizable to people familiar with the original, but still coherent, accessible and funny to people who aren’t. The third is the way the whole thing is both funny and scary, with moments that, if taken seriously, are truly terrifying, but that never lose their sense of humor. Consider the very first “Treehouse of Horror”. The source material is incredibly famous from start to finish. The opening segment cribs from Poltergeist (a movie that directly spawned two sequels, indirectly spawned a television series, and is currently being remade) and a number of other classic American horror and haunted house tropes, including the ubiquitous “ancient Indian burial ground”. The second part takes its cues from The Twilight Zone, one of the most well known and critically acclaimed television series of all time. And the third retells a poem so famous that a couple of years later they named an NFL team after it. That alone isn’t enough, of course. Each segment goes beyond what spawned it to give it that special Simpsons twist while remaining clear to people who’ve never encountered the originals. You…
And the Children Were Silent
“That doll is evil, I tells ya. Evil! Evil!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson “Grampa, you said that about all the presents.” – Marge Simpson “I just want attention.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson I happened to find myself at my brother’s house yesterday, keeping an eye on three of his kids, two nephews (13 and 11) and a niece (8). Though they’re well aware that the new episodes are subpar, they wanted to watch the new Zombie Simpsons. When Homer farted for the first time my niece got a goofy grin on her face, but the boys only looked up from their laptops intermittently. Not a single one of them laughed out loud during the entire episode, and when it was done my niece said, and I quote, “That wasn’t very good.” Allow me to agree with the eight-year-old. Of the various crimes against comedy that went into those four segments, the farting was the most tiresome, but the entire episode was an exercise in stretching weak jokes and weaker ideas to fill that unforgiving time requirement. The premise of the opening segment is Homer getting trapped a la 127 Hours, but even though that whole thing was supposed to be an introduction, it took nearly two minutes just to get Homer out into the boonies. Once he was there they dragged it out even more by having him chew off a limb three (3) times. The second segment had such a weak premise that it couldn’t make it through even its limited runtime without a classic Zombie Simpsons swerve, having Homer suddenly become Spiderman. The Dexter thing suffered a similar fate as it ran out of steam and needed divine intervention to make it to the commercial break. The Avatar segment, easily the longest, clocking in at nearly eight minutes, spent more than a quarter of its runtime on the goofy battle/action/whatever sequence at the end that was light on jokes, thought and satire and heavy on surprisingly boring cartoon violence. There were a couple of lines I actually liked, notably Flanders telling the hooker to “Spend less time on your back and more time on your knees” and Chalmers’ windy but accurate “This is a delicate mission that requires utter loyalty. I can think of no better candidate than the resentful guy in the wheelchair who has just arrived.” But for each of those there were a dozen or more cringe inducing duds like the alien repeatedly screaming at Milhouse. When she yelled at him for kicking the rock my instant reaction was, “I wonder how many times they’re going to repeat this.” The answer was three. All in all, this was about what to expect from Zombie Simpsons in a Halloween episode. Turned loose with no limits on their creativity, they hash together a few tepid pop culture references and call it a day. Anyway, the numbers are in and they are the worst ever for a Halloween episode. Last night’s unworthy successor was silently endured by just…
Sunday Preview: Treehouse of Horror XXII
Image from here, photoshop by Dave. Well, that was a nice two weeks, but Zombie Simpsons returns tonight with another indifferent and slow witted entry in the once proud Treehouse of Horror series. Simpsons Channel has the lackluster details: Homer takes a dangerous dive into an isolated canyon on Candy Peak, but when a crashing boulder traps his arm, he channels Aron Ralston (guest voicing as himself) to save himself. In “The Diving Bell and Butterball,” the first of three hair-raising Halloween tales, a venomous spider bite leaves Homer paralyzed, but when Lisa discovers Homer’s ability to communicate through natural gases, he is able to express his love for Marge. The killer spells continue in “Dial D for Diddly,” when Ned Flanders, devout preacher by day, transforms into a cold-blooded vigilante by night. In the final terrifying tale, “In the Na’Vi,” Bart and Milhouse are assigned on a mission to access a sacred extract on a distant planet. They morph into the land’s indigenous one-eyed avatars, but when Bart finds love and an eternal mate abroad, he is caught in planet warfare. For those of you scoring at home, that’s two times Homer gets paralyzed/trapped, as well as two topical segments that no one will care about by this time next week.