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May

Compare & Contrast: Megastar Guest Voices

“We want Michael! We want Michael! We want Michael!” – Crowd
“Here he is, here’s the guy want to see!” – Homer Simpson
“He’s three hundred pounds!” – Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
“He’s white!” – Woman in Crowd
“He’s dressed without flair!” – Moe
“Boooo! Boo!” – Crowd

It would take an awful lot of words just to catalog, to say nothing of exploring or explaining, the myriad of mistakes that comprise “Lisa Goes Gaga”. The episode had it all: bizarre and comedy free flights of fancy, unvarnished celebrity marketing, excruciatingly bad exposition, magic powers, characters acting bizarrely out of type (Lisa, Skinner, there were a lot), pointless and unrelated scenes, and, to top it all off, the entire thing may or may not have been the dream of some anonymous backup dancer. But all of those problems cascaded from one central failing, the inability of Zombie Simpsons to handle the very famous.

Whether or not you are a fan of her songs or of the outsize public persona to which her music is only tangentially connected, Lady Gaga is undeniably one of the most famous and discussed people on planet Earth here in 2012. She’s enormously popular with her fans, of course, but she’s also reached that rare level of fame where literally anything she does is news to the celebrity press, and her statements and actions frequently push beyond the paparazzi ghetto and into regular news. Even a passing familiarity with popular culture requires you to at least know who she is.

This is Wikipedia’s list of Season 23’s guest stars:

Aron Ralston, Jane Lynch, Mario Batali, Anthony Bourdain, Tim Heidecker, Gordon Ramsay, Eric Wareheim, Neil Gaiman, Andy García, Kevin Michael Richardson, John Slattery, Matthew Weiner, Kevin Dillon, Janeane Garofalo, Jackie Mason, Joan Rivers, Dana Gould, Ted Nugent, Armie Hammer, David Letterman, The Tiger Lillies, Jeremy Irons, Michael Cera, Jamie Hyneman, Adam Savage, Julian Assange, Kelsey Grammer, Alison Krauss and Union Station, Jackie Mason, Robbie Conal, Ron English, Shepard Fairey, Nicholas McKaig, Kenny Scharf, David Byrne, Glenn Close, Brent Spiner, Kevin Michael Richardson, Steve Coogan, Treat Williams, Bryan Cranston, Eric Idle

There are a lot of recognizable names on that list, but in terms of raw fame, none of them are even in the same league with the one time Stefani Germanotta. Parts assigned to a bunch of television chefs, or a talk show host, or even some well known movie star are basically interchangeable. There are, after all, quite a few television chefs, and if Jeremy Irons doesn’t want to be the talking bar rag, there are plenty of other respectable British actors with great voices out there. There is only one Lady Gaga.

That yawning fame gap means that you have to do something special for her. Just having her show up as somebody’s girlfriend or rival won’t fly. Even more importantly, it’s a fantastic opportunity. Someone who draws that much attention from that many places opens up a nearly unlimited array of potential subjects and stories. Zombie Simpsons wasted all that by having Lady Gaga not just play herself, but play herself as Lady Gaga the Megastar.

We’ll do what she did, and that’ll make people like us, right?
(Second image shamelessly yoinked from here.)

Twenty seasons ago, The Simpsons took a similar opportunity with Michael Jackson – who was, relative to the time, probably even more famous than Gaga is now – and turned it into one of their most memorable episodes. Crucially, they did it by stripping Michael Jackson of everything that made him Michael Jackson the Megastar: his looks, his fame, his fashion, his sex appeal, everything. All they left him with was his talent and his voice, which, if you’re having him play a fictional cartoon character, are the only truly important parts.

Creative, recognizable and funny will always be better than mindless repetition.

They understood that exaggerating the already exaggerated – and that kind of globe spanning fame is nothing if not the exaggeration of one person into something more than a person – was pointless. Once someone has actually taken a chimpanzee with him on tour or gone out in public wearing a dress made of meat, there isn’t anything you can do to make the situation meaningfully stranger. Trying to compete with things like that by making them even bigger or weirder isn’t the least big creative, it’s just an animated imitation of something someone else is already doing. If news broke tomorrow that Lady Gaga was touring in a pink and purple train with giant shoes on its drive wheels and a built in concert stage, you might be impressed, but you wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

By contrast, making Michael Jackson an ordinary person is a real feat. Unexceptional and unremarkable are two things Michael Jackson never was. From the time he became famous as a child right up until his death, Jackson was always larger than life. But on The Simpsons (and really only on The Simpsons), he was just a guy, a bricklayer from New Jersey who liked it when people were nice to him.

That humanity is why the story in “Stark Raving Dad” has such heart to it and why the episode is unique among all the things Michael Jackson was famous for. Bart and the rest of the town love Michael the Megastar. For them, it’s about the album sales and the dance moves and the one white glove covered in rhinestones. For Leon Kompowsky, however, those things are incidental to Michael Jackson, the talented boy who loves his sisters and writes songs for them.

The only time “Lisa Goes Gaga” even hinted at that kind of depth and creativity was when Lisa went off on Gaga for giving people false hope and unrealistic expectations. All the positive attitude and self confidence in the world can’t change the fact that sometimes people fail, that sometimes life gives you lemons that cannot be turned into lemonade. But the episode dropped that idea almost as soon as it considered it, and ended with Lisa doing things that the overwhelming majority of Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters will never get to do: meet her and sing with her and experience even a little bit of what it’s like to look upon the world from that tremendous height. After all, there’s a parallel universe somewhere in which Germanotta stubbed her toe before an audition or didn’t meet the right people and today she’s wearing regular clothes and working at a temp agency for slightly more than minimum wage.

The Simpsons openly contemplated that idea by showing that what made Michael Jackson special would’ve still made him special even if he’d been a fat mental patient who dressed without flair and never sold a single record. After all, his music could reach deep and bring people together even when it was played on an overturned waste basket. Massive fame and all the glitzy trappings that come with it may be nice, but they are too impersonal to define a person or their talent. Zombie Simpsons was too distracted by the shiny objects to notice that, so they mistook Lady Gaga’s fame and the pizzazz that comes with it as an end in itself rather than as a side effect of something more important. Once that mistake was made, the episode never had a chance.

May

Compare & Contrast: Wedding Reception Guest Lists

By Charlie Sweatpants 52 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and Simpsons
Tags: A Milhouse Divided, Ned 'N Edna's Blend

“Would you guys do a favor for a guy in love?” – Kirk van Houten
“Sure.” – Drummer
“Yeah.” – Doobie Brother
“It’s why we’re here.” – Keyboardist

“Ned ‘N Edna’s Blend” uses a lot of ideas, characters and jokes from earlier episodes. There’s a religious school that’s more expository and less believably insane than the one in “Whacking Day”. There’s Flanders calling a talking dog “the spawn of the devil” when we all know from “Bart the Lover” that it’s Todd who considers the idea of a talking dog “blasphemous”. There’s even that poorly stereotyped theater guy, who’s not nearly as humorously delusional as the great Llewellyn Sinclair from “A Streetcar Named Marge”. But for the starkest illustration of just how differently The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons approach the same kind of concept, there’s nothing better than looking at the way each portrayed a wedding reception hosted at the Simpson home.

Like “Ned ‘N Edna’s Blend”, Season 8’s “A Milhouse Divided” takes marriage as its inspiration, and both episodes end up with a small party on Evergreen terrace to celebrate recent nuptials. The differences arise when you begin to consider not only who is at these parties, but why they are there and what they do. In the case of Zombie Simpsons, the event is less of a real party and more of a roll call of wacky characters:

I’m mildly surprised by the lack of Bumblebee Man.

I only count two strangers in that image (the anonymous couple underneath Moe); other than that everyone is a recurring character (and I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be Helen Lovejoy behind the bush to the right of Disco Stu). Here’s the guest list as of this establishing shot:

Bride: Groundskeeper Willie, Superintendent Chalmers, Mr. Largo, Miss Hoover, Lunchlady Doris, and (I guess) the van Houtens.
Groom: The Lovejoys and (I guess) Homer and Marge.
??????: Moe, Lenny, Carl, the Nahasapeemapetilons, Cookie Kwan, Disco Stu, and Sideshow Mel

Half the guest list has no discernable reason to be there and we haven’t even gotten to the bizarre sequence with Captain McAllister and Lindsey Naegle. For characters like Disco Stu and Cookie Kwan, neither of whom gets a line, there’s no reason to have them there at all. What’s more, even the characters who have a plausible reason to be there don’t do anything. Miss Hoover, for example, doesn’t get a word in even though we know that her and Krabappel are work friends who’ve hung out in the past. Almost everyone in that shot is simple background filler, they don’t have anything to do with the story outside of this party, nor do they do anything in this scene.

By contrast, here’s the guests at Homer and Marge’s second wedding:

Hey look, people who have reasons to be there.

Here the only people we have are Marge’s mother and sisters, Homer’s father, and the other couples that were at the dinner party that begins the episode. There aren’t any random celebrities or Springfield eccentrics who have no connection to these people or their lives. Not only does this make the story seem more realistic and relatable, but it also means that when it comes time for people to crack jokes and act funny, we don’t have to just drop in random characters for no reason. Instead we get Lovejoy’s exasperation at Homer’s vows, the hip rock & roll combo with one Doobie Brother, and Kirk’s hilariously pathetic failure to re-woo Luann, including asking for his shirts back and his meek acceptance of being ejected at the hands of her vastly superior new boyfriend.

Compare that with what passes for comedy at the Flanders-Krabappel reception. Since none of the secondary characters who should be there have anything to do with the rest of the plot, the only thing Zombie Simpsons can do is paste in McAllister and Naegle hooking up and Moe and Lisa staring dumbly at the fourth wall. Marge breaks up the former for reasons that don’t make any sense (I fail to see how it reflects poorly on the host when two people get together at a wedding reception), and the latter is yet another attempt by Zombie Simpsons to deflect how badly the move to a four act structure has affected the show.

The entire reception scene in Zombie Simpsons is hollow. It goes on for two minutes after the shot I grabbed above, and yet the only event that’s even vaguely plot related is Flanders and Krabappel getting into a big fight over Rod and Todd. The rest of the space has to be filled with the out of place antics of other secondary characters (pretty much all of whom come from Season 9 or earlier) because there’s simply nothing else going on. This is bad enough on its own, but consider what a staggering failure of imagination it represents.

This show had two characters fall in love and get married, and not just any two characters. Flanders and Krabappel have both been with the show since Season 1; not only do they come from very different social spheres, but they’ve had countless interactions with other characters over the years. That much history should open up all kinds of possibilities, everything from secular-religious conflicts and accommodations (which the episode barely touches) to quick and simple jokes about the backstory of some of the other characters. Just between Hoover and Reverend Lovejoy you’d think they could come up with at least one line that was relevant and funny. But with all those untapped ideas and rich character bios at its fingertips, Zombie Simpsons went with random flirting between two characters who are unrelated to what’s happening and unrelated to one another.

The empty nature of the thing is another example of the way Zombie Simpsons treats Springfield and its citizens as flat, lifeless background ornamentation. They’ve lost any interest in using the characters as characters, and instead just see them as a collection of traits that can be trotted out at any time and for any reason. (“The sea captain gets with the business lady? Outrageous!”) The Simpsons never needed to resort to those kind of cheap shortcuts because it treated its characters like real human beings (even the nameless musicians have lines and motivations), and the scene is tremendously smarter and richer because of it.

Kirk asking for his shirts back is kinda funny on its own, but it’s made so much better because of who he is and of how pitiful it is for him to still be caught up on some old shirts that we saw Luann burn much earlier in the episode. Zombie Simpsons never does that kind of thing, and the result is weird scenes where characters act with little to no motivation and the jokes have nothing to do with the story. In The Simpsons, as in real life, it matters who’s on the guest list. In Zombie Simpsons, it doesn’t.

May

Compare & Contrast: Homer’s Imaginary Friends

By Charlie Sweatpants 6 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: The Last Temptation of Homer, The Spy Who Learned Me

“Colonel Klink! Why have you forsaken me?” – Homer Simpson

The hallucinatory Stradivarius Cain in “The Spy Who Learned Me” isn’t quite as bad an idea as a tiny green space alien that only Homer can see, but it’s not far off. Even if we set aside some of the more glaring incongruities about Homer’s imaginary friend (what’s with the other imaginary characters interacting with him? were there any reasons besides killing time and cross promotional masturbation for him to pop out of FOX’s stupid football robot?), we’re still left with a number of problems that illustrate not only how bad an idea this was, but how poorly they executed it as well.

First, consider why Cain is in the episode. He appears when Homer is sitting in Moe’s watching television, bluntly declares that he’s the result of the concussion Homer has suffered, and that he’s there to help Homer get back into Marge’s good graces. Right here at the start, strange things are happening even if we set aside the oddity that apparently some part of Homer’s brain knows how to be suave, confident and charming.

By the time he appears, Homer’s concussion is pretty far in the past. Thanks to Zombie Simpsons’ relentless insistence on terrible pacing, the concussion happens just before the five minute mark but Cain doesn’t show up for six more minutes after that, past the halfway point. On its own this wouldn’t be too terrible, except that at the end, after Homer gets clonked on the head with that guy’s gun, the other characters and Cain show up instantly as Homer pounds on his own skull with a rock.

I didn’t know that rock could do that.

Even more than the usual problems that arise from plot holes and weird leaps of logic, this kind of inconsistency is extremely shitty storytelling. Cain showed up at Moe’s long after the initial injury with only his say so linking his presence to Homer’s getting hit in the head (and even that was done in passing). Then when the unnamed guy bashes Homer with the gun, there’s no indication whatsoever that the blow made Cain disappear, so having Homer start hitting himself to get Cain back is doubly strange. I know I usually complain that Zombie Simpsons over-explains things, but in this case they did the opposite.

Compare that undercooked justification to the simple efficiency of Homer’s guardian angel in “The Last Temptation of Homer”. Homer’s in a panic because his home life is a mess, he thinks teevee is telling him to cheat on his wife, and the marriage counselor to whom he just confessed his secret desires ended up being Ned Flanders. When Flanders tries to get Marge on the line, Homer freaks, hits his head on the side of the phone booth, and poof, Sir Isaac Newton.

See, Zombie Simpsons? This isn’t that hard.

There’s no doubt in the audience’s mind as to who this semi-transparent guy is or why he’s there. He doesn’t need to say, “Homer, I’m here because you hit your head on the side of the phone booth” because we just saw that happen. In turn, that means he can introduce himself quickly and the episode can move immediately to his transformation into Colonel Klink (with Werner Klemperer doing the voice) and his unintentionally disastrous attempts to show Homer what his life would be like if he’d married Mindy instead of Marge (“Madam President, your approval rating is soaring”).

On top of that, The Simpsons had the good sense to keep the character only Homer can see well in the background. Klink doesn’t alter the plot, he’s there in support of things that are happening in the real world. He’s the opposite of those weird digressions Zombie Simpsons likes to take because his presence and his actions as Homer’s supernatural protector make sense for who he is and reinforce what’s already going on in the story. Cain, on the other hand, is basically Ozmodiar. Only Homer can see him, and pretty much all of Homer’s actions are based on Cain’s advice.

In total, we have Zombie Simpsons taking a weak idea and botching it, where The Simpsons took a similar idea and used it well while not asking it to do too much. The kind of show that has even Homer’s guardian angle become frustrated with him knew enough not to make his imaginary friend the center of the plot.

May

Compare & Contrast: Existential Crises in Childhood

By Charlie Sweatpants 8 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again, Moaning Lisa

“I’m still trying to figure out what’s bothering Lisa. I don’t know, Bart’s such a handful, and Maggie needs attention, but all the while, our little Lisa’s becoming a young woman.” – Marge Simpson
“Oh, so that’s it. This is some kind of underwear thing.” – Homer Simpson

Beneath the unvarnished cruise line agitprop, the hastily dropped money saving plot, and that bizarre encounter with penguins in Ant-fucking-arctica lies what may be the most half-assed aspect of “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again”, its blisteringly simplistic and incomplete handling of Bart’s serious melancholy. Though the episode doesn’t really get around to what Bart’s actually feeling until past its midpoint, the Bart we see here is floundering among the deep and unanswerable questions of life. Is this all there is? What should I be doing with my life? Since Zombie Simpsons always – always – follows in the footsteps of The Simpsons, it’s worth looking at the first time the show handled a youthful crisis of self doubt and existential dread, Season 1’s “Moaning Lisa”.

The driving idea of “A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again” is Bart’s unhappiness, his belief that because he doesn’t have enough “fun”, his life is a total waste. To its surprising credit, Zombie Simpsons actually portrays this rather grimly, by having Bart imagine himself on his death bed, looking back on a life wasted at school and work, the only real accomplishment of which was to produce a son capable of wheeling him into the hospital to die.

It’s more bleak than funny, but I’m almost impressed.

Of course, being Zombie Simpsons, they viciously undercut this rather depressing concept in a number of ways. Not only do they place it right after their pathetic song-vertisement, but they actually have Bart say out loud exactly what he’s feeling three (3!) times in succession. First, young Bart laments that vacation will end and fun with it. Then old Bart says the same thing. Then they cut back to young Bart who repeats it again. You can make a case for the third one, because it does have Bart resolving to keep the cruise going forever, but the first two are 100% unnecessary filler.

Being aware of how full frontally bad your writing is doesn’t make it okay.

As poorly and as late in the episode as Zombie Simpsons is presenting it, however, this is some heavy shit Bart is dealing with. (And no, the montage at the beginning doesn’t count, even as foreshadowing. It’s fluff that gets discarded as soon as the cruise commercial comes on.) Even though he’s only kinda sorta still a kid, to have a ten-year-old imagine his unhappy death is both sad and morbid. It’s a meaty enough concept that you could, were you so inclined, base a decent episode around it.

Now that’s foreshadowing.

Naturally, “Moaning Lisa” is better than just “decent”, and that’s due in no small part to the fact that it takes her feelings seriously enough to introduce them at the beginning of the episode and then show us why she feels that way. Lisa is unhappy because her father is a terrible parent, her brother torments her night and day, and her mom doesn’t understand her, and we see each of those happen.

Homer doesn’t mean to make things worse, but that’s exactly what he does:

Homer: Why don’t you climb up on Daddy’s knee and tell him all about it.
Lisa: I’m just wondering, what’s the point? Would it make any difference at all if I never existed? How can we sleep at night when there’s so much suffering in the world?
Homer: Well, uh, eh . . . c’mon, Lisa! Ride the Homer Horsey!

That’s followed by Marge telling her to take a bath, Bart yelling at her, Maggie declaring her love of the TV, and then Homer telling her to stop playing her saxophone in the house. Even at this early stage of The Simpsons, everything is interspersed with jokes and comedy (and there’s the great video boxing B-plot), but the story takes precedence because without it, nothing else matters.

Consider the scene with Bart, Lisa, Maggie and the television. Bart’s mad at Lisa, Lisa’s sad, and both of them are doing everything they can to get Maggie on their side. When Lisa gives up, and Maggie heads for the television, it works not only because she chose the box over her siblings, but because the stakes have been raised so high. Loving television over people wouldn’t be nearly as funny if it weren’t so serious. It’s the difference between slapping some unrelated jokes into a story, and telling a story that is itself both poignant and funny.

Teacher. Mother. Secret Babysitter.

Of course, that distinction is totally lost on Zombie Simpsons. They’ve got this profoundly ominous cloud hanging over Bart’s head, but instead of making use of it, for comedy or story, they tuck it off to the side so they can continue with their hyperactive gibberish. After Bart manages to convince the ship that the entire world has been destroyed, itself a plot twist that makes no sense on any level whatsoever, all the things he had been loving about the cruise vanish. No more good food, no more water slides, no more endless amusement.

Bart doesn’t react to any of this; he, and he alone, is completely untouched by what’s going on. Like so many other things, this could’ve been used constructively. They could’ve had the family show Bart that it wasn’t the ship that he loved, but being with other people or some such nonsense. Instead, Bart remains bafflingly immune to the horrors all around them while the show trots out whatever apocalypse gags were left over after the “Outlands” episode a couple months ago.

However, even that level of head scratching weirdness isn’t enough for Zombie Simpsons. They decide to ratchet things up even further by stranding the family in Antarctica before finally, at long last, getting Bart to realize some kind of lesson about making the most out of life. Even then, they have to club you over the head with it, though in this case the expository narration is necessary because what they’re showing you – trapped in Antarctica and freezing to death – is so wildly different than what they’re saying:

Lisa: Well, sure life is full of pain and drudgery, but the trick is to enjoy the few perfect experiences we’re given in the moment.
Homer: Yeah, stupid. Stop thinking about fun, and have it!

By this point, the realization, and the depression that necessitated it, are hardly even footnotes to what’s happened and what’s happening. Leave it to Zombie Simpsons to ask the audience to take emotional satisfaction in an ending after enduring the near seizure level mood swings between “triple upgrade”, Homer with an orange mohawk and spiked shoulder pads, and a survival situation that’s set to kill them all very soon.

By contrast, “Moaning Lisa” doesn’t end until the story wraps itself up by actually addressing the problem Lisa’s been having since the beginning. In the car on the way to school, Marge makes another attempt to help Lisa:

Marge: Now, Lisa, listen to me. This is important. I want you to smile today.
Lisa: But I don’t feel like smiling.
Marge: Well, it doesn’t matter how you feel inside, you know? It’s what shows up on the surface that counts. That’s what my mother taught me. Take all your bad feelings and push them down, all the way down, past your knees until you’re almost walking on them. And then, you’ll fit in, and you’ll be invited to parties, and boys will like you, and happiness will follow.

This is terrible, repressive and retrograde advice, but at this moment in the story it’s the best Marge can do. She still doesn’t understand what’s wrong with Lisa, so she falls back on what she was told by her mother, which we in the audience already understand since we saw it earlier.

As soon as Lisa steps out of the car, she starts doing what her mother told her, and this is when the episode shows us both a) how disastrous it is, and b) Marge realizing how disastrous it is. No sooner has Lisa opened her mouth than she’s being taken advantage of and letting her hopes and passions die. That in turn prompts Marge to swoop in and tell Lisa what she’s needed to hear the whole time: that even though it sometimes doesn’t feel like, Lisa is loved and valued for who she is.

Not only is Lisa’s emotional burden lifted, but we the audience get a fulfilling ending, with Marge and Lisa bonding and the whole family going to the jazz club to see Homer embarrassed by Lisa’s song. By comparison, Zombie Simpsons brought up a lot of serious emotions, ignored them for its preferred pastime of lunatic zaniness, and then dropped in a glib and hollow ending at the last second because it had literally reached the end of the world. One of these is thoughtful and funny, the other considered being thoughtful, but dropped it because penguins.

Apr

Compare & Contrast: March-April Romances

By Charlie Sweatpants 31 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Beware My Cheating Bart, New Kid on the Block

“She’s beautiful. Say something clever!” – Bart’s Brain
“I fell on my bottom.” – Bart Simpson
“D’oh!” – Bart’s Brain

There are a lot problems with “Beware My Cheating Bart”. For starters, it’s kinda sexist and disturbing. Beyond that, it’s further evidence that Zombie Simpsons has turned its kid characters into empty, anti-human nobodies. And, of course, it manages to lack any kind of story coherence while doing all those things. What makes it all more glaring than usual is the way “Beware My Cheating Bart” so closely follows the plot, structure, and even jokes of the boundlessly superior “New Kid on the Block”.

One of the most handy things anyone ever told me about sexism was that the easiest way to gauge how sexist something is or isn’t was by reversing the gender roles and seeing how weird or fucked up it would seem. Applying that little rubric, “Beware My Cheating Bart” fails miserably compared to “New Kid on the Block”. In the latter, it would mean a ten-year-old girl developing a crush on the fourteen(ish)-year-old boy next door, showing him that his girlfriend was bad news, and then ending with them bonding as friends by making a prank call. A little unusual, maybe, but certainly not creepy. In Zombie Simpsons, it would mean a fourteen(ish)-year-old boy flashing a ten-year-old girl, then making out with her repeatedly, hanging around with her in little kid pizza joints, and running about town late at night. That is creepy, no two ways about it, and that means you might not want to be doing it at all.

Uh . . . yeah, please don’t do that again.

Leaving that unpleasantness behind us forever, the best way to shake off the weirdness of having a character the episode identifies as a “total pre-puber” getting hot and heavy in the privacy of the principal’s office is to remember that it’s been a long time since Bart was anything like a normal kid, and the same goes for Jimbo and everyone else in this episode. Just in that first scene in the movie theater, we get sitcom-tastic clunkers like this:

Dolph: We’re gonna to be checking out a delightful Hong Kong horror remake known as ‘Crawlspace’, based on Paxing Kongjian.

And this:

Jimbo: Shauna, food for thought, if we don’t watch movies about torture in crawlspaces, how will we know what to do if someone puts us in a torture crawlspace?
Kearney: Not if, when.
Shauna: Nah. I’m gonna go see one of those Jennifer Aniston movies where she rolls her eyes on the poster.

This kind of stilted, formulaic dialogue is hacktacular on a couple of levels. First of all, what little humor they’re trying to wring out of these fake movies dissolves away when you have your characters basically explain the jokes as they’re saying them, not to mention the movie posters behind them that do the same thing.

Ha! That’s what s/he just said. I get it now! I get jokes.

More importantly, nobody talks like this except comedy writers. None of the characters here act like actual characters, instead they’re little more than animated loudspeakers. The things they’re saying don’t work in the context of where or who they are; they only make sense if you’re sitting in a room with a bunch of people constantly hurling punchlines at one another. Zombie Simpsons may not have a laughtrack, but it’d be awfully easy to insert canned laughter into that. Observe:

Jimbo: Shauna, food for thought, if we don’t watch movies about torture in crawlspaces, how will we know what to do if someone puts us in a torture crawlspace?
[Short laugh]
Kearney: Not if, when.
[Longer laugh]
Shauna: Nah. I’m gonna go see one of those Jennifer Aniston movies where she rolls her eyes on the poster.
[Long laugh, with subtle amounts of “ooh”]

Each line is its own self contained piece of cheap fluff, and there’s hardly any interaction between them. Now, consider the first time we see some of the same characters in “New Kid on the Block”. Bart and Laura are sitting on the curb in front of Laura’s new house while their moms are inside talking. They don’t spit ungainly cultural references back and forth, instead they actually get to know each other as Bart tries out his little pranks and Laura impresses him by already knowing them.

Similarly, when Dolph and Kearney walk by, they don’t immediately crack some joke that’s intended for the audience instead of the other people who are supposedly right in front of them. They speak like there really is a girl sitting there, with Kearney trying one of those hideous pick up lines that only seem like good ideas to very naive teenage boys:

Kearney: Hey, baby, how ’bout putting your finger in my ear.
Laura: Well, I don’t know, your boyfriend looks like the jealous type.
Kearney: Hey, what the?
Dolph: That chick’s messing with our minds.
Kearney: Let’s get out of here!

Each line leads directly and necessarily into the next, so not only is this funnier, but it also works naturally with who these characters are and what each of them is trying to do. Laura continues to demonstrate how cool she is by effortlessly annihilating Kearney’s hapless pass at her, while Kearney and Dolph fail, panic and flee from a girl who’s clearly smarter and tougher than they are. On top of all that, the audience sees Bart’s crush on Laura deepen after he watches her defeat his tormentors.

Sigh. She’s dreamy.

This sort of thing can be seen throughout both episodes. In “New Kid on the Block”, Bart and Laura both act like kids their age. Laura babysits, plays video games at the Kwik-E-Mart, and completely overlooks Bart’s puppy love because she has no reason to notice it. Meanwhile, Bart falls head over heels, but has no idea how to go about it (in no small part because Homer gets drunk while failing to explain the facts of life to him). The jokes and humor (Two Guys from Kabul, Escape from Death Row) are inserted into natural interactions for two kids like them to have.

In “Beware My Cheating Bart”, the opposite happens. What jokes there are get blasted into weird situations, while Bart, Shauna, Jimbo, Lisa and everyone else act like dating weary adults. They give each other sophisticated relationship advice, know every cliche, and generally act like the same kind of one dimensional characters you’ll find in those eye rolling Jennifer Aniston movies. They couldn’t be less like real kids if they were played by hard bodied, thirty-something movie stars:

Shauna: I want to find out who I am. And that’s something only an inappropriately older man can tell me.
Bart: Well, that is one lucky, creepy guy.

By this point in the episode, I have no idea who these people are supposed to be, or even if they’re still people at all. When this happens, Jimbo has apparently been patrolling Bart’s back yard for hours on end, Shauna has realized out of the blue that she wants something else, and Bart drops his entire infatuation as though it never happened. There’s no connection between events, things happen because everyone’s been through this so many times before that, when it comes to what should be the climax of the story, they already know what to do.

By contrast, in “New Kid on the Block”, Bart thinks Laura is finally taking a shine to him when she confides in him that she’s started dating Jimbo. Bart doesn’t see this coming, and Laura doesn’t realize how much she just hurt him. Neither of them is really aware of what’s going on with the other because – again – they’re just kids. Check out Laura’s swooning description of what she likes about Jimbo:

Bart: How can you like that guy?
Laura: I don’t know. Maybe cause he’s an outlaw. You know that dead body they found behind the mayor’s house?
Bart: Jimbo killed him?
Laura: No, but he poked him with a stick.

Hey look! Characters emoting.

Just as with Laura’s dismissing of Kearney, everyone here is perfectly in character, and they sneak in that joke about Quimby murdering someone while keeping the dialogue very kid-like. On top of that, none of them knows where things are going to go from here. Laura likes Jimbo because she thinks he’s a good looking rebel who plays by his own rules. Jimbo likes Laura because she’s a cool chick who doesn’t mind when he takes his shirt off. And Bart schemes to break them apart because he knows that Jimbo is bad news. Instead of romance veterans who go through the motions, Laura, Jimbo and Bart all act like themselves right up to the end.

Zombie Simpsons took a bad romantic comedy template, grafted their characters onto it without the least bit of consideration as to why any of them would act like that way, and figured a few semi-clever asides would be enough to redeem it. The Simpsons knew how to create something better than that, because on that show they understood that having kids act like kids isn’t an impediment to having them be funny.

Mar

Compare & Contrast: Hostile Robots

By Charlie Sweatpants 9 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Itchy and Scratchy Land, Them Robot

“Wow, this is so much like my dreams, it’s scary.” – Bart Simpson

The robot apocalypse has been a staple of fiction literally since “robots” were first imagined. According to Wikipedia, the word “robot” was first coined for a Czech play about robots who, you guessed it, rise up and defeat us squishy humans. (Apparently, it’s a translation of the Czech word for “slave”. I learned something today.) That idea has been the foundation for who knows how many works of fiction, and has so thoroughly penetrated mainstream culture that making jokes about it is more or less obligatory every time some new advance in actual electronics is announced.

Most stories about robot uprisings occur in the realm of science fiction for the obvious reason that, as Linda Hamilton so eloquently put it back in 1984, “They cannot make things like that yet.”. Indeed, they cannot. This presents a problem for shows like The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons, which have contemporary settings but still want to have some fun at the expense of our would be overlords.

Since this is fiction (and animated fiction at that), no problem is really insoluble. Whether you’re broadcasting in 1994 or 2012, if you want to have rebelling robots, you can have rebelling robots. The important question is how you go about it. You can work the robots into the larger framework of the episode, making them and their characteristics part of the setting and satire. Or you can just conjure them out of nowhere, strip them of all characteristics save the most grossly basic outline of a “robot”, and have them traipse around with no discernable rhyme or reason. The former is what The Simpsons did in “Itchy & Scratchy Land”, the latter is a roughly accurate description of whatever the hell it was Zombie Simpsons did in “Them, Robot”.

The Simpsons always had its share of improbable plots, but murderous robots was pretty far out there, even by their standards. Consequently, the episode is very deliberate about how it introduces the concept that will eventually be crucial to its ending. The first act is all about the family going on vacation, and doing so in very familiar terms: marketing gets kids to pester their parents, the parents eventually cave, and there’s a long and not terribly pleasant car ride. All of it is given that specially ludicrous Simpsons touch (Homer having a trunk full of fruits and vegetables, AM radio’s love of “signs of evil”, the shortcut), but there’s nothing that isn’t relatable to anyone who’s ever spent slow hours in the front or back seat on a family road trip.

The turn comes right before the first commercial break, when they go from the Itchy Lot to a helicopter that has a Jurassic Park style logo on the side and a pilot who confidently informs them that nothing can “possi-ply” go wrong as the Simpsons nervously glance at one another. It’s an obvious allusion to a massively popular science fiction movie, and the last shot before the ads is a rather terrifying looking island. Those last few scenes not only foreshadow the rest of the episode, they also subtly prepare the audience for the kind of events that are more often found in big budget science fiction.

I think Dr. Wily might be in there somewhere.

As an amusement park, Itchy & Scratchy Land is another great example of the way the show parodied ideas rather than brands. There’s plenty of Disney in the place (and Homer saying that he “kicked a giant mouse in the butt” remains a great dig), but it’s also mocking amusement parks more generally and the way that they have a narrowly controlled idea of what fun is. Disney World, Universal Studios and the like bill themselves has happy places, but underneath the gaudy surface are miserable employees, command systems that make them more like police states than parks, and a never ending hustle to make sure that there is no money left in your pocket when you leave the place. Anybody who has ever been to one can easily recognize all of these things, which makes suspension of disbelief about animatronic robots (another well known amusement park staple) that can walk upright and brutally attack each other that much easier.

When the audience is first introduced to the robots as part of a typical amusement park parade, we’re already primed to accept them as part of a recognizable (albeit exaggerated) landscape. And the show doesn’t waste any time either. Right in that first scene, we learn everything we need to about the robots: they’re armed, they don’t react well to flash photography, and they are programmed only to attack each other. These three characteristics remain constant throughout the episode, so when the revolt comes and they override their safety features (part of the ongoing Jurassic Park theme), no further explanation or exposition is necessary. The rules of this strange but familiar place have already been laid down, and the ending works within them.

You can draw a straight line from those first hints of danger right through to the end. As the story progresses, additional elements are seamlessly picked up so that when it does come time for a robot to go after Homer with an ax, there are no questions in the audience’s mind about why the robot is attacking or why it has an ax. The whole thing is so well constructed that they can actually have Homer make an exposition joke (“What are you, the narrator?”) without even slowing things down.

To compare with that intricate and comprehensive build up, Zombie Simpsons has some generic robots from somewhere, a power drill, and nothing else. The robots simply appear from behind a curtain with no reason or explanation given for how they came to be or how they got there. For the better part of the episode they stand idly by while Homer kills them in rather gruesome ways, forces them to play baseball, kills some more of them, and then sets a big pile of their twisted remains on fire. During all this, the robots alternate between being super strong and being incredibly fragile. The effect of all those manic actions, unannounced changes, and empty carnage not only undermines each scene, but the story as a whole.

For most of the episode, Homer’s been able to destroy individual robots with little more than a hard shove. The very first one he kills simply collapses to the ground after he bumped into it. Then he sticks a power drill into their heads and all of a sudden not only have their hands changed shape, but they’ve become frightfully capable of violence, including breaking through doors and windows and swatting away guard dogs with ease. The episode proceeds as though they are now all but invincible killing machines . . .

. . . right up until . . .

. . . they’re easily defeated by things which they would’ve torn through in the previous scene. The rampage ends just two minutes after it began by abruptly changing – yet again – the nature and capabilities of the robots.

Zombie Simpsons is no stranger to weak, illogical, or outright non-existent plots, of course. But it hurts them worse than usual in this context because the entire plot, as opposed to a scene or two, is predicated on something so strange and unbelievable that it kills any kind of flow or humor. All they’re left with is cheap silliness like corn dogs and squeegees. There’s nothing wrong with silliness, of course, but Homer didn’t defeat the robots when he threw his underwear at them.

The Simpsons pulled off their robot apocalypse because they treated it carefully, building up to what would’ve been head-exploding, laugh-killing nonsense had they introduced it earlier. Zombie Simpsons dove head first into that nonsense and never came up.

Mar

Compare & Contrast: Family Therapy and Meta Commentary

By Charlie Sweatpants 5 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: How I Wet Your Mother, There's No Disgrace Like Home

“Wait a minute, these mallet things are padded with foam rubber. What’s the point?” – Homer Simpson
“They’d work much better without the padding, Doc.” – Bart Simpson
“No, no, that’s not true.” – Dr. Marvin Monroe

Shortly after Frink fell out of the sky and “How I Wet Your Mother” took its disastrous Inception turn halfway through, one of the scenes the family quantum slept into was a callback to an old Tracey Ullman short called “Family Therapy”. (The original is about the family going to a therapist whom they torment until he throws them out of his office.) But it’s also reminiscent of the ending of Season 1’s “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”.

As usual when Zombie Simpsons recalls something The Simpsons already did, even a quick glance at the two scenes shows the yawning difference in humor and craftsmanship between the two shows. On The Simpsons, the therapy office is the culmination of the entire story about Homer wanting his family to be postcard perfect despite the fact that he’s the biggest (but by no means only) reason they aren’t and never will be. There are jokes about family life, bargain basement therapy, pawn shops, poverty, energy conservation, and television itself mixed in with physical gags and genuine feelings.

On Zombie Simpsons, the therapy office is little more than a random sketch among many, each of which features five empty and emotionless comedy troupers doing whatever zany things come to mind. The only thing in it that had anything to do with the rest of the episode was a coffin that was filled with fish, so even if this scene absolutely, positively had to be a based on a Tracey Ullman short, they could’ve dropped that particular prop into any one they liked. The contradictory and skeletal framework Zombie Simpsons passes off as a plot didn’t require them to be there or add anything to the scene.

It’s not the real Simpsons, but an incredible simulation!

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if Zombie Simpsons had bothered to tie the therapy office to the rest of the episode, because the underlying story was the kind of meandering nonsense you might hear from a five-year-old: See, Homer wets his bed [giggles], and then he’s got skis and there’s a coffin [sips from juice box], but then he falls off a cliff, but then they find the coffin in this room [wipes nose on sleeve], and then the coffin, um, the coffin is full of fish [gets distracted when sibling runs by]. You don’t mind this kind of stuff from the five-year-old because, hey, five-year-old. Zombie Simpsons doesn’t have that excuse (and stopped being cute a long time ago).

Beyond their places in each episode, though, both scenes also offer an informative meta-statement about the nature of their respective series, not only their specific places on television, but also in popular culture more generally. The overarching theme of “There’s No Disgrace Like Home” is about the Simpsons being a dysfunctional family, one that will never live up to the ideals of domestic bliss so common in popular portrayals of American families. That means one thing for the characters within the fictional universe that’s centered on Springfield, but it also means that the show itself, in the real universe of television, was rejecting the normal way of doing things and offering a critique of programs where the kids hardly fight and the dad always wears a nice shirt to the dinner table. Having the family embrace its shortcomings rather than strive for highly idealized fiction marked The Simpsons as a show apart, something distinct and innovative.

Very few programs feature electrocuted infants.

The throwback therapy scene in “How I Wet Your Mother” can be read in a similar way, albeit with vastly different implications. Not only did it occur as part of yet another tired movie takeoff episode, but its only discernable purpose was empty nostalgia.

As a movie, Inception had already been parodied to death long before Zombie Simpsons got anywhere near it. There have been so many trailer mashups, alternate endings, and inside jokes, that a quick search for “Inception Parodies” not only turns up a ton of them, but a ton of collections of them as well (‘Inception’ Parodies and Remixes Invade the Web (Videos), Top 10 Inception Trailer Parodies, "Inception" Guides and Parodies). There just isn’t much left to be said about it.

This came out in October of 2010, and even it was a ripoff.

And while it’s true that Zombie Simpsons hadn’t yet gotten in on that feeding frenzy, that’s hardly an excuse. If Zombie Simpsons and its slow production cycle want to be a respected part of popular culture, then they have to do something more creative than just having Simpsons characters act out a movie that’s nearly two years old. That sort of blandly derivative stuff worked for low budget web videos that came out while Inception was still in theaters. It doesn’t work when you’ve got months to think, write and prepare, plus millions of dollars to animate and present. Those are advantages that a better show could use to offset the time lag, but Zombie Simpsons doesn’t even try.

That huge problem is magnified when, as part of that hacktacular “parody”, they did a piece of desperate fan service using ye olde tyme animation and voices for no reason other than to remind people of better times. It’s a double whammy, not only are they failing to keep up with today, they’re also making a base appeal to their few remaining viewers to remember them as they were rather than as they are. I’ve long said that the only thing that makes Zombie Simpsons special is the fact that it came from The Simpsons. This is them tacitly agreeing with me.

There’s nothing new or interesting on offer in “How I Wet Your Mother”. The entire Inception part of the episode is things that have been done before and done better, either by The Simpsons or by others. When Zombie Simpsons goes to the family therapy center, there’s no point to it other than as a reminder of things the show used to be. Worse, by using its contribution to the already saturated Inception-parody genre to do nothing more than reference itself, Zombie Simpsons highlighted its own creative bankruptcy. By contrast, “There’s No Disgrace Like Home” used its trip to family therapy to mock a diverse array of topics and declare its independence from the kind of shows that were typical of its time. Where The Simpsons stood out and did things no one had ever seen before, Zombie Simpsons limps after trends, never getting there on time.

Mar

Compare & Contrast: Fake Stores and Artists of Varying Fame

By Charlie Sweatpants 13 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and Simpsons
Tags: Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart, Homer and Apu, Mom and Pop Art

“Dad, chew with your mouth closed. You’re losing your mystique.” – Lisa Simpson
“Lisa, all great artists love free food. Check out Jasper Johns.” – Homer Simpson
“You squeal on me, I’ll kill you.” – Jasper Johns

Zombie Simpsons’ remarkable inability to parody things beyond changing around a few letters has been brought up around here before. Ditto their lame celebrity guest policy of having people voice themselves in what usually amount to barely concealed brag statements about how awesome they are in real life. With “Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart”, Zombie Simpsons managed to pull both of those tired old rabbits out of their threadbare bag of tricks.

“Swapper Jack’s”, the latest in the long line of renamed brands that Zombie Simpsons mistook for satire, is so unbelievably lazy that I feel like a bit of a rube for even giving it this much consideration. I’ll give them credit for some decent sign gags on the outside of the store, though. “Grass-Fed Lettuce” is kinda funny, as is the idea of meat so pampered that’s its sung to sleep. But those are generalities, there’s nothing about them that’s inherently linked to Trader Joe’s/Swapper Jack’s. There are, after all, a lot of stores that cater to foodies with disposable income.

Not bad, Zombie Simpsons. Too bad you had to go inside the store.

Once they walk through the doors though, any attempt at broad satire is instantly dropped in favor of bland, semi-complimentary one liners for this particular store. Like “Cinnabun” a couple of months ago, “Swapper Jack’s” isn’t so much a parody as it is an advertisement. Little tweaks to the decor and having jelly that even Lisa hasn’t heard of are the kind of half-clever, self-congratulatory ideas you’d normally expect to find in a company newsletter.

Contrast that gentle fluffing with the unlimited contempt poured into the Monstromart in “Homer and Apu”. The establishing shot lets us know that this place, partly Costco, partly Wal-Mart, partly the rest of those giant warehouse stores, is not going to come out of this well.

It looks like the headquarters of some Eastern European secret police agency.

The entire time Marge and Apu are at the store, hilarious and terrible things are happening. The place only sells nutmeg in sizes that would last for years, and their mania for bulk allows Barney to accidentally trigger a cranberry juice tidal wave by asking a giant syrup container where the lampshades are. Then there’s the wonderfully disingenuous (and successful) declaration of corporate love via loudspeaker, the kind of cheap, commercial chicanery The Simpsons lived to mock. Nothing about the place, from the “1000 Items or Less” express aisle to the parade of “pathetic, single men”, would ever make you want to shop there or any place like it. Monstromart wasn’t born out of a love of big box stores the way “Swapper Jack’s” was born out of someone wandering into their favorite Trader Joe’s and taking notes. Monstromart is mean.

But their love of Trader Joe’s wasn’t the only thing Zombie Simpsons wanted to promote this week, there was also Shepard Fairey and his lesser known comrades in paint. The real tipoff that this is more about “these guys seem cool, let’s put them on TV” than it is “hey, let’s make fun of street art” is the fact that there are four of them, and three of them don’t do anything but be themselves. Kenny Scharf, Robbie Conal, and Ron English are all artists of at least some renown, but none of them are famous the same way Shepard Fairey is famous. (To take the simplest measure of modern influence, Fairey’s Wikipedia page is more than three times bigger than all of theirs combined.) To have them do nothing but recite their names and mumble a few lines about street art is a complete waste. Consider:

Milhouse: Who are you guys?
Kenny Scharf: Kenny Scharf, Robbie Conal.
Shepard Fairey: I’m Shepard Fairey.

That’s followed shortly by this:

Shepard Fairey: We’re not bullies. We’re artists, and so are you. Urban vandalism is now the hottest art form there is.

When you have your most famous guest star say who he is, what he does, and why its popular, something has gone terribly wrong. It’s not funny, or even trying to be funny. Instead, it’s like what you’d hear at a museum if you spend the ten bucks to rent the headphones.

When I call your name, you say ‘present’ or ‘here’. No, say ‘present’.

That’s weak sauce by any measure, but especially when you compare it to Jasper Johns appearance in “Mom and Pop Art”. Johns isn’t a household name either (I’d never heard of him before I saw that episode), but he is a serious professional artist whose work has sold for millions of dollars. Which is why having him pilfer light bulbs and generally act like a jerk is so great. He was pushing seventy when that episode was written, but it has him scrambling up ladders and stealing motorboats. In just a few moments of screen time, it’s patently clear – even to people who don’t know who he is – that while he’s voicing himself, he isn’t playing himself.

The Jasper Johns in “Mom and Pop Art” is no more representative of the real guy than the Hugh Hefner who has a bunny staffed research facility or the Mickey Rooney who flies in by helicopter to play child roles. Those guys were voicing themselves, but they weren’t just being themselves. If they were, there’d be no point. The Simpsons understood that, Zombie Simpsons doesn’t. It thinks the guest stars are the point.

That’s why they drag in four different street artists despite having barely enough lines for one of them. For Zombie Simpsons, the cachet of having the guys on is more important than giving them something funny to say or do. It’s the same thinking that leads them to make thinly veiled advertisements for Trader Joe’s and Cinnabon and then pat themselves on the back for being clever. The Simpsons didn’t bring on Jasper Johns as a way of saying, “This guy’s awesome”, they brought him on to make fun of art and pretend to be a kleptomaniac dickcheese. And they certainly didn’t create Monstromart to gently tweak the foibles of understaffed stores that make shopping a baffling ordeal.

Zombie Simpsons shops at trendy stores and hangs out with cool people. The Simpsons laughs at things like that.

Feb

Compare & Contrast: New Towns

By Charlie Sweatpants 13 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: At Long Last Leave, You Only Move Twice

“Mr. Scorpio, this house is almost too good for us. I keep expecting to get the bum’s rush.” – Marge Simpson
“We don’t have bums in our town, Marge, and if we did they wouldn’t rush, they’d be allowed to go at their own pace. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m in the middle of a fun run!” – Hank Scorpio

Though you’d hardly know it from how much screen time it got, the main plot of “At Long Last Leave” was the family Simpson moving to a new town. Coincidentally, this is also the main plot of “You Only Move Twice”. The differences between the two are too numerous to count, but to get a good approximation of how large the gap is, we needn’t look much further than the way the respective new towns are portrayed.

Start with just the basic mechanics. Cypress Creek is the main setting of almost the entire episode. The Simpson family gets there right after the first commercial break with nearly three quarters of the episode still to go. The Outlands isn’t introduced until the episode is already half over, and it doesn’t stay on screen long. Less than three minutes after we catch our first sight of it, Homer and Marge and back in Springfield. We don’t see it again until there’s only a few minutes left in the episode (and Homer and Marge’s trip to Springfield is longer than either of the times we see The Outlands). By contrast, “You Only Move Twice” doesn’t go back to Springfield until the very end.

Then there are the respective houses. In Springfield, 742 Evergreen Terrace is as much a part of the Simpson family as Grampa. The television, the bedrooms, the kitchen table, there’s a recognizable believability to the place (even if the floor plan is somewhat impossible) that makes the scenes that take place within better than they otherwise would be. The house in The Outlands shares none of those traits. Even if you set aside the fact that it makes no sense how they came by it, the shanty in The Outlands has no personality. It’s just a shack, and it has nothing to do with the rest of the episode. There’s never a clear shot of it, and the only thing the family does is walk out of it.

Blink and you’ll miss it. Near as I can tell, this is the only time you see the whole house.

But in Cypress Creek, the house itself is funny. It’s a funhouse reflection of the kind of palatial McMansions that were so vogue right up until 2008. Though the family is only there for the one episode, you get a sense of how vast the living room and kitchen are, of the tasteful upper-middle-class elegance of the back yard and dining room. This isn’t done purely for show either, the house is so self sufficient, cleaning and watering itself automatically, that Marge has nothing to do. This striver’s paradise even keeps Maggie busy for her.

This show can make a terrified baby funny. Suck it, Zombie Simpsons.

Moving beyond the house, the rest of Cypress Creek is just as well realized. The planned community is the opposite of Springfield’s broken down chaos. Everything works: the schools are good, the shops are trendy, and the activities are healthy. And, of course, we get to see all of these things and laugh at them and the real life counterparts they so closely resemble. Anybody who’s ever been through a resort town in America can recognize something like “The Spend Zone”. Ditto highly funded schools that have a program for everything.

The Outlands, by contrast, are so sparingly portrayed that I’m still not sure quite what they’re supposed to be. They clearly liked the whole Mad Max thing, with Mohawk Maggie being the prime example of that. But they also had it scaled back to something vaguely recognizable as backwoods America, especially with the nameless shotgun guy. That the rest of Springfield shows up would seem to support the “backwoods America” model, but then the whole town is abandoned and Bart smashes Skinner with a helicopter, which is much more “Mad Max”. They seem contradictory, but neither is on screen enough to be coherent or intelligible, so who knows?

What makes the relative paucity of scenes in The Outlands, indoors and out, so bad is the fact that the story is supposed to be about either a) the Simpsons adapting fine to their new home, never to return, or b) the townspeople deciding that they all want to leave Springfield (for some reason). The episode can’t seem to decide, but whichever it was going for, the ending hinges on this point. It’s the main conflict of your story, it’s not something you can breeze over or be vague about.

Cypress Creek, on the other hand, is on screen enough that it feels like a real place, and is tremendously funnier for it. The shops, the house, the school, the fun run, all of it is funny precisely because it’s an (only slightly) exaggerated version of a white collar, corporate yuppie utopia. That they would have a school so lavishly funded that Bart can do no harm and a house so automated that Marge feels useless is believable enough that you know the joke must have had some sting for the kind of people it was mocking. Lisa, irony of ironies, has the Edenic nature she craves turn on her. Only Homer wants to stay, which means his eventual decision to return to Springfield is the culmination of all those other events.

Even by Season 8, moving the Simpsons out of Springfield was something that had been done a few times already (“Dancin’ Homer”, “Cape Feare”, even “Deep Space Homer”). But it doesn’t feel played out or rehashed in “You Only Move Twice”, and a big part of that is because Cypress Creek is a fully thought through location. That its idyllic setting is all in support of things like Project Arcturus just makes it funnier. Compare that to the brief, confusing, and potentially contradictory sketchpad known as The Outlands. The place makes no sense and is hardly on screen, which is all the worse when you remember that everyone spontaneously decides to move there. As usual, Zombie Simpsons collapses under even the slightest scrutiny, while The Simpsons is built to last.

Feb

Compare & Contrast: Lisa’s Romances

By Charlie Sweatpants 20 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and Simpsons
Tags: Lisa's Date with Density, The Daughter Also Rises

“Well, I guess this is it.” – Lisa Simpson
“You mean, like, goodbye?” – Nelson Muntz
“Let’s just call it, smell you later.” – Lisa Simpson

Around the edges of “Lisa’s Date with Density” you can see the problems that, given a few years, would swoop in and eat the show from the inside out. The emotions are a bit contrived in places, Nelson’s not quite the bully we know, and the plot has to cheat a few times to wrap itself up. But in Season 8 those things are peripheral, the core of the story and the episode fit in with the place we know as Springfield and the characters who inhabit it. Just as importantly, while there’s no denying that Lisa and Nelson are acting a bit more adolescent and less kid like than they should, there’s still a recognizable childishness and humanity to them that makes the story work.

Lisa doesn’t, for example, develop her crush on Nelson because of some cliched contrivance. He doesn’t save her from something; nor does she glimpse him in a candid moment of tenderness when he thought no one was looking. She just laughs at him being him, in this case tormenting Groundskeeper Willie. This is one of those things that just works in The Simpsons. We in the audience get to laugh at Groundskeeper Willie; Nelson (in detention) and Lisa (in band practice) are being themselves (and so are the other kids with their “x likes y” refrains); and the main story moves along without resorting to nonsense.

“And that’s how Willie waters.”

By contrast, in “The Daughter Also Rises” Zombie Simpsons employs a “meet cute”, one of the more hacktacular ideas ever to come out of the entertainment industry. (It’s a concept so durably overused that it has its own article on TV Tropes and Wikipedia.) That they call it a “meet cute” isn’t a joke, it’s just them describing what’s happening. Where’s the joke in Lisa gushing and her new beau throwing a fork in the air? Or their stilted flirting as they instantly anticipate a love for the ages? There isn’t one, the whole thing is dead-eyed, paint-by-numbers crap. Hollywood is littered with writers and actors who can do this scene in their sleep, because it’s not just a trope, it’s an adult trope for adult performers and adult characters.

Things just get worse from there. Lisa and Nick go through three goofy set pieces, each one the same kind of sly, fake-clever horseshit. First they’re at an outdoor cafe, where this supposed kid is looking all charming and suave in a gray suit. Then they’re in a montage where they hang out a balcony, on top of a climbing wall, and Moe’s (of all places) as they go through a few vaguely Hemingway type situations. And finally, Nick shows up at the Simpson home with a bottle of wine before he charms both Marge and Maggie (we’ll get to the after-dinner fiasco in a second). None of these scenes make any sense for them as kids, for them as characters, or for Springfield as a location.

I think this kid’s dad is Andre from “Homer’s Triple Bypass”.

In Season 8, Lisa and Nelson go through a much more believable childhood flirtation. Lisa likes Nelson despite herself, and Nelson eventually finds himself doing the same. They don’t have that instant and nauseating sense of destiny that you get in formulaic romantic comedies. Instead, we see them move through it believably, with Nelson initially just going with the flow while Lisa does the “getting to know you” stuff. It’s funny because of what happens (the cat, “Nuke the Whales”, Milhouse getting brained), but it’s also genuinely plausible. Nelson’s not exactly boyfriend material, and Lisa has a hard time seeing that her caring for him isn’t going to magically turn him into boyfriend material. And none of it requires anyone to look right at the camera and say “meet cute” as a way to shrug their shoulders at mediocrity.

The endings work (or don’t) in similar ways. After Nick (who I keep wanting to call Colin since he’s just as non-descript) comes over for dinner with his bottle of wine, impeccably tasteful suit, and robotically precise manners, he has nowhere to go as a character. He’s confident, handsome, and oh so perfect, and all as (apparently) a little kid. Which is why the next time we see him he’s a completely different person.

Left, At Lisa’s house (12:50); center, on screen but silent (16:40); right, next time he speaks (17:40).

After the scene in the family living room, he literally doesn’t say a word for two commercial breaks. He does find himself in a senior shuttle with Lisa and Grampa, where – for the first time ever – he’s nervous and jerky. What the hell happened? It’s so out of the blue as to be disorienting. The last thing he says at the Simpsons’ house is:

Nick: Mrs. Simpson, I’d like your permission to take your daughter to the Doritos Nutrition Fair at the school gym.

He’s still Mr. Smooth. After he thanks Cletus, it’s this:

Nick: I don’t know, this water’s a little choppy.
Lisa: I thought you rode up the Zambezi without a guide.
Nick: Right. Right.

After that he complains about her cold hands, that his lips are cold, and then just walks away because he’s suddenly sad. This is supposed to be the same kid who confidently flirted with Lisa, took her lots of places, and aced the dreaded first meeting with her parents? They could, of course, have shown us why this change came about. They even had a chance to do it when he was sitting in the living room and Marge demanded that Lisa stop spending so much time with him. That could’ve given him the jitters or something. But, by longstanding Zombie Simpsons convention, he simply wasn’t in that scene even though he was sitting right there. So not only do we get a kid who doesn’t make any sense when we first meet him, he manages to change into a completely different – but equally nonsensical – character before the end.

“Lisa’s Date with Density” doesn’t have anything remotely that clumsy. On the contrary, Lisa and Nelson’s little relationship implodes when it becomes obvious to both of them that they aren’t right for each other. Lisa can’t change Nelson completely and he’s not willing to change enough; so they part on good terms because that’s all there is to it. It’s not the world’s most original idea, but it follows nicely both from who they are outside of this episode and how they act during this particular story.

Of course, I haven’t yet mentioned the elephant in the room, which is that in Season 8 it’s the first time we see Lisa really become involved with someone. From all those Corys to the boy at the library to Langdon Alger, we know she develops the occasional childhood crush, but “Lisa’s Date with Density” was the first time we saw her go after someone. It was also . . . drum roll please . . . her first kiss.

A moment with actual emotional relevance! Careful, Zombie Simpsons might be allergic.

By Season 23, Lisa’s been through four or five relationships. There was the time she fell in love with the environmentalist guy, there was the dude ranch thing, there was the movie, and I think I’m missing a couple. So when she spouts hopelessly naive, romantic comedy gibberish like “The person you kiss under a mulberry tree is someone you’ll love for the rest of your life”, it falls even flatter than it otherwise would. It’s a dumb statement to begin with, but it just doesn’t do coming from someone who used to be mature enough to let Ralph Wiggum down gently and have a successful breakup with Nelson Muntz. “Smell you later”, on the other hand, is great.

Feb

Compare & Contrast: Bart and Milhouse Fall Out

By Charlie Sweatpants 41 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Bart's Friend Falls in Love, Moe Goes From Rags To Riches

“Whoa, I bet the 8-Ball didn’t see that one coming.” – Bart Simpson
“Yeah.” – Milhouse van Houten

With so many years of backstory hanging over its head, Zombie Simpsons often resorts to the inane and bizarre to keep believable and long established relationships fresh. Once upon a time, Moe was Homer’s bartender. Sure, they knew each other a bit better than the average rag and coaster jockeys, but they never strayed too far from the recognizable baseline of bartender-customer. Along the same line, Skinner and Chalmers used to be junior and senior in a dumb bureaucracy and Lenny and Carl used to be office buddies. All of those have been trashed under a half-clever veneer of self knowing television tropes. Homer and Moe are best buddies when they need to be; Skinner and Chalmers are attached at the hip, and Lenny and Carl are . . . whatever they are.

In that same vein, Bart and Milhouse have gone from plausible boyhood friends to an overtly self-aware pair of co-dependent jokers. When The Simpsons still cared about its audience and characters, Bart was the dominant half of a realistic friendship and Milhouse was the forgiving and easily awed sidekick. That’s a pretty good basis for fiction, and it worked for a long time. But even an archetype that durable can only hold out for so many hundred episodes before it becomes a stereotypical hack job. At this point, their roles have gone beyond “well established” to “crap, how do we make this not a complete repeat?”, and that’s the real problem of their half told story in “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches”.

Bart and Milhouse have fought before, many, many times. Sometimes it was a minor part of the episode, like “Bart After Dark” or “A Milhouse Divided”; sometimes it was a major part of the episode, like “Homer Defined” or “Bart Sells His Soul”. But for comparison to “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches”, nothing is closer than “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”.

In both episodes, Milhouse gets pissed at Bart for taking him for granted. And in both episodes, Milhouse eventually forgives Bart. The difference is in how those things happen, both the falling out and the rapprochement. In The Simpsons, Milhouse gets mad because of a serious betrayal; in Zombie Simpsons, Milhouse snaps with no warning for no real reason. On the other end, Milhouse in The Simpsons sees his beef with Bart resolved; Milhouse in Zombie Simpsons goes with the flow because he knows just as well as the audience that things have to get back to normal.

Sadly, this is what passes for normal these days.

In “Moe Goes from Rags to Riches”, the opening scene is a town meeting at Moe’s that becomes a dance party. (Of course it does.) In the course of said meeting, we see the two of them dancing together to Lionel Richie, and the following exchange happens:

Bart: That’s even sadder than being friends with Milhouse.
Milhouse: You know something, Bart, I’m getting tired of things like that.
Bart: Tired of what? I dump on you and you take it, that’s how friendship works.
Milhouse: Not anymore. Friendship over.

This comes from precisely nowhere. And while you might be tempted to forgive Zombie Simpsons this narrative shortcut because we already know Milhouse resents Bart in general, don’t forget that Bart has said plenty of worse things to Milhouse over the years with no reaction whatsoever. Based on what we know of the two of them, this sudden eruption of pique is entirely out of character. Zombie Simpsons doesn’t give us even a single line where we see Milhouse steaming up before he’s at full spurned-friend boil.

I’m asking for white hot rage and you’re giving me a hissy fit!

By contrast, in “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”, Milhouse snapping comes with an entire episode’s worth of buildup and occurs even quicker. Instead of a tired, verbose and unexpected exchange, The Simpsons has Milhouse lose it with a single, exposition free word:

Bart: Listen, Milhouse, I got a confession to make. I’m the one who narced on your kissing.
Milhouse: What?!

Not only is this shorter and funnier, but it fulfills the prime commandment of screenwriting, “show, don’t tell”. In Zombie Simpsons, Milhouse tells us why he’s mad, even though Zombie Simpsons is taking for granted that we already know the reason. Here, no explanation is needed because we’ve seen the two characters build up to this over the course of the entire episode. Milhouse’s anger, and his subsequent death grapple with Bart, shows us how pissed off he really is.

Hallelujah, they’ve done it again!

Things get even more embarrassing for Zombie Simpsons as the two move from their confrontation to their inevitable reconciliation. In “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love”, the reconciliation happens quickly; The Simpsons had no illusions about pretending that Bart and Milhouse would end up something other than friends. The tension during their fight – the deliberately overwrought horn music, Bart contemplating smashing his best friend with scissors, a broken bottle, and a brick – is all comedy. The scissors? Sure. But there’s no reason for there to be shattered glass and masonry in Milhouse’s room other than as a gag. The show doesn’t even pretend to imply that Bart’s actually going to use them, so when he finally settles on the Magic 8-Ball as his weapon, it fits. It’s physically plausible and plot relevant (the 8-Ball having predicted their falling out back in Act 1).

Zombie Simpsons lacks anything even remotely resembling that kind of subtlety and relevance. Since they dove into their dead end conflict in the very first scene, they have no story to tell. All they’re left with is a few disconnected set pieces: Bart at Milhouse’s window, Bart breaking in to Milhouse’s room, Bart outside Milhouse’s front door. There’s nothing to these scenes except for Bart and Milhouse exchanging hackneyed, knowing banter like the predicable sitcom characters they’ve become.

Instead of giving us a fun reason for the two of them to be angry at one another and then resolving the unavoidable quickly, Zombie Simpsons creates a problem for Bart and Milhouse out of nothing and then expects the audience to care as they wrap it up with one glacial dead end after another. The Simpsons knew not to pretend that things weren’t going back to normal. Zombie Simpsons doesn’t (or doesn’t care), so they stretch out the worst part and are left with nothing to show for it but nonsense like Milhouse swallowing rocks, Bart falling to pieces overnight and reading a sappy poem Lisa wrote, and Drederick Tatum appearing from nowhere. They said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet.

Jan

Compare & Contrast: Simpson Kid Causes Mass Hysteria

By Charlie Sweatpants 10 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Bart's Inner Child, The D'oh-cial Network

“In the spirit of the occasion, I must tell you what I think. You two screwed up royal!” – Mayor Quimby
“You know, I really don’t feel like being blamed.” – Bandstand Guy

Going all the way back to Season 1, The Simpsons had a knack for telling big and even outrageous stories in a way that that made sense within an episode and in the sometimes strange universe of the show. Whether it was Homer’s safety crusade in “Homer’s Odyssey”, Marge’s campaign against cartoon violence in “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge”, or Lisa’s anti-corruption protest in “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington”, the show knew how to put its characters (and therefore its satire, humor and cynical perspective) into places that ordinary people (and shows) were unlikely ever to tread. Walking the line between making things too unbelievable to be recognizable and too cliched to have any impact required a fine touch, and The Simpsons excelled at it.

A great example of that comes in Season 5’s “Bart’s Inner Child”, where Marge’s fears that she’s a stick in the mud, Bart’s unchecked id, and the self help woo of Brad Goodman gradually combine into a disastrous town festival. A very bad example of that came this week with Season 23’s “The D’oh-cial Network”, where Lisa’s desire to have friends somehow spun itself into a fad that turned Springfield into a chaotic wasteland overnight. Both episodes wrap things up with chaos that gets blamed on one of the Simpson kids, and from a strictly “could this happen in real life?” perspective, both stories are far fetched. But you don’t notice or care in The Simpsons because the entire episode builds smoothly to its conclusion, which is not inexplicably out of scale with what’s already happened. By contrast, in Zombie Simpsons, the conclusion is vastly more cataclysmic, comes out of nowhere, and has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story or the original problem that got things started.

Once the town falls for Brad Goodman’s easy answers in “Bart’s Inner Child”, we see the normally staid and responsible characters begin acting more like Bart. In order, Brockman, Lovejoy, and Krabappel embrace his consequence free outlook on life, and it’s no coincidence that it’s those three characters that we see doing so. All of them are usually buttoned down and boring. So when we see Patty, Selma, Willie and Skinner (all similarly responsible characters) behaving like Bart at the “Do What You Feel” festival, it isn’t a surprise. Furthermore, it’s Willie’s newfound embrace of not doing his job – specifically oiling the Ferris wheel – that leads to the episode’s moment of maximum chaos: the runaway wheel and the escaped zoo animals. Nothing that happens is overtly physically impossible (wheels do roll, after all), and every action that leads to that moment has built on the others.

Compare that carefully constructed moment to the town wide destruction in “The D’oh-cial Network”. After some scenes from a mall, Lisa wants to make a few friends and goes on-line to do so. Immediately the strange improbabilities begin piling up. Has Lisa never been on-line before? Were those other kids who instantly responded to her message all just waiting around and not talking to anyone before she typed, “Do you like ice cream?”?

In “Bart’s Inner Child” we see that the people of Springfield are unhappy and that they want to believe Brad Goodman’s bullshit. It follows that many of them would get carried away with it. In Zombie Simpsons things just start happening because that’s sorta kinda how they happened in The Social Network.

Beyond that, the central reason for Lisa creating the site instantly becomes obsolete. In her first scene after her improbably successful late night chat session, we see her happily interacting with the other nerds:

She sure does look miserable in that room with other people happily doing what she tells them to do.

This is stunningly bad storytelling. Lisa’s motivation for creating this thing was to make friends, and then, just a minute later, she’s got friends! They could write their way around this easily, of course. Maybe she wants female friends, maybe she wants non-nerd friends, by their own admission they weren’t pressed for time in this episode. But they don’t even bother.

And while they’re torpedoing their own premise, they’re still stacking up bizarre set pieces and cringe worthy leaps of logic. Like Lisa’s strangely attention grabbing “Do you like ice cream?” message, “SpringFace” explodes in popularity for no discernable reason. At first Lisa’s chatting on an already built school instant message site, and then – wham! – something she apparently built from scratch becomes an overnight Facebook clone and social sensation. No reason is given for why this happens, nor does the episode take any time to show it expand. In the next flashback scene, everyone is already hooked:

Didn’t that school used to be poor?

To be fair, the prosecutor says that they “skip ahead” in the flashback, but why would they do that? This is an episode that ran short and a story that hardly had a chance to get started before it turned into a city wide catastrophe. Lisa doesn’t even sit down and begin chatting on-line until the nine minute mark, and there are only a handful of scenes after that before we get to the total breakdown of society. There isn’t nearly enough time or action for there to be anything like the buildup necessary for a civilizational collapse. The car crashes, the fires, everything is orphaned by the story and so it ends up feeling random, dumb, and head scratching:

I’d hate to think of what would’ve happened if these people had known about Facebook too.

In the total destruction of the city versus the the collapse of a bandstand and a Ferris wheel, the wildly different senses of proportionality and scale between The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons are crystal clear. By the time we get to the “Do What You Feel Festival”, we’ve already seen the unintended consequences of town’s newfound embrace of Brad Goodman. The parking lot is a mess, Willie is threatening to kill the lot of them, and Bart has realized how much it sucks to have everyone else act like him. By contrast, the chaos in “The D’oh-cial Network” comes out of nowhere, like lightning on a cloudless day. Lisa just wants some friends, then she has some friends, then the world ends.

Which brings us back to the respective endings. In “Bart’s Inner Child”, there’s a plausible path back to normality. The Brad Goodman obsession turns on itself, and since we’ve actually seen the why, how and what of the collapse of the fad, everyone can return to their previously unhappy lives and watch McGarnagle.

“The D’oh-cial Network” has nothing like that. Because it spun itself up from nonsense, it’s only option is more nonsense. The ostensible resolution is that Lisa takes down her site, but that isn’t going to delete the smart phones everyone is carrying around with them. It isn’t going to stop Homer from texting Marge from Moe’s, or stop people from looking down at screens in church or while they’re driving. Unless I blacked out and missed a scene where Lisa was given power over all video games, it isn’t going to keep Bart and Milhouse from playing first person shooters. And it certainly isn’t going to keep Comic Book Guy (of all people) from doing things on-line. The actions, motivations, and resolution are all completely unconnected, and that’s before you remember than none of it makes sense anyway.

“Bart’s Inner Child” moves deftly from Marge, to Bart, to the whole town. So while there is a certain amount of cartoon violence and nonsense at the end, it never feels strange, unexpected or unbalanced. Whereas no part of “The D’oh-cial Network” follows logically from any other, so even if they had bothered to cook up a semi-believable resolution, it still wouldn’t have worked or been remotely plausible.

[Programming note: Sorry for the late notice on this, but those clowns in Congress are at it again, and Dead Homer Society will be going dark tomorrow, 18 January 2012, to protest the potential passage of SOPA and PIPA. As a site that relies heavily on fair use and incoming links, the passage of either could easily lead to us being shut down, and I’ve heard worse excuses for taking a day off. Assuming I can get this to work later tonight, the site will follow Wikipedia’s example and be shut down from midnight Eastern tonight until midnight Eastern tomorrow. What a bunch of clowns.]

Jan

Compare & Contrast: The Republican High Command

By Charlie Sweatpants 4 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Politically Inept With Homer Simpson, Sideshow Bob Roberts

“Hail, brothers! Coranon silaria, ozoo mahoke!” – C.M. Burns
“Mahoke!” – Republicans

There were so many nonsense plot twists in “Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson” that some of the worst ones went by so quickly I almost didn’t notice that they had happened. At one point though, they stopped briefly at the impenetrable fortress that is Republican Party Headquarters. That imposing structure made its first appearance in “Sideshow Bob Roberts”, and while this isn’t the first time they’ve revisited it, this one was notably similar because the fiends and ghouls within its walls were doing the same thing they were doing back in Season 6: selecting a candidate.

In each case they weren’t selecting the candidate alone. Both times they were making their choice with the help of a popular talk show host. But that’s about where the similarities end.

In “Sideshow Bob Roberts”, those men (and their vampire friend) are exactly the kind of people you’d expect to see plotting strategy in the highest tower of a scary ass castle. They begin their meeting with a ritualized and evil sounding greeting, and they’re there for the explicit purpose of placing one of their unquestioning henchman in the mayor’s office. Even better, they’re so contemptuous of democracy and apathetic toward anything but their own interests that at first they actually think that the water cooler in the hallway is the candidate. These guys are mean and powerful, but also kinda clueless. In other words, they’re Republicans.

Note that everyone but Barlow is clapping.

Now consider what happens at the exact same meeting, in the exact same place, in “Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson”. It’s even mostly the same cast of characters, but none of them do anything except sit there in the background. Burns is the only one who speaks, and all he does is ask Homer to pick from a set of actual candidates. For starters, the Burns I know would never abdicate a decision to the likes of Homer. More blatantly, these guys have become powerless feebs. They’re supposed to be evil and just short of all powerful, and yet they sit silently while Homer picks their presidential candidate. How the hell did these guys ever earn their way to the top of that castle?

Compounding what a bunch of slack jawed wimps they are, Ted Nugent strolls out of the darkness firing his little bow to the surprise of everyone:

You’d think a castle like that would have better security.

Zombie Simpsons isn’t making any kind of political point here, they aren’t mocking the Republican Party or any part of our goofy, convoluted electoral process. They’re thoughtlessly using the same party headquarters they’ve always used before getting to what they know best: getting everyone else out of the way so that Homer and Ted can act like crazy people.

The problem is that this situation isn’t funny and doesn’t work unless those guys at the table are at least a little frightening and/or competent. The castle, the maps on the walls, the overall Bond villain motif, none of that matters if the supposedly boss Republicans are a bunch of silent, slack jawed nobodies who give power to Homer, don’t know that Ted Nugent is in the room, and act intimidated and scared instead of contemptuous and powerful.

It goes almost without saying that once things leave this room they continue on their wildly different paths. When Sideshow Bob ran for mayor, he ran for mayor. He stacked the debate in his favor, broadcast dishonest commercials, rigged the election, and immediately began an autocratic rule, convinced that he was above the law. Nugent gutted an elk and then went away.

Like the castle meeting itself, Nugent’s non-candidacy was another woefully blown comedy idea. Actually making Ted Nugent the Republican nominee isn’t a terrible concept. It’s not exactly an act of insightful genius, but it’s not a complete dry hole either. Zombie Simpsons doesn’t try that at all. Once Nugent meets Homer, he just sort of hangs out at the Simpsons house until the end of the episode. Nobody runs for anything, nor is there any satire, of Nugent or anything else. Nugent and Homer just do some goofy stuff and then it ends.

Watching Zombie Simpsons do things like go to Republican Party Headquarters is like watching a couple of kids sit in their parents car and pretend to go for a ride. They can superficially mimic the scenes and actions, but they aren’t leaving the driveway. There’s no substance, no movement, no thought or action. And if you’re looking for something that’s funny, subversive or even just memorable, you’re completely out of luck, because that’s not what they do.

Dec

Compare & Contrast: Bart’s Remorse

By Charlie Sweatpants 16 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Bart vs. Thanksgiving, Marge Be Not Proud

“Oh, yikes, what is that?” – Bart Simpson
“It’s the centerpiece, Bart.” – Lisa Simpson
“Well, it’s taking up valuable real estate.” – Bart Simpson

As our friend Mike Amato has been plowing through all the old episodes, I’ve been wondering what he was going to say about “Marge Be Not Proud”. This week, I got to find out. He’s a lot more upbeat about the episode than I am, but what surprised me in reading his take was how little we actually disagreed. There really are a lot of good and excellent parts in this episode, and his long list of tidbits and quotes is very solid (I’ve always liked “You have entered: power drive”).

Where we part seems mostly to be in how much weight we assign to certain problems:

If you read this blog then you’re probably familiar with Dead Homers Society, and their attesting that this is the sole blemish on seven flawless classic seasons. I can’t claim some of their gripes aren’t valid; when you boil it down, this is a “very special episode” played fairly straight, with no real twist or subversion. But what keeps it engaging and impacting is its honesty.

Certainly some things bother or don’t bother some people more than others. For example, I can’t work up too much excitement over problems with “canon” and inter-episode continuity, but start having characters behave in ways that are anathema to their established personalities and I go ballistic. Mike is willing to overlook the “very special episode” thing, but it really rubs me the wrong way, and it’s the main reason that this is the only episode in Season 7 I almost never watch.

“Marge Be Not Proud” was the first time the show really let itself get bogged down with conventional television tropes. They did it in a way that’s subtler than “The Principal and the Pauper”, but both of them are weak stories being propped up by teevee convention (cheap morality for “Marge Be Not Proud” and shocking twists for “The Principal and the Pauper”). Relying directly on old saws like that was something the show had never done before, and it produced episodes that attempt to portray real emotions, but end up undercutting themselves with hoary tricks and tired cliches.

That reliance is something Zombie Simpsons would later make almost routine, but in “Marge Be Not Proud” it was novel. They simply didn’t used to do things like that. Consider a similar story of Bart misbehaving and then redeeming himself, “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”. Both episodes are built around holidays, but, more importantly, both episodes involve Bart acting out and Marge dealing with it.

When Marge yells at Bart in “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”, all the emotional weight of the episode is condensed into a single devastating line that comes like a kick to the stomach: “I hope you’re happy, Bart, you’ve ruined Thanksgiving!”. That is Marge at a full boil (and a bravura delivery by Kavner), and for Bart it comes completely out of the blue. He has no idea how much he hurt Lisa, which is why he doesn’t understand that his cavalier attitude about it is what pushed his mother over the top from angry to enraged.

Yikes indeed.

This is (yet another) one of those scenes from The Simpsons that just flat out works from start to finish. Everyone is in character. The feelings, actions and relationships involved are believable and realistic. And you don’t feel bored or cheated that the rest of the story is spent resolving the conflict set up in this moment because the emotional punch of the scene is devastating. Just look at the aftermath:

Homer & Marge – Furious at Bart, but that quickly turns to fear and remorse when they find out he’s gone.
Lisa – Crushed that her centerpiece, a “labor of love”, was destroyed by the brother who constantly overshadows and torments her. It breaks her in a way that no previous incident has because she begins to suspect that Bart is irredeemable, which is both sad in and of itself and bad news for her in general.
Bart – Sees the destruction of the centerpiece as an accident and is self centered enough that he genuinely doesn’t understand why everyone is so upset over it. With Lisa, Homer and Marge all seriously angry at him, he gets defensive and bails.

The ruining of Lisa’s centerpiece is such a titanic moment that the show needs only to lightly reference the emotions it generates with little and humorous touches afterwards. When Bart tramples the flowers he has to remind himself that he’s mad. When Lisa tries to read the family her poem there’s just the briefest moment of resignation on her face as she is, once again, instantly set aside as the family chases down Bart.

“Marge Be Not Proud” doesn’t have anything even approaching that kind of deft touch with its story. Bart’s remorse is constantly paraded before the audience, as though we’d forgotten it from a few seconds ago. They lay it on so thick that Bart gets caught not once, but twice. There’s basically no progress to the story in between his encounters with the security guard, it’s just one drawn out sequence of Bart feeling bad about himself. “Bart vs. Thanksgiving” has a lot going on so it never gets bogged down rehashing what we already know. “Marge Be Not Proud” has just the single thread: Bart and Marge feeling bad about each other, and it pounds it into the ground.

Much of the episode is one event after another that reinforces Bart’s guilt about stealing the game. Right from the time Brodka (whose Lawrence Tierney gruffness is great) puts his hand on Bart’s shoulder, it’s an unrelenting parade of the exact same thing. There’s Bart walking through the mall with Brodka; there’s Santa rejecting Bart; there’s Brodka leaving the unsparing message on the answering machine; there’s Bart being told he has to go back to the store; there’s Marge pointing out that he’s ruined all their past photos. Each segment strikes the same tone: Bart feels bad. And all that happens before he gets caught the second time, after which the guilt trip really starts to get heavy.

Are you tired of seeing this expression? This episode isn’t.

Interspersed with all that is a lot of very funny stuff (“Where was I? Oh yeah, stay out of my booze!”), but it can’t conceal the fact that this episode has the emotional range and progression of a metronome. It just keeps hitting that same point over and over and over and over and over.

The monotony of it not only leaves the episode wanting in terms of emotional depth, it also guarantees that the ending is going to be face meltingly obvious. Since the episode has spent so much time wracking Bart with guilt, the only thing it can do at the end is have him finally, at long last, make good. All those scenes of Bart looking nervous, embarrassed, worried, remorseful, etcetera paint it into a corner from where there is only one, hacktacular exit.

The same isn’t true of “Bart vs. Thanksgiving”. When Bart returns to the house after having been at the homeless shelter, he stops short of walking in the door because he has no way of knowing that everyone is worried about him and that his return will be welcomed. He still doesn’t understand why they were so mad at him and fears a repeat. From his point of view, their anger was a grotesque and hurtful overreaction, and since he hasn’t spoken with them since, he has no idea what to expect now.

Even in the harsh moments, things stay funny.

In turn, that sets up his rooftop reconciliation with Lisa, which is both sweet and lined with little jokes to keep things light (“the boy nobody wanted just won the Super Bowl”, “did they cry?”/“yes”/“whoa, bulls-eye!”). Every character acts according to what they know at the time, and all the scenes work within both the plot and emotional boundaries that were established earlier.

The ending of “Marge Be Not Proud” is much clumsier (though still a far cry from Zombie Simpsons). Just like in Season 2, the big moment is Bart returning to the house, this time after having gotten a nice picture of himself taken. Right here the episode opens up a rather stark plot hole. Bart went back to the Try-N-Save and had no problem whatsoever with Brodka. Huh? A big chunk of the middle of the episode is the fact that Bart can’t go to the Try-N-Save. Did that restriction get lifted? They don’t say.

More immediately jarring is the way they stage Bart’s return. After he walks into the house the show puts on this big confrontation between Marge and Bart over what Bart has in his jacket. Marge and the audience are supposed to believe that it’s the video game, but Bart knows it’s his picture (with receipt, just in case you didn’t get it yet). Since Bart knows that, what is the point of that little mini-chase? Of Bart’s terrified looking behavior? Bart’s been trying to make good for a third of the episode at that point, are we really supposed to think he’s stolen video game? The entire scene is fake tension filler before we get to the hammy conclusion that we all knew was coming.

It’s Christmas, so Bart is apparently aware that the end must involve lots of ham.

This is the problem with having such a formulaic, one note plot: it leaves you with no option for resolving it other than cheese drenched schmaltz, a sentiment the show had rigorously avoided to that point. And since it’s something Bart’s been trying to do for most of the episode, by the time it finally happens it’s more of a relief than a resolution.

There’s real emotional pain in both of these episodes, but “Bart vs. Thanksgiving” uses it mostly in the background to drive a typical Simpsons story. Even better, the emotional state of the characters changes as they go through the plot. Bart realizes that the family he was so mad at is actually the best thing he’s got; Lisa feels sad that Bart is gone even after what happened. Finally, they have their private moment on the roof where Bart at last becomes aware of what he originally did.

“Marge Be Not Proud” puts its lone emotion front and center where it weighs everything else down and makes the story painfully simplistic. It’s a single note compared to a symphony, and while there’s a lot of decent stuff in between, the episode has the same kind of weak structure that characterizes so many bad episodes that have come since. If you can abide that one note droning in the background, then more power to you for Troy McClure’s shoplifting video, “SimReich”, and the way Lisa drops the can of fake snow. I can’t. Too many bad episodes, “The Principal and the Pauper” included, start rattling around inside my head.

(Oh, and do read Mike’s whole post, it’s got lots more of the good stuff than this does.)

Dec

Compare & Contrast: Maggie’s Silence

By Charlie Sweatpants 31 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Holidays of Future Passed, Lisa's Wedding

“Will that girl ever shut up?” – Homer Simpson

The more I think about it, the more “Holidays of Future Passed” feels like a flashy, stripped down remake of a classic movie. The effects are splashier, the budget higher, and the cast larger, but despite the occasionally entertaining scene or idea, the whole thing is a jumble. Too often you’re just marking time until the next segment begins, hoping it’s better than what you’re currently seeing. To illustrate that, I’d like to take a look at a running joke “Holidays of Future Passed” slavishly copied from “Lisa’s Wedding”: Maggie’s silence as an adult.

Like the enduring mysteries of which state contains Springfield and why Mr. Burns can never remember Homer, Maggie’s silence is one of the show’s longstanding quirks. They did an entire episode around the idea with “Lisa’s First Word”. They also liked to occasionally drop it in as a little gag, like when Bart faked her voice in “Radio Bart” or Maggie babbled like Flanders in “Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily”. But even in “Lisa’s First Word” it was never a big joke. Instead it cropped up from time to time in quick and unobtrusive ways, a playful wink from the show to the audience.

It was fleeting and flirtatious, and that very scarcity was its charm. “Lisa’s Wedding” demonstrates an inherent understanding of the that fragility. They knew “Maggie talks” wasn’t important or deep enough to support whole chunks of the episode, so they slipped it into parts of the story where it could work without wilting under the spotlight. There are just three times Maggie almost talks in “Lisa’s Wedding”:

1) When Homer goes to use the phone, she’s already on the line, talking in her room.
2) At the dinner table, Lisa asks if she wants to go dress shopping but Marge yells at her to not talk with her mouth full.
3) As the ceremony is about to start, she’s interrupted just before singing “Amazing Grace” by Hugh announcing that the wedding is off.

Compare that to a whopping eight in “Holidays of Future Passed”:

1) When getting an ultrasound (with her band just hanging out for no reason), the robot tells her that she can’t talk because baby.
2) As she goes to board the teleporter, she’s silently directed to the airplane instead.
3) Inside airplane, she sits impatiently.
4) Going into labor in a taxi cab, she doesn’t say a word.
5) In the hospital entrance, Kearney the cabbie somehow gets her checked in while she doesn’t do anything.
6) In the hospital delivery room, they actually give her a pacifier (see below).
7) Still in the delivery room, Marge walks in to her daughter about to give birth, no words are exchanged between the two of them.
8) Finally, back at home, Maggie presents the baby to her family but still doesn’t say a word. Marge declares it a girl and, since this is Zombie Simpsons, no one even asks what her name is.

I always communicate my immediate medical needs non-verbally.

Not only are there a lot more of these, they’re uniformly dumber than the mere three in “Lisa’s Wedding”. You’re not going to say something to the cab driver or the hospital staff while you’re in labor with no friends or family around? You’re not going to tell people the name of your new kid? In “Holidays of Future Passed”, Maggie-doesn’t-talk isn’t a clever conceit, it’s an obtuse and stubborn silence, one that was made up and forced on her in a piece of exposition that itself made no sense. Are all pregnant women forbidden from talking in the future? That’d be a much more interesting idea, so naturally Zombie Simpsons completely ignored it.

Even more telling, if I asked you what Future Maggie is in this episode, would you be able to say anything beyond “rock star”? That’s all we know about her, that she’s a musician. It’s the absolute bare minimum of backstory and isn’t explored in any way.

Contrast that with all the things we learn about Maggie in those three (much shorter) scenes in “Lisa’s Wedding”. Right from the first view we get of her (the image at the top of this post), we can tell a bunch of things about her. She’s dressed in a very “tough girl” sort of way with a work shirt, pants and heavy looking boots. She’s at least kinda bad assed because there’s a dirt biking trophy in the background, but we can tell she’s also smart because her room is littered with books. Plus she’s got to be pretty sociable if she’s on the phone all the time.

In just this brief glimpse of her we can see that she’s got Bart’s attitude and Lisa’s brains. So when we see her glower at her mother for telling her not to talk with her mouth full, or hear Dr. Hibbert tell us that she’s quite the hellion but also has a beautiful voice, it fits in with what we already know. It’s only a few seconds, but you get a decent idea of what kind of teenager Maggie is, of a character that befits the baby girl who can catch beer bottles before they hit her father in the head, pull the trigger on Mr. Burns, and have a bitter rivalry with the baby with one eyebrow.

What is “rock star” compared to that? And what kind of “rock star” remains silent through airport check in, a wild taxi ride, hospitalization, and fucking labor because a robot told her to? The Maggie in “Holidays of Future Passed” is a grown up baby and has just as little personality. The Maggie in “Lisa’s Wedding”, though on screen for hardly any time at all, has a thought out persona that fits in with what we already knew about her.

Which brings us back to her remaining silent. Zombie Simpsons takes having her not say anything as a kind of burden, just another established piece of beloved fan lore that they have to dutifully write their way around. But they can’t be bothered to come up with reasons or interruptions that are the least bit plausible even initially, much less when used over and over again. The Simpsons didn’t do any of that. Instead, they saw keeping Maggie silent as a comedy opportunity and took advantage of it accordingly. That’s why Homer complaining that she talks too much and Hibbert complimenting her pipes feels like the writers are having fun and playing around while expository robots and silent labor feel like they’re clumsily routing themselves around an impediment.

We know this is what you want to see, you mangy fanboy dogs.

Dec

Compare & Contrast: Krusty’s Nadirs

By Charlie Sweatpants 12 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Krusty Gets Kancelled, The Ten-Per-Cent Solution

“That dummy doesn’t scare me. I’ve had plenty of guys come after me and I’ve buried ’em all: hobos, sea captains, Joey Bishop.” – Krusty the Klown
“Don’t forget the Special Olympics.” – Ms. Pennycandy
“Oh yeah, I slaughtered the Special Olympics!” – Krusty the Klown

In the introduction to yesterday’s Crazy Noises, I mentioned that “Krusty Changes His Show” should be up there with travel episodes, Homer gets a job, and other serially repeated plots (Lisa gets a cause, Bart gets a girlfriend, etcetera). A corollary to that is the way we see Krusty freak out once he’s at his wit’s end. That’s another thing they did several times even before the show’s EEG went flatter than Kansas (“Bart the Fink”, “Last Temptation of Krust”), but for comparison to the hapless ball pit bath we see in “The Ten-Per-Cent Solution” I’d like to look at the first time we see it, in “Krusty Gets Kancelled”.

I would submit to one and all that this is a man truly at a low end:

Krusty Gets Kancelled10

Take a good look at the above image for a second. Krusty’s gaze is lowered and his hair is disheveled; his shirt is frayed and his pants are faded. His sign is haphazard looking even before you read that unlimitedly pathetic message that’s scrawled on it. From the point of his shoes to the droop of his hair, he is every inch unhappy, ashamed, and hopeless. Now take a look at this character:

He’s not happy exactly, but everything from his clothes to his hair to his face is on model and looking quite spiffy. Nor is he outside on a street corner, he’s sitting in a ball pit in a nice, comfortable and climate controlled Krusty Burger. Nothing about his appearance or location even remotely bespeaks the kind of desperation as the Krusty from Season 4. That difference becomes magnified when they start talking.

Zombie Krusty acts like he normally does, screaming, yelling, and generally very manic. When Lisa informs him that he isn’t her hero, he just ups the ante for wailing and thrashing about. The whole thing is designed to be funny the same way so much of Zombie Simpsons is: franticly and with a maximum of zaniness. Neither his dialogue nor his behavior matches the events or emotions he’s theoretically experiencing. Though, to be fair, that may be expecting too much from a show that just just fired him back and forth between two cannons.

This is the only thing “Will Drop Pants for Food” Krusty says, in response to Bart asking him if he’s making any money:

“Nah, that guy’s giving it away for free.”

This is another one of those perfect, multi-layered Simpsons lines. In just eight words we understand that Krusty is totally defeated, unable even to succeed here at his lowest, pants dropping ebb. Worse, he’s being out pants-dropped by a disheveled old man and is so despondent that he doesn’t care enough to walk to a different street corner to try again. Nor does the animation let up. Krusty’s head never raises and he meekly goes with Bart and Lisa when they take his arms on their shoulders. On top of all that, there’s the harmless but wonderfully insane absurdity of the crazy old guy with his pants down singing “The Old Gray Mare”.

And Krusty’s ordeal isn’t over. Bart and Lisa still have to cheer him up, convince him he can be a star again, and then get him back into shape after he drinks nothing but milkshakes. The point of doing all that – aside from the way it’s funny as it’s happening, of course – is to make the ending have a satisfying payoff. We see not only Krusty have a real crisis, but also why his special is such a success, how he got in trouble in the first place (stealing bits, wasting his money), and finally, with the ruby studded clown nose, the fact that he’s already back to his self destructive ways.

That, boys and girls, is a hell of an ending. Not only do they tie in all the celebrities and give them something to do, but they don’t moralize or show Krusty being anything other than the self centered jerk we all need him to be.

By contrast, in “The Ten-Per-Cent Solution”, Krusty doesn’t go through much of anything. After that extended flashback, Joan Rivers takes him back as a client almost immediately. As soon as that happens, he gets himself a revival show, and no sooner is that finished than they’re back together as a couple and he’s off to HBO. There’s no connection or cause to any of this, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Even Zombie Simpsons can’t just fizzle out quite that easily though, so they manufacture a conflict out of thin air by having Rivers go nuts once she and Krusty get to HBO. Bear in mind that this isn’t something that is so much as hinted at earlier in the episode. Despite the fact that they could’ve easily set it up during his revival show or the flashback, it drops completely from the sky just a few minutes before the credits roll. In fact, Rivers-the-loony-agent is so thin and transient that it gets dropped just as completely as it got conjured almost immediately. Rivers is threatened with getting fired, but instead of that happening, she and Krusty get a different HBO show. Roll credits. Huh?

Everyone looks upset, and with good cause. The final conflict is about to be introduced at the 16:00 mark.

That, boys and girls, isn’t even an ending. Rivers wasn’t acting crazy, then she was, then she wasn’t. It’s like a sentence that trails off in the middle.

Here’s the kicker, “Krusty Gets Kancelled” is easily the wilder and more improbable story of the two. For all its sloppy execution, Krusty gets fired –> reconnects with old agent –> gets new show isn’t an insane plot. (By Zombie Simpsons’ standards it’s downright tame.) Bart and Lisa get in touch with half a dozen celebrities they’ve never met to put on a star studded show right there in Springfield is much stranger and unrealistic. But none of that matters because the story is well told. We see Krusty go through a real crisis, we see him claw his way back up, we see the celebrities doing things that are sort of what you’d expect (Midler being a do-gooder, the Chili Peppers playing a concert, Hefner hanging out in a smoking jacket) while still being funny and twisted (crashing the pickup truck, having a promoter believe Moe’s holds 30,000 people, a research facility staffed by women in bunny costumes).

You can get away with crazy stuff from time to time if you make the effort to slip it into something the audience cares about. On the other hand, you can’t get away with even sane stuff if you don’t bother to make it anything other than a disconnected series of skits.

Nov

Compare & Contrast: Flapping Dickey

By Charlie Sweatpants 9 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and Simpsons
Tags: The Last Temptation of Krust, The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants

“It ain’t comedy that’s in my blood; it’s selling out.” – Krusty the Klown

I’ve started quite a few Compare & Contrast posts this season by noting that there were a lot of different possibilities for what to compare and contrast. It’s true as well for “The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants”, the two big, blinking neon obvious ones being the raft trip and Homer becoming an executive. The raft trip in “Boy Scoutz ‘N the Hood” contains things like Flanders doing “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” with the books of the Gospel and Homer actually bragging that they’re all doomed. The promotion in “Simpson and Delilah” is because of a crooked union contract and comes only because of the world’s prejudice against bald people. (Oh, and there’s Karl. I love you Karl.) In both cases The Simpsons had things that fit better in the overall story, made more sense, and were actually, you know, funny. I could elaborate, but I’ve harped on those things a lot in the last few weeks. Instead I’d instead like to take a look at a smaller incident that illustrates the comedic weakness of Zombie Simpsons.

Back in Season 9, as a way to explain that Krusty’s clown/1950s standup routine was painfully dated (oh, the irony!) they had him epically bomb at a charity comedy festival. Just as things are going completely off the rails, none other than Jay Leno asks rhetorically, “What’s he gonna do next, a flapping dickey?”. Immediately Krusty indeed begins, ahem, flapping his dickey. The audience remains unimpressed, and Krusty swiftly gets the hook.

Simpsons era Krusty knew this wasn’t funny.

On Zombie Simpsons though, the flapping dickey is a working gag rather than a sign of being abysmally unfunny. Its mere existence is supposed to be funny in and of itself. (It even goes to 11.) Moreover, Krusty is expecting it to work. As he says, “Why can’t I be funny with just my words? Bill Maher doesn’t put dangerous things near his crotch.” Zombie Simpsons is thinking something like “A flapping dickey? That could be funny if we make it extreme!”. Yes, they’re implying that Krusty is lame, but at the same time they’re expecting you, the audience, to laugh at the thing itself.

Apparently the spinning bowtie didn’t make the cut.

This episode has a lot of problems far worse than its earnest treatment of the flapping dickey, even including the scene’s lame conclusion when Krusty’s machinery backfired and he fell down. But it’s indicative of the overall cheapness that Zombie Simpsons brings to its humor. It’s one thing to take low hanging comedy fruit, it’s another to take the stuff that already fell off the tree and try to package it as gourmet.

Nor is the flapping dickey an isolated incident. Just in this episode there’s things like pouring Homer a bunch of consecutive glasses of bourbon, pretty much everything (the wrong family, the chopped up contract, the lawn mower-foot thing) from that montage, and Homer stopping to take a whiz while swimming between the rafts that inexplicably can’t see each other. If you’re feeling generous you could give them high marks for at least trying to keep things busy, but are any of those things supposed to actually be funny? They aren’t even halfway to clever.

Things like this are why Zombie Simpsons is such a bore to watch if you want to do anything other than stare blankly. It’s a hash of things that have been done better before and the dumbest, least imaginative things anyone could think of. That’s why the flapping dickey is such a perfect example, it’s not just a repeat, it’s a repeat of something that was deliberately not funny.

Nov

Compare & Contrast: Defeating the Bad Guy

By Charlie Sweatpants 21 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: The Book Job, Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish

“Wait, come back! You can’t do this to me! I’m Charles Montgomery Burns!” – C.M. Burns

As an audience member, there are few things more satisfying that a good defeat of a wretched villain. Unfortunately, that also means when things go wrong, when the villain is bland or the ending is weak, it is correspondingly unsatisfying. At the end of the “The Book Job”, Homer and his improbable posse use what Lisa describes as an idea from “every movie ever” to stymie a book publisher who, despite what the music would have you believe, isn’t all that evil. I say “stymie” instead of “defeat” because it isn’t at all clear that what he’s doing is evil or that he’d be in any way displeased with the results; and I say “book publisher” instead of his name because he’s so bland he didn’t get a name. By contrast, at the end of “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”, Marge permanently defeats Mr. Burns’ run for governor with nothing more than her wits and the three eyed fish that was in the first scene.

For a really enjoyable villain defeat, you need to have a proper villain do terrible things so that people really want to see him lose, which Zombie Simpsons naturally doesn’t. The nameless book publisher doesn’t commit any crimes, hurts no one, and hardly seems all that evil. What is his offense, exactly? Editing a book that was deliberately made to be crappy and formulaic? Only on Zombie Simpsons could rewriting mass produced schlock be considered a sin.

The only evil thing about this guy are his fashion accessories.

Mr. Burns, one of television’s great villains, hardly needs describing, so let’s just concentrate on what he’s trying to do in “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”. After his plant miserably fails an inspection, he’s faced with a hefty but by no means ruinous repair bill. Instead of spending money on fixing the plant, his response is to purchase the governor’s office so he can continue running his business in a manner that will one day render the planet uninhabitable. The Simpsons being The Simpsons, it’s played for laughs, but when you think about what he’s trying to do it’s truly despicable. The other guy just wants to sell a few books that, while low brow, don’t harm anyone and actually seem to make quite a few people happy.

Beyond his lack of evil though, the bad guy in “The Book Job” doesn’t actually get defeated. At the end we see that the book, trolls and all, is quite popular. The bookstore has given it lots of shelf space, and kids and geeks are reading it avidly. Since all he wants to do is make money selling books, and he doesn’t care at all whether the book is about trolls or vampires, he’s actually won. The million dollars he paid to Homer’s goofy gang of the suddenly hyper-competent is a small price to pay for the runaway bestseller and budding franchise he appears to have on his hands.

The opposite happens to Mr. Burns, who sees himself humiliated on television and his campaign for governor thwarted on the eve of success. Best of all, Burns is defeated by his own villainy. His disregard for polluting the water is what allows Marge to defeat him.

In short, the nameless book guy isn’t evil and doesn’t lose. Mr. Burns is unlimitedly evil and is utterly beaten. One of those is a great ending, the other is Zombie Simpsons.

Nov

Compare & Contrast: Conventioneering

By Charlie Sweatpants 42 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and Simpsons
Tags: Homer Badman, The Food Wife

“Sorry kids, but this is the one event I want my darling wife by my side.” – Homer Simpson
“Oh, well thank you, Homer. But take one of the kids.” – Marge Simpson
“Marge, they can’t carry enough candy! They have puny little muscles, not big ropey ones like you.” – Homer Simpson

Like last week, there are quite a few aspects of “The Food Wife” which were done better on actual episodes of The Simpsons. There was the family trying out ethnic food, which made more sense and had more to do with the rest of the episode in “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish”. There was Homer’s now advanced woodworking skills, which were probably intended as a callback of some kind but which only reminded me how little Zombie Simpsons is like its predecessor. There was especially the way Marge becomes afraid that she’s no fun, which was infinitely funnier and more believable in “Bart’s Inner Child”. For sheer simplicity though, nothing really beats the way “The Food Wife” and “Homer Badman” both open: with the family going to a convention.

The differences in the things Zombie Simpsons cares about and the things The Simpsons cared about are massively apparent right in the opening scenes. As “The Food Wife” begins, Lisa and Bart have earned a reward of some kind and are going to get a “Saturday Surprise Dad Day”. As soon as Marge announces that, the kids cheer and Homer lets us know that this is something that happens quite often. In just this one scene we can see how much the family has degenerated into characterless, one dimensional nobodies.

Nothing says “The Simpsons” like a prosperous family that loves spending time together!

Homer, the man who used to routinely avoid doing anything with his kids, is excited to take them somewhere on his precious Saturday. Bart and Lisa are thrilled at the prospect of some of Homer’s half assed over-parenting (and Bart has somehow been behaving well). And Marge, despite the jealousy that the audience will repeatedly see her go through for the rest of the episode, is just peachy keen on all of this. Not only do none of these things fit with who these people are supposed to be, but since Homer rattles off two things he’s done before it means that it’s been going on like this for a while. This is particularly jarring when it comes to Marge, since “cemetery paintball” and “go karts on real roads” don’t sound like activities she’d want her ten-year-old son or eight-year-old daughter doing. The entire scene is pure Zombie Simpsons, apathetic towards the characters and generally nonsensical (and we haven’t even gotten to the convention yet).

Compare that with the opening scene from “Homer Badman”, which also takes place at the kitchen table. This one opens with Bart picking the non-marshmallow pieces out of his cereal, Lisa calling him on it (revealing her own hatred of the non-marshmallow pieces in the process), and then Homer talking about the candy convention to which he’s gotten tickets. But he doesn’t give his mouth watering description of the convention because he’s planning to take his kids, though they immediately beg him to do just that. Instead, he wants to take Marge. She’s flattered by this but doesn’t really want to go, and it’s only then that it comes out that he actually wants to take her because Bart or Lisa won’t be able to carry as much candy as she can.

Everyone in this scene is perfectly in character. Bart and Lisa are acting like kids who just want sugar, with Lisa being the less lazy and more conscientious of the two. Marge is acting like the responsible adult. And Homer is at his best: unthinkingly disappointing his entire family (the kids because they can’t go with him, Marge because she’s being used as a pack mule), but only doing so because of his well established love of candy. And, of course, every part of the setup is a joke, from Bart picking at the cereal to Homer’s reasons for wanting to bring Marge. You’d need a transcript to include all the gags (and even that wouldn’t do it justice). The Simpsons cares about its story and its characters, Zombie Simpsons just plunges ahead into nonsense.

You can see that directly once the respective kitchen scenes are over. Zombie Simpsons jumps immediately to the video game convention, where Homer has somehow acquired VIP tickets. How did that happen? Well, they don’t say, but my immediate guess would be that the writers are so used to being VIPs that they’ve forgotten that Homer isn’t one. By contrast, The Simpsons shows us Homer getting his regular tickets by taking advantage of Apu.

More than that, “Homer Badman” also shows us a second scene at the house that sets up the rest of the episode. First we see Marge reluctantly getting sewn into the many pocketed trenchcoat that Homer’s going to use to smuggle candy out of the convention. Then our main guest character, graduate student Ashley Grant, arrives to babysit. She doesn’t just pop into the episode for no reason, she shows up because Marge can’t find anyone else to sit for her kids.

Even better, she immediately joins the joke parade while we find out who she is. She’s smart, capable, and, crucial to the sexual harassment plot, believes that women don’t have to be second class citizens. Bart objects (“How can you leave us with this maniac?”) and prepares to destroy yet another babysitter, but Grant is unfazed and instantly disarms him with “Disemboweler IV”.

“The game where condemned criminals dig at each other with rusty hooks.”

On Zombie Simpsons they don’t have anything like those scenes and just cut instantly to Homer and the kids breezing into the video game convention with their VIP badges:

Come right in, Mr. Selman.

There’s a superficially similar scene when Homer and Marge arrive at the candy convention but, like Zombie Simpsons and The Simpsons more broadly, the similarities are only cosmetic:

Homer? Excited. Marge? Nervous. Story? Progressing.

In the scene from “The Food Wife”, Homer and the kids walk past a nice orderly line that looks like a pretty decent recreation of the entrance at something like E3. It is neither funny nor creative, and they’re doing so with VIP badges that Homer got from nowhere. Whereas in “Homer Badman”, we saw Homer get the tickets and the candy convention is so desirable that it hilariously requires a dozen police officers to guard its entrance. It makes more sense in terms of the story, it’s a joke, and it takes only a second; the arrival in Zombie Simpsons is nothing more than a reenactment of how nice it must be to have private security kiss your ass, but includes lots of exposition in case the audience didn’t understand.

Part of the reason Zombie Simpsons skips right into the video game convention is because, unlike the candy convention, the video game expo has nothing to do with the rest of the episode. More than that, however, is the way the vast majority of “The Food Wife”’s attempts at humor are pop culture riffs, and they want to get to those quickly. Even then most of them are references not jokes; “Guts of War” isn’t a parody of “God of War”, it’s just a wink and a nod to let you know that they’re hip and cool enough to know who Kratos is. The same is true of “YBox”, “Electronic Crafts”, “Medal of Duty”, and “Gamestation 3”.

It sure was nice of them to essentially repeat Apple’s slogan for them.

By contrast, the candy convention is filled not just with candy jokes, but with the kind of absurdist exaggerations that The Simpsons reveled in creating. Instead of a bunch of signs that are misspelled versions of “Hershey” or “M&M”, we get a sour ball so sour that it must be contained in a magnetic field. It’s not only funny, but it’s a hell of a lot more creative than replacing the word “Rock” with the word “Marching”. We also get “The front desk is looking for Mr. Goodbar”, the wax lips guy, and the security guard who insists that Marge put some sugar on her celery or get out. And, of course, there’s the precious gummy Venus de Milo, which is giddily insane, and which will soon drive the main plot forward and give us Homer’s Pop Rocks/Coke bomb.

At the video game convention, Homer goes into a lame first person shooter mode and beats up a bunch of people to get to another non-joke reference, the “Funtendo Zii”. After that, the “Funtendo” crap just ends; there isn’t so much as a callback after Homer and the kids go hopping over the fence. The Gummi de Milo, of course, is what gets Homer in trouble with Ashley Grant, what gets him looking like a drooling pervert on Rock Bottom, and what eventually exonerates him. It’s not just absurdly funny as an idea, it’s the lynchpin of the plot.

Zombie Simpsons puts its characters in a place they have no business being and likely wouldn’t want to be anyway if they were still even remotely themselves. Once there, they decorate it with a few cute signs and a couple of semi-clever takes on real video games before dropping the whole thing. The Simpsons keeps everyone in character, takes a few familiar notions and uses them to create a whole world of ludicrous candy inventions, and uses all of it to keep the plot moving and entertaining. The yellow hue is misleading, these two shows have nothing in common except it.

Nov

Compare & Contrast: Martin Prince

By Charlie Sweatpants 13 Comments

Categories: Compare & Contrast and The Simpsons
Tags: Bart Gets an F, Replaceable You

“You’re killing me, fish. Never have I seen a greater or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me! I do not care who kills who. To catch a fish, to kill a bull, to make love to a woman, to live!” – Martin Prince

There was a great deal of nostalgia laden fan service in the (presumably) non-ironically titled “Replaceable You”, which means that there are a great deal of things that could be compared and contrasted. The nerds made an utterly pointless appearance, Homer got an assistant, and Mrs. Glick was apparently killed off while Dr. Nick came back to life and spoke. (Was that the first time he’s spoken since the movie?) There was also a rivalry between Bart and Lisa for the science fair, which was stupid, shallow and a blatant act of repetition. But something simpler gets at the deeper problems with Zombie Simpsons, and that something is good old Martin Prince.

Like many of the less flashy supporting characters in Zombie Simpsons, it’s hard to pin down exactly when the light went out of Martin’s eyes. The family and more major characters like Flanders and Burns get enough screen time that you can follow their devolution more or less as it happened. Others, like Patty, Selma, and Miss Hoover, have basically fallen off the show, so when they do make their infrequent appearances it’s a lot more jarring. Such is the case with Martin.

Like so many others, Martin has become more of a prop than a character. Instead of acting like anything resembling a ten-year-old, even a very smart one, Martin spends most of his time sitting in the background or delivering the occasional semi-clever one liner that would be more at home on something like The Big Bang Theory. That’s where you get setup-beat-punchline sitcom garbage like this:

Martin: Good shot.
Bart: Not really. I was trying to bounce it off your left testy.
Martin: Testis, my friend.
Bart: Ugh.

That’s not how people talk, that’s how sitcom writers make people talk. It’s basically a late night monologue that happens to be between two people.

(And that’s ignoring the way Martin makes his entrance by conveniently hanging from a tree outside of the Simpsons’ kitchen window. It’s the standard Zombie Simpsons need to have characters appear precisely when needed with no regard to whether or not they’d actually be there. By comparison, in “Bart Gets an F”, they strike up their conversation after Martin overhears the twins messing with Bart on the school bus.)

Since Martin is now very less than human, that kind of cheap, formulaic cornball is the only way they can think to make him even resemble funny. Zombie Simpsons can’t generate any genuine humor from him without that crutch, so once they run out of things for him and Bart to parrot at one another, he basically goes silent. That is not an exaggeration.

Martin is in the episode all the way to the dance party ending. But he only really speaks between his tree branch arrival at the three minute mark and the time he and Bart finish constructing their alternatively cute and vicious plot device a little before the seven minute mark. After that he has only two lines for the entire rest of the episode. The first comes on the playground:

“So, partner, what’s next on the agenda?”

Bart gets a little flustered at that, like he no longer wants to work with Martin, but that never goes anywhere because Milhouse shows up to get passive aggressive, and then Grampa and the Old Jewish Guy also mysteriously appear. Martin is silent throughout.

We don’t even get to see his second line. It’s dubbed over as crosstalk during the inexplicable “marching robots” sequence:

His only other line is “Wish I’d thought of that”, but you’ll note that his lips never move.

Those two lines are all he says for the final fourteen minutes plus of the episode. For that entire time he just stands there, like the prop that he is, letting Bart take all the action and do all the talking.

He doesn’t say a single word during any of these scenes. Not one.

This stands in marked contrast to the vibrant, recognizable and hilarious little boy in “Bart Gets an F”. Even by the first episode of Season 2 we already know that Martin is the smart teacher’s pet of Mrs. Krabappel’s class. He snitches on Bart in “The Crepes of Wrath” and it’s his intelligence test that Bart sabotages in “Bart the Genius”. As Martin himself says, Bart is his “natural enemy”.

But Martin isn’t some rubberized punching bag or a one note wonder (like Comic Book Guy has become). Rather, he’s a bright, precocious and lonely kid who doesn’t fit in. It’s that relatable humanity that turns otherwise simple sentences into great jokes. When Martin’s sitting under a tree reading Moby Dick while the other kids are playing baseball, he talks like the sophisticated adult he wants to be instead of the child that he is:

“I’m sorry, Bart, I am unfamiliar with the rules of your sport. I didn’t want to interfere with a ball in play.”

After the other kids laugh at his pathetic throw to return the ball, he drops the immortal:

“Well, back to the forecastle of the Pequod.”

Those are hilarious precisely because they are so perfectly him: massively nerdy and resigned to being lonely, but not entirely unhappy. He’s a well developed character, and that’s what makes him funny. He doesn’t need sitcom-y tag lines like “Testis, my friend” or “Heavens to Asimov!”, because what he’d really say is much funnier and far more human.

Nor are his attributes limited to his embarrassments. After Bart and Martin make their deal, Bart to get study help, Martin to get social help, we see the full range of Martin’s absurd dorkiness (“No study area is complete without adequate plant life”, his hilarious mischief equation). As their partnership continues, Martin comes into his own as a free spirit and mild trouble maker. Martin may have been unpopular, but that’s because there’s no book he could read on how to be popular, and no one had ever told him not to sit in the front of the bus or ride a bike with a basket on the front. Since he’s smart and a quick study, he absorbs Bart’s lessons and blossoms into the boy who can say:

“Who would’ve thought that pushing a boy into the girls’ lavatory could be such a thrill. The screams! The humiliation! The fact that it wasn’t me!”

Just like resigning himself to an imaginary life aboard the Pequod, this line is completely him. He still uses adult words (lavatory, humiliation), but now that he knows the rules he can do the things he didn’t understand before. It’s also hilarious, not only for the pitch perfect excitement in Russi Taylor’s delivery, but for the analytical bent of Martin’s newfound love of doing what the other boys used to do to him. Even then, he doesn’t become a Bart clone, doing things in his particular Martin-like way (acing a test and saying “Later, Mrs. K”, calling his friends “fellows” as he leads them to the arcade). That this all comes in an episode that began with him quoting Earnest Hemingway about living life to its fullest is just icing on the cake.

There’s no comparison between the erudite and animated kid in “Bart Gets an F” and the dead eyed shell that created a killer robot before going silent for the last two thirds of his time on screen in “Replaceable You”. One of them is a real character who is funny up and down the line, the other is a sitcom bit player who’s content to lean back on his heels and let the laughtrack do its work.

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