“Uh, sorry, you’ve got to be a pilot to drink in here.” – The Little Black Box Bartender
“But I am a pilot.” – Homer Simpson
“Where’s your uniform?” – The Little Black Box Bartender
“Um, I stowed it safely in the overhead compartment.” – Homer Simpson
“Well, you talk the talk. Here’s a loaner.” – The Little Black Box Bartender
“It’s okay, Marge, we don’t need to go on a trip. We’ll just wait for the killer bees to come to us.” – Homer Simpson
“Well, everybody’s got a fear of something.” – Marge Simpson
“Not everybody.” – Homer Simpson
“Sock puppets.” – Marge Simpson
“Where? Where? Ah! Ahhh!” – Homer Simpson
“Sammy, you’re too old to go on a date with two twins on the same night you’re supposed marry Diane without Rebecca knowing.” – Carla
“Okay, Carla, I’ll make you a bet. If this affects my Major League comeback I’ll sell the bar.” – Sam
As part of our tireless efforts to demonstrate the many ways Zombie Simpsons fails to entertain, Season 23 will be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that can only be produced by people typing short messages at one another. More dedicated or modern individuals might use Twitter for this, but that’s got graphics and short links and little windows that pop up when you put your cursor over things. The only kind of on-line communications we like are the kind that could once be done at 2400 baud. So disable your call waiting, plug in your modem, and join us for another year of Crazy Noises. This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “lingerie”).
The end of “The Man in the Blue Flannel Pants” is so hoary and cliched I can just quote TV Tropes:
Character schedules dates with two different people at the same time. The character tries to keep both, going back and forth between the two dates without letting either know what’s going on. Hilarity allegedly ensues.
Can also apply to other scheduling conflicts, where the character tries to juggle an event that he’s responsible for attending, versus a more personal event that he really wants to attend.
You may recognize that from every crappy sitcom in the history of canned laughter. Though most live action shows don’t feature the main character jumping overboard and swimming back and forth between two rafts.
Beyond that there was one other scene I wanted to highlight for its particular stupid. Between the time Homer fully becomes an accounts man and that boring as hell montage, there’s a brief scene at the Simpson home. Homer returns from his new job to find Marge in a nightie holding a martini.
Flats? June Cleaver and Betty Draper scoff at flats.
This is clearly supposed to be Marge’s 1950s teevee housewife routine. On its own this could’ve kinda worked. It’s dumb, sure, but you could put Marge through the same transformation that Homer goes through, hating her alienated life. They don’t, of course. The next time we see her she’s back to her normal self as if this never happened and no explanation is offered. So it’s twofer, a wasted comedy opportunity that also doesn’t make sense.
Compounding the problem, immediately after this, Bart and Lisa show up, ready to go to bed. Marge doesn’t act at all like herself, she just dismisses them the same way Homer does. That leads to Bart and Lisa imitating Marge in acting totally out of character. Why on Earth would either of them want Bart to read a story to Lisa? Is that supposed to help Lisa fall asleep, having her bullying brother sitting on her bed? And why would Bart go through with it? What does he care? Again, no explanation is given, and when Lisa finally does get Bart reading, the story basically ends.
Like Marge doing a Donna Stone impression, Lisa and Bart as book buddies could’ve, maybe, sorta kinda worked. Again, it’s dumb, but there’s a story with at least a few jokes to tell there. Instead we got an amputated B-plot while Marge went back to her old self after one brief, inexplicable scene. Could someone please stop by the Zombie Simpsons office with some staples or paper clips? I’m convinced these scripts are just loose pages that never get read in chronological order.
Charlie Sweatpants: Ready to get started?
Mad Jon: I am
Charlie Sweatpants: Where to begin? The unconnected opening, or the mini-unconnected opening that opened the unconnected opening?
Bart and Milhouse’s little conversation/wedding cutaway was odd, but then it cut to a completely unrelated Krusty thing, which was itself basically unrelated to the rest of the episode.
Mad Jon: Yeah, the unconnected opening was probably my least favorite part. Followed by the mini-unconnected one. But that’s just me.
It just kept re-running the same joke about Krusty not wanting to drink his own brand of vodka.
Charlie Sweatpants: Which didn’t show up again for the rest of the episode.
Someone noted in comments that Homer’s supposedly downing martinis left and right and they didn’t bring back the vodka that made up the first five minutes.
Mad Jon: They did use the joke enough for even a whole Zombie season, so maybe the writers got tired of it.
Charlie Sweatpants: Very possible. But that just leads us to Krusty picking Bart out of the crowd for no reason, which led to a fancy party at Marge and Homer’s for no other reason.
Mad Jon: I imagine that the reason was so they could have that mind-numbingly stupid karaoke scene that I guess led to Homer being a mad man. Which may be the worst scene I’ve seen in a long time. Why does Homer think that karaoke would save the party? Who knows. How did it actually work? Even better question.
Charlie Sweatpants: The whole party was aggravatingly dumb. By my count, even before Burns showed up there was Kent Brockman, Krusty himself, Rainier Wolfcastle, the Rich Texan, Bumblebee Man, and Drederick fucking Tatum. Are any of these people supposed to be people anymore?
And then Homer switches back and forth from blitheringly dumb to suave and charming in the space of a single scene.
Mad Jon: Yep.
Charlie Sweatpants: And then Burns shows up alone, is awkward with everyone, and then once they’ve had their karaoke party and things are (I guess) cool, Smithers appears just because. Was he there the whole time? No. They just needed him not to be there right until they did.
Mad Jon: Yep again.
But don’t worry, that allows Smithers to utter the joke about Homer setting the world on fire, and then Homer becoming an accounts man.
Which leads to a take off episode, which is only what, 5 years late?
It was even late for the major network’s mirror series failure.
Charlie Sweatpants: Speaking of the accounts man, he also just appeared. First Homer was alone in Burns’ office, then there was a guy with a drink and a cigarette.
Mad Jon: Transitions are not an account man’s strong point I guess.
Charlie Sweatpants: Take off is about right. It wasn’t satirizing Mad Men, it wasn’t even satirizing working too much, drinking on the job, or anything else. It was just Homer going through a few motions until he stopped.
I did think John Slattery got in a few okay lines, particularly his regret about not seeing his secret other family, and there were some little things like him pointing to his nose to Quimby so they could go do coke in the bathroom, but that was about all this episode had to offer.
Though, as usual, even the decent stuff was taken too far. When Marge goes to visit him and they’re suddenly in the bedroom: kinda funny. When they keep doing it: less and less so.
Mad Jon: I agree about Slattery, and I agree about the ongoings.
He was a bright spot in black hole. Unfortunately I couldn’t see past the event horizon.
Charlie Sweatpants: Well, the rest of it was just so damn bad. I guess I have to hand it to them, I didn’t see sitcom-river-rafting coming as an ending.
As soon as I realized what they were doing I just shook my head. Inviting two groups of people to the same place at the same time? They made fun of that back in "Fear of Flying". Now they’re actually doing it.
Mad Jon: That was out of left field. But it was equally as improbable as any other crazy ending that was most certainly guaranteed, so I can’t be too angry about it.
Charlie Sweatpants: The sheer physical dumbness of it was exceptional though, even for them.
They were going down parallel rivers, couldn’t see one another, and no one in either boat wondered why Homer was constantly jumping overboard? The fuck?
Mad Jon: The fuck indeed.
Charlie Sweatpants: Is everyone supposed to be rock bottom stupid here? Because I’m out of other explanations.
Mad Jon: Look, do you want to see Homer poke himself in the eye for 20 seconds and piss in a bush or what? These things don’t happen on their own, you have to have a crazy lead in or these bits just don’t work.
Charlie Sweatpants: I’d be inclined to say they don’t work anyway, but that’s just me. And then there was the freaking waterfall.
Which, again, the fuck?
Mad Jon: Oh yeah. Homer went over the fall didn’t he?
Also he found some gold too didn’t he?
Also some government guys died there too, eh?
Charlie Sweatpants: But that was after he was able to push his entire family to safety. I think he went over because, as Chekhov once said, if you see a waterfall two minutes before the end of the third act, the main character will go over it in one minute. Or something.
Mad Jon: Close enough.
Still not as bad, however, as the throwaway Maggie DUI scene.
TV doesn’t usually ‘bother’ me. I am pretty desensitized in general, and pretty hard to shock. But that scene scarred me on several levels.
Enough that the van Houten sex scene didn’t even register with me for quite a bit.
Charlie Sweatpants: I didn’t pay it that much heed. I mean, you could see it coming a mile away.
The van Houten thing was just lame. Like it’s supposed to be a shock joke, only they have to have Kirk pipe up just to make extra sure we get it.
That’s one of those instances where less is more, and they went with more and then some.
Mad Jon: It bothered me. That’s all. A lot.
Also there was a b-plot wasn’t there?
Charlie Sweatpants: Half of one.
Bart reads to Lisa, Lisa reads to Bart, Bart reads to bullies who promise to see him again . . . and then it ended.
Really weird.
Mad Jon: It turns out Bart can’t read well. And Lisa can help, and absolutely no lead in was necessary.
Charlie Sweatpants: Don’t sell them short. There was the lead in where Homer got home from work and Marge was already in some kind of lingerie and that meant that Bart and Lisa had to spend time together.
Of course, that whole twenty seconds or so is like one unbroken string of out of character weirdness, so . . . maybe you’re not selling them short by not bringing it up. The sooner humanity forgets about it the better off the species will be.
Mad Jon: I think we’re through the looking glass on this one buddy.
Charlie Sweatpants: Yeah, but I’d rather not be.
“Don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!” – Clancy Bouvier
There was a lot of (content-deficient) news about Zombie Simpsons coming out of Comic-Con this week, a bit of which I’ve linked below. Long story short: it’s going to be just as dull as Season 22, which was just as dull as Season 21, which was just as dull as Season 20, and so forth. They released a promotional clip from the Halloween episode, but when I went to watch it on YouTube it said that it’d been taking down due to a copyright claim by FOX. Morons. In the realm of news not coming out of Comic-Con, FOX is changing its deal with Hulu to prevent all you internet freeloaders from seeing their shows for (almost) free. New episodes of Zombie Simpsons (and other shows) won’t be available at Hulu until a week after they originally air. It’s almost like they don’t want you watching their shows. Of course, we’ve also got some neat fan art, a writeup of a Simpsons trivia night I desperately want to attend, some word nerd love for “cromulent”, lots of Mike Reiss, and the usual smattering of excellent usage.
Enjoy.
Can I Borrow an Answer? My Night of Simpsons Trivia – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this refreshing, full-bodied write-up of classic Simpsons trivia night in Brooklyn.
Simpsons’ Vet Mike Reiss Leads a Toonful Evening – Awesome recap of Mike Reiss’s appearance at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival last week. I love this part:
For a writer not a comedian, Reiss timing was pitch-perfect on lines like, “I’m Jewish. I would never eat a ham sandwich in a synagogue on Yom Kippur – if anyone was watching.”
Oh, and the episode he brought with him was “Like Father, Like Clown”. No Zombie Simpsons.
The Simpsons’ Mike Reiss Talks About Unexpected Success and Superheroes’ Jewish Origins – A related interview with Reiss. I would submit this as a big part of the reason the quality of the show has fallen so dramatically:
How many seasons were you and Al the showrunners?
Part of season two, and then seasons three and four. It was a real burnout job. The job nearly killed me. I was working 100 hours a week, and we were working 51 weeks a year. The big change that’s happened over the years is that we started out with six writers, and then we went up to eight writers, and now we have 23 writers — and everybody’s really good at the show. But that’s allowed us to spread the workload around. Al’s been running the show single-handedly for eight or 10 years. And that would not have been possible in the old days.
Fox challenges cord-cutters by sticking TV shows behind paywall – Oh, this is rich. If you want to watch FOX shows on Hulu, you’ve either got to be a Hulu Plus subscriber or a subscriber to a cable/satellite package that lets you go through a convoluted login process. Why? Let FOX “president of affiliate sales” Mike Hopkins explain:
What caused Fox, and presumably others, to become gun-shy about putting ad-supported content online for free? "We’re concerned that cord-cutting is going to be a problem," Hopkins said.
The subscriber gravy train is leaking gravy, and their response is to make sure the doors are still locked. Shrewd. There are a lot of reasons watching television on-line sucks, but the luddite intransigence of the local affiliates (who have the networks by the balls for all kinds of arcane reasons) doesn’t get nearly the press it should.
[Brief note on Hulu Plus: I was staying with a friend last weekend and he’s got access to Hulu Plus through someone at work. Hulu Plus is awful. It’s hard to navigate, the commercials are relentless, and when things do come back or go to commercial the video skips. They may get some of those things sorted out in the future, but as of right now it’s not ready for primetime.]
“The Simpsons” [Film Roman] – Television Critics Association – Some bland quotes from Jean accompanied by some mildly interesting pictures of the current animation process.
Behind-the-scenes: The Simpsons – A small tour of the animation facility with some banal quotes from Jean and Mark Kirkland and the usual heavy emphasis on upcoming guest stars. Sadly, no pictures.
Lil Chase’s top 10 unwords – Oh yeah, “cromulent” is on here.
Is Homer Simpson Coaching The Baltimore Ravens? – This is just excellent usage:
Derrick Mason? I like your hustle.
That’s why it was so hard to cut you.
Santa Cruz: Cruzer – Some officially licensed Simpsons skateboards (via).
Unmotivated Socialites – This is the story of the beginning of a project wherein one member is skeptical:
DANIEL Oh, I'm so out right now. ALEX If you hear me out, Everything will be coming up Millhouse okay?
Tim Hortons USA Vs Tim Hortons Canada – It’s The Little Differences – The little differences between Tim Hortons north and south of the St. Lawrence with audio YouTube of Wiggum and the boys from “22 Short Films About Springfield”.
As gripping as ABC – Excellent usage:
IN AN EPISODE of “The Simpsons,” Steven Wright tells this joke: “I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the zebra did it.” Lisa, of course, has to explain the joke to Homer: “Dad, the zebra didn’t do it, it’s just a word at the end of the dictionary.”
But even Homer didn’t need Lisa to explain to him the underlying premise: Nobody reads the dictionary cover to cover.
The article’s about a novel written as a dictionary. What will they think of next?
Comic-Con 2011: Ronan Posts a Question to ‘The Simpsons’ panel – No Sideshow Bob in Season 23, that’s a relief.
Savouring the Journal: A Simpsons Synchronicity! – No sooner do you think about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, then they appear on The Simpsons in a foreign country.
“Expand my brain, learning juice!” -Homer Simpson – In a delightfully ironic twist, Freakoutville uses a quote from Season 17 to link to an awesome fan made drawing of Homer accompanied by an endorsement of us. Well played.
10 things we learned about ‘The Simpsons’ at Comic-Con – It’s a stretch to get to ten, but never underestimate the ass kissing/space filling abilities of Entertainment Weekly. They’ve been doing this a long time. On the actual news front, not much beyond the usual: more guest stars, more gimmicks, more Ozmodiar.
Dangerous Entertainment News – Monday, July 25 – Linking the above article:
Seriously, only EW would write a promotional article about a classic show that should have been cancelled about ten years ago. Keep up the hard-hitting analysis EW!
Amen on both counts.
“What if you pretended that this couch were a bar, then you could spend more nights at home with us. Huh?” – Marge Simpson
“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.” – Homer Simpson
“I’m sorry doctor, he’s just afraid you’ll blame all my problems on him.” – Marge Simpson
“I’m not here to blame anyone.” – Dr. Zweig
“Mom, can we talk to you?” – Lisa Simpson
“Can’t talk. Keeping myself in a state of cat like readiness.” – Marge Simpson
“Uh, neat.” – Lisa Simpson
“Wow, classy.” – Homer Simpson
“Good evening, sir. Would you please leave without a fuss, right now?” – Maitre d’
“Okay.” – Homer Simpson
“Greetings, good man. Might I trouble you for a drink?” – Guy Incognito
“Oh get out of here Homer.” – Moe
“Homer? Who is Homer? My name is Guy Incognito.” – Guy Incognito
