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I think I get it, I was thinking something like "Can a show age into something different, transform from a whatever comedy/drama into a time capsule of the world it was made in?" And now that I think about it, that's not a hard thing for any show to accomplish. By default every show is a product of its time unless it's really trying to do something different. But that doesn't make it still a good show to watch for modern audiences. We can see sexist episodes of Friends and learn something about how casual sexism could be played off as a joke back in the 90s. But just as a joke, it's cringey now. That's kinda the idea, right?
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Sep 6, 2017 21:18
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One joke from the Simpsons that I never got as a kid is the final scene in "Itchy and Scratchy Land" where Euro Itchy and Scratchy Land is completely deserted. It wasn't until I read Disney War a couple of years ago that I realised it was because Disneyland Paris was seen as a) a vanity project for Michael Eisner; b) projected by everyone other than Michael Eisner to be an expensive failure; and c) actually wasn't an immediate success. I feel like that episode was broadcast the year Disneyland Paris opened, so it was timely, but now Disneyland Paris has been consistently popular for 20 years or so, so it probably makes less sense on rewatch. I feel like those early episodes of the Simpsons have elements and allusions that make less sense now than they did in the early 90s but still work as jokes because they're funny on their own. One example that occurs to me is the one where Lisa is addicted to the Corey hotline, which is a premium phone service she calls to listen to an actor based on Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. This isn't something that I'd say has aged well on one hand because a) the Coreys aren't teen heartthrobs any more and one of them is dead; and b) I'm pretty sure those hotlines aren't a thing any more because we have Twitter now. But on the other hand, it's still a funny joke on its own. Or the episode where Rodney Dangerfield guest stars as Mr Burns's illegitimate son, who's basically a Rodney Dangerfield character. I didn't know who Rodney Dangerfield was when I watched it and I don't think kids going back to it are likely to know who Rodney Dangerfield is either. But that doesn't matter because it's still funny and he gives a funny performance. Or even the season three episode where Michael Jackson is the guest star; he's playing a role (a guy who thinks he's Michael Jackson) rather than playing himself. I wonder if the episode where Lady Gaga guest stars and it's basically about her will age as well in 10-15 years. Wheat Loaf has a new favorite as of 21:51 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 21:25
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The Lady Gaga episode was the lowest rated episode pretty much ever, so it can only go lower.
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Sep 6, 2017 21:29
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JacquelineDempsey posted:"McNeal". "Single Female Lawyer", right? Yes, I got it but only because I dated a woman who had named her dog "Allie" and asked her what the name meant. My other friend's dog was named "Xena".
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Sep 6, 2017 21:45
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BiggerBoat posted:"Single Female Lawyer", right? Careful, that show almost got us all killed. Unless that's  you were making
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Sep 6, 2017 21:49
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Wheat Loaf posted:I feel like those early episodes of the Simpsons have elements and allusions that make less sense now than they did in the early 90s but still work as jokes because they're funny on their own. One example that occurs to me is the one where Lisa is addicted to the Corey hotline, which is a premium phone service she calls to listen to an actor based on Corey Feldman and Corey Haim. This isn't something that I'd say has aged well on one hand because a) the Coreys aren't teen heartthrobs any more and one of them is dead; and b) I'm pretty sure those hotlines aren't a thing any more because we have Twitter now. But on the other hand, it's still a funny joke on its own. Chat lines are still a thing. Depending on your horrid television viewing habits, you can still find commercials for them, although I imagine all the numbers just route to an overseas call center where ladies act like they're hot singles in your area. BiggerBoat posted:"Single Female Lawyer", right? Yes, I got it but only because I dated a woman who had named her dog "Allie" and asked her what the name meant. My other friend's dog was named "Xena". Naming your cat Mrs. Harrison Ford is more unique, but doesn't roll off the tongue as well when you're screaming at her to get off the drapes.
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Sep 6, 2017 21:58
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Krispy Kareem posted:Naming your cat Mrs. Harrison Ford is more unique, but doesn't roll off the tongue as well when you're screaming at her to get off the drapes. I'm just gonna go ahead and name my next pet "Fonzie"
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Sep 6, 2017 22:15
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Priest Chat Back is the best hotline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pGcE7IvCTs
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Sep 6, 2017 22:20
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Alhazred posted:Skyfall heavily implied that Bond is bi. i think it more implies that Bond will go bi without hesitation if it gets the job done BioEnchanted posted:Jack Black at least can be charming and funny as a person. I can see that being attractive I guess. girls will gently caress funny schlubby guys all the time, ya'll goons need to get out more. i mean not every super-hot girl will do that but plenty of them will Tumble has a new favorite as of 22:28 on Sep 6, 2017 |
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Sep 6, 2017 22:26
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Going back to no one remembering insanely popular (at the time) shows like Ally McBeal... Futurama gets a little meta on its aging poorly in that early episode where the aliens come to Earth after seeing centuries-old tv transmissions and demand to see "McNeal". People rightfully criticize all the lazy pop-culture jokes of post-cancellation Futurama but even the original run was pretty bad about that at times. Especially when they had the foresight to usually stick with references that were old enough to be timeless like original Star Trek or Richard Nixon but then reference things like Y2k and Nintendo 64 that were dated when the episode was airing. Also the episode that effectively argued in defense of intelligent design was really weird.
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Sep 7, 2017 00:34
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Nintendo 64 is pretty timeless at this point. Thing's been out for over 20 years now and people still talk about it
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Sep 7, 2017 01:40
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 Xbox is huge!
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Sep 7, 2017 01:55
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After rewatching some early episodes of Star Trek TNG, I'm surprised it ever got to season 2. It is not good. I remember loving the returns of it when I was a kid. I don't know if the early episodes aged poorly, or if I've just aged.
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Sep 7, 2017 02:17
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Isn't the first season pretty well known as not being nearly as good as what came after? It's been a while since I watched TNG
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Sep 7, 2017 02:19
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It's been my experience that most shows with pretty bad first seasons in the fantasy/Sci-fi genre tend to be really good in the long run and last a decent while. Meanwhile shows with excellent first seasons tend to become garbage pretty quick like Sleepy Hollow.
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Sep 7, 2017 02:34
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^^ also Once Upon a Time.
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Sep 7, 2017 02:44
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lifg posted:After rewatching some early episodes of Star Trek TNG, I'm surprised it ever got to season 2. It is not good. I remember loving the returns of it when I was a kid. There's a pretty good documentary about TNG on Netflix called "Chaos on the Bridge." It's really good. Covers the creation of the show and all the turmoil it went though in those early days. It's a miracle it got a second season.
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Sep 7, 2017 03:28
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I'm not sure what the crossover is between Ace Attorney fans and Better Call Saul fans, but if that's you, this is a pro-loving click
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Sep 7, 2017 03:48
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lifg posted:After rewatching some early episodes of Star Trek TNG, I'm surprised it ever got to season 2. It is not good. I remember loving the returns of it when I was a kid. I'd argue you can just skip to season 3 of TNG. Like, the first ~50 episodes are trash.
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Sep 7, 2017 03:56
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Mu Zeta posted:I'd argue you can just skip to season 3 of TNG. Like, the first ~50 episodes are trash. And then you can skip the rest of it too
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Sep 7, 2017 04:11
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Guy Mann posted:People rightfully criticize all the lazy pop-culture jokes of post-cancellation Futurama but even the original run was pretty bad about that at times. Especially when they had the foresight to usually stick with references that were old enough to be timeless like original Star Trek or Richard Nixon but then reference things like Y2k and Nintendo 64 that were dated when the episode was airing. They Y2K one wasn't so bad either, because the jokes were about Fry's parents being ultra paranoid about it at the time of it happening, not like, it affecting the year 3000. His dad even blames the food poisoning they get on New Years on Y2K.
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Sep 7, 2017 04:22
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Just re-watched Mission Hill and there's a handful of dated things in it (corporations hiring hip Gen X-ers to do nothing, ahahahaha), but the thing that maybe aged the weirdest was that episode with the big vague international crisis going on in the background that Andy spends the whole episode ignoring. One of the few details we learn about it is that it somehow heavily involves Dennis Rodman. That kind of struck me.
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Sep 7, 2017 04:22
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Isn't the first season pretty well known as not being nearly as good as what came after? It's been a while since I watched TNG Roddenberry was simultaneously a paranoid jerk who resented how long he'd been professionally ignored after the original series ended while also being a utopian weirdo who'd marinated too long in nerd adulation and started to believe his own hype. The former caused a whole mess of problems and infighting, but the latter lead to all the weird stuffy might have heard before, like, Roddenberry didn't want there to be conflict between characters, because the humans of the Federation would have evolved past "disagreements." Haven't seen Chaos on the Bridge yet, but I'll check it out because the stories I've already heard are wild.
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Sep 7, 2017 04:35
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LeafyOrb posted:It's been my experience that most shows with pretty bad first seasons in the fantasy/Sci-fi genre tend to be really good in the long run and last a decent while. Meanwhile shows with excellent first seasons tend to become garbage pretty quick like Sleepy Hollow. The first season of Babylon 5 is famously bad; fortunately I actually started watching the show late in the second season (pretty sure Divided Loyalties was the one), and caught up with the rest through reruns.
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Sep 7, 2017 04:46
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Solice Kirsk posted:The Grinder was a hilarious show and it loving sucks that it got cancelled. JacquelineDempsey posted:Going back to no one remembering insanely popular (at the time) shows like Ally McBeal... Futurama gets a little meta on its aging poorly in that early episode where the aliens come to Earth after seeing centuries-old tv transmissions and demand to see "McNeal". Absurd Alhazred posted:The first season of Babylon 5 is famously bad; fortunately I actually started watching the show late in the second season (pretty sure Divided Loyalties was the one), and caught up with the rest through reruns.
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Sep 7, 2017 07:27
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Tiggum posted:I watched Futurama when it was new, and I had no idea until now that that was supposed to be an Ally McBeal reference as I never watched it or really knew anything about it. If you'd asked me what it was about, I'd have guessed "sitcom set in an office". The Futurama episode was still funny though. Even if you've seen Ally McBeal it's not a great parody of the show. She doesn't have that much sex and is mostly just quirky and irritating.
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Sep 7, 2017 08:09
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I mostly only remember Ally McBeal from that episode and one thing where the dancing baby gif appeared in the show and it was apparently a big deal. I think I'm starting to see why it was so quickly forgotten. BioEnchanted posted:I think a concept that has aged poorly in particular is the concept of "Special episodes" about ~real life themes~ like sex/STDs and drugs and the like. It's interesting looking at recent things that were making fun of that whole era's attempt to boil a complex issue down into a child-friendly hour of boredom (and by child-friendly I mean something their parents won't whine about, no one gave a poo poo about how the actual kids felt...) like the internet show Don't Hug Me i'm Scared, that are coming out alongside modern cartoons like Star Vs or Steven Universe, which all tackle those kinds of abstractions. Those haven't so much aged poorly as all the people who had to put up with them have grown up and admitted to everyone that they suck. That and they seem to have all backfired pretty badly. Didn't Dinosaurs have an episode that admitted how stupid anti-drugs episodes were, and asked kids to stop doing drugs so TV shows don't have to do sappy anti-drugs episodes anymore? Nowadays you're more likely to see episode which treat some relatively mundane thing suspiciously like a drug habit. Gravity Falls has a few episodes where kids get high as a kite off of expired/banned food. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends has both Franky's addiction to her grandma's cookies turn into raging cocaine-esque habit, and Mac's sugar intolerance apparently manifests as PCP. Then again, it's not very new, Transformers having that infamous episode where Megatron and the Decepticons all get plastered on Energon.
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Sep 7, 2017 08:54
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Inescapable Duck posted:I mostly only remember Ally McBeal from that episode and one thing where the dancing baby gif appeared in the show and it was apparently a big deal. First Internet meme that ever went mainstream, wasn't it? Either that or that guy who made this video resume which included him ballroom dancing, snowboarding and benching 500 lbs... when he was trying to get hired by Merrill Lynch or Goldman Sachs or something.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:04
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Speaking of Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, bringing up cartoons and ageing poorly... well, maybe it wasn't a great idea from the start, but Cheese's portrayal as a grab-bag of stereotypes of people, especially children, with mental disabilities is pretty uncomfortable. Let alone the character mostly just existing to inconvenience others and make loud, annoying noises.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:21
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The main things I remember about Ally McBeal are Robert Downey Jr. being stuntcast as her potential husband and basically going away because he want to jail or rehab or something in real life. Also there was one blatant Starbucks commercial where three of the main women (that were so thin that even combined was probably under 200 pounds) talked about how drinking Starbucks was like sex.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:22
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Tiggum posted:I heard Babylon 5 was really good and watched about five episodes before giving up. I guess I'll give it another look at some point if the second season is as big an improvement as that. S2-4 is some of the best TV sci-fi ever made imo. S1 is a bit ropey in places but you need to watch it all because it sets up a lot of the major plot arcs for later. S5 is a huge letdown, and goes to some strange places, but is still watchable. Do not watch any of the movies or spin-offs. Sweevo has a new favorite as of 13:36 on Jan 15, 2022 |
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Sep 7, 2017 09:35
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Inescapable Duck posted:Speaking of Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, bringing up cartoons and ageing poorly... well, maybe it wasn't a great idea from the start, but Cheese's portrayal as a grab-bag of stereotypes of people, especially children, with mental disabilities is pretty uncomfortable. Let alone the character mostly just existing to inconvenience others and make loud, annoying noises. I never really watched that show but I once went to a movie (I can't even remember which movie it was) which played half an episode or a 15 minute segment during the advertisements before the trailers, and when you looked around you could see people getting increasingly pissed off at it and particularly how irritating the blue one with his annoying voice was.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:40
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I just rewatched the Malibu Stacey episode of the simpsons for the first time in probably like a decade and I'm sure it's been mentioned before but Smithers as a character is... weird. It's like half of him is an actual character and the other half is a raging gay sex freak or some awkward gay stereotype obsessed with dolls and cleanliness etc. The 90s was a really weird time for gay representations in media where it was like "hey these guys are people and deserve to be treated as such but... lol what the gently caress is up with them"
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Sep 7, 2017 09:56
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Sweevo posted:S5 is unwatchable trash. Not really, it would be pretty okay if you could excise that goddamned Byron.
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Sep 7, 2017 09:56
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Aesop Poprock posted:I just rewatched the Malibu Stacey episode of the simpsons for the first time in probably like a decade and I'm sure it's been mentioned before but Smithers as a character is... weird. It's like half of him is an actual character and the other half is a raging gay sex freak or some awkward gay stereotype obsessed with dolls and cleanliness etc. The 90s was a really weird time for gay representations in media where it was like "hey these guys are people and deserve to be treated as such but... lol what the gently caress is up with them" It's all so weird that the basically only gay recurring character is in a subservient job beneath an older man he pines for. It's definitely not meshing well with current culture. Note: I haven't watched the show in like a decade so maybe they've updated him a bit.
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Sep 7, 2017 10:01
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Still better than the mincing woopsie stereotype from the 70s, or the leather-clad sexual deviant one from the 80s.
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Sep 7, 2017 10:49
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well why not posted:It's all so weird that the basically only gay recurring character is in a subservient job beneath an older man he pines for. It's definitely not meshing well with current culture. Note: I haven't watched the show in like a decade so maybe they've updated him a bit. For a while I thought they did a great job of the joke not being that he's gay, but that he's madly in love with a reprehensible and withered husk of a man, but to modern tastes it does start to feel kinda uncomfortable. They made a big songa nd dance a few years ago about how he was finally coming out of the closet, so it's probably moved on a bit.
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Sep 7, 2017 11:12
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IIRC in the commentary for one of the early seasons Groening talked about how Smithers wasn't really meant to be specifically gay or not but just attracted to Mr. Burns. I've never seen anything past season 20 and only have passing familiarity with stuff after 12 so I don't know how he gets treated later on. I guess there was that one episode in a later season which was one of those "future" episodes and Smithers takes shots to make him straight or something like that.
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Sep 7, 2017 11:38
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From the first decade of the show, there's bits here and there but it's mostly implicit. There's the one where Mr Burns makes him take a vacation and he's shown staying at an all-male resort, or the one where John Waters guest-starred which had a scene which implied his character was going out with him, or the X-Files crossover where he panics when Mr Burns asks him if he's going to spend his weekend doing "something gay". Probably other examples, but those are the only ones that immediately occur to me.
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Sep 7, 2017 11:47
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Mu Zeta posted:The main things I remember about Ally McBeal are Robert Downey Jr. being stuntcast as her potential husband and basically going away because he want to jail or rehab or something in real life. Also there was one blatant Starbucks commercial where three of the main women (that were so thin that even combined was probably under 200 pounds) talked about how drinking Starbucks was like sex. Reading this post made me remember those things. Previously, the only thing I remembered about this show was the title character sniffing Jon Bon Jovi's rear end. 
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Sep 7, 2017 12:15
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