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gamer roomie is 41 posted:I still have no idea who Mel Zetz is or why his suit would fit on Bart, I have no idea who the union rep with the jowly voice is from Klassic Krusty. Mel Zetz was a made up name who in my head looks like Billy Barty, and AFL-CIO chairman George Meany was supposed to be AFL-CIO chairman George Meany, who was featured on a US postage stamp for his 100th birthday in 1994. He was featured in the episode Bart of Darkness which aired in, you guessed it, 1994. Meany's still a deep cut for sure but it's not like the writers had to reach very far for it. I was a nerdy kid who collected coins and stamps so I actually got that one. It's possible Mel Zetz was actually supposed to be a riff on Billy Barty, who's real name was Billy Bertanzetti, and who was a wise cracking dwarf popular in the 50s, 60s, and 70s (and also he played Noodles in UHF, another amazing comedy classic that has a *very* similar vibe to early simpsons in regards to its references) HOWEVER I admit that is a real stretch and probably not the case. If you haven't seen UHF and you're a fan of classic comedy, seriously go watch it. Cosmik Debris fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 02:06
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Kramer Before Kramer.
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Aug 7, 2023 03:38
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What was Kramer like after Kramer?
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Aug 7, 2023 03:39
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I teach middle and high school at a private international school in Thailand, and the students definitely like Seinfeld and Friends. I suspect that having Millennial and younger Gen X parents plus all the teachers being Millennials and young Gen Xers have strongly influenced their English language tastes in a way that kids growing up in English speaking countries haven't been. Plus with the internet, whenever there is a weird reference they can just look it up. What drives me insane is that they watch the shows cropped to fit their screens and that is so much worse in my opinion than just not knowing what the pop culture references are.
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Aug 7, 2023 03:47
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Blame the streaming services for that. I think it took almost a year for Disney to add a 4:3 mode to Simpsons eps. Netflix was gonna do the same thing for Seinfeld but nothing yet
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Aug 7, 2023 03:50
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Has Simpsons done a "Krusty is getting replaced by a hot crazy female clown (probably played by Margot Robbie)" yet?
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Aug 7, 2023 03:56
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Atlas Hugged posted:People also tend to forget that Bozo the Clown was still in syndication in the 90s, so Krusty wasn't all that alien to kids who watched Saturday morning television. Wikipedia is wildly overstating the popularity of loving Bozo the Clown  It died in pretty much every market past the 60s, and only saw national reach because a local Chicago station (WGN-TV) was syndicated nationally through cable providers starting in the 80s. Also, The Bozo Show wasn't even a saturday morning thing. It was a weekday morning thing and then eventually got shoved into a Sunday timeslot. The joke basis of the Krusty show absolutely was lost on most people. hatty posted:Blame the streaming services for that. I think it took almost a year for Disney to add a 4:3 mode to Simpsons eps. Netflix was gonna do the same thing for Seinfeld but nothing yet Nah. It's basically the same thing as what happened with widescreen VHS releases in the days of 4:3 TVs, people just have some weird obsession with filling the entirety of their screen. To hell if it's actually how the content they're trying to watch is supposed to be viewed. Like even with native 16:9 formatted content, a lot of younger people will just zoom in until it fills the entirety of their 2:1 phone screen.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:06
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Bozo is still known enough to have been a reference on I Think You Should Leave. Bozo did the dub.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:13
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Data Graham posted:Kramer Before Kramer. actually...not. Seinfeld season one premiered July 5th 1989, 16 days before UHF. Richards was around for a while before that, he was on fridays in 1980 and did a lot of physical comedy. He was basically being typecast. quote:Wikipedia is wildly overstating the popularity of loving Bozo the Clown I think there was a bozo the clown show in Chicago in the 90s which is a massive, massive media market iirc that was widely syndicated throughout the country. I was aware of Bozo when I was a kid, there was a rumor going around our school in the 2nd grade that some kid had the real bozo the clown coming to his birthday party and everyone was freaking out about it despite nobody really knowing anything about bozo the clown other than he was a famous clown Like with most of this stuff, our parents were well ware of Bozo the clown and it rubbed off on us to a lesser extent. My dad would point out clowns and refer to them as Bozo the Clown when I was a kid even though he was just being silly And to keep bringing it back to UHF, since I was a huge weird al fan, there was a Bobo the clown bit on uncle nutzy's funhouse which was what made me aware of low-rent local TV clown shows. Seriously watch uhf if you've never seen it. Cosmik Debris fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 04:14
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I recall in my area growing up we had WGN Bozo during the week, and on weekends we had a very low-end and almost depressing non-WGN Bozo. The latter was popular or cheap enough to air for years on the weekends in a syndicated spot, from what I recall. But into that, through the 90s and maybe into the early 00s we still had the regional afterschool/before school kids programming blocks with high-energy hosts to promote things. Outside of that robot from Toonami, did anyone else on the cable front continue that trend past the early 2000s?
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Aug 7, 2023 04:22
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JediTalentAgent posted:But into that, through the 90s and maybe into the early 00s we still had the regional afterschool/before school kids programming blocks with high-energy hosts to promote things. Outside of that robot from Toonami, did anyone else on the cable front continue that trend past the early 2000s? Nah I think it eventually got cheap enough to just make animated bumpers, rather than paying a host, like for the fox kids club or whatever that aired at 2. I'd get home from kindergarten and watch dark wing duck and animaniacs and tiny toons on fox but they didn't have a host. Just wacky bumpers.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:27
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In the Seattle area there was JP Patchesquote:The J. P. Patches Show was on TV for 23 years. For the first thirteen years, it was on twice a day, mornings and afternoons, six days a week (including Saturdays, where it aired only in the morning)) from Monday, February 10, 1958, through Saturday, December 26, 1970. For the next eight years, the show only aired mornings, six days a week, Monday, December 28, 1970, through Saturday, December 30, 1978. For the final two years, the show ran exclusively on Saturday mornings, Saturday, January 6, 1979, through Saturday, September 19, 1981. There was one final week of episodes, mostly retrospectives and farewells, from Monday, September 21 through Friday, September 25, 1981. The J.P. Patches Show ended up broadcasting around 12,000 episodes. I kinda remember that being a big deal among the seattle generation that grew up with it but it’s faded. That sheer clown output seems Krustyesque.
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Aug 7, 2023 06:13
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Howdy Doody. That's a character that I'm sure people will say exists still as a recognizable 'thing' but I think most people who know him only do so through Woody from Toy Story or Gabbo from Simpsons. I might have posted this in another thread, but this is some nightmare fuel from the final episode of Howdy Doody. https://youtu.be/PDJ-z9pjGCE?t=74
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Aug 7, 2023 06:23
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I'm pretty sure the idea of the Krusty show is based on Rusty Nails, a Portland area tv clown that would have been airing during Matt Groening's childhood
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Aug 7, 2023 06:36
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I'm vaguely aware of a TV show host from the 80s or early 90s licensed from and vaguely resembling King Koopa from the Mario games who had a banger theme song and looked like a pimp.
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Aug 7, 2023 06:43
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I'm vaguely aware of a TV show host from the 80s or early 90s licensed from and vaguely resembling King Koopa from the Mario games who had a banger theme song and looked like a pimp. https://youtu.be/OtQ9BafnBik The story behind that show is pretty wild.
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Aug 7, 2023 07:10
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ishikabibble posted:Wikipedia is wildly overstating the popularity of loving Bozo the Clown I mean, that's just Wikipedia I guess. I'm going by my actual memory and experience. I don't think it matters much if it was Saturday versus Sunday morning. It was on with enough frequency that many kids at the school I attended in Florida in the 90s all knew what it was. Yeah, there was likely a different specific clown show that Groening was inspired by from his childhood, but the concept wasn't this weird anachronistic idea that 90s kids couldn't get their heads around.
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Aug 7, 2023 09:46
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I always assumed Krusty was a riff on Bozo the Clown.
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Aug 7, 2023 09:49
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As an Australian child I thought Krusty was a clown cause clowns are funny
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Aug 7, 2023 10:37
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I watched Bozo as a kid in the early 90s. Tommy from Rugrats references him as an example of a great person with red hair. I think he was still fairly well known.
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Aug 7, 2023 11:26
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I think the general point is that TV clowns were still very much a thing people in the 90s were aware of. Which specific clowns people knew is kinda beside the point. Most kids "got" the idea behind the Krusty the Clown show.
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Aug 7, 2023 13:06
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SweetMercifulCrap! posted:Bozo is still known enough to have been a reference on I Think You Should Leave. Yeah, and as a British kid who never had a clown show, it wasn't hard to go "oh, okay, Bart is into this Clown Guy" when I was 7 and the show was first airing or whatever. Obviously, a lot of the more specific references came later, but that's true of a lot of The Simpsons. Here's a dark admission: one of my favourite Simpsons lines is a Gil line. I don't remember the episode, just that he sold a car and exclaimed "Oh boy, Gils eating FOOD tonight" in the way most people would exclaim steak or whatever.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:15
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Disco Pope posted:Yeah, and as a British kid who never had a clown show, it wasn't hard to go "oh, okay, Bart is into this Clown Guy" when I was 7 and the show was first airing or whatever. Obviously, a lot of the more specific references came later, but that's true of a lot of The Simpsons. And correct me if I am wrong, Gil was a "Glengarry Glen Ross" reference.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:25
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It's always very funny that certain Simpsons characters have become more famous than their once-obvious inspirations. Krusty is maybe one of the few examples where his genesis is relatively obscure. Aside from him you've got Gil, Bumblebee Man, the Boy Scout Troop Leader (Paul Lynde), the "YEEeeeeeeEEEEEES? guy" (Frank Nelson), etc who are all based on figures that are at least recognizable to people of a certain age or demographic.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:31
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Krusty Burger is also a thing on the show. 90s kids who didn’t know who Bozo was certainly were familiar with Ronald McDonald.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:33
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Poochy was a Cousin Oliver reference.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:34
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While some of the archetypes and characters are dated, its strange how some still play really well on rewatch. Comicbook Guy still exists. Every school has a Martin.
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Aug 7, 2023 15:41
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redshirt posted:And correct me if I am wrong, Gil was a "Glengarry Glen Ross" reference. Yeah, he's Jack Lemmon's desperate salesman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROYuupoGarQ
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Aug 7, 2023 15:44
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The ones who are characters first and references second still hold up, like gil. The ones who are just references and don't have anything else to them, like the yeeeeees guy, as one offs are fine, but as recurring characters strike me as familyguy-esque
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Aug 7, 2023 15:52
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Cosmik Debris posted:The ones who are characters first and references second still hold up, like gil. I dunno who the yeeeeeeees guy references to begin with, but there's plenty of meat on the bone with that Jack Lemmon character.
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Aug 7, 2023 16:02
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There were a number of local TV presenters for showing theatrical cartoon shorts. Even with shorts that were being made for TV, the shorts would often get cut up for fitting into a different programming block. It can be hard finding information on all of them because they were the definition of disposable media. There were also a number of children's shows that had performers in front of live audiences of children. Not that many with clowns, but there definitely has been an idea out there for a long time of clowns as children's entertainers. I think there's some very weird dynamics as to what things get culturally deemed as being for children. Clowns in general have a lot of archaic roots from times gone by.
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Aug 7, 2023 16:46
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Tolkien's theory for what becomes thought of as "for children" was whatever is old and out-of-fashion, like Victorian furniture, which all gets stuffed into the spare room and forgotten, until you suddenly have to repurpose that room into a baby nursery. Then the baby has all these old-timey things from a bygone era, like clowns and fairies, to grow up with, and you forget that it was you who put that stuff there to begin with and not the kid's own choice Thinking about like, Bugs Bunny theatrical shorts and wartime cartoons, leading to the adult audience phasing out of it and all animation being assumed to be kid stuff Data Graham fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 17:00
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redshirt posted:And correct me if I am wrong, Gil was a "Glengarry Glen Ross" reference. My English teacher told me Gil was based on Willy Loman. I’ve been living under that illusion until today.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:04
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Bugs Bunny was a reference to a famous movie scene of Clark gable eating a carrot and saying what's up doc? Now that's a reference to bugs Bunny himself.
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Aug 7, 2023 17:08
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Ah like the big chungus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srTqxL_6Ysg
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Aug 7, 2023 17:11
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Halisnacks posted:My English teacher told me Gil was based on Willy Loman. I’ve been living under that illusion until today. Could be both!
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Aug 7, 2023 17:13
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Cartoons were always referencing older media that gets lost to time as the cartoons age. Like I remember a few Tom and Jerry cartoons would end with Tom getting hosed up and facing the camera to say in a weird booming reverberated voice, “DON’T. YOU. BELIEVE IT.” before the fade to black. I had absolutely no idea what it was referencing as a kid. It wasn’t until the Internet age that I found out Don’t You Believe It! was a radio program in the ‘30s and ‘40s that used that same booming voice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9U_C_q6WcU
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Aug 7, 2023 17:32
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I got a whole load of secondhand knowledge of golden age Hollywood stars from watching old Merrie Melodies. Knowing exactly what Peter Lorre was like without knowing he was a real person
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Aug 7, 2023 17:44
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And then catching Casablanca on a late night classics marathon and instantly recognizing him just based on the caricatures
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Aug 7, 2023 17:46
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In farm frolics they showed a horse, and said, ok horse, trot for us. And the horse started trotting. Then it would say ok, let's see your gallop, and it started galloping. Then the narrator said, now cantor, and it jumped up and started doing this song and dance routine that meant nothing to me. Then years later I learned about Eddie cantor and immediately thought of that scene. They did another one of those pun based cartoons and showed an ice plant which was a plant made of ice. I happened to have grandparents in a small town and behind their house was the ruins of the old ice plant where they made the ice for your ice box. I had to explain that to someone and they had no idea that ice boxes used to be a thing they just assumed people couldn't store food before refrigerators, and I was like bro the Romans made ice... Also the word gangbusters has entered the common lexicon and most people don't even know it's from the phrase, "coming on like gangbusters" to mean something loud and cacophonous, which came from the 1940s radio program gangbusters which started off with no warning this crazy loud sirens and gunfire and noise and stuff and was very startling Cosmik Debris fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Aug 7, 2023 |
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Aug 7, 2023 17:55
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