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It definitely hit for me 30 years ago in upstate New York. That's how people were back then.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:27
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Tree Bucket posted:I'm sorry, are you saying he's a liar? no, i said he got fired.
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Jan 8, 2024 15:42
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Phlegmish posted:Oh yeah, that's another good example. That said, I am self-aware enough to realize that classic Simpsons was supposed to be a parody of a bygone, idealized America, and not necessarily a 1:1 representation of reality. I assume that even in the US most people don't regularly attend church services, especially nowadays. If you told me the majority of Americans attended church regularly back when that episode was created I would have believed you. It's fallen off a lot since. My family was never religious at all, but there were always some kids in my friend group who would become visibly uncomfortable if someone used "Jesus" as an expletive, or asked you to go to church with them next Sunday, so I guess I could see where the episode was coming from.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:22
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fwiw I used to use "Jesus Christ" as an expletive online around ~2000 a lot, and when someone said "hey stop doing that" it was a girl from the Netherlands
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Jan 8, 2024 16:24
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Does anybody remember that episode where they go to a dude ranch and Lisa now hates the enslavement of horses and tries to murder the sister of the boy she likes? I think there was something about beavers in the side plot. That was well past the good seasons and doesn't come up a lot but it was the episode where I realized there was nothing for me in The Simpsons any longer and dropped it without looking back.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:48
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Phlegmish posted:Oh yeah, that's another good example. That said, I am self-aware enough to realize that classic Simpsons was supposed to be a parody of a bygone, idealized America, and not necessarily a 1:1 representation of reality. I assume that even in the US most people don't regularly attend church services, especially nowadays. The Simpsons struck me as the sort of mainline Protestants who probably skipped around from denomination to denomination before settling into whatever Lovejoy’s preaching out of ennui or Marge liking it well enough. My dad was raised Lutheran and my mother’s parents were frothing hellfire southern Baptists, and I got dragged to a lot of different churches before they kinda stopped bothering to go at all. I wouldn’t claim my experience is broadly representative, but I sort of implicitly got where the show was coming from, and that it was essentially thumbing its nose at the institution as an obligation.
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Jan 8, 2024 16:54
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the modernist church building is an extremely nice touch big 1959 energy
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Jan 8, 2024 17:07
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but the denomination is FIRST CHURCH OF SPRINGFIELD
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Jan 8, 2024 17:08
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Lovejoy is usually the only church in town that everybody goes to regardless of their background. There's some kind of higher structure that Lovejoy answers to, I think Bing Crosby came by to audit him once.FireWorksWell posted:I don't think aging them up would change anything that's wrong with the show now I think the writers are generally sick of writing the children as children, or at the very least they can't really bring themselves to treat the kids as such anymore. Bart seems to be more of a teenager where he is constantly expected to have put some kind of thought into his future (which everybody knows is going to be a dead end) and he's on the cusp of being interested in girls. Lisa acts not just like an adult, but she's gone through a couple of midlife crises and had her biological clock ticking. Which I think a lot of the time that started out as mostly jokes. A lot of jokes about the kids acting like they're a lot older than they are. That makes sense as a joke, and it's a common joke to do. But like they kept doing the same jokes repeatedly and it kinda just became the the new baseline. It's a lot more obvious with Lisa because she is usually portrayed as the voice of reason (IE the voice of the writers) in a way that doesn't fit at all with being a small child.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:33
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^ none of that matters though because the writers now and for the last two decades are almost completely incapable of writing things that are funny. Or, more accurately, nobody involved in the production cares and everyone is just churning out whatever for paychecks. So they age the characters up... then what? Same lovely, cringey, over-explaining-every-joke humor. Re: church talk - I grew up in a midwest suburb town and I would say that the way the Simpsons depicted the overall consensus of going to church aligned with my experience. It felt like more people than not went to church on Sundays or at least felt guilty that they didn't because they were aware it was a thing they should do. By the end of the 90's, that sentiment was largely gone already. It's just one of the many ways the good seasons are a neat little time capsule of the era in the US.
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Jan 8, 2024 18:56
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Shaman Tank Spec posted:PatP also has Billy and the Cloneasaurus, which is also an all-timer. Mate, it's in the bloody linke you posted. 
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Jan 8, 2024 22:40
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I needed those... I really did
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Jan 8, 2024 22:41
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The proof that the show wouldn't change in any good way is in the future episodes
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Jan 8, 2024 23:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:Lovejoy is usually the only church in town that everybody goes to regardless of their background. There's some kind of higher structure that Lovejoy answers to, I think Bing Crosby came by to audit him once. Those are good points I think the writers have mentioned it was a mistake not to have young adults in the core cast as it limited stories or made them use the wrong characters for plots, so that was part of the reason Fry was in his 20s. One of my favorite “everyone goes to church” moment was the montage of Burns laughing at the Irishman & he’s shown cackling while kneeling at a church that isn’t Lovejoy’s.
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Jan 8, 2024 23:47
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Lovejoy's church was initially a deliberate mishmash of various vaguely Christian elements, with him being called Reverend but wearing a Catholic style collar and all, it was later on they established it was specifically a fictional Protestant sect. Might have also been to avoid offending any particular sect by deliberately mixing it up. It was only later on they started bringing attention to specific elements and bringing up the Protestant-Catholic divide. And one episode had a scene where nearly all the black characters attend a Baptist revival service, because of course they loving did. (Funny thing is that Marge being raised Protestant seems to imply the Bouviers were a Huguenot family) One of things things where the Simpsons is indeed a bit of a time capsule, as over the 90s and 00s Christianity really had its last gasps as a dominant cultural force, with the family attending Sunday services going from being entirely normal to something unusual for a not particularly devout or conservative suburban family. (See also Homer the Heretic; non-traditional religion is considered unacceptably weird and anti-social even compared to a mainstream established faith) I think you can also track this with the og Flanderisation; Flanders had always been deeply religious, just the cultural signifiers around that changed so rapidly that he went from being a genuinely kind to a fault pushover to a creepy intolerant fanatic, because that's what everyone now associates the deeply religious with.
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Jan 9, 2024 07:10
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I hate the zealot Flanders spin. It ruins the entire drat joke and now Homer's the straight man because of course you hate the nosy, judgemental bigot. I've never seen a funny joke come out of Flanders being a Stephen King Christian Lady. Cynical and hypocritical Lovejoy was the perfect vehicle for that already.
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Jan 9, 2024 07:48
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The whole dynamic is a funny one given all those Simpsons-Dragon Ball memes, where Homer works perfectly as Goku a lot of the time, except when anything with Vegeta comes up, and then Homer works even better as Vegeta while Flanders is Goku.
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Jan 9, 2024 07:55
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Ghost Leviathan posted:all those Simpsons-Dragon Ball memes I am now learning a thing.
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Jan 9, 2024 08:08
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edogawa rando posted:Mate, it's in the bloody linke you posted. Who the hell looks at youtube descriptions? I'm too busy being a maverick! But yeah now it makes more sense -- it really was too good a bit for PatP.
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Jan 9, 2024 08:41
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I remember there was an episode where Lovejoy says the denimination of the church but yeah it was some mishmash combo of various church denominations. Obviously said as a joke on how vague it all is.
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Jan 9, 2024 09:02
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Zeniel posted:I remember there was an episode where Lovejoy says the denimination of the church but yeah it was some mishmash combo of various church denominations. Obviously said as a joke on how vague it all is. He also says that they originally split from the Catholic Church over the right to attend church while wearing wet hair. And then adds that the church has since rescinded that right.
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Jan 9, 2024 09:07
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RE: the lollapalooza episode this is a bit of a strange one. it has the same problem as lisa the vegetarian, where there's a bunch of great moments.. great username posted:No way, boo to this opinion. Lots of classic lines ..like this. also, the strobe light scene is like a top 5 visual gag of all time but despite these and many other great moments, i never actually liked the episode itself. maybe it's cause i've always disliked anything related to woodstock. or maybe it's cause i never listened to the smashing pumpkins so i couldn't relate. so admittedly my distaste for this episode probably has more to do with vibes than anything substantive really. vegetables posted:Nobody ever talks about that Season 6 episode where Marge is a cop, and sometimes I have to double check it really happened hmm? what's wrong with that episode? Tree Goat posted:sounds like somebody needs to watch S28E19 “The Caper Chase” where Mr Burns, the POV character who we all are meant to empathize with, goes to Yale and is disgusted to learn that the students there are all “entitled wusses” and later Homer destroys a bunch of woke robots through the power of micro aggressions a clip from that cursed episode appeared endlessly on my youtube recs for months during the 2016 election. it was one of the most popular simpsons clips of all time, and i shudder to see how many more millions it's gotten since  Cosmik Debris posted:
yes! this is a very underrated aspect that made the best episodes of the simpsons as funny as they were. frank grimes' line about living between two bowling alleys for example Mr Interweb fucked around with this message at 09:58 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 09:26
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I think the church is supposed to be Reform Presbylutharan. Which is a mashup of Presbyterian and Lutheran. Basically archetypically protestant. I'm surprised they didn't work in Anglicanism, Calvinism, and Southern Baptist beliefs as well.
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Jan 9, 2024 09:39
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I guess this all means Ned Flanders is not actually a good example of Flanderisation because it’s not exactly the case that a single aspect of him is exaggerated over time? It’s more that his character has to fundamentally change to make sense, which is not the same thing
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Jan 9, 2024 13:27
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FreudianSlippers posted:I think the church is supposed to be Reform Presbylutharan. Which is a mashup of Presbyterian and Lutheran. Basically archetypically protestant. I'm surprised they didn't work in Anglicanism, Calvinism, and Southern Baptist beliefs as well. Presbyterianism is a Calvinist denomination  There are so many Protestant churches, especially in the US, that a Presbylutheran one probably actually exists somewhere.
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Jan 9, 2024 13:34
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I liked back in the day when the different christian schisms would argue about which testaments were actually cannon or not. That was fun. drat Synod of Hippo has a lot to answer for!
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Jan 9, 2024 13:46
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Das Boo posted:I hate the zealot Flanders spin. It ruins the entire drat joke and now Homer's the straight man because of course you hate the nosy, judgemental bigot. Oh yeah it’s fine to have it as part of the family as it gets us the Flanders kids walking into walls God will remove later, but he’s a better character when allowed to have other interests. The Leftorium wasn’t even religious.
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Jan 9, 2024 14:41
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_aYPBDXpxA&t=95s
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Jan 9, 2024 15:05
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Phlegmish posted:Presbyterianism is a Calvinist denomination So many of our town's churches closed that they merged into a MethoPresbyCalian one.
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Jan 9, 2024 15:07
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I still remember years ago on the forums how we'd argue that the older episodes weren't actually BETTER, it's just rose tinted glasses. Now they're so easy to obtain it's a fuckload more obvious that nope, they're definitely better. I think my cutoff for when I knew it was getting lovely as a kid was the 200th episode. It just felt so fuckin' different. Like the thread has said there's other bad episodes before it but that's when I realised it wasn't the same show any more. God, so many episode beginnings that just go nowhere as well
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Jan 9, 2024 15:59
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Ghost Leviathan posted:He also says that they originally split from the Catholic Church over the right to attend church while wearing wet hair. And then adds that the church has since rescinded that right. Have you actually read this thing? Technically, we're not allowed to go to the bathroom. - Lovejoy
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Jan 9, 2024 16:05
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I knew it in my heart for years, but my ultimate breaking point was apparently season 17 (!!). I distinctly remember watching an ep with Ricky Gervais (who I was not familiar with at the time and only just realized it was him in the role recently) doing a wife swap with Homer and Marge, and being baffled by the end that I couldn't find a single scene that was meant to be funny. TheRealJims did a retrospective on season 16, and at the end of the vid he started talking about why he was dreading season 17, and all of the stuff he listed were The specific examples of why I remember hating the show (this is the season with "vendetta" for instance).
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Jan 9, 2024 16:13
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idk if it's because I hate the new writing and think the show is bad, but the way cartoons are animated now just looks so lovely. Everything having exactly the same resolution and clarity regardless of its prominence in the scene. Classic simpsons has the best animation. Season 1 animation is awful, season 2 is getting there, season 3 is when the look really starts to get established and 4 is when it's locked in. Then, presumably when they switched to computer animation around season 12 or 13 it just starts to look so bad. I think there's multiple reasons classic simpsons is classic. It's like every element came together for 8 seasons. The animation, the writing, joke pacing and delivery, the voice acting, everything. then it all slowly falls apart.
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Jan 9, 2024 16:30
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It also became Fox’s Big Thing, and risk averseness and shepherding the golden goose took over… but it’s also been running for a third of a century. As others have said with The Simpsons’ treatment of religion, culture has changed out from under the show and the writers won’t do the hard work of actually redefining and aging the characters, so it’s an aimless, undying shell of itself lashing out at whatever the writers decide might have some comedy to be extracted. It’s lazy and reactive, and my twelve year old and I were talking about it when she mentioned that the show’s unfocused, cantankerous, and mean without actually being sharp.
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Jan 9, 2024 16:50
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Cosmik Debris posted:Classic simpsons has the best animation. Season 1 animation is awful, Season 1 animation is rough no doubt, but there's still lots of interesting and very well done shots and compositions and colour use in there. Far prefer that than the sterile animation of the new seasons.
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Jan 9, 2024 17:31
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Simpsons peaked as a short sketch on the Tracey Ullman Show. Fun fact: The first time I saw the Simpsons was at a movie theater, going to see "The War of the Roses". It was short sketch they played before the movie, featuring Bart at the psychiatrist with family, and he's eating all the candy and loving it. I laughed hard. War of the Roses? Not as funny.
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Jan 9, 2024 17:34
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gen Z: yeah sometimes I watch that fox cartoon that's been running since television started, it's ok me: that means you haven't known the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of the simpsons
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Jan 9, 2024 17:34
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dr_rat posted:Season 1 animation is rough no doubt, but there's still lots of interesting and very well done shots and compositions and colour use in there. Whereas if Bart met Laura Powers in a current season you know his dancing would just be a completely sterile and 100% on model Beauty and the Beast dance scene parody
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Jan 9, 2024 17:39
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Bart's math train nightmare with Martin was hella cool and I thought "wow this new show has got it going on" e: in 1989 the best TV animation any of us had seen was like, Christmas specials from the 70s. Well, and the Disney Afternoon Data Graham fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Jan 9, 2024 |
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Jan 9, 2024 18:09
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I dislike how modern Simpsons animation has to have or cast shadows on everything. Shadows that make no sense given the light sources, but everything’s gotta have shadows and shading, nonetheless. And yes, even the shadows/shading are sterile and on-point at all times.
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