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Season 8 is when you can see them start to get more experimental with the episodes, they just all happen to still be good (You Only Move Twice, Viaje Misterioso, and my all time favorite episode Homer's Enemy). Season 9 they finally have a couple of whiffs (most notably Principal and the Pauper), but it's still mostly good. Season 10 is when the hit/miss ratio starts to get really out of control. To answer the thread question, I'd have to go with the "feuds" with Family Guy/South Park. That should be so beneath an iconic series, even as a marketing ploy. The Futurama one I can excuse even if it was bad, because at least it was the spiritual successor to The Simpsons with the same creator and several writers. Groening's at least allowed that as an artist. Also, can someone who stuck around past Season 11 confirm or deny that Lenny and Carl became gay lovers? I feel like that was the plot of an episode I happened to drop in on, but maybe I imagined it?
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Feb 6, 2017 12:00
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I watched a couple episodes from 11 and 12 recently, and one thing that struck me was how the writers shat on their own writing. In "Bart to the Future," they make a joke about putting a B-plot in because the A-plot was too thin. In "Trilogy of Error," the episode ends with monkey yelling (subtitled) "This episode makes no sense!" Frank Grimes acknowledged a lot of the logical inconsistency in The Simpsons universe, but incorporated into the characters. A classic line like "Don't ask me how the economy works" is totally within Homer's character while accomplishing the meta-joke about creative liberties taken with the family's financial situation from episode to episode without breaking the fourth wall.
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Feb 7, 2017 01:18
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What was that episode in 2005 that got over 20m viewers? Seems like there's one big outlier every year (possibly the Treehouse of Horror/season opener), but the gap that year is ridiculous. Blind Pineapple fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Feb 7, 2017 |
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Feb 7, 2017 10:09
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Another point I'd make against Principal and the Pauper is that Itchy, Scratchy, and Poochie had already made all the same points, but did in within the context of the show. It was also just funnier all around despite the super cringe-y scene where they use Bart as a proxy for their "not like you nerds could do any better" rant even though it makes no sense for Bart's character to hold such a position. The iconic scenes with the kids focus group and "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet" more than make up for that. To be clear, this is not to say "Principal and the Pauper" was the low point. I just see it as one of the first cracks in the dam.
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Feb 7, 2017 23:54
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Scudworth posted:I forgot that Splitsider made a list of things that happened in newer Simpsons eps for people who stopped watching it (from 2013): Good lord, all this "Principal and the Pauper" chat, and it turns out they went back to that well repeatedly.
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Feb 9, 2017 11:58
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get that OUT of my face posted:"the principal and the pauper" gets all the ire among fans because it was the first episode of season 9 that felt off. the Lord of the Flies episode was worse, and if any number of those not-as-good episodes were in the place of that one, it would be the one fans point to as the downfall At least Das Bus had some classic lines. "They have the internet on computers now," "Go banana," and "tastes like burning" are all top-notch. I don't remember the order they were aired, but I remember Principal and the Pauper and Lisa the Skeptic were the ones that hit me as being noticeably worse than the episodes I would watch in syndication.
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Feb 22, 2017 08:34
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alpaca diseases posted:so does anyone else think homer actually got with mindy, but he was just imagining it's marge to get through guilt etc? that's how, watching it, it initially seemed to me anyway 
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Feb 26, 2017 01:42
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:There are several excellent episodes in the post-cancellation Futurama though. "The Late Phillip J Fry" is easily a top 10 episode for example. Late Phillip J. Fry, Prisoner of Benda, Clockwork Origin, Mobius Dick, and Murder on the Planet express would all be in my top 20. They could've made one really good season after the comeback, but 2 full ones was too much and resulted in a lot of filler (and a handful of truly dreadful episodes). The last season before the first cancellation had some duds too, though, they just tend to be overshadowed by some of the absolute best episodes of the series that were also in that season. Futurama suffered from too many restarts that kept shaking up the natural story arc, not so much a dearth of ideas. The Simpsons (to bring this back on topic) suffers from running way longer than it ever should have and the creative well has dried up. Futurama still showed flashes of the charm and comedic greatness people loved it for all the way to the end. The Simpsons hasn't shown that for the majority of its existence now. I don't think too many people would have a post-S10 episode in their top 10 or 20.
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Feb 26, 2017 23:03
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I need to re-watch Futurama at some point. I still say it's my favorite my animated show, despite its problems. I think the biggest way they missed the mark in second run was not keeping Fry and Leela together consistently. The chase angle was already played out and it could've added a new dimension to the show, and probably provided some good moments in otherwise forgettable episodes. My favorite episodes were the really trippy sci-fi ones, but I didn't mind the standard sitcom elements, as a lot of it had a "the more things change the more they stay the same" kind of subtext about the human experience. Fry was glad to escape his mundane life from 1999, but even traveling intergalactically surrounded by mutants, robots, and aliens he still has to deal with a lot of the same problems and introspect accordingly. As far as it holding up goes, the things I'd worry about are the early 2000s tech jokes (I remember the episode where they went onto the 3D internet in S2 already looked super dated by 2005) and the fact that we have a real-life robot-Nixon in office, which might cause some of those jokes to fall flat. Of course, I suspect the second item is going to taint most American political humor of the last 40 years. death by computer posted:The exact point where I started questioning if bringing Futurama back was necessarily a good thing was the Susan Boyle Boil episode. That was kind of a Principal and the Pauper moment for Futurama, where it was a sharp change in tone from what the series had done previously, and not in a good way. Like I said earlier, though, it bounced back enough that the only way you could continue that analogy is if The Simpsons ended after S9.
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Feb 27, 2017 22:08
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Bust Rodd posted:I'm agape all the Futurama opinions. I've always felt like the 4 original seasons are pretty much perfect, I can't really think of a bad one. The Honking, Bend Her, Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV, and Lobstertainment all come to mind immediately. I think the fact that there's way more good than bad in the original run gets some pretty weak episodes a pass (though I agree overall it's top-notch tv), and the opposite is true for the second run. Great episodes get the stink of the series lows all over them.
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Feb 28, 2017 22:13
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Son of Rodney posted:One thing this thread has taught me is that I'm propably the only person who enjoyed the Futurama movies. All of them. Repeatedly. Bender's Big Score is solid, and I liked the second half of Bender's game with the fantasy parodies. I've seen Wild Green Yonder at least three times, and I can't remember the plot at all. Overall, I'd say they were fine for getting a Futurama fix post-cancellation, but had we known the series would come back, we would've been better off without them.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:35
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Fried Watermelon posted:There are Futurama seasons on Netflix Canada but they are season 7, 8, 9, and 10 and I'm too lazy to go look them up to if they are the end of the show or even if they are the new Comedy Central episodes Comedy Central split up the last 2 26-epidsode seasons into 4 13-episode seasons. Also, for some reason the first run had 5 seasons, but was released later as 4 seasons on DVD.
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Mar 3, 2017 23:55
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Ralph Hurley posted:Frank Grimes had what I thought was a kind of cool, easily missed character quirk where he nervously wiped his sweaty hand on his pants before shaking hands with someone. He did it at least twice in the episode and it was never acknowledged. One of my favorite things about the episode is how the entire B-story of Bart getting a dilapidated building from a city auction sets up a perfect throwaway line when Grimey comes to dinner. There really wasn't anything in Simpsons canon to that point to make anyone jealous of having Bart as a kid, but that side story let Homer throw in that his son "owns a factory downtown" in his haste to make himself look good. It's just one of many things that contributes to Grimey's meltdown, but that scene doesn't work nearly as well if he has to lie about or gloss over Bart. Homer needed to be sincere yet have zero self-awareness to really (unknowingly) twist the knife. I'd like to think that whole Bart story was crafted just for that one joke, even if the truth is more along the lines of "Well I just copied the Bart stories we already have and added this abandoned building to lower wind resistance, and I feel this Milhouse gag is pretty sharp," "Agreed first prize!" Sometimes to make the best episodes, you have to be a little lucky.
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Mar 6, 2017 08:56
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