|
This is the worst bit of The Simpsons to me, and how bad it is goes deep. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QEHvs7BLDg First off, a bunch of ivy league jokes that only the writers get because they're all out of touch ivy leaguers. Then it turns out that the scene is all trying to make fun of college SJWs and how they're all trying to cancel culture because they're too sensitive about things like halloween costumes. Not a funny joke, and a pretty gross thing to be making a big point about. And then there's the fact that Mr.Burns is the protagonist of the scene, as the one sane man against the absurd SJW madness, which is part of how the series is kind of decaying and can't really use Mr.Burns as a villain anymore because it's too sentimental about him as a longterm character. And then there's the fact that it's a real thing that there's a lot of public bias against the idea of nuclear power despite the fact that it's environmentally friendly from its lack of emissions and relative efficiency. Part of that is a few big scares historically, but another part of that is just pop culture portrayal of nuclear power as a scary, threatening thing. The Simpsons is probably the biggest, most famous pop culture portrayal of nuclear power as a scary, unsafe, threatening thing. Which at the time was just one of many wacky silly choices out of nowhere. A wealthy industrialist whose apparent only revenue is from running an electrical utility is weird, but it doesn't matter, you don't need to research or think about the cultural impact when making a primetime sitcom in the 90s. But now that The Simpsons is one of the longest running shows on TV with a worldwide reach, it has to reckon with having this cultural importance that it doesn't know what to do with. It has long outlived all of the things that it was originally a playful satire of. But if they wanted to address people's misapprehensions over nuclear power, they could build an episode around that instead of making an episode about how unreasonable these college students are for getting upset over blackface halloween costumes.
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2023 23:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 17:02 |
|
|
I guess with the nature of Simpsons where the writers grew up on the show, they thought Bart was the cool kid, the obvious subversion to that is to show how most of the things that makes Bart cool as a kid will go against him later in life (assuming that he picks up literally nothing later in life, which I guess he needs to remain about the same in order to stay recognizably Bart), as opposed to how Lisa is often the vessel for their personal self-fulfillment, either benefiting from being a lonely nerd later in life or just directly living out the dreams of a middle-aged adult despite being 8. There's been so many episodes of Bart being a little poo poo that it gets harder and harder to take his penance seriously in the sad Bart episodes. Maybe he only means to mildly torment people instead of doing harm, but he is dumb as hell and regularly doesn't care to think out consequences, so it's never really a surprise when he does do harm.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2023 18:55
|
|
|
No squash, nor stretch for all that movement. Homer's fat is absolutely rigid.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2023 17:08
|
|
|
emgeejay posted:it genuinely is more high-effort animation than you’d see on the show five years ago. the problem is that it still looks like poo poo Yeah, it definitely takes a lot of effort to do, but it's not really expressive at all. I kinda wonder if it's specifically referencing a tap routine from some old movie, maybe even tracing over one, but that'd also be a Family Guy gag. Seems like it might miss the appeal of tapdancing, but I don't know much about that.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2023 06:13
|
|
|
Writing for a show takes up a larger percentage of their time, and if the writers want to step up in their career, they can't stay around writing for the Simpsons, while being a VA just means showing up a few days in a booth, and the Simpsons VAs have been able to keep doing plenty of other work in their careers as much as they like while still showing up to get a paycheck from the big famous show they have a big part in. Some people with successful careers independent of their VA work on the Simpsons just have recurring roles because it's not much of a hassle for them. Once you're past the main cast members, it's even less demanding to just agree to keep showing up. But also there was one VA who did leave the show for a little while over a pay dispute, and that's why they killed off Maude Flanders
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2023 17:29
|
|
|
Mr Interweb posted:wow, that's tremendously petty To be fair, that was probably most of it on the showrunner side. It would've been possible to recast Maude like they did with the VA's other characters, and it would've been possible to have Maude just not talk, but the fact that the VA left and they'd have to otherwise downplay the character made it an easier decision. All the sources I've seen describe the pay dispute as being "with Fox" as opposed to the showrunners, and that's just the way the biz is sometimes.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2023 14:56
|
|
|
Speaking of resolving pay disputes... Later Futurama is both cringey about future jokes where they try to make fun of/celebrate modern technology that the aging writers don't really understand, and when it tried to have heart, it was stuck in a weird rut where most of the characters couldn't get much more development and the writers kept trying to keep a treadmill going of Fry and Lila being about to get into a relationship, but never actually doing it.
|
|
#
¿
May 19, 2023 15:46
|
|
|
I think the worst thing Bender's done (both least funny and needlessly cruel) is the episode where he made up the holiday Robonukkah and he needed to get petroleum oil for his robo-floozies to wrestle in, so he went drilling, but when there was a cave-in that trapped him and the rest of the cast, he ended up waiting until the human cast decomposed and turned into oil to be his Robonukkah miracle. I heard once that when Futurama started, it ended up drawing a bunch of the "smart guy" writers away from other comedy projects, but I don't really know any other details about that.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2023 00:44
|
|
|
Is this episode the most Dr. Hibbert's wife has ever spoken?
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2023 03:21
|
|
|
I think 4 of the characters are Homer. I've always felt like it's part of a show's weakness when it hits a point where it just stops expanding its world, and The Simpsons has gone for a long while where it hasn't been adding regular characters and there's just so many one-offs that disappear forevermore after their one thing. That's why they've had to mine out new depths to formerly one-dimensional gag characters and get creative about pairing supporting characters off in new combinations. And it's just going to get worse as the amount of available established characters decreases.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2023 04:22
|
|
|
Halisnacks posted:I really haven’t watched much new Simpsons at all (maybe a couple of dozen episodes from the last 20 years?), but when they try to expand the character universe more durably now it seems like it doesn’t work in the same way as it did during the golden era seasons. I saw an episode with an apparently semi-recurring love interest of Moe’s, but since it wasn’t her first appearance, it actually felt like I was missing context. I think that's more from the fact that both episodes with her, she's part of the main plot, instead of the trajectory of most of the characters showing up a few times in gags or as supporting characters before getting put in the focus.
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2023 16:56
|
|
|
The newer episodes would have to be remembered for the guest stars to be remembered as the thing that made it worse. I get the sense that the Simpsons probably has a pretty big budget to play around with when paying celebrity guest stars as well. So aside from the people who like the show and the people who think it could be a fame boosting move, it's not a bad job for celebrities who are just regular ol' working actors.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2023 06:41
|
|
|
I feel like for most people, hating things is tiring, and liking things is fun, so if you dedicate a chunk of your life to something you hate, you'll probably mellow on it or find something to like inside all of that. It takes a lot of effort to maintain a passionate hate for long periods of time, often you have to use tricks to keep it up, and people who get really good at hating things often end up as pretty bad people. So it's only natural that the guy who made a podcast about a show that he mostly liked is going to mellow out on what he thought was the worst bits as he stays in close contact with it.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
They stopped making Lego Movies, Pixar stopped making sequels, Johnny Depp and Disney have cut ties, I wish there were people out there trying to bring back Reboot, the last use of the IP was horrible. I guess since Disney is taking another whack at Haunted Mansion, they're still doing theme park ride movies, and I don't really remember anything following in the vein of the Emoji Movie, but it sure seems like a safe bet that somebody will try using that model again. Outpost22 posted:They spelled google wrong, I hope somebody got fired for that blunder Unfortunately, they were specifically hired to spell it that way because the writers are insufferable nerds. Keromaru5 posted:I'll admit it, I might be into a Marvel Letter Column movie. It sure is a look into another world if you find scans of old letter pages. This is the one I will always remember. 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2023 04:00
|
|
|
When Futurama started, Fry was more of the main viewpoint character, and as such he was a relatable everyman, and from that perspective, the audience would be more aware of his inner life and his flaws compared to the other characters. And when the show stumbled from that into something like an ensemble comedy, they leaned way more into the idea that Fry is just really dumb (which conversely meant that the other characters were some kind of smart). Although it's also a classic male gaze situation with relationship between Fry and Leela where the man is supposed to be relatably flawed and dumpy, while the woman is supposed to be attractive and perfect except for the natural inscrutability from being a separate human being with her own inner life.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 11, 2023 00:30
|
|
|
Bart is Gen X.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2023 04:10
|
|
|
I watched all of Monty Python when I was a teenager because al of it was up on Youtube in those days. I enjoyed it, but I could see how a whole lot had depreciated from not just being from a foreign culture, but from being from another era and not being on TV. So much of Flying Circus focused on the idea of being designed to blend in with with other TV, so presumably a lot of viewers would tune in at the middle of an episode and be very confused. So a decent amount is lost from being removed from the contexts and aesthetics of the 70s TV it was basing itself off of, although the absurd bits are more evergreen. The Simpsons is a bit more subtle about how reliant it was on the state of TV in the 90s, but a lot of it hinged on being able to toss out a broad range of references to a number of things that it was confident its audience would be immediately familiar with, and that gave episodes a lot more zest, whereas now when the Simpsons makes references, there's some kind of sense that it feels the need to explain from the ground up what it's referencing like it's the first time its audience has heard of it (which could be just as much from the age of the writers as from the death of the TV monoculture).
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2023 17:06
|
|
|
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.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2023 16:46
|
|
|
You Are A Elf posted: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. Most stuff before the 60s were shorts shown in theaters, often before movies, I'm not really sure of the full business model back in the day. But a lot of theatrical shorts really pander a lot to contemporary movie fans, often just being a series of caricatures of celebrities. I think these generally got selected against when it came to television syndication because there's not very much to them if you don't know what they're referencing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOFG_qmoH8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMWUtw6BR28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDqlUmRnBbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nqWpMreXwc
|
|
#
¿
Aug 7, 2023 20:11
|
|
|
Lisa has been written like she's 30-something for a while now. I think there have been episodes about her having various middle-aged anxieties, like needing to think about settling for a romantic partner instead of keeping playing the field. Which is pretty hosed for an 8-year-old.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2023 04:28
|
|
|
Bart has had a lot of romance episodes and 3 marriages, but also a number of his relationships are underscored by not knowing what romance and sex is so that still relies on him being 10. I do think that even outside of the future episodes, the writers do have an idea that Bart will peak early and live most of his life as a burnout bum. But it's weird when they try to criticize Bart on those ground because he's still just a kid.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2023 22:03
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/Snack_Memories/status/1690882426434641920
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2023 04:29
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1696835591860605263
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2023 18:52
|
|
|
Ror posted:apparently it’s not canon, it’s an episode where the premise is that the show is ‘hacked’ and proceed to play shocking or terrible moments that are made up. but they also play some moments from episodes considered weird or bad like the jockey episode, so who knows what they’re trying to do. The point is that the Simpsons doesn't have many ideas of what to do next for the characters, it's hard to keep things interesting, and it's not even like figuring out a way to produce an actually good episode will necessarily bring viewership back up. What will bring viewers back is news of weird status quo shakeups, whether or not they actually stick, because when people hear the news, they'll pop their head back in to see what's going on.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2023 00:04
|
|
|
Apu was never particularly politically correct, that's a large part of why he was a joke. It wasn't "here's this indian character" it was "man, all convenience store owners are foreigners, amirite". I think Hari Kondabolu's opinions on Apu were more nuanced than just "Apu is an offensive stereotype", and more "it's hosed up that the most prominent Indian guy in American pop culture is a white guy doing an accent". Annabel Pee posted:They seem to have changed Lisa specifically from a liberal to just the voice of reason for whatever the writers are complaining about. A few episodes later they have her complaining about participation trophies. It's the kind of joke that I think comes from the writers getting too old and bitter at whatever the kids these days are doing, and too lazy to express it in an actually clever way. It's not like it'd be unlike classic Simpsons to make fun of Barbie trying to be more representative, adult comedies often try to do scattershot satirization without really thinking through the details, but they wouldn't do it so lazily, or feel the need to make Lisa do it because she's the "smart" character. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Sep 25, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2023 15:39
|
|
|
I caught an episode of the new Futurama, and it was really boring. The whole plot is just the characters sitting around the meeting table talking about the Professor's newest invention. No action or satire, just the writers being insufferable dweebs. Do you think we could tell if our lives were being written by insufferable dweebs? Billy West is sounding old. There's not much distance between Fry and Farnsworth.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2023 02:39
|
|
|
Das Boo posted:Huh, this made me realize a kind of flaw in these character designs: Their neutral facial expressions are wide-eyed and dot-pupiled, so you lose the potential comedy from any surprised expressions. A lot of adult-focused cartoons seem to purposefully turn away from excessively animated and exaggerated expressions, and I think the original Simpsons might've been on the vanguard of that. King of the Hill would later be a more extreme example. I'm not really sure of the whole reasoning, maybe it's supposed to highlight the writing more than the physical action, maybe it's supposed to create more of a realistic appearance (especially with violence, the less exaggerated you make it, the more real it can feel), maybe it's to perfect the look of somebody with no thoughts in their brain, maybe it was just to differentiate from children's cartoons at the time when there was an explosion of excessively expressive animation as a revival of classic Looney Tunes style, maybe there's an idea that adults will read more emotion into blank faces.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2023 17:33
|
|
|
Hedgehog Pie posted:Loss is literally the only thing I know about that comic. Well that ain't right. Enrich yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e60JlM6ZXHc
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2023 05:43
|
|
|
When Apu started out, the show was very much not trying to not offend, although an indian convenience store cashier was too old hack to even be funny from a transgressive angle. As time went on, and the curtains closed on the ability of the show to expand Springfield or introduce any new characters, Apu became an important regular character and a valued device for whenever the show wanted a store owner (to the point that everybody gets their groceries at the gas station). And I don't think the show ever really tried to tone down Apu's stereotypes or potential offensiveness (a couple later additions probably make things worse), but I think the writers were so used to Apu being a thing that they forgot that he was entirely built on an offensive joke, so they got blindsighted when complaints got high-profile.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2023 06:07
|
|
|
I'm generally a sucker for snappy songs, but I think the Simpsons probably has more flops for songs than hits. They're definitely not all the Planet of the Apes musical. Most of their songs exist for the jokes first rather than having like individual musical quality. Like The Spring in Springfield is a joke about musical numbers in general, but the actual song is kinda bleh. I don't think anybody is left humming Yvan Eht Nioj or Everybody Hates Ned Flanders. Even the Monorail song is more of a joke than a song, like it's playing off of the Music Man, and gets the vibe across, but it doesn't get into any of the patter that makes the Music Man work. It's just a couple rhyming couplets and then into chanting. So I think resenting the later songs comes down more to just not liking the jokes involved. Poking through the wiki to find songs to judge isn't very helpful because the lists like including all the real songs that Homer sings along to and the like, which I wouldn't count. Put it in H.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2023 23:43
|
|
|
SweetMercifulCrap! posted:I was convinced that these were the real lyrics for a long time, and had sworn I had heard a real version with this. Not what I remember.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 25, 2023 20:48
|
|
|
I don't think I ever watched the Simpsons "when it was good". I was just a bit slow at browsing television. It's definitely inarguable that Simpsons is the most influential animated TV sitcom, but I feel like I lack the cultural context to fully appreciate it like the people who like it most. Definitely watching TV that's on right now, I'd rather watch American Dad or something more elaborate like Lower Decks. When watching old stuff, I feel like I've seen enough of the Simpsons and would rather watch something else that I could learn more from. Maybe I've also been spoiled by how many Simpsons clips I see on the internet, so I don't really feel like sitting through a whole episode. Old theatrical shorts are pretty good for that, because if you wanna watch any, you might as well watch a whole short, it's only like 7 minutes. In my life personally, I had a time when I watched Family Guy because people at school kept on talking about it, and then looking up the references on Wikipedia. I don't really remember enjoying it much, and now I definitely hate Family Guy and think the world is lesser for it continuing to exist.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2023 23:25
|
|
|
Herb had some kind of confirmation bias after seemingly climbing his way up from nothing, and then his company had to be already teetering on the edge for one bad concept car to sink the whole thing. Then his baby translator seems like probably a scam to me. Wouldn't mind him showing up again, Danny DeVito's great, and the Simpsons could probably use some more side characters to play with.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2023 07:35
|
|
|
I thought Marge's mom barely talks even when she does show up though. I think she's just older than Abe and in much worse shape and less active than either him or Mr. Burns, and also isn't really emotionally close to Marge or the family in the first place anyways. She's a lot like Patty and Selma in her general apathy and antipathy. I think the last time she showed up was the fantasy episode where she just wanted to loving die.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2023 17:32
|
|
|
Every so often I see some video on Youtube about people making mods for the Simspons Hit and Run videogame. I guess the Simpsons is the perfect mix of kids watching it, but it's for adults, and it's still around, so people with old nostalgia for the videogame to return to as adults, but it makes me wonder what it would be like if any of those other many, many tie-in videogames that were made at around the same time still had a fanbase with that sort of dedication.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2023 00:45
|
|
|
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRKOenxiRaY
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2023 03:51
|
|
|
Hedgehog Pie posted:I'm always thrown off by what counts as the midwest. I think it always extends some distance west in my head, definitely as far as Montana and Wyoming at least. The thing is, "midwest" is meant to mean more in the middle. Montana and Wyoming are just plain "west" by my reckoning. The midwest is away from the urban centers of the east coast, past the appalachian mountains that fences in the east and can't be easily built on top of, but not quite the vast expanses of emptiness that defines most of the western Great Plains. The western boundary of the midwest is often up for grabs, but I feel like if you look at population density maps, there's a very sharp dropoff of population west of Minnesota, and I think that should be the dividing line. For a long while there was the steadily advancing frontier, but at some point people could just skip through all that and settle straight on the west coast instead. But it's all flyover country if you're one of those people on the coast who mainly only ever wants to visit the other coast. Those are the major population centers of the country, and they've increasingly dominated pop culture in recent decades, reversing the previous trend from like the 50s to 80s where mass media made a lot of efforts to try appealing to less dense suburbs like what characterizes most of the midwest. I think the Simpsons was originally trying to copy that by being set in a small inland town, but as writers churned and the original media that the Simpsons was satirizing died out, the predominantly coastal (elites even) writers gave up on that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2023 18:35
|
|
|
I guess after poking around looking at the Simpsons driving games, I found The Simpsons Game from 2007 (largely unrelated to the Simpsons movie of 2007). I had no interest in trying to play an old and forgotten tie-in game, but since it was fully voice-acted, and seems to be a more elaborate game than Road Rage or Hit and Run, maybe it's something worth watching the cutscenes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsyt4gr0zGs In summary, doesn't seem very good. Aside from the writing seeming generally weak and not bothering to put any more emotional side to the story to even out the gags, the game seems largely obsessed with making extremely contemporary videogame references. Marge is angry about the violence of the new game Grand Theft Scratchy, an EA executive bribes Mayor Quimby, Dr. Frink marries a Koopa, there's a boss fight against Will Wright, and during one section Bart and Lisa complain at length about the whole system of videogame marketing. The plot is about the Simpsons discovering that they are in a game and have videogame powers, and after some initial troublemaking in Springfield, the Simpsons have to confront first the makers of the game, then Matt Groening, and then god, to convince him to fix everything. God is a gamer though, so the Simpsons have to beat him in Dance Dance Revolution and then threaten to destroy his memory card, which upsets god because he still needs to finish Oblivion and doesn't want to have to start over. I guess it's neat that Marge's gameplay is a lovely version of Pikmin.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2023 07:30
|
|
|
Very much some writer (or maybe a couple of them) is very angry at some friend or relative and wants to go on a very passive aggressive rant that I don't think really fits with Homer's previously defined socioeconomic status. I guess the most un-homer thing is complaining about cucumber in signature cocktails. Riptor posted:why the gently caress were those orange slices drawn with that degree of detail I guess because they were worried people wouldn't interpret them as orange slices.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 17:02 |
|
|
dads_work_files posted:Who's the newest recurring character in the Simpsons? Apu's children? I haven't watched it in forever so maybe they're still adding new guys? I think Comicbook Guy's wife, from 2014. Which I guess it was kinda bold to throw in a big status quo change new character after not adding anybody for a very long time, but then they didn't really do much with her. Before that, I guess Shauna Chalmers, who the writers actually have fun with, and they slowly upgraded her from having a bunch of incidental bits to being the daughter of superintendent Chalmers so that they could do stories with them as more primary characters.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 24, 2023 05:28
|
|