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I could have sworn for a while Fox was trying Family Guy and Futurama during the regular week, too. I don't know if it was just some sort of contractual obligation to get in as airings or what since at those times neither show was officially cancelled.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:58
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FilthyImp posted:Yeah. Without Bart as a prototype, I'm not sure Cartman gets to exist. Dennis the Menace was the typical 'bad' kid before then, right? Outside of the Simpsons, MTV/Nick had a lot of success with cartoons appealing to teens/adults/pop culture with Ren and Stimpy and Beavis and Butthead without even really trying to go for that level of attention. Simpsons had the backbone of primetime family sitcom satire to it, which likely helped it on broadcast. But without the Simpsons having that 'family sitcom' appeal, we might have seen animators veer away from trying to make stuff for that prime-time market for them and just had cable like USA, Nick, MTV and Comedy Central pick up the slack by going for youth/counter culture audiences. Fox did experiment a few times in the early 90s with the Batman:TAS airing in prime-time hours, while the Burton Batmania was still somewhat alive, too. Again, without the primetime sitcom success of the Simpsons as the thing everything was getting measured against, MAYBE Fox would have stuck with and supported Batman:TAS a bit longer and a bit harder. We might have had the family action/adventure cartoon format become the defining prime-time animation format, instead. Stuff like Gargoyles, Johnny Quest, etc. might have ended up developed less for a Saturday morning/afterschool audience and changed into something for a prime-time. By the time further attempts like Invasion America came out, it might have been accepted as a norm rather than something new. Anime is/was another option. Late 80s it was still largely only a format that had a small cult following in the US, but IF the Batman Era had been a real thing, coupled with the Power Rangers boom, someone like Carl Macek probably could have found a largely PG-13 anime series or two and recut and redubbed it for a US prime time audience. We might have been watching some retitled, redubbed version of Gundam on NBC by 1994 ,a few years before the actual anime boom started in the US.
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Jan 10, 2019 18:46
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By around that same time, TBS/TNT was doing occasional late-night showings of various anime/adult animation productions: Vampire Hunter D, Robot Carnival, Twilight of the Cockroaches, Heavy Metal. If the anime boom in the US was instead started about 3-5 years sooner, with content that could become popular without it being based on video games or fighting anime, as well as content chosen and edited down to appease network censors and audiences, there might have been a different overall tone to the fandom and format in the US over the next 20+ years. Some short series or productions might have gotten a US Broadcaster release as miniseries (as were still popular at the time) with the draw being some fairly popular actors redubbing the voices. It would have also been in the midst of the Disney animation revival with their LIttle Mermaid, BatB, Lion King and Aladdin successes, anyway, most of which had celebrity voices in them.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:07
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It might still sell pretty well in foreign countries, and I'm sure there's just enough merchandising to justify keeping the show on the air a little bit longer. Fox ought to hire Joss Whedon to be showrunner so they have an excuse to cancel it.
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Jan 14, 2019 09:27
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This talk about naming conventions reminds me of when I was watching Red Dwarf and the way characters referred to one another. Dave Lister: Everyone practically refers to him as "Lister" or "Mr. Lister". Holly seemed to call him Dave more frequently, but maybe that's something to do with programming to come off as more friendly. (Come to think of it, I'm not even sure if Cat ever called him by his name at all with any regularity.) Arnold Rimmer: Same issue as with Lister. I sort of recall everyone referring to most characters with just their last names, save the single-name Cat, Kryten, and Holly. For a while I thought I maybe just took that for a British 'workplace professional attitude' sort of thing or 'in the future, society goes with the family name more than the given name.'
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Feb 12, 2022 10:26
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Disco Pope posted:Would it not be a result of the ship having nautical style conventions, so they'd know each other by rank and surname? Lister even referred to his crush (and later crewmate) by her last name. Yeah, this leans into more of what I was thinking on the one point. But even further, some of the various episodes where Lister would interact with people like Olaf Petersen, who in something of an extremely friendly and excited moment I seem to recall he still only referred to him by his last name. I think the books do something similar where just about every character introduced and referred to by mostly only their last names. But along the lines of the comment about how no one are really friends on the show, I think even the books lean into that perhaps a bit more: Lister's found himself a group of people to hang out with and be 'friendly' with on the crew, but he's ultimately made up his mind very early on in his employ with the company that he's not there to make friends (or to work, for that matter), he's just using the job as for free travel back to Earth. Maybe it just gradually stood out a bit more because over in Trek at around the same time you'd get crewmembers going "Geordi", "Will", "Julian", "Bev", etc. in their off hours/casual settings.
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Feb 14, 2022 15:11
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Over in another thread I mentioned that Chuck Lorre got his start on some children's cartoons of the 80s/90s. (Things like Toxic Crusaders and Pole Position.) With the slow death of the Saturday Morning/first-run syndicated cartoon broadcast market since the early 2000s, I'm sort of wondering if there was anyone left that ever transitioned from the more or less 'kids cartoon' market to something like The Simpsons. I mean, I'm pretty sure even Seth MacFarlane did writing for some Cartoon Network kids stuff in the 90s before getting Family Guy into the shape it eventually became.
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Mar 12, 2022 07:52
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I don't even know if this has changed or not, but years ago when I needed a foreign language requirement for college admission, I had asked if something like an ASL sequence of classes count towards that and the advisor responded like I was stupid for even asking that since "sign language is NOT a foreign language." That was years ago, though. However, a quick search seems to have an more iffy modern interpretation of where SOME schools DO consider courses in ASL for such requirements.
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Apr 14, 2022 06:17
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Lascivious Sloth posted:They're just a cash cow now, they sold out a long time ago. They also had amazing writers that went on to become big and do better things. Are there any writers they have now with a good resume? (I don't know) I still partially contend that the decline of the Simpsons starts around the same time more 'adult audience' animation options started to become available. South Park was one thing, but soon you had Adult Swim, TNN, G4, MTV, FX, and Comedy Central doing more original animation projects. Obviously, not all these projects were good, but I'm also sure that a lot of writers might have considered trying to get their own thing produced in hopes of repeating that South Park/Adult Swim success than just being another writer on the Simpsons.
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Apr 17, 2022 07:50
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I think the last time I saw a 'new' episode of the Simpsons was probably about 6 or 8 years ago. I seem to recall it being something of a controversial episode with some sort of investigation or something? Like Lisa trying to solve a mystery, maybe. I don't even remember the episode, just the fan reaction, for some reason.
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Jun 3, 2022 06:56
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Annabel Pee posted:I vaguely remembered this too and looked it up, are you thinking of 'The Seemingly Never-Ending Story'? Season 17 (16 years ago!), its the one with the story-within-a-story thing going on. I looked it up, and that doesn't seem to be it. The one I'm thinking of I THINK has something at the end where Lisa has brought everyone together to reveal who the real criminal was and turns out she was maybe totally wrong as she wrote "bee guy" (who i don't even think was in the episode).
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Jun 11, 2022 18:35
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I was mixing up multiple episodes too, because it turns out I was completely wrong with my opinion and recollection: "Homer Is Where the Art Isn't" was maybe the last I saw and it turns out that I DID enjoy that episode. Maybe it was sandwiched between a lot of bad ones ones.
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Jun 11, 2022 20:39
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One tech prediction I think a lot of people (even folks with tech backgrounds) got wrong in the 90s was how rapidly mobile computing would advance and become more affordable. To paraphrase examples: You weren't going to sit on the the beach, telecommuting to work, because you weren't going to take your $2000 laptop to the edge of the water and drag out a phone cord to connect online. You weren't going to take your computer into the goddamned shower to listen to a radio show. Etc. God, I think I just found out old Max Headroom episodes are on a free service right now and I want to check them out to see how close they were to predicting the future in comparisons to later shows.
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Aug 15, 2022 05:17
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Improbable Lobster posted:later episodes are better, but it never gets great I had a few playing in the background a few nights ago and this sort of mirrors my feelings. At the same time it feels like it comes off as a bit more accurate than other depictions of the near-future with a few of its plot points and storylines, so if nothing else, it's satisfying that aspect of my curiousity when it comes to revisiting the show.
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Aug 23, 2022 17:38
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Around that time, though, was that WB in the 90s was apparently seriously considering a live-action Scooby movie before the ones we got in the early 2000s. Some of the interest was seemingly fueled by a Scooby-Doo-themed kid's meal promotion for Burger King where a 'live-action' Mystery Machine van was featured, driving some fans to speculate a live-action movie was imminent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ-1ix8fIBQ It's possible that Zombie Island might have had some of its DNA from that window of time: Either concepts for a live-action movie that didn't get made or was being used as an animated direct-to-video 'commercial' to gauge or build interest in the brand for an eventual live-action reboot.
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Oct 4, 2022 08:41
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We are about as far out from the release of Zombie Island as we were from the start of the original run of Scooby Doo to the release of Zombie Island. Much like Terminator probably has a lot people always thinking "Arnie is the good terminator', I wonder if the last near-quarter century where the 'supernatural' aspects of the show has become a pronounced just enough has made huge parts of the audience just think the whole franchise has ALWAYS been about 'X% guys in rubber masks'/'Y% actual monsters, AIs, aliens, and ghosts.' Even in the pre-Zombie Island era, the franchise DID have the 13 Ghosts of Scooby series, so there's something of a precedent there.
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Oct 4, 2022 09:38
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Did Scoob and the gang ever run into Wonder Woman or Superman? I know they did Batman and Robin, but now I'm wondering if the 'superhumen' aspects of the other two would have veered too far away from 'nothing supernatural really going on.' I know the Brady Kids cartoon had WW and Supes, though. I also wonder how much the Buffyverse figured into the perceptions of Scooby-Doo. At the near-height of that show's popularity and for a long time afterwards, weren't the main cast of characters referred to as the 'scoobs' or something by the fanbase? Except in that show it literally was actual monsters and such every week underneath the mask of human flesh
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Oct 4, 2022 18:54
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Soon Homer will be old enough that they'll do a flashback episode about how he was an aspiring rapper when he was Bart's age and by the time he graduated high school he got a record contract. The episode is built around Bart finding a bunch of Homer's old CDs at a rummage sale, with titles like "Homersexual", "The Homergasm", "The Homertorius B.I.G." The entire family except Marge and Homer laugh hysterically at the songs, but Homer insists he wasn't doing parody rap, it was hardcore and serious about street life and you kids shouldn't be listening to this. Homer has to work on getting back his street cred and respect from his children.
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Oct 18, 2022 18:31
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In the early 90s there was an Uncle Buck TV series that created some controversy because a character said, "You suck!" at a time when Bart Simpson was already saying "I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?"
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Oct 19, 2022 05:43
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happyhippy posted:Never been banned watching TV, but for The Simpsons it was about how rich you were. This makes me think that there were a lot of kids who did/could/would just make up poo poo about episodes that they knew other people hadn't seen knowing full well they coudn't be proven or disproven and even the magazines would be behind or incomplete on episodes more than likely. Some guy I knew years ago would do that all the time when the internet wasn't so widespread, too. You name the show or movie or comic, nothing was too small for him to lie about if he knew you couldn't disprove it.
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Oct 21, 2022 14:16
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With Daria, though, I think the music really did add a lot of flavor and identity to the attitude of the show. I think I've told this before, but somehow I think over the course of time I saw three music edits of an episode and the differences in how the ending of the episode played out with each different audio mix felt way different. When another MTV show of around that time was airing, the live-action "Dead @ 21", I seem to remember an interview someone from that production did saying that the use of then-current music in the show was always expected to be changed. Essentially, they'd envisioned the show being frequently rerun on MTV for so long that on those future reairings the audio mix would replace 'older' songs with more modern hits.
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Oct 22, 2022 07:27
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Speaking of Daria, I had to do a double check on the Lower Decks episode with the Vulcan ship because I thought the out of control Vulcan had the same voice actress. It wasn't, but it felt so much like the same actress with a different tone in their voice I had to be sure.
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Oct 23, 2022 18:31
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Should be Debt Note: You write someone's name in a book and it inflicts them with the amount of debt you see fit to burden them with. Bart uses it to make people's lives a living hell in Springfield.
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Oct 26, 2022 07:50
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Prurient Squid posted:Just do Bartkira you cowards. Full length, canonical. Just sparked the memory of the long-rumored anime episode of Quantum Leap that Katsuhiro Otomo was supposed to have directed. I think the claim was that during the Olympics in the early 90s people saw a clip of Akira was shown on NBC with a mention of "Sam leaps into a cartoon!" I don't even know how/why that specific rumor became a thing for a while.
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Oct 27, 2022 06:38
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Mr Interweb posted:- for some reason, after a gradual decline up to season 11, seasons 12-15 were the most successful seasons of the simpsons, doing better than any of the 'golden years' seasons except 3 I did a big write up on this for another thread, but I'll repost most of it: JediTalentAgent posted:2000-2001 Simpsons had an average of about 15M viewer and was a lead-in to the then popular Malcolm in the Middle. Other channels in the same block showing Wonderful world of Disney*, Touched by an Angel*, Dateline, Ed, Steve Harvey. So, their highest rated seasons in that time coincide with both weak competition while also being part of a block of other successful shows on a night where pretty much everyone is going to have to stay in because of work/school week starts the next day.
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Jan 29, 2023 07:21
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Iron Crowned posted:The Simpsons was already in decline, Cold Case and Extreme Home Makeover were just there to pick up the slack. Anecdotally, I spent a lot of time watching The Simpsons with my parents, and my parents started watching Cold Case instead. Another argument I've made in the past, in addition to the direct prime-time competition, there were a number of other competitors for 'cartoon coolness'. South Park is obviously a big one. For the 8-18yo audience that the Simpsons used to be a bit more of a special thing for when it came to animation on television, you had the early 00s anime boom with both extremes in that demographic. Content that was being sold to grade school and middle school kids that was slightly more mature than typical Saturday Morning/After School fare as well as material aimed at the HS/College kid crowd. In addition, early 2000s was a time when we had a bit of post-South Park boom in animated series that didn't have a primarily K-8 audience in mind. Adult Swim with its anime/Western Animation line-up, TNN, Comedy Central, and G4 trying to get in on it, too. Success/failure of some of those might have had some effect when it came to Simpsons, either in how much they went from being lunchroom conversation compared to other shows, how they continued to make episodes in the face of something like South Park being the new 'edgy', or who wanted to write for them when creatives saw new opportunities on cable.
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Feb 3, 2023 04:44
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I don't know that much about Street Fighter's general tone and stories but it feels like going all GI Joe with it isn't entirely unfitting. Which they pretty much did 2 times over, oddly enough: Street Fighter figures that were part of the GI Joe line of action figures in the 90s and a SatAM cartoon that pretty much had the SF characters as GI Joe team. Something that I'm not sure anyone else ever talks about in this regard: Back in the 90s, a lot of those USA Network cartoons did a whole interconnected series of episodes that was essentially "Heavy Metal (for kids)". I seem to recall they tied together Wing Commander, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc. into a shared universe via some object of cosmic power source that was appearing as a macguffin in their respective episodes that would turn up in another series. I know it's a minor thing, but it feels like it should be the sort of trivial thing that countless articles and youtube articles should have been created on by this point.
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Mar 18, 2023 16:51
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Go watch Bonestorm (2021) or go to hell!
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Mar 20, 2023 04:59
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A strange memory I have of season 8 is flipping through the first official Simpsons episode guide from the 90s and that's the season it ended with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_episode_guides There's probably very little reason in the age of wikipedia to keep doing more updated versions, but a part of me might find a history book of the entire franchise interesting; something collected like that "Live From New York" book about the history of SNL. It seems like something they couldn't do until the show was officially done, though.
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Apr 20, 2023 06:29
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A long time ago I posted something from an article or a wiki about "Where the the Daria characters end up?" and it felt sort of opposite of where the closing credits futures for the characters hinted they'd end up. I know there's supposed to be a Jodie spin-off at some point that's been in production/development for the last few years, but the article I was thinking of was here: https://ew.com/tv/daria-20-years-later/ I'm sort of really 'meh' on this updated designs and ideas for where the showrunners imagined the characters would end up.
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Apr 25, 2023 08:09
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bobjr posted:King of the Hill reboot I think largely depends on if they make Bobby an adult failson or not. My headcanon has always been that the show has been all about hinting that Bobby grows up to be a serial killer.
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May 25, 2023 06:54
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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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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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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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SlothfulCobra posted: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. Seems like the joke should have been Homer being completely oblivious to what a Destination Wedding was/is and the entire skit is everyone else filling him in with the most minute details that has him being more and more disillusioned by the prospect. Or go back to some old-fashioned Homer is dumb stuff. "It's in the Poconos!" "We've got to go all the way to that puppet-themed restaurant in Shelbyville?!" "That's Pinnochio's, and they're not puppets, they're marionettes, dad. The Poconos are in Pennsylvania." "SO IS DRACULA, LISA!"
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Dec 11, 2023 17:23
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Mantis42 posted:
Homer dances out of the room, singing a badly remembered version of the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" using Pocono, Benihana, etc.
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Dec 12, 2023 05:30
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Going on sarcastic rant about social trends is what a real-life 30-something Homer would do. Grandpa Simpson could probably do the same long winded rant about destination weddings and it might work better, but you'd also end it with him going, "Destination wedding? What's that?"
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Dec 12, 2023 06:51
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