“Excuse me, ma’am, don’t you think you’ve gambled enough?” – Mr. Smithers
“No.” – Marge Simpson
“Okay.  We’re required by law to ask every seventy-five hours.  Get her another free drink.” – Mr. Smithers

“Groundskeeper Willie was in my nightmare too, but he got me with hedge clippers.” – Lisa Simpson
“He ran his floor buffer over me.” – Nelson Muntz

We’ve got a lot of good links this week.  There’s two promising new blogs, several people who agree with us, and lots of fan made stuff (including a Mexican Bart figurine).  But we’ve also got three – count ’em, three! – people who had the Simpsons in their dreams this week.  Good thing you don’t have to pay a royalty for that yet.  There’s also some good discussion of older episodes, a cool Flash map of Springfield, plenty of usage, and Zombie Simpsons damaging relations with Pakistan (well, sort of). 

Enjoy.

Clickerbox: The Simpsons Season 2 – Smooth Charlie’s Link of the Week is this tour of Season 2 courtesy of someone who wasn’t allowed to watch the show as a kid but has seen many of the later episodes.  She’s harsh on some episodes I love, but it’s fascinating to see someone coming at them from a perspective utterly unlike mine.  She goes through the whole season, so there’s a lot here.

Cartoon Quotes – A new blog featuring, as you may have guessed, daily quotes from cartoons.  It’s brand new, and has quotes from several characters ranging from Bugs Bunny to Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but Homer’s on the banner and there have been three Simpsons quotes already.  All three of them are dead on correct, so let’s hope he keeps it up.

Interactive Map of Springfield – I sort of think I’ve posted this before, but it’s damn cool.

Poll: What is your favorite season of The Simpsons? – Lenny says that after much thought she’s got a favorite, but before she reveals it, she wants to know yours.  I don’t think I could pick one, I’d just feel all the seasons I didn’t pick staring at me accusatorily.  But if you’ve got one, go ahead. 

Kidrobot and The Simpsons present Matt Groening – There’s going to be a Matt Groening doll.  I suppose it was inevitable. 

Forrest Gump and the Simpsons via YouTube – What if you took the audio from an extended trailer for Forrest Gump and matched to clips from the show?  Well, you don’t have to, someone else did and it is fantastic:

That is great. 

The Simpsons Meets Skyrim of the Day – Fus Ro D’oh.

10/18/11 – Even in dreams you can’t escape The Simpsons:

We are at our apartment, watching The Simpsons, while we wait to leave for the wedding. The roommate who is getting married points out how the character Lisa has changed in the episode, while my other roommate bakes.

Merman Sideshow Bob and Bart by ~Foxiso on deviantART – Fan made drawing of a Sideshow Bob as a merman drowning Bart, the idea for which originally came in a dream.

20th January – Another Simpsons dream:

Dream 5! Ohh yeah, we’re getting into the big numbers now! I was in our conservatory. I was with my brother, and a man who looked like one of the characters for the Simpsons. We were about to get filmed for an episode. It went well, so I went to watch the premiere. I looked like a Simpson!

That’s just what you’d look like if you were a cartoon character. 

You Built What?! A Wearable LED Television – Remember that guy from last summer who built a television into a coat and had The Simpsons playing on it?  He’s back, this time with a shirt that also plays The Simpsons.  Excelsior to you, David Forbes.  (via)

Obituary: Phil Hartman – Our old friend Gran2 has started a new blog called “Late Obituaries”.  It’s either obituaries written long after the person dies, or an obituary for the genre of obituaries.  This is the first post, and it strong suggests the former.  That is a great picture of Hartman. 

Bidding war over dried glue that looks like Homer Simpson. Sort of. – When this ends, I just picture the two guys who bid thousands for it giggling and running away when one of them wins as the auctioneer has to ask, “Yes, were there any serious bids for this item?”

Fascinating contest in store – Somewhere in New Zealand there is a racing greyhound named Sideshow Bob:

Secondly, the potent Dave and Jean Fahey Canterbury training partnership provided the quinella in both of those heats, although one of them (Sideshow Bob) has since been an injury-enforced scratching.

I really wish there was a picture. 

Valentine’s Day Card – Awesome homemade “Choo Choo Choose” Valentine’s Day card. 

LEGO-Can you guess what they are? – The Simpsons one is very minimalist and cool, but for giggle factor the champion has to be Lego Princess Leia photocopying her own butt. 

Not Even Selma Will Have Him – Memebase – Forever alone!

Cartoon Pick of the Day: The Simpsons: Maggie Makes Three – Very nice writeup of “And Maggie Makes Three”.

Top 10 TV Theme Tunes – There’s a lot of good YouTube here, as well as more British shows than you usually see on lists like this.  And, of course, we all know what’s at #1. 

CAN’T SLEEP – Very Demotivational – That bed never gets old. 

Leading News Resource of Pakistan – Last week I made fun of Zombie Simpsons for basically airing a free commercial for Cinnabon with their barely disguised “Cinnabun”.  Here’s why they deserve your scorn:

‘Cinnabon’ opens newest location in Karachi

[…]

Homer Simpson loves them. Jerry Seinfeld wants to marry them. And now Karachi residents can enjoy the world famous cinnamon rolls filled with the company’s signature Makara Cinnamon.

Somebody’s using it to actually pimp Cinnabon in Pakistan.  This never happened with Duff or Buzz.

Station / Estación # 10: Obrera – Click through for some excellent graffiti of Homer and Bart near a metro station in Mexico City. 

These are the bricks you’re looking for – A take on the evolution of Lego, with a particular knock at a Zombie Simpsons’ joke from a couple of weeks ago. 

Marge and Lisa Simpson Loves Donatella and Allegra Versace. Fashion Simpsons – From the same site as last week’s fashion mashups. 

The GOP’s Seemingly Never-Ending Debates – Poor usage:

Apart from global appeal, intentional comedy, puckish charm and hints of a first-rate mind operating under a veneer of stupidity, Sarah Palin has something in common with Bart Simpson. I’m specifically talking about the scene where Grandpa, forced to babysit the kids, refers to a note card provided to him by Marge. It reads: “Always do the opposite of what Bart says.” Too bad the GOP isn’t as smart as Abe Simpson.

That manages to get the quote wrong and the character wrong, and that’s always poor usage. 

My Favourite Cartoon Character – Cool fan made computer animated Lisa. 

Nice Bart Simpson pictures – There’s two here.  There’s a boring one of a Bartman statue at Comic Con 2009.  The cool one is a homemade Bart figurine from Mexico. 

Brits want to use bees as security guards to protect historic site – Excellent page whoring usage, io9:

Vandals are damaging a historic site in Wales, and its operators have come up with an ingenious solution: protect the place with bees. This should work, for as noted bee expert Homer Simpson once observed, bees will bite your bottom, and then your bottom’s big.

Got a dumb story with no hook?  Gin up a tenuous Simpsons connection and put a picture of Homer on it.  Denton has taught you well, young one. 

The 15 Best Band Cameos on TV – Good list here.  There’s lots of YouTube, and Simpsons makes it three times, for Smashing Pumpkins, The Ramones, and The Beatles, which comes in at #1. 

First You Get the Sugar: The name might confuse, but the music doesn’t – Speaking of bands and the show, here’s another band that took it’s name from an episode:

“People in tune with The Simpsons get it pretty quick,” observes drummer Daniel Moscovitch.

“While others still don’t understand what it is,” chimes in guitarist Adam Kagan. “Which is good – I say go rent Scarface, then watch The Simpsons, and then you’ll understand.”

Australia Day…In 10 Words « In 10 Words – That scene in “Bart vs. Australia” was the only good thing to come out of Crocodile Dundee, and they made two sequels! 

Homer Simpson Kills Ned Flanders by ~darthraner83 on deviantART – Fan art of Homer eating a donut after having just casually beheaded Flanders with a lightsaber.  Definitely works better than a pipe. 

Bart Simpson by ~katval1 on deviantART – Fan art of a slightly disturbing, goggle-eyed Bart.

Lisa Simpson by ~aquariano186 on deviantART – Speaking of disturbing, here’s fan art of a grown up Lisa with an undersized head and an oddly placed bust. 

Simpsons scratchboard art by Edwin Vazquez – Lots more than just Simpsons characters here, very neat.  The urinating Mickey Mouse is particularly depraved looking. 

Man wins €680,000 with one-euro football accumulator bet – Excellent reference:

Anyone who has seen The Simpsons episode where Monty Burns opens a casino knows that betting is evil, and Gamblor will ensnare you with his neon claws if you partake.

Gambling is the finest thing a person can do.

Rangers’ Rookie Hagelin Honed His Skills as a Standout at Michigan – Another NHL player who likes the show:

Hagelin’s adjustment from Sweden to the United States was surprisingly smooth. He was already fluent in English, having learned the language in school and through daily viewings of “The Simpsons” and “That ’70s Show.”

“In Sweden, they broadcast the American shows in English with Swedish subtitles, whereas in many European countries they dub them,” Hagelin said. “Watching those shows in English was big for me.”

The Simpsons Trivia Game – A free, 1500 question Simpsons trivia game for Android. 

Billy Cundiff: An Open Letter to the Baltimore Ravens’ Latest Scapegoat – Lenny actually says “Everybody” not “Everyone”, but this is still excellent usage:

To borrow a line from The Simpsons, "Everyone makes mistakes: that’s why they put erasers on pencils."

Poor Billy Cundiff. 

Family Guy (And Other Controversial Cartoons) – A Family Guy review that agrees with us:

They parody songs, popular sayings, celebrities and other cartoons (such as The Simpsons… And how it’s not been funny since you were 13 – sad but true).

Indeed, sad and true.

30 Rock: Best Comedy on TV or Stuck in Cruise Control? – And here’s a review of 30 Rock that agrees with us:

I get the argument of, ‘Come on, 30 Rock should challenge itself and try something different.’ But look what happened to a show like The Simpsons. That was the funniest show on TV for about 10 years, but its style definitely started to change, and it got terrible, and quite frankly, I cringe when I see ads for an upcoming episode today. And trust me — this is coming from a die hard Simpsons fan back in the day.

And I guess that’s my point. I’m sure after 10-12 years, the creative team of The Simpsons needed to try something else with the show. It didn’t work. Okay, fair enough. Let’s move on. But that show is still on the air today, and it’s getting progressively worse, completely losing what made it so brilliant in the first place. At this point, stop trying to change it, and just end it.

Amen, brother. 

Five TV Shows That Changed The World – Finally, here’s as excellent a one paragraph summary as you will ever read:

The Simpsons (1989-today)

Fully explaining the impact of The Simpsons in anything less than a massive leather bound tome is nearly impossible, considering the brilliant creative minds it has bestowed upon the world (Brad Bird! Conan O’Brien! Greg Daniels!), the countless shows it has influenced (South Park! Family Guy! Every show that’s ever been on Adult Swim!), and the staggering number of classic episodes it is responsible for (“Marge vs The Monorail!” “Homer at the Bat!” “Cape Feare!”). The “Golden Age” of The Simpsons is nearly a decade’s worth of sharp satire, breaking down every facet of American culture into hilarious, endlessly quotable, and sometimes even touching animated half-hours. Without The Simpsons, cartoons may have always been socially unacceptable for people over the age of 12 to watch. That an entire generation is growing up with a watered down, way-past-its-prime version of TV’s greatest dysfunctional cartoon family is a shame, but the first ten seasons of The Simpsons remain mandatory viewing for the pop culture fiends of the future.

Testify! 

“Get yer haggis right here!  Chopped heart and lungs boiled in a wee sheep’s stomach!  Tastes as good as it sounds!” – Groundskeeper Willie

“Unckie Herb, what advice would you give to a boy who will most likely become a bum like yourself?” – Bart Simpson
“Discarded pizza boxes are an inexpensive source of cheese.” – Herb Powell

“Why do we need new bands?  Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974.  It’s a scientific fact.” – Homer Simpson

Back at the end of December, reader Brian sent in a link to a video at The Escapist modestly titled “The Simpsons Is Still Funny – Pt. 1”.  It’s about five minutes long, and you can view it at the link.  The second part, “The Simpsons Is Still Funny, Part 2”, came out a week later.  These are the kind of internet videos where there’s a fast talking voiceover accompanied by a series of pictures, memes and other low cost imagery.

These particular Zombie Simpsons defenses are narrated by a guy named Bob Chipman, who usually does movie videos.  Obviously I don’t agree that what FOX puts out on Sundays is still funny.  (I don’t even think it should be called “The Simpsons”.)  But Chipman makes some plausible but easily falsified assumptions that come up every once and a while, and they’re worth rebutting in detail.

The tagline of the first video is “The Simpsons isn’t bad, you just grew up”, and that’s a reasonably accurate summary of the video.  The Simpsons came out when Chipman was a kid, and he grew into an adult during the single digit seasons which are widely considered to be the best ones.  His basic theory is that since he and others like him became more sophisticated fans as the show was at its peak, people have a nostalgic need for those seasons to be remembered as the best ones.  Unlike He-Man, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Transformers (all of which he specifically invokes), The Simpsons was a childhood love that could still be loved by adolescents and adults without any of that icky irony.

I’m going to quote his conclusion at some length here (this begins at the 4:05 mark):

We might have moved on from thinking that cherry bombs and graffiti and “Ay Carumba” were the coolest things on Earth.  But now we could groove on, you know, incisive showbiz satire, everyday working class annoyances, and the existential ennui of being a smarty-pants trapped in a dumbed down world, all punctuated by a rotating staff of extremely talented comedy writers.  That was the real miracle of The Simpsons’ golden age, thanks largely to a parody of the bad-little-boy sitcom archetype briefly becoming an actual phenomenon with kids and winning a massive grade school audience for a show that was originally intended for an older, primetime viewership, it was able to become for those same kids one of the few precious entertainments of their childhood that was still just as awesome, if perhaps in a different way, as they grew up through their teens and into young adulthood.  That, my friends, is how something goes from being simply a good TV show to a full blown, unassailable pop culture institution.  And since the timeline of that quote-unquote “institutionalization” roughly coincides with the first nine to ten years of the series, guess which seasons tend to be remembered as “the best ones”?  So, yeah, from where I sit, that is how The Simpsons earned a legacy of such high standard that even The Simpsons couldn’t live up to it anymore.

The gist of all that is that The Simpsons simply isn’t as good as you remember it being, you just love it because you loved it as a kid and it’s still highly watchable now that you’re an adult.  The big, flashing problem with this is that most fans didn’t grow up with the show the same way he did.  He’s mistaking a very narrow age bracket of people as everyone.

This is all based on a wildly incorrect and myopically self centered assumption back at the 2:20 mark of the video:

“It seems to me that a certain majority of disappointed, hard core Simpsons fanatics are also, unsurprisingly, ground zero Generation 1 fans roughly in my relative age bracket.”

A “certain majority”?  Outside of Chipman’s immediate friends and acquaintances, is there any evidence for that rather narrow age restriction whatsoever?  He certainly doesn’t provide any, instead just assuming it to be true.  But it isn’t true.  In fact, it isn’t even remotely true.  Chipman was a kid when the show came out, so he probably knows a lot of other people who were kids when it came out too.  But the show, while popular with kids, was never just for kids.

That is all the more remarkable when you remember that there was a complete lack of adult animation at the time (at least in this country).  Before it even premiered, people knew kids would watch it.  After all, it was a cartoon and it was on at 8:00pm, the long protected “family hour”, when kids were expected to be watching television.  But adults latched on to it just as hard and as quickly.

To be sure, most of those adults were probably on the young side, members of that sweet, sweet 18-34 demographic.  But “Bartmania” wasn’t a children’s fad the way Pokemon would later be a children’s fad, or the way the Ninja Turtles and Transformers had been children’s fads a few years before.  It was a general cultural storm that encompassed not only kids, but millions of adults as well.  Two quick quotes from John Ortved’s book should serve to illustrate this.  Here’s current show writer Tim Long (p119):

“When the show started, I was a sophomore in university.  I remember thinking, This is the fasted, funniest show ever.  I cannot believe this show is on the air.  It just felt like a miracle.”

This was a common sentiment among people his age bracket, and he was born in 1969.  Ask a fan roughly Long’s age sometime and you’ll get stories about The Simpsons being something people watched in college bars or at home in groups.  During the early years of the show, new episodes were an event for a lot of people long past puberty.

Here’s Robert Cohen, who was a production assistant during the first couple of seasons (p120):

And for me in particular, the first “holy crap” moment was during the Hollywood Christmas parade, which is this dopey parade that goes down Hollywood Boulevard, and stars of yesteryear wave from convertibles; it’s this very weird parade.  It was the second season, and they’d asked the Simpsons to be in the parade, so they hired some dancers to put on costumes and Jay Kogen and I wore our Simpsons crew jackets.  We piled into this car called the Gracie-mobile, which was this big old El Dorado convertible painted with the Gracie logo.  The plan was that we would drive the Simpsons down the street in the parade.  When we pulled out on to the street and it was parade time – I was at the wheel – the people mobbed us to the point that the car could go only about twenty yards.  The sheriff’s department had to veer us outta there because it was like a riot.  And they weren’t interested in us.  They were interested in these actors in Simpsons costumes.  Obviously they weren’t even the real Simpsons.  That’s when I realized, Holy crap.  This thing’s outta control.  Because it was just hundreds of people mobbing stinky felt costumes that represented the show.  I knew the show was popular, but I didn’t realize how popular until that moment.

Those hundreds of people were not all ten year olds.  Moreover, right about the time those anonymous people in costumes were escaping that mob, this was on newsstands all over the country:

This was when the cover of Time was among the most important cultural markers in America, and it’s not about a children’s obsession, it’s “The Best of ’90”, period.

The Simpsons was never a kids show, so when Chipman compares people obsessing over its “golden age” to the way people have kitschy attachments to He-Man or Transformers, he’s conflating two very different things, his personal experience and that of the wider audience.  The idea that the show declined noticeably isn’t restricted to people born from roughly 1975 to 1985.  It’s a widely held opinion among people of disparate ages, and plenty of people followed the entire arc of the show from Season 1 to Season 9 or so as adults.  No pre-pubescent nostalgia is needed to say that the show has gone to hell.

As if to underscore how weak this argument is, the second video drops this concept completely.  It doesn’t support this contention and barely even mentions it.  Instead, it focuses on the way the culture and the media environment have changed around the show.  Chipman gets to his point quickly (1:00):

The Simpsons was an absurdist parody.  My contention, then, is that the reason it’s different now is less because the show itself has changed, but that the world around it has changed to the extent that almost everything it first existed to skewer, satirize and parody doesn’t exist anymore.

He continues from there to discuss how many of the situations parodied on The Simpsons were universally recognizable because there were only three networks and everyone was at least aware of the family sitcom tropes the show liked to make fun of.  Nowadays, with hundreds of channels and the bottomless pit of the internet fracturing the culture into a bunch of tiny niches, he thinks the show had to become an exaggerated parody of itself to survive.

The problem with this is that while there’s a superficial truth to it, it misses the fundamental aspects of American life The Simpsons got at.  The police on The Simpsons are fat, incompetent and often drunk on their own power.  Whatever the quality of your local force, that overall perception remains very much with us.  Springfield Elementary is perpetually underfunded and doesn’t do many of its kids a whole lot of good.  Sound familiar?  Corrupt local politicians, annoyingly pious neighbors, gossipy church ladies, and evil plutocrats are still a recognizable part of the American landscape.  Self help scams, niche conventions, and painfully dumb awards shows haven’t gone anywhere either.

While some of the concepts the show parodied have faded from memory, the basic take on American life remains amazingly current and relevant.  To say, as Chipman does, that the show has become “less vital and certainly less relatable” (4:40) simply because the media landscape has changed is to let Zombie Simpsons off the hook.  There have been plenty of vital and relatable shows (pick a critical darling from the last decade) that, while never reaching the level of fame The Simpsons reached, don’t come in for the same kind of routine criticism as Zombie Simpsons.  That’s because they aren’t dragging around twenty years of backstory, aren’t constantly repeating things they’ve done better in the past, and aren’t kept alive because FOX doesn’t want to risk a profitable timeslot on a flop.

More than just being a cop out, however, saying a show has to get away from what made it great to stay alive sounds more like a reason to take it off the air than keep it on the air.  There are any number of familiar examples of this, silent movie stars who couldn’t make the transition to sound, rim shot comedians in tuxedos who became dinosaurs after Lenny Bruce, hair metal bands embarrassed off the charts by grunge.  At some point, people stop caring about what you were doing, and if you can’t change sufficiently, then you’re going to become irrelevant, just as Zombie Simpsons has.

We can still appreciate classics from a bygone era.  Truly great books and movies often stay great, genuinely good music has a way of enduring, and those old seasons of The Simpsons have aged incredibly well because they still speak to so much of our lives.  But to keep doing what no one cares about anymore is the definition of malingering.

As always, this is somebody’s opinion and they’re perfectly entitled to it.  But the specific arguments Chipman is making here simply don’t hold water.  They’re riddled with factual inaccuracies, somewhat contradictory (so the show did change?), and generally sloppy.  Saying that people’s love of the original seasons is based on nostalgia may be true for a few individuals, but there’s no evidence for that among the general population of fans.  Saying that that the world evolved around it is true, but in no way changes the fact that plenty of other shows have found ways to not suck in the era of http.  Think Zombie Simpsons is funny all you want, but don’t try to back up your opinion with things that aren’t true and don’t make sense. 

“You wanted to be Krusty’s sidekick since you were five!  What about the buffoon lessons?  The four years at clown college?” – Sideshow Bob
“I’ll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way!” – Cecil

“This is one more Emmy than you’ll ever win you bantering jack-in-the-box!” – Sideshow Bob
“Just don’t drop that thing in the shower, Bob.” – Krusty the Klown
“No talent shill!” – Sideshow Bob
“Second banana!” – Krusty the Klown
“Panderer!” – Sideshow Bob
“Bore!” – Krusty the Klown

This was a very above-average commentary by the standards of Season 14. In this case it actually helped that they had a lot more guys than usual because there’s only a few times when no one’s talking at all. It also helps that this is a Sideshow Bob episode, which gives them plenty of excuses to bring up old episodes and other (mostly) unrelated stories. To be sure, there are still lots of tangents and the occasional moment where you can tell they aren’t real proud of what’s going on, but for the most part they did seem to enjoy both the episode and commenting on it.

The episode itself is still terrible, of course. It doesn’t make sense, involves a lot of bad slapstick and action, and tries to make up for that with unrelenting hyperactivity. This includes Sideshow Bob getting repeatedly electrocuted, a blatant piece of musical filler at the end, and lots of fake tension and suspense. The main plot concludes with a stilt chase because, you know, stilts.

Eleven (eventually twelve) guys on this one, including Castellaneta and Groening, the latter of whom might have said ten words the entire time.

0:35 – The whole idea here was for Sideshow Bob to not be the criminal. But it’s getting harder for them to come up with things for him that aren’t just “straight out murder”. There haven’t been a lot of Bob episodes since this one.

2:00 – David Silverman talks about how the original design of Bob was non-descript because he was just Krusty’s silent, background sidekick. Brad Bird spiced it up after hearing Kelsey Grammer’s voice for “Krusty Gets Busted”.

3:30 – Silence broken by uncomfortable laughter as Homer is in a steam room with a naked Rainier Wolfcastle.

4:30 – Here’s a perfect moment of Zombie Simpsons commentary. Jean invites Steven Dean Moore to talk about how he did the animation for the door of the sauna. While he’s doing that we see Homer’s badly desiccated body collapse out of the room. That part doesn’t get mentioned.

5:15 – Long silence here broken by a discussion of whether or not this is a real Sideshow Bob episode and how FOX often has slightly misleading ads for what the episode is about. The time they billed the episode as “The Simpsons are going Canada!” but only had about two minutes of Canada in it is mentioned as another example.

6:00 – Long tangential discussion about “Silence of the Lambs” and whether or not real criminals are used to catch other criminals like they’re doing here. This gets to other movies and prison snitches quickly.

6:40 – Long silence broken by Jean asking why Sideshow Bob’s skin is a lighter color. Nobody seems sure other than, “that’s probably how Brad did it”.

7:00 – Generic praise for Grammer as a guest voice.

7:30 – That leads to an interesting note from Silverman, that for “Black Widower” he added more mouth shapes for Bob because of Grammer’s nuanced pronunciation.

8:00 – And we’re off on a tangent about other guest voices and celebrities they’ve made fun of. The widow of Mr. Rogers apparently once ran into Jean and knew they’d made fun of her husband.

8:50 – They were still talking about Mrs. Rogers when someone broke in to talk about the episode (pointing out that they’re referencing “Krusty Gets Busted”) and it took them a second to stop interrupting each other. It was actually surprising that someone wanted to talk about what’s going on. Ha.

9:30 – Laughing about the first open appearance of Frank Grimes Jr., the real villain here.

10:10 – Jean: “The Simpsons are awfully friendly with a man who chased Bart around with a machete.” Meanwhile, Bart is needlessly electrocuting Bob.

10:30 – Guys keep laughing every time a character comes up and whacks a Homer dummy Bob set up. A lot of the time on things like this the laughter sounds nervous or forced, but they really seem to think this is hilarious. Can’t say I agree, but these are always better to listen to when they’re having fun.

11:15 – Boredom sets in again quickly though as someone wonders why Moe’s sometimes has a pool table and sometimes doesn’t.

12:30 – Not much is happening so they’re talking about the song at the end of this episode. These days they have a harder time getting song parodies cleared.

13:00 – I guess they got nominated for an Emmy with that song. Someone remembers peeing in the men’s room with Alf Clausen after they lost. It’s actually funny.

13:30 – Now it’s time for more Emmy tales. Apparently that year if you went to the bathroom they wouldn’t let you back into the auditorium.

14:40 – Tim Long just showed up, so that puts us to twelve guys.

15:15 – Homer’s on a parade float now, and they’re mentioning the usual difficulty of animating crowds.

15:50 – Now they’re talking about a crowd scene in the movie. Homer’s running people over on his parade float, but that doesn’t come up.

16:30 – Laughing about “The Museum of Swordfish”.

17:00 – Long silence as Bob, Duffman and the Duff Blimp save Homer.

17:40 – Interesting tidbit here as everyone’s ignoring the stupid chase scene that’s happening. They had a lot of trouble with pullouts (i.e. zooming back from a shot) when they switched to digital color because it made the thickness of the lines go screwy so it didn’t look like it was the same drawing. They prefer to do cuts.

18:15 – Silence broken when everyone laughs at Homer’s inability to remember Frank Grimes.

18:30 – They do a flashback to “Homer’s Enemy”, and talk a little about how you can see the difference between the animation from Season 8 to Season 14.

19:00 – Mostly silence here, with the brief mention of “Homer’s Enemy”.

19:30 – Now we’re back to more typical desultory laughter.

20:00 – Sideshow Bob’s trying to stab Bart now. Jean’s laughing because no matter how many of these they’ve done it never is the last one.

20:30 – And now they’re discussing the next Bob episode. Meanwhile, Bob is singing and no one’s paying attention.

21:30 – They’ve spent the last minute telling unrelated stories.

22:00 – The original ending was going to be Bob getting hit by rakes as he leaves the Simpsons’ yard. They decided against it.

22:20 – And we end on them joking about being in a sauna like at the beginning of the episode.

“Wow!  How many home runs you gonna hit with that?” – Bart Simpson
“Let’s see, we play thirty games, ten at bats a game . . . three thousand.” – Homer Simpson

“The happiest day of my life was three Sundays ago.  I was sitting on my Daddy’s knee when the Saints, who were four and a half point favorites but only up by three, kicked a meaningless field goal at the last second to cover the spread.” – Lisa Simpson
“Dear God.” – Ms. Hoover

Happy 20th Anniversary to “Lisa the Greek”!  Original airdate 23 January 1992.

“Oh, very well, it’s time for your bribe.  Now, you can either have the washer and dryer where the lovely Smithers is standing, or you can trade it all in for what’s in this box.” – C.M. Burns
“The box, the box!” – Nuclear Inspector