It Comes With A Slice Of Canteloupe At The End: THE SIMPSONS SEASON 1 POLL

I will have to re-watch these to vote. The problem w the Simpsons (and Seinfeld) is that you can read the plot description, think "meh", and yet the jokes could be top quality and have nothing to do with the plot!

Jacques: First, you must get to know your lane.  Feel the slickness, feel the
            slippery finish. Caresses it, experience it. Quite smooth, isn't it?
   Marge:   Oh, very smooth.
   \<
   Jacques: Smooth?
   Marge:          |Yes, very.
   Jacques:        |          |Yes?
   Marge:          |          |    |Yes.
   Jacques:        |          |    |    |Yes.
   Marge:          |          |    |    |    |Smooth.
   Jacques:        |          |    |    |    |       |Smooth.
   Marge:          |          |    |    |    |       |       |Yes.
   Jacques:        |          |    |    |    |       |       |    |Yes.
    :        You could eat off of it.
   \>

S1 is really uneven, but there are some classic jokes in there, as already demonstrated upthread. I always loved the cloud talk bit in The Telltale Head.

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsx4ilSG391qzzd6io1_500.png

Matt Groening apparently says Life On The Fast Lane is his second favourite episode.

how many times have you people seen these?

I remember the show premiering in January and being an instant sensation, so I probably saw all of em and loved the show, but was already out of college and a full-time widgetmaking commuter... so probably mighta caught a couple of these agin in the '90s, not since.

oh yeah, the only one I know by title is the Xmas pilot.

i saw almost all of them in syndication from around 1994 to 2000--twice a day after school. over and over countless times.

yeah was annoying how much they would syndicate these but then, say, the lemon tree episode would never get a re-airing

when I was buying Simpsons DVD sets this is the one I omitted. started with s2 and went through s9.

i saw almost all of them in syndication from around 1994 to 2000--twice a day after school. over and over countless times.

― ryan, Wednesday, October 2, 2013 1:56 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, either the 7:00 or 7:30 slot on fox. saw them all out of order, i don't really think of them by 'season' either except for season 1 since the animation was noticeably different

well see you know these the way i kno(e)w I Love Lucy.

I also started reciting a Little Rascals ditty to a fellow '60s child last week, and he finished it.

I remember taping them and watching them as I got ready for school in the morning, and I'd watch them on Sky religiously til I had actually finished school, so just in that timespan I've probably seen the average episode dozens of times.

I haven't seen most of these since I was like 11 years old. I can't imagine what they'd be like now. I remember recently seeing the ones where Homer dances with the "exotic dancer" and the bowling instructor one, both centered around some pretty serious themes that didn't appear much in later seasons. Sort of an abstract quality to both of those. Kinda want to rewatch all these now.

plus you'll get the Kubrick references

Taped Seasons 1 and 2 as they aired, re-watched endlessly. Was in college during Seasons 3 through 6, and had a Thursday night class, so I missed most of those. I got caught up during the summer, and later in syndication (with those infernal cuts!)

During Season 7 I was living in an area without a Fox affiliate. My parents taped it every week and sent me the full tape. I spent an entire Saturday watching that tape, and then again and again, and again and again and again. It was wall-to-wall classics: Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part 2 through Mother Simpson, with the previous year's Treehouse of Horror and Itchy & Scratchy Land.

plus you'll get the Kubrick references

― Miss Arlington twirls for the Coal Heavers (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, October 2, 2013 1:06 PM (2 minutes ago)

ha! I bought a dodgy Kubrick DVD boxset from China and watched all of his movies in about a 2 week span. this was literally my first thought after many of them, "ahhh, now I get that scene in that Simpsons episode..."

pre-DVD era me and my housemates would dedicate ourselves to taping every episode as it aired, since the syndicated repeats were edited. watched those tapes over and over and over

yeah millenials must have the same experience watching Citizen Kane. "It's the Mr Burns song..."

you mean White Stripes song, surely

http://i.imgur.com/of0nFo9.jpg

I'm convinced you can almost entirely create Citizen Kane with clips from The Simpsons at this point.

http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z74/IanTheCool/1f01_015.jpg

love love love the weird ambience of early simpsons -- entire minutes go by with no jokes! homer says smart things! entire episodes revolve around bart's pranks! the animation is so stretchy and weird!

that said, the season 1 dvd is kind of a ripoff -- they really should've thrown the tracey ullman shorts on there.

apart from the christmas episode (which can hold its own with any TV christmas episode imo), the standout here is 'krusty gets busted.' sideshow bob is a fully formed character from the start -- this actually still might be my favorite sideshow bob episode.

The pacing in S1 is what jumps out the most at me. Jokes and scenes are quickly established, done with and they move on to the next thing. Sometimes awkwardly so. The Klasky-Csupo animation seems so jarring now, but frankly I'll take it over the shitty computerised way they do it now.

Also, anyone who continues to whine/debate about when the show jumped the shark is gettin FPed by me. WEVE DONE THAT TO DEATH.

Albert Brooks as both RV salesman Cowboy Bob and bowler/Marge paramour Jacques. There are outtakes on the DVD of Brooks improvising as Jacques that are simply amazing.

Yes, I was about to say the same. I think a lot of his and Marge's exchanges were also fairly live/adlibbed, iirc?

There's heaps to love about this early stuff tho. The RDRR nerdjoke in "Bart the Genius", the whole Marge/Jacque dialogue, black Mr Smithers (love to know the story behind that), "Krusty wore big, floppy shoes, but he's got little feet,like all good-hearted people".

no one who saw these first in syndication or on DVDs should be entitled to any opinion on this whateoever

I opened the thread again this morning and am still laughing over Homer's rabbit trap.

The more I think on this, the more "Bart the Genius" stands out as a potential vote, although "Life on the Fast Lane" is still the front runner for me.

http://home.comcast.net/~doa4/RDRRstare.gif

i also have a fondness for 'bart the general,' but i can't tell if it's because it's a good episode or because i enjoyed the bully-gets-his-comeuppance aspect

Was that the only instance of Marcia Wallace doing a non-Mrs. Krabappel voice?

xp

Use in scientific research[edit source]
"Bart the General" and Seinfeld's "The Tape" were used in a Dartmouth College experiment to study brain activity in relation to humorous moments in television shows. The results were published in a 2004 issue of the academic journal Neurolmage. The researchers noted, "During moments of humor detection, significant [brain] activation was noted in the left posterior middle temporal gyrus ... and left inferior frontal gyrus".[10]

wtf, there are like 100 funnier simpsons episodes

maybe the jokes come too fast and furious in better episodes. "humor detection" would be going on almost the entire time!

http://i.imgur.com/4fGuv9Q.gif

I just want to spend my whole day watching that.

Bumping.

I still haven't voted. :\

i think i'll vote bart the genius, was kind of the quintessential simpsons episode for me when the show first started. i watched these episodes then they originally aired, i was 7 years old!! i had like the only family in the neighborhood whose parents let their kids watch the simpsons. my whole family watched it together and we were totally hooked (except my mom), recording every episode on VHS until season 9. my oldest brother would come home from college and we'd all watch them together in marathon sessions

seasons 2-8/10 are going to be ROOOOOOOUGH choosing

Went w/ telltale head bc of story structure w/ call of the simpsons a close 2

xp yeah, might need to include an "ALL OF THEM" option so nobody has to Sophie's Choice

Went w/ telltale head bc of story structure

Man Simpsons used to be so good at structure, one of the saddest things about the newer ones is they are mostly just a bunch of unconnected wacky shit happening.

tbf, they've lost around 2-3 minutes per episode since 1990, which writers have said has messed with the plotting and structure significantly.

So, given the 3 minutes they gave Del Toro, how are they going to shoehorn 3 stories into the 14 minutes they have left for this year's Treehouse?

Del Toro is directing a Treehouse segment? Interesting...

I'm another who rewatched this recently and was surprised by how good it was, there's a slight dissonance because it's quite far from the show it had become even by the middle of season 2, but from a very early point they'd constructed something very consistent and distinct. It presents its subversiveness and its cleverness in a different way than it would later, but still goes impressively far in both respects. 'There's No Disgrace Like Home' stands out in my memory as a dud in a way that none of the others are, a couple of others are a bit weak, but overall this was already great TV. Gonna struggle to make my decision between five or six of them...

Don't get the "Disgrace" hate. There's some great stuff at the picnic and it ends with the family willingly shocking each other silly.

'there's no disgrace like home' - come on, the electric shock therapy bit is one of the best gags of season 1

xp!

Jeez what's ILE come to when we can't do a bit of hatin'. Actually 'No Disgrace...' isn't as clear in my memory as the others, maybe I forgot about it in my most recent season rewatch. Don't remember much besides drunk Marge and the shock therapy. More than the others I think it has the external problem of being hard to reconcile with where the show would later go, what with the inverted Homer-Marge dynamic.

babysitter bandit episode by far the shittiest of season 1

yea even my 7 year old self didn't like that episode

Shocked they didn't cancel the show right then and there.

Can you imagine if that HAD aired as the first ep, as planned? Even after being sent back for re-animation?

I think that's the only pre-crapulence Simpsons episode I've only seen twice. And I don't mind if I never see it again.

I think one of my favorite quotes when I first started watching these is from There's No Disgrace Like Home:

Homer: I'm sorry, Marge, but sometimes I think we're the worst family in town.
Marge: Maybe we should move to a larger community.

Kind of weird how different the characters were back in season 1.

i watched these episodes then they originally aired, i was 7 years old!!

jesus fuck I'm old

Does "Bart the General" contain the series' first self-referential moment? I'm thinking of when Grandpa is writing his (hilarious) letter to a TV network in which, among other things, he lists a bunch of words that he requests never be mentioned on television again, including "family jewels" (referring back to earlier in the episode when Homer told Bart to "go for the family jewels" when fighting Nelson). Maybe not a proper self-referential moment in that its referencing something from the same episode, but the moment nevertheless feels conscious of the influence that the show was starting/about to have on the culture (definitely in retrospect, if not so much at the time).

First self-referential moment I can recall (noticed it at the time, "Oh wow!") is in the season two episode where Burns runs for Governor - Bart gets his picture in the paper for catching a three-eyed fish, and cuts out the newspaper clipping to paste it in a scrapbook next to another clipping about the decapitation of the Jeremiah Springfield statue.

Season One seems full of pokes at the show's supposed negative influence on kids - Krusty Gets Busted is basically all about it! I don't know how much lead time they had; they might have just been guessing that they'd get pushback from parent groups and such. But the 'family jewels' callback is a different kind of gag, I guess.

I'm amazed those are callbacks I never noticed before! And I watch my DVDs all the damn time.

Just watched "Bart the General." Not seeing why it's gotten so much attention here. A few good sight gags (Bart rolling home in the trash can) and a couple of moments of sparkle in the script, but overall a bit rote. Like a Dennis the Menace episode with a few attempts at real jokes. Herman really doesn't add much, either - easy to see why they didn't use him much again. A more intense, OTT version of that concept (like the 'Nam vet history teacher on Daria) could have taken them places. Abe, at least, has a little of what would later make him so great.

Telltale Head: pretty decent! Felt 'fuller' than some of these have, probably because of the (admittedly underdeveloped) B-story about Homer's football bet and the bowling ball catalogue. (Wondering, in fact, if I'm missing a resolution to that - some of my friend's collection is from syndicated reruns.) As elsewhere, certain scenes/gags play out too long, like Lovejoy unintentionally lip-synching the color commentary, but here it's charming rather than grating.

Watched Season One not too long ago and it struck me how much heart these early episodes had. Bart actually, legitimately CRIES in three separate episodes! Anyway, "Homer's Night Out" is easily top ten all-time for me, so I'm voting for that one. Homer and the burlesque singer doing "I Could Love a Million Girls" (from Ragtime!) always makes me smile. "It's an honor to have a reeeeal swingin' cat with us tonight. Homer Simpson: Party Guy."

There's also this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBTYri2KGEE

I've hardly caught any 'late, bad' Simpsons, but this was just on telly and it was awful. Most of it was watchable but not funny, but Nelson and Lisa acting out of character was just so painfully pointless and dreadful. Like, I'm not sure what they were even trying to do with it? Just so lacklustre.

Thread for heaping derision (or sadness) on recent Simpsons probably belongs elsewhere, if at all, but I just caught a 2013 ep last night:

http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Love_is_a_Many_Splintered_Thing

...and yeah, watchable but never funny describes it perfectly. There were a million sub-plots, wacky Family Guy-like references to other things, all this stuff happening to no apparent point.

Political biographer Robert A. Caro and former Conan O'Brien bandleader Max Weinberg guest starred as themselves.

Sold

Prefer Max's Futurama cameo tbh

http://theinfosphere.org/images/e/e4/Max_Weinberg.png

I've hardly caught any 'late, bad' Simpsons, but this was just on telly and it was awful

If I'm thinking of the right episode this is the one that has Skinner's eulogy for Martin Prince (who is worngly thought to have died) which begins 'Martin was an shy,awkward child who never had the chance to grow into a weird, unloved adult' which might be my all-time favourite line from the show. But it was pretty crappy by this point, occasional flashes of brilliance aside

Yeah, that line was in it, and not bad. I think Wiggum had a line or two that worked as well. But maybe three lines in the whole thing? Come on, that's not enough.

caught the first two episodes of the season. the 'homeland' parody or whatever it was was completely unfunny and kind of incomprehensible. might have been partly due to my low expectations but the halloween episode was actually kind of fun, laughed out loud a few times at the dr. seuss parody especially. but was also struck by the sort of casually mean-spirited tone of the whole thing, callous in a way that i don't remember the older halloween episodes being.

gettin an itchy SB finger over here guys.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Crap!

So, I've seen all of these at some point in time, some more than once, but I'd hoped to rewatch most of them before the poll was up. As it is, I've just done "Bart the Genius," "Krusty Gets Busted," "Bart the General," and "The Telltale Head." Ugh. It sounds like "There's No Disgrace" and "Homer's Night Out" are the other big ones I'm missing - maybe "Crepes of Wrath" too (which I'm sort of curious about since I remember it being so strange).

Ended up voting "Life on the Fast Lane" simply because its the most consistently funny of these.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

haha I wonder if the thread title swung this since nobody can be arsed to actually revisit these

Wow, never seen a poll with so little curve

Tough but fair. Season 2 tomorrow!

I've been finding myself re-watching the early seasons of The Simpsons recently, and I was surprised by just how many of these episodes I remembered. There was quite a few of these episodes I hadn't really seen since the early '90s, and I was struck by how slower-paced, much less surreal and relatively undeveloped (character-wise) these episodes are in hindsight.

However, I still like this season, and I think its flaws only become apparent with hindsight - it was fine at the time!

The scene where Marge unplugs the TV just as Homer is finally going to defeat Bart at that boxing game is still as fucking funny to me as the first time I saw it. As is Bart receiving/testing out his spy camera, Homer screaming at Bart and Lisa "BE NORMAL! BE NORMAL!" at Burns' picnic while Marge gets drunk on punch (which now all seems strange to watch all these seasons later) - and, of course, "KWYJIBO" ...