The Simpsons

I went to a friend's for Turning Red on d+ and we followed it with "Bart Sells His Soul" - was surprised to find they'd decropified it. so at least there's that. the last one I saw on there looked ghastly.

There was outrage over the cropping of The Simpsons pretty early on, and Disney responded rather swiftly. I wish they'd do the same for other shows, though; we've been watching Buffy again and, while I can't remember if the series ever switched over to widescreen during its initial run, I highly doubt it was in that format the beginning of its run (again, not sure when widescreen became the norm).

it was post 2000 iirc

The Wire wasn’t widescreen for instance

but it is now on HBOMax

It didn't truly become the standard until the broadcast HD switch-over in 2009, but most TV productions had already switched in the years immediately before then. Some earlier shows/productions were shot "protected for widescreen", meaning they were framed for both full-frame and widescreen, with the latter being insurance for later syndication (and eventually streaming & BluRay). I don't know if Buffy or The Wire were one of those though.

The Wire wasn't, but they went over the cropped version scene-by-scene to make sure everything worked.

http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/

on Buffy, they didn't: https://www.themarysue.com/remastered-buffy-is-a-butt/

Did Joss write that url?

I caught a new one a couple weeks ago called 'Pixelated and Afraid' that I thought was pretty good. Bit of a throwback, maybe because of covid that it was pretty much just Homer and Marge with one story line.

growing up I remember that Simpsons arcade game being everywhere we went and I don't think I ever made it past the second level. they have a cabinet at a bar I go to and even with $4 worth of quarters I couldn't get past the graveyard level. well today I went with my son to one of those day-pass arcade places and they had one so I told him, lets go we're beating this game today. there's so much of it I hadn't seen, including a genuinely bizarre dream level which is pretty damn out there by 90s arcade standards. its so freaking hard too. by the end I was using up a credit every minute or so. is anyone actually good at this game?

amusingly my son has a Simpsons chess set and a Simpsons backpack and has now played the Simpsons arcade game, I don't think he knows it's a TV show

Lol dude I get exhausted playing that game at the local free play.

Double Dragon is much, much shorter

touched by your fun dad and son arcade experience, frogbs

he has no idea how good he has it

I wish they let smithers be this evil on the show

https://64.media.tumblr.com/06398f409df0b3f4fa349e3fc66e0a1f/tumblr_oruio8GgKu1qhvf1mo1_1280.jpg

thats what makes the game interesting, it was released in 1991 while Season 2 was still airing, so it was mostly developed before the show started getting good. it's got that early Simpsons bootleg weirdness to it.

When you didn't have cable and your exposure to this show was all the merchandise and the arcade game, you thought it was going to be Bart in blue t-shirts, Bartman this, Bartman that

None of us knew it was actually going to be about the PTA disbanding and such

tbf the show WAS very Bart-focused early on

people had a lot of cows back then

thoughts on the postulated season 33+ "renaissance"? I've seen a few episodes and some of them were actually pretty good considering, you know. others not so much. at least it feels like some people on staff are actually trying for once. on the animation side it's a lot less bland than I remember it being for a couple of decades (the "new" opening is still a disgrace)

people have always blamed new writers for ruining the show but if anything it's the old harvard boys in charge (who haven't been hungry or funny since the 90s) who are holding the simpsons back from becoming something really cool (in a new way, not in a "neoclassical" sort of way). in theory I think they could take it somewhere very interesting (that's if julie kavner's throat holds up, and if disney doesn't keep slashing the budget)

xpost My mother loved that Simpsons game because she was in a bowling league when I was like 9 or 10 and since dad was working she'd bring my bro and I to the alley and that video game kept us pretty much preoccupied for hours

I've seen a few newer episodes that made me chuckle but admittedly haven't given it much of a go yet.

once the show started to be ok with Family Guy-ish gags and 'reference' jokes, though, it wasn't for me.

idk the only reason I know johnny carson is a thing is because of classic simpsons and I'm not sure I ever needed to know

but in general I agree - actually it's shocking how family guy-esque the episodes from just before family guy started already feel. clearly it was the style at the time

This happened last night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9ZU0fGoQ00

OK sure

love them but I hoped the pop song montage era of the show was behind us - at least the gen xers have taken over from the boomers now I guess

hang on no I don't love them I mistook them for someone else that's embarrassing

It was only when Maisie saw a TikTok video of Bart and Willie that she realized that he was still alive, so she reconnected with him. Willie then ran back to Scotland to get married to her. Bart is upset over this because he thought that he and Willie had a connection over their dislike of girls.

don't want to jump to conclusions but this sounds like a skipper to me

We've been watching the early era Simpsons with our son. my wife actually hadn't really seen much of it either tbh. That first decade, the episodes are so sharply done, it's just mostly very effortless with the rare awkward moment coming from whenever they're inserting celebrity cameos. Some of those actually do work though a lot of them just feel like the episode is pausing to incorporate them. And then once it hits its family Guy era, it feels like entire episodes are pausing for strained gags gags (and more callous, nastier ones at that) which would have just been an easy layup and all the funnier for it in an earlier time.

Subtract 1 (one) "gags" from that post

I don't watch modern Simpsons much (maybe 1 episode a year) but my impression is that the joke writing is generally okay, but the show has gotten mean-spirited and cynical, and also it seems to be weirdly dismissive of its own audience. it feels like the writers are scared of coming up with something clever and having it go over someone's head. like here I think you have a classic Simpsons gag which they basically ruin by having the characters talk through it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B9EZXV3Gt4

(though I guess this episode is probably 20 years old by now, lmao)

I dunno, I for one would have appreciated a couple more characters providing additional information on Otm Shank and perhaps saying his name another time or two. That would have been very, very funny.

like the episode is pausing to incorporate them. And then once it hits its family Guy era, it feels like entire episodes are pausing for strained gags gags (and more callous, nastier ones at that) which would have just been an easy layup and all the funnier for it in an earlier time.

a Simpsons obsessed fan told me back around 2000 that the episode where Homer refuses to give Grandpa his kidney and flees the hospital is where he jumped ship because it was a level of callousness that was far removed even by Homer's standards

they have hundreds of full episodes of johny carson tonight show on tubi and ive been watching it, lots of the topical humor is lost on me but it’s really funny and a lot weirder than i expected

this movie was so bad, i saw two entire rows walk out! and these people were all on a plane!

it bothered me when i started to notice how common it became to just set up a deadly thing in the scene and end the scene with homer doing it – drink poison, grab a live wire, pull the plug on somebody, etc. Obviously there was always surreal violent slapstick but at some point it became a reflex to just constantly have homer making the most violent & gruesome choices in any given scene, to the point of becoming untethered from what an actual joke is. That’s what they were supposed to be parodying with Itchy & Scratchy but it just took over the actual show.

the thing that made Homer endearing in his ridiculousness in early Simpsons is that he had a humongous heart even if it wasn't immediately apparent at times, from the letter he wrote Marge when he left temporarily to get a job and save up enough to help raise Bart, and he had plenty of moments of being a bad parent/husband, but he was teachable. he always took the stupidest, clumsiest route to the destination but would eventually get there.

xp Flanderization (unsurprisingly the Simpsons is the trope namer & has its own subsection): https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Flanderization/TheSimpsons

By the ninth and tenth seasons, he started to become a Jerkass, and by the eleventh season he lost whatever impulse control he had left, Took a Level in Dumbass and became a dangerously imbecilic, aggressive alcoholic with no emotional control, bursting into tears and throwing a temper tantrum on a regular basis. Lampshaded in "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular":

Troy McClure: Professor Lawrence Pierce of the University of Chicago writes, "I think Homer gets stupider every year." That's not a question, professor, but we'll let the viewers judge for themselves. (Cue montage of Homer being increasingly stupid)

On our last rewatch I remember being surprised by there being bits in season 2 where Homer is a complete cunt who doesn't care about Maggie or forgets that she exists

It obviously got to more ridiculous/all-consuming levels by the time of Grimey (who had it coming)

homer's cruelty has been well documented but his transformation into loudmouth party dude in the late 90s is an underreported aspect of his downfall as a character. he's actually pretty cuddly these days but the damage has been done

IMG isn't the main villain of the simpsons decline but he's the biggest supporting villain imo - he's the one who said they don't need women writers because it's a guy's show. of course marge and lisa were treated even worse than usual at this time. he also wrote the episode where homer killed maude flanders because they couldn't be bothered to pay her voice actress (the main effect of which in universe - because she was such an undeveloped character - was to permanently destroy the comedy between homer and ned)

there isn't really a main villain afaict other than time and an unhealthy addiction to the status quo (giving us absurdities like millennial homer and marge) - and many of the other supporting villains are the heroes of early simpsons after they got rich and tired and complacent

something I miss that got lost pretty early on is the level of class consciousness in the early seasons. I think the transformation of mr burns from villain to harmless old kook is symptomatic of this perspective getting lost as the writers got waaaay too comfortable with hollywood

actually in reeeally early simpsons (the shorts) homer is a massive dick in a more realistic abusive way (groening working through his daddy issues) and I'm glad they grew out of that fast because it wasn't funny

with any long running show I think the overall tone is something that you can't really mess with - even if you add a bunch of characters and change the overall style of humor I think whatever amount of heart and absurdity you have in first couple seasons is what you have to stick with. like with Seinfeld for example if they wanted to do an episode where it was revealed that all the characters really did deeply care about each other I don't think even the best writers on the planet could've pulled it off. and I think that's why the finale didn't really work, it's hard to buy the characters' cumulative misdeeds coming back to haunt them, because that's not how the show ever really worked in the past

a Simpsons obsessed fan told me back around 2000 that the episode where Homer refuses to give Grandpa his kidney and flees the hospital is where he jumped ship because it was a level of callousness that was far removed even by Homer's standards

― a very very unfair (Neanderthal), Monday, December 4, 2023 11:28 AM (forty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

the x-ray with grandpa's exploded kidneys struck me at the time as gross and mean in a way the show usually veered short of

though I admit the Simpsons writers were so good they actually *did* make this work with the Frank Grimes episode, which as I'm sure many people have speculated would've been perfect as a series finale

that even made it onto their albums, like when Mr Burns says during "Look At All These Idiots" (from The Simpsons Sing the Blues) -

That man by the cooler
Drinking water, as if it's free

[SMITHERS]
Oh. That's Homer Simpson, sir
A drone from sector 7-G

[BURNS]
Yes, well, call this Simpson to my office
And stay to watch the fun
If he's 6 feet when he enters
He'll be two feet when I'm done

only real banger on that album

they really put a lot of work early on into developing homer's insecurity as it relates to economics and his experience at work (the christmas episode is an outstanding example) - they lost much of this even while the show was still peaking - by the time grimey shows up everyone including burns now loves homer for some reason

king of the hill - which in some ways is more conservative than the simpsons - does a lot more interesting things with class and employer/employee relations after the simpsons kind of stopped taking it seriously

Grimey episode was kind of an outlier though, I thought the point was everyone saw Homer as a loveable goof because that's how the people watching the show saw him, so the episode was saying "yeah but what if you really had to deal with a guy like this"

and yeah KotH was pretty good with that sort of thing, Hank's relationship with Mr. Strickland is a pretty nuanced thing and imo actually kinda foreshadows the way Republican voters view Donald Trump

something I miss that got lost pretty early on is the level of class consciousness in the early seasons. I think the transformation of mr burns from villain to harmless old kook is symptomatic of this perspective getting lost as the writers got waaaay too comfortable with hollywood

OTM, I've been re-watching the early years as well (in the midst of season 3) and I'd forgotten the degree that the family was economically struggling--lots of mentions of missing car payments or late payments. I don't think that material vanished completely, but certainly seemed to be less of plot focus as seasons went on.

I don't think I could get into a new episode because the show just looks wrong to me now--too slick, too HD.

The kidney episode also bothered me when it aired, I think it must have been one of the last new episodes I watched.