When The Simpsons was good

[Ignatius_S]

No gags here really, just a lovely little animated segment.

I'd never noticed the music is a Spanish guitar type cover of Golden Slumbers! What a nice touch.

It is lovely and also owes rather a lot to the bed sequence in Pierre Étaix's Le Grand Amour.

[idunnosomename]

No gags here really, just a lovely little animated segment.

I'd never noticed the music is a Spanish guitar type cover of Golden Slumbers! What a nice touch.

yes they have to change the music on the first clip show for rights reasons. And turning the incredibly dangerous situation into a Little Nemo style dreamland is just a brilliant gag especially the lengths they take it to.

That first clip show is also a good showreel of their most ambitious animation sequences. Dont skip it!

Why I laugh.

[MattD]

No gags here really, just a lovely little animated segment.

I'd never noticed the music is a Spanish guitar type cover of Golden Slumbers! What a nice touch.

While I think the quality of classic Simpsons owes a lot to the time and culture it was made in (e.g. just one example off the top of my head, Ranier Wolfcastle, as hilarious as he is, riffing off Arnie is really relevant for that time period but not so much today), they lack funny and bittersweet scenes like this (funny as a kid when I watched it, a bit closer to the bone as an overworked adult). Any humour lacks the depth it once had.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I've mentioned it before but the episode where Homer gets sent to India to run the Springfield Nuclear India division or whatever has this line in it, "You're the first man to ever outsource the American worker's sense of entitlement and privilege" in response to Indian workers talking about paid sick leave and personal days.

Apart from the fact that it's aged like fucking milk, LISA says that line.

Lisa.

yes and this highlights one of the worst problems with the simpsons approach to "issues" writing after season 8, and how cowardly the writers were to attach that to Lisa as the "issues" character

because Lisa was established as "good" in the eyes of the audience, it didn't matter if she was actually good or not or if there was age or context appropriate conflicts for her to be involved in. they just had her say stuff that the "good" or "progressive" character could say for cheap shots. i don't think they could have endlessly recycled the disillusionment narratives of Mr Lisa Goes To Washington and Malibu Stacy but those are really great eps, you don't want Lisa to let go of either her childhood or her idealism, but you also want to see her learn and grow up. its a great tension and makes for a lot of funny humour, and the writers can be mean about Lisa without being mean at Lisa (like her constant smartypants references and Howl! at thanksgivings, both cringeworthy and funny)- its the same problem as jerkass Homer. its writing that completely forgets that its supposed create a tension or contradiction in the minds of viewer.

Lisa at her best i think is like Peanuts or Calvin & Hobbes: we want her grow up because she's a smarter version of ourselves at her age, but we also don't want her to grow up because she'll get disillusioned and there won't be the fun of seeing her try to deal with adult problems as a precocious brat anymore. the world's ultimately gonna let her down, we don't actually want to see that play out on screen, just the suggestion of it. for me Lost Our Lisa is the cut off point for her - where's she's alternatively a hapless brat and more worldly than her parents: without a tension between the two, there is zero sense of the whimsy a little girl who just a little bit too smart to exist in reality. i like how that matches to Homer's impulsiveness, i like how Bart and Homer crave each other's approveable on a fundamental father/son level but have very little understanding of each other as people. yet there's a very sweet complicity and mutual understanding with Lisa which seems entirely fitting for Homer, a guy who's just as soft and whimsical as he's quick to anger. its a really nice portrayal of a certain kind of father/daughter relationship that never fell into the stereotype of the daddy's girl that most sitcoms and comedies did. probably still do. i always find it very poignant in classic episodes where Marge scolds Homer "a little girl needs to rely on her daddy" - because it misses the point subtly, Lisa isn't a daddy's girl, the fact that even Marge misses out on Lisa and Homer's relationship is a good way of subtly telling the audience how special it is, how Lisa and Homer have a special mutual understanding. Bart doesn't necessarily like hanging out with Homer but he needs his reactions and approval constantly. Lisa doesn't give a fuck about her fathers opinions but she loves doing things with him and gets sad if he ignores her. its great, when you think of how badly 90s/00s/10s animated comedies did "boys like sport, girls like boys" differences, the difference between Bart and Lisa was handled expertly for 8 seasons then flushed away on a whim. i never felt that Bart = Dumb or Lisa = Smart was the point, both were neglected in different ways and each had a unique relationship with their parents. it wasnt like the usual sitcom "you kids!"

and the less said about My Sister My Sitter the better.

[Ferris]

That first clip show is also a good showreel of their most ambitious animation sequences. Dont skip it!

Loved the meta-format of it as a kid. Also worth it for this gag:



"That's not a question, professor."

[Sebastian Cobb]

i wonder who on this forum has seen the most episodes of the Simpsons to verify that no, they are all bad.

I'd be surprised if there weren't a handful of completists, someone admitted to be still religiously watching Hollyoaks having watched it since it started recently.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Apart from the fact that it's aged like fucking milk, LISA says that line.

Lisa.

"Please, kids, stop fighting. Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil's got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers."

[idunnosomename]

sadly even classic-era Lisa is totally a lib

to be fair, she is eight

[Catalogue Trousers]

Can someone please try to explain to me what is so funny and/or memorable about that Steamed Hams thing?

[non capisco]

STAN! STAN! HE'S OUR BOY! IF HE CAN'T DO IT, NO-ONE.....WILL.

[Shaxberd]

Watched Homer the Heretic today. It's an odd one because the central premise - Homer stops going to church and this is a Big Deal - is very low key and grounded as episode premises go, but also feels very alien to me.

Even in the 90s, even in a sporadically church-going family, it seemed quite unusual to me that the Simpsons went every week and so did most of the rest of the town, and that Homer staying home is seen as such a serious issue by Marge. The kind of mainline Protestantism they adhere to seems to have fallen out of favour significantly in the US these days too. (Do the Simpsons still dress up for church every Sunday in recent episodes? Has there been any comment on the rise of Evangelicalism?) With hindsight I think the Simpsons might have been the first media that made me realise Americans are really serious about their religion.

[idunnosomename]

Can someone please try to explain to me what is so funny and/or memorable about that Steamed Hams thing?

steamed hams is an absolutely brilliant send up of a contrived sitcom cover-up situation that goes to perfectly-judged absurd levels. how Chalmers tests Skinner on his terrible excuses, including specific points like New York State dialects, and then gives up when his explanation is that the Northern Lights are concentrated entirely within his kitchen when his house is on fire. not a line of dialogue is wasted. brilliantly performed by Shearer and Azaria too.

I remember reciting bits of it back-and-forth in school in the 90s long before "internet content". it's basically as good as the best Monty Python sketches how brilliantly done it all is. long may it be a thing imo

[Old Nehamkin]

Can someone please try to explain to me what is so funny and/or memorable about that Steamed Hams thing?

You mean the actual scene itself or all the youtube edits that have sprung up in the last few years? If the former, I guess what's broadly funny about it is that it takes a sort of boilerplate farcical sitcom set-up and compacts it into such a short, stripped-down form that mostly just consists of this mundane pitter-patter between Skinner and Chalmers but still manages to escalate in a ridiculous fashion as Skinner's lies get weirder and less coherent.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Watched Homer the Heretic today. It's an odd one because the central premise - Homer stops going to church and this is a Big Deal - is very low key and grounded as episode premises go, but also feels very alien to me.

Even in the 90s, even in a sporadically church-going family, it seemed quite unusual to me that the Simpsons went every week and so did most of the rest of the town, and that Homer staying home is seen as such a serious issue by Marge. The kind of mainline Protestantism they adhere to seems to have fallen out of favour significantly in the US these days too. (Do the Simpsons still dress up for church every Sunday in recent episodes? Has there been any comment on the rise of Evangelicalism?) With hindsight I think the Simpsons might have been the first media that made me realise Americans are really serious about their religion.

It didn't seem that alien to me at the time because although pretty much everyone I knew didn't go to church regularly like the Simpsons did, both first and middle schools were cofe and the people running them sort of pretended that was still quite common behaviour.

[idunnosomename]

recent Church episodes

Bart becomes a Catholic and the Simpsons' Church is established as "The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism" (as a joke for the "one true church" but it's established as wiki lore now). 2005 Liam Neeson is the Holy Guest Star to save you a click
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Father,_the_Son,_and_the_Holy_Guest_Star

Homer becomes a deacon 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulpit_Friction

Two-parter 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrin%27_Priests

what's quite odd is that Matt Groening had a very agnostic upbringing as far as I can tell. his father Homer was raised Mennonite which is an Anabaptist denomination: not mainline at all (long story short it's related to the Amish). but the Simpson family going to what is obviously a mainline Protestant Church is first established in the 1988 short "The Pagans" so it was a very early idea.

[kalowski]

Are there any good episodes with a punning title because it feels to me that a pun is a great red flag for post S10 shit Simpsons.

[TommyTurnips]

I was surprised to see that some consider season 8 to be the drop off point because I've always considered season 10 to be the safe point to stop watching the simpsons and to this day I haven't seen anything later than season 10, much to the annoyance of my wife who was raving about some episode where Bart starts a boy band. "Whaaaat? You haven't seen that one! It's so good!" she gasped. I quickly googled this episode and found that it's in season 12. "Well no wonder I haven't seen it, it's in season 12". She knows full well my policy on post 90s simpsons but still keeps bringing it up like I'm some massive stick in the mud for not watching the boy band episode.

[Ignatius_S]

recent Church episodes

Bart becomes a Catholic and the Simpsons' Church is established as "The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism" (as a joke for the "one true church" but it's established as wiki lore now). 2005 Liam Neeson is the Holy Guest Star to save you a click
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Father,_the_Son,_and_the_Holy_Guest_Star

Homer becomes a deacon 2013
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulpit_Friction

Two-parter 2020
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrin%27_Priests

what's quite odd is that Matt Groening had a very agnostic upbringing as far as I can tell. his father Homer was raised Mennonite which is an Anabaptist denomination: not mainline at all (long story short it's related to the Amish). but the Simpson family going to what is obviously a mainline Protestant Church is first established in the 1988 short "The Pagans" so it was a very early idea.

There's a long-running tradition in American sitcoms for the main family to be Protestant, or presumably Protestant. When I say long-running, from the 1940s and there are episodes that centre around that.

In David Everitt's masterly biography of Nat Hiken, he makes some reference to this talking about audiences. Car 54, Where Are You? and The Phil Silvers show were both critically lauded and did well in terms of viewers, but with the latter, it was urban audiences, not rural ones that the show did well with. This has been ascribed partly to Nat Hiken's humour and partly due to their multi-ethnicity, playing well to the former but not the latter. Everitt contends that the audiences of that period (late 1950s-early 1960s - although I would say that there's a case for later) in rural areas preferred their sitcoms to based around white, presumably Protestant, families with white bread humour. Networks would respond accordingly.

Also, it's to consider entrenched anti-Catholicism in the States, which meant it was considerably less likely to have a sitcom family who were Catholic. Slight tangent, so I will keep it brief, but when The AV Club looked at an television episode of Dragnet involving a church (a statue of Jesus had vanished) with a Latino congregation, when Joe Friday's partner says 'you people' to the priest, they interpreted this as racism on part of the detective but this was comment was due to their religion, rather than ethnicity. On the radio series that first had the same episode, there's another episode about a Catholic hospital that has drugs stolen from it, the nun (who  clearly isn't Latino) comments about reading the Father Brown crime books to which the same detective remarks 'I didn't know you people had your own police'. The 'you people' is is quite different the character usually talks and it was after listening to both episodes that I twigged that it was due to their religion.

In the King of the Hill, the Hill family are Protestant (Methodist) - like The Simpsons, it fits the tradition of the portrayal of sitcom families in small American towns.

[idunnosomename]

Are there any good episodes with a punning title because it feels to me that a pun is a great red flag for post S10 shit Simpsons.

I mean to be fair there's loads of them early on. they ease off on them mid-period but there's enough established for the shit puns of the Scully years onwards

Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (kicking it off with a ridiculous non-pun)
There's No Disgrace Like Home
Moaning Lisa
The Crepes of Wrath (brilliant pun and my fav episode of S1)
Simpson and Delilah
Dead Putting Society (great episode - to the point I'd rank it as one of my favourites ever - but terrible pun to the point I don't think it can really qualify as ironically bad. its just bad)
Principal Charming
Stark Raving Dad
Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington (another non-pun, but this one doesn't even have the same number of syllables, which is obviously the joke)
A Streetcar Named Marge (same)
Bart of Darkness
Lemon of Troy (now THIS is brilliantly terrible)

[Oh, Nobody]

Are there any good episodes with a punning title because it feels to me that a pun is a great red flag for post S10 shit Simpsons.

Separate Vocations, the best episode.

[neveragain]

I'd never noticed the music is a Spanish guitar type cover of Golden Slumbers! What a nice touch.

Wow. Never noticed that, it's lovely.

[Old Nehamkin]

Dead Putting Society (great episode - to the point I'd rank it as one of my favourites ever - but terrible pun to the point I don't think it can really qualify as ironically bad. its just bad)

Always enjoy how incredibly angry Homer is throughout this episode.

I think in the early days of the show the writers didn't really expect anyone to know or care about the episode titles so consequently they're mostly either straightforwardly literal ("Homer's Barbershop Quartet", "Bart Gets an Elephant") or sometimes a fairly tossed-off pun or allusion as above. Then by the late 90s/early 00s you had episode guides getting published, the full-season box sets starting to come out and much more comprehensive cataloguing of the show online and I guess that's when the thing of every single episode title being a sort of pointedly clever/referential pun became the norm.

[idunnosomename]

they would be printed in TV listings in newspapers though, so people would know them. and the layer of the pre-broadcast listing was important back then: even though they're (mostly) not on screen the titles weren't totally obscure. I knew all the episode titles of the Simpsons on the BBC before I had the internet because they were in the Radio Times (other TV listing magazines were available etc).

[Ferris]

Just remembered Mr Burns' original roster for his team of softball ringers and am trying to explain why I'm laughing at "Mordecai 'three-finger' brown!"

I think they're all real players (Brown* certainly was, as were Honus Wagner and Cap Anson**) and played in roughly the same era? Though I'd have to check, I think those three were all active in the 1910s.


_{*he had a finger pulled off working on a farm as a youth, which mean he held the baseball in a weird way and could impart a ton of spin and strike out batters with his slider (?), or some other breaking pitch anyway
**disappointingly a massive racist, from memory he helped set up segregated leagues like a dead old twat}

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

Was thinking about whatever episode it is where Marge is tired of the family eating dinner off their laps in front of the TV

"Lisa, how was school?"

"How was what, what?"

"School, school!"

"Not time for school."

"I know it's not..." (frustrated Marge noise)

Then later in the same scene:

"I'm going to the dining room to have a conversation. If anyone wants to join me, feel free. ...Hello Marge. Hello Marge, how's the family? I don't wanna talk about it. Mind your own business!"

It's the fact that she passive-aggressively talks loudly enough for them to hear her Having A Conversation, and then immediately gives up with "I don't wanna talk about it".

[Sebastian Cobb]

MATTINGLY GET RID OF THOSE SIDEBURNS!

[Ferris]

"I'm going to the dining room to have a conversation. If anyone wants to join me, feel free. ...Hello Marge. Hello Marge, how's the family? I don't wanna talk about it. Mind your own business!"

That's so good.

MATTINGLY GET RID OF THOSE SIDEBURNS!

He's the current bench coach for the Blue Jays - yelling at him to 'trim those sideburns' in august was worth the price of admission.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Dead Putting Society (great episode - to the point I'd rank it as one of my favourites ever - but terrible pun to the point I don't think it can really qualify as ironically bad. its just bad)

It should have been "Dead Putts Society".

[Video Game Fan 2000]

i would have gone with "golf morning vietnam"

[Video Game Fan 2000]

even with thousands of steam hams this is still one of the funniest things in the world