Cobweb Heart posted:

gently caress outta here dude

frytechnician posted:

The "Maude Death" episode played a few weeks back - caught it having breakfast at my girlfriend's place as I don't bother having a TV. Holy gently caress, that episode is way, WAY worse than I remembered. It is unbelievably clunky, ham-fisted and unnecessarily cruel & heartless. Most of all, it isn't funny. It just makes you groan and all the voice actors sound like they're reading their lines so slowly and obviously, it's like they're trying to make non-english speakers understand them.

Cobweb Heart posted:

Having deliberate eras of the show with different flavors would have been an incredible idea (I'd still only watch the first couple but whatever). There's a British show that did that, Blackadder, right? It actually would have fixed every continuity problem and gave them a stupid but not insulting route for Homer to invent grunge and meet and fall in love with Marge eighty different times. And in fact, it would work forever, get everyone used to spinoffs and alternate shows with the Simpsons name, and even let them keep making episodes at reduced popularity if a major voice actor quits or dies. Almost seems like Ivy League writers should have been able to conceptualize and float it. Too late now lol

Cobweb Heart posted:

Did they? (Really, I didn't watch it)

sout posted:

Homer's Enemy owns

Riptor posted:

No that's Harry Shearer

Houle posted:

Or they would pull a Maude Flanders and just kill off every character he voices. Just have some long painfully unfunny sequence of a bunch of beloved characters dying in horrendously unfunny ways. Or just have half of Springfield be a smoking crater and have none of the characters acknowledge it or the missing characters who don't show up anymore.

cool new Polack jokes posted:

When they stopped voicing incidental characters and starting playing themselves exclusively. Hey it's 50 Cent, maybe he'll help! Hey it's Tony Blair, maybe he'll help!

sweetmercifulcrap posted:

I'd have a very hard time picking a top 5 from seasons 3-8. It's so consistent that I'd say the worst episodes are maybe a B- at worst.

Wizard Master posted:

You got to see Barts dick

sweetmercifulcrap posted:

Oh, the other thing about Marge Be Not Proud is it shows the bullies easily getting away with stealing over and over (although they are stealing useless crap), and the spoiled brat kid who demands and gets two copies of Bonestorm because he doesn't want to share (who's mom makes a comment about what bad parents Bart must have), Milhouse having it and bragging about it... it makes a point to show you why he would be driven toward stealing it and also that the other kids (besides Milhouse) are legit bad kids.

Vookatos posted:

Also holy poo poo, really wouldn't though it would be real, but it sure loving is, was aired only a few month ago and has Big Bang Theory couch gag.

Ein cooler Typ posted:

Ein cooler Typ posted:

it's the same actor she's just 30 years older

berth ell pup posted:

7 is the best season of the simpsons as almost every episode is gold. It starts to crack in 8, 9 is eh 10 it becomes bad.

I contend the Deep Space Homer (s5) is the first truly bad simpsons episode. The premise is contrived, and they guest voices (aldrin?) were poorly done. Some people just can't be voice actors. I bet it took 100 takes to get a suitable "Careful! They're rippled!" and the one they used is still pretty bad.

TF2 HAT MINING RIG posted:

The Principle and the Pauper is actually one of the good season 9 episodes.

Aesop Poprock posted:

...Turn of what century? Ren and Stimpy was like early-mid 90s I don't remember there being a cartoon aesthetic it fits from the early 1900s

Aesop Poprock posted:

Right but that's like 50s-70s stuff

facebook jihad posted:

https://youtu.be/KqFNbCcyFkk

I found this video on YouTube and it's pretty good. Doesn't say too much we don't already know and apes a lot from zombie simpsons. I kind of thought his discussion about the beginnings of the show were pretty informative.

A good click though to summarize a lot of the points made in this thread and others, especially for people who haven't familiarized themselves with it

EnvyJ posted:

Principal and the pauper was great, gently caress you oval office otherwise

OWLS! posted:

I rewatched the movie last night.
It was good for a few laughs.

Phlegmish posted:

There's usually a sort of Gauss curve with (worthwhile) entertainment products, where it starts out rough, they eventually hit their stride and enter a golden age (seasons 3-8/9 for the Simpsons), before inevitably running out of ideas and having the scenarios and writing become increasingly uninspired and self-referential.

The Simpsons is just unique in that the 'decline' period is now the vast majority of their run

General Dog posted:

Guess it depends on how you feel about the post Larry David years. But yeah, a decade seems to be the absolute limit that you can sustain excellence, but that's like living to 120; you're talking 99th percentile at that point. Even an all-timer like 30 Rock, which was never bad, was showing some wear by seasons 5-7.

Whatev posted:

No. It's the opposite. Simpsons Safari is a terrible negative one-off you exuberant virgins.

Whatev posted:

Randomly watched a bad episode on youtube yesterday so here is a really embarrassing bit from it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kknltynNco

steinrokkan posted:

455 likes
24 dislikes

54 40 or gently caress posted:

The Simpsons is still going to be funny if you're a kid. My nephews certainly do discriminate based on season.

General Dog posted:

I'm not sure what a Simpsons recovery would even look like. The show originally caught fire for how different it was from tv orthodoxy, but now it IS tv orthodoxy. Nearly every sitcom on tv, and certainly every animated sitcom use the Simpsons template as a jumping off point. Trying to "reinvigorate" the Simpsons would be like trying to remake I Love Lucy. It's a product of its time, it really can't be divorced from the cultural context of the 1990s.

The characters have reached the point that they're cultural icons on par with something like Mickey Mouse or the Looney Tunes, and like those characters, you reach a point where it's impossible to inject any kind of life into them anymore. Our vision of them is so solidified that they're not allowed to surprise us anymore.

General Dog posted:

I think if the Simpsons post-season 10 existed in a vacuum as its own show, the first ten seasons never existed, nobody would think it was the worst show on television or anything, it would generally just be though of as okay (questions of why it's so popular or why it's lasted so long set aside).

54 40 or gently caress posted:

IIRC they were forced by Fox to do the clip shows, and fox wanted something like every fifth episode to be a clip show or something ridiculous like that.