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Super Eyepatch Wolf: The Fall of the Simpsons - How it happened
- Thread starter WrenchNinja
- Start date
peanutbutterlatte
Member
Rewatching Season 3 this week makes it painfully obvious. The humour used to be so god damn clever.
Now Homer grunts "I'M HORNY" through a mouth brace. Sigh.
Now Homer grunts "I'M HORNY" through a mouth brace. Sigh.
Sibersk Esto
Banned
I'm thinking of finally biting the bullet and going through the Simpsons now that Simpsons world is a thing.
ElectricBlanketFire
Member
That's actually one of the only "new" episodes (read: 15 YEARS OLD GAAAAH!!!) that I enjoy because Homer is being a nice guy and caring toward his family.
Gentleman Jack
Member
From how this starts it feels like a retread of the material in deadhomersociety's megacolumn: zombie simpsons: how the best show ever became the broadcasting undead
We'll see if he brings something new to this kinda old convo about 'why is the simpsons worse now than 28 years ago?'
Oh he actually lists dhs as a source. So that's nice.
We'll see if he brings something new to this kinda old convo about 'why is the simpsons worse now than 28 years ago?'
Oh he actually lists dhs as a source. So that's nice.
GhostTrick
Banned
TurnipFritters
Member
I think the most recent episode I watched had a South Park parody.
GhostTrick
Banned
They ruined the whole thing. Animation became crap, the wealth of characters became to decrease and gags became less subtles.
Gentleman Jack
Member
I thought that's what they did due to staff complaints of overwork and untenable schedules?
GhostTrick
Banned
Transistor
Banned
You're missing out on some of the greatest comedic television ever
Geno Breaker
Banned
They reair the old episodes all the time though.
Isn't the Simpsons anti continuity though? Maud Flander's death was the only thing actually sticking, that springs to mind.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Yeah that was pretty much the zombie simpsons manifesto condensed into 24 minutes.
Ehhh.
Ehhh.
Regulus Tera
Romanes Eunt Domus
Wish he had talked about the change in animation quality as well.
The video makes it clear that it was closer to a gradual loss of writing staff and not one single major shift that precipitated it.
Devil's advocate
Member
It never really became canon, there are later episodes that contradict or ignore it. Which is also what happened for a lot of other stuff like the Simpson Gene, Homer's half brother or Mister Burns son.
Ravensmash
Member
Great video - thanks for sharing.
That made me feel a mixture of nostalgia, anger and then finally, sadness.
That made me feel a mixture of nostalgia, anger and then finally, sadness.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Modern broadcast networks still operate under a present threat of legal sanction if they don't toe the line on said sensitivities.
Stead Fast
Banned
I never got the impression that anti-continuity as an intentional stance, more that the cast were so well fleshed out that writing staff could play with 'rubber band logic' (something they refer to repeatedly on the commentaries of the peak seasons), in that they could make Homer more stupid in one scene rather than the next if a) the joke would fail without the change, and b) still allowed Homer to snap back into a smarter frame of mind in the next scene without leaving the audience scratching their head. If you could do both, then go nuts. And a lot of canonical inconsistencies occur when this is performed - Mr. Burns and Grandpa spring to mind having wildly different origins depending on an alluded to joke at different points in the series. From one point Mr. Burns parents were poor, and he was adopted by a cold billionaire, in another episode his mother is a wretched hag (still alive) who had an affair with President Taft. Not the same character, but since joke 1 allows us to laugh at how materialistic Mr. Burns is, that even as a child he immediately fled for a Capitalist's idea of heaven (especially suitable since the plot of said episode sees him nearly ruin the town for his stuffed bear), the other reveals a vain, politically motivated businessman with laughably old skeletons in his closet. Neither exist together (unless their is a sick-ass fan theory of how his mother went from loving destitution to sleeping with a president) but both are jokes that reinforces Mr. Burns already staple character.
What makes the Skinner one stick out so much is that the whole plot relies on a joke that is a) flimsy in every single stage of it's execution (from the reveal to the resolution, none of it is funny beyond "haha! lolrandom!") and no amount of 'rubber band logic' can convince an audience that the character of Seymour Skinner was a delinquent turned solider turned academy award worthy actor. By actor, I mean nothing of this man, at any point earlier in the show, gave the rise to the assumption that he is a deceiving person whose true feelings are kept hidden in public. He is flimsy, shambolic, hen-pecked by both mother and staff, stressed, clearly wants what is best for those around him, loyal, belittled, clearly rueful at his core against both mother and boss, sexually repressed - I can go on. All those things and more were crafted by the staff over multiple years as being the common identifiers for Skinner in an episode. What the impostor episode does is say "fuck it!" to all that, Skinner is a fraud and no one ever knew. It's a betrayal of everything the show gave us about his personality, not his history; that a man so beaten as him by life was actually leading a double life, only for said double life to become the accepted reality by the end of the episode.
Where was the joke in that 22 minutes of screen time? It was a conscious laugh at continuity executed so poorly that it is deemed appalling by critics and rarely mentioned by staff, and reeks of the very clear notion that Super Eye-Patch Wolf mentions in the video: it became the pop culture it was satirising, it wasn't making commentary anymore, it was just laughing at itself because it ran out of any other ideas.
Yeah, but it's crazy that just a few decades ago the Simpsons was considered offensive and dark, and now we have stuff like South Park and Rick and Morty on basic cable.
You can have good comedy in those shows with and without them, but they are too often used as a crutch.
Or in the case of something like the Big Bang Theory, the show is an even emptier husk without them.
I'm not 2 mins in and I don't think I can go on watching. Using IMDB user reviews a some kind of yardstick. Simpsons were something like 10 seasons in or more when you could give individual eps. a score and people were already nostalgic about peak Simpsons due to the VHS and later DVDs.
admiraltaftbar
Member
Well made video but I can't agree with anyone who states that the Skinner not really being Skinner episode was some grand starting point of the decline from which the show never recovered. Especially when originally you can pretty much see that Skinner and Agnes' relationship was many times just to set up psycho references (like the one clip played in the video where Skinner looks outside at the Bates-esque home), although the writers did start backing away from those jokes when Skinner was more fleshed out as a character.
The honest answer is just that the writers and the showrunners changed quite a few times and each change brought new ideas that sometimes clashed with each other. This happened even in the golden years but it honestly wasn't a problem. The rise of humor like Family Guy and the need to deliver show after show, year after year just led to a drop in quality for the Simpsons as the newer writers couldn't maintain working on the show if they refined ever joke down to the best joke like the writers did in the golden years.
It sucks but its easy to go back and watch those episodes and nothing will take away from how good they were.
The honest answer is just that the writers and the showrunners changed quite a few times and each change brought new ideas that sometimes clashed with each other. This happened even in the golden years but it honestly wasn't a problem. The rise of humor like Family Guy and the need to deliver show after show, year after year just led to a drop in quality for the Simpsons as the newer writers couldn't maintain working on the show if they refined ever joke down to the best joke like the writers did in the golden years.
It sucks but its easy to go back and watch those episodes and nothing will take away from how good they were.
As much as I usually like SEW for the research he does, he also kinda cocks up some of his information about staff changes by only looking at the specific writing staff.
Like, he has Oakley and Weinstein as having left the show during the point where, uh, they were actually running the series.
Sibersk Esto
Banned
SEW has a problem with his non-opinion videos where it seems like he does very narrow research that can be picked apart quite easily.
They aren't a crutch, they're part of the rhythm and pacing of these shows. Seinfeld without the laughtrack is still good but is missing something at its core. The laughtrack is there to emulate the feel of a stage play, like you're there viewing the lives of these characters with everyone else. They don't hurt or help a show on their own, or cover for their flaws, they're just a mechanism that's part of the genre that can either be used well or not.
One Day at a Time and Big Bang Theory are 2 shows of opposite quality within the same genre. BBT isn't using a laugh track to trick people into laughing, and ODAAT isn't held back by them either. They're a part of a show's DNA, and critic Todd VanderWerff argues that when used correctly, they're like another character on a show.
I dunno. Usually his research seems fine, since.he's not really tackling as big subjects and his sourcebase is at least reasonable (ie: looking at volume sales for Jump series when charting the decline of Bleach)
Here just seems to be a lot of reuse of other people's work and really weak sourcing via IMDB rankings. It also dawns on me that his writing staff thesis is even more questionable because he's clearly looking at season by season, and thus isn't catching that the actual writing staff exodus happened between seasons 4 and 5. The only reason you still get most of the old staff being credited after season 4 is because of season 4 episodes being held over to be shown during season 5. Taking that into consideration, the show was as strong, if not arguably stronger, after the massive shift in staff.
admiraltaftbar
Member
I think it's also a little disingenuous to say Simpsons were always raging against the sitcom machine when a lot of those classic episodes have tons of jokes referencing classic tv that the writers loved.
Whatever.
Andrew Korenchkin
Member
Everyone shits on Apu, but Cletus is more offensive imo. Apu at least has life and is hardly a prop; Cletus is.
Gentleman Jack
Member
Furthermore, count me in the club who hates Homer's Enemy as an episode and among those pretty convinced it represents the biggest point of inflection for how the writers treat Homer the character vs homer the hollow, cartoonish oaf he's become.
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
Cletus has one of the best jokes in the series which makes it all worth it.
He's on top of a telephone pole and says "I can call my Ma while I'm up here. HEY MA! Get off the dang roof!"
That's gold.
Oakley and Weinstein have some awesome DVD commentary on the Season 7 and 8 box sets, and on a number of occasions they lament "I think we actually made Homer too stupid this episode."
I want to say there's even one where they joke about being the team that kicks off the trend of Homer's year-over-year decline in intellect.
Still though....that episode is a bonafide classic. And I'm a huge fan of Season 7 and 8's constant flirting with almost laying the gags on too thick.
True Savior
Member
It's a sad video :/