The Official Simpsons Griefing Thread

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GeneralFriendliness said:
Wait, so people don't like Marge Be Not Proud? I thought it was one of the more well received and highest rated episodes in the series along with other emotional episodes like And Maggie Makes Three and Bart Gets an F.
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The Zombie Simpsons site had this to say about the show.

The exception is “Marge Be Not Proud”, which indulges in the cheap moralizing and rote storytelling of the family sitcoms The Simpsons had started off explicitly mocking.


“Marge Be Not Proud” was, in the parlance of crappy television, a “Very Special Episode”.25 Like so many very special episodes, this one involved a small family crisis brought on by a childish moral breach. Channeling countless television kids who came before him, Bart steals something. That sets in motion a series of television tropes and cliches that play out so predictably that they wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1950s: Bart steals, Bart gets caught, Bart feels bad, Marge finds out, Marge distrusts Bart, Bart feels worse, Bart makes good, they hug, the end.


The episode is made all the more jarring by having Bart be the one who sinks into guilt and self pity. Bart was America’s bad boy, the underachiever who was proud of it. Here he acts like every sitcom kid since television began, haunted by something he did and crushed that his mother is disappointed in him. The Simpsons had never before handled emotions that clumsily.


In the first season, Marge rescued Lisa from bad motherly advice (“Moaning Lisa”); in the second season, Marge accused Bart of ruining Thanksgiving (“Bart vs. Thanksgiving”); in the third season, Homer sulked and didn’t want to go to Bart’s soapbox derby race (“Saturdays of Thunder”); in the fourth season, Marge felt ignored by Homer during her play (“A Streetcar Named Marge”); in the fifth season, Marge threw Homer out (“Secrets of a Successful Marriage”); and in the sixth season, Lisa’s wedding (“Lisa’s Wedding” . . . duh) collapsed because of her love of Homer. Genuine emotional moments were often handled within the framework of the show and The Simpsons knew how to play them with a light touch; using them to swiftly advance the story and then getting them out of the way. But in “Marge Be Not Proud” the emotional moments don’t just linger, they repeatedly grind the story to a halt so that the audience can be assaulted by the obvious time and again.


That tendency has grown considerably worse over time, so compared to episodes in the later seasons, “Marge Be Not Proud” is subtle, witty and well constructed. But while it’s got enough great jokes that it would be the standout of just about anything past Season 10, in Season 7 it sticks out like a sore thumb. It was produced right after “Mother Simpson”, which had ample opportunities to delve into schlock and didn’t, and it preceded “Bart the Fink”, “A Fish Called Selma” and “Summer of 4 Ft. 2”, all of which could’ve easily been weighed down by their heavier moments but weren’t.


In Season 7, it is only “Marge Be Not Proud” that uses a shop worn, moralistic plot and unfolds it at such an agonizingly glacial pace. It is a very special episode, the first one the show ever did, and the harbinger of Zombie Simpsons.
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Make of this what you will.
 
Duncan Hills Coffee said:
The Zombie Simpsons site had this to say about the show.



Make of this what you will.
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To be fair, Dead Homer's Society regards the first 11 seasons to be good It's just that they consider that episode to be antithetical to what The Simpsons is about.

On that note, does anybody else feel that Dead Homer's Society is one giant circlejerk? Don't get me wrong -- I do not disagree at all with their stance on the Classic and Zombie eras of the show, but something about the way they express their CLASSIC SIMPSONS GOOD, ZOMBIE SIMPSONS BAD views is irritating me. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the point of constantly spewing passionate hateboner for something one has once loved and just being negative in general.
 
Brit Crust said:
To be fair, Dead Homer's Society regards the first 11 seasons to be good It's just that they consider that episode to be antithetical to what The Simpsons is about.

On that note, does anybody else feel that Dead Homer's Society is one giant circlejerk? Don't get me wrong -- I do not disagree at all with their stance on the Classic and Zombie eras of the show, but something about the way they express their CLASSIC SIMPSONS GOOD, ZOMBIE SIMPSONS BAD views is irritating me. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the point of constantly spewing passionate hateboner for something one has once loved and just being negative in general.
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What bothers me about Dead Homer Society is that some of their points don't hold a lot of water. One of their points is that the later seasons were "wackier" than the early ones, and I guess that's true, but at the same time some of the classic seasons are full of wackier episodes. Season 6 for example has Itchy and Scratchy Land, complete with the ending where the robots go berserk in a thinly-veiled parody of Jurassic Park, Two Dozen and One Greyhounds where Burns is harvesting animals for outlandish clothing, and Bart's Comet where the whole town panics over a comet that might kill them all. You can certainly say the show got wackier, but if you ask me there was always a wackiness to it, if that makes sense.
 
One of the really old episodes I haven't seen in quite awhile is the one where they go camping. The one where Homer made a trap that catapulted a rabbit, and people thought Homer was Bigfoot.
 
You know what episode I really remember for some odd reason? Homer the Heretic.

Homer: "You know, I have a feeling there's a lesson here."
Marge: "Yes, the lesson is-"
Homer: "No don't tell me! I'll get it. The Lord is vengeful. Oh, spiteful one! Show me who to smite, and they shall be smoten!"
 
ToroidalBoat said:
One of the really old episodes I haven't seen in quite awhile is the one where they go camping. The one where Homer made a trap that catapulted a rabbit, and people thought Homer was Bigfoot.
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Call of the Simpsons, I remember when Burger King used that as the basis for a set of figurines they gave away in their happy meal knockoffs.

bk-camping-set.jpg
 
The episode that made me roll my eyes and stop watching was the one where Bart becomes an emancipated minor and in the span of five minutes they're like "hey look everyone it's Tony Hawk, Blink 182, the cast of Jackass and England's prime minister!"

The sad thing is I think that episode was made in 2001. This show's been rotting for a long time.
 
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Ruin said:
The episode that made me roll my eyes and stop watching was the one where Bart becomes an emancipated minor and in the span of five minutes they're like "hey look everyone it's Tony Hawk, Blink 182, the cast of Jackass and England's prime minister!"

The sad thing is I think that episode was made in 2001. This show's been rotting for a long time.
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That's kinda why I bailed at that point, when the celebrity cameos start to flood in and the jokes turn away from "funny" to "LOOK! pop culture relevence!", that's a big ol' JUMPED THE SHARK neon sign lighting up. Like, when Bart fraudulenty joins the Big Brother program when Homer is too lazy to be a Dad, they at least created a generic character to pair him up with. After 2000, they'd have just paired him up with Hootie and the Blowfish..... just because.

Well, enough griping, more fond memories:


-There's William Henry Harrison

I died in thirty days!
 
Ruin said:
The episode that made me roll my eyes and stop watching was the one where Bart becomes an emancipated minor and in the span of five minutes they're like "hey look everyone it's Tony Hawk, Blink 182, the cast of Jackass and England's prime minister!"

The sad thing is I think that episode was made in 2001. This show's been rotting for a long time.
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That episode was also the 300th episode broadcast and was heavily advertised as a milestone episode at the time.

And I remember it sucking hard.
 
I saw this on Discord the other day. Holy shit, I love everything about this.


I'm surprised the creator doesn't have more views on this, considering the quality. If this were made in 2012 this would have become a meme. Maybe the algorithm just hates quality and wants everyone to subscribe to Jimmy Kimmel.
 
Woah, that was like some Liquid Television-tier shit from back in the day....

Speaking of back in the day. Moe used to be funny when his schtick was acidic surlyness and not self-loathing to the point he's 3 mintues from suicide all the time.

-Show of hands, who here is a designated driver? BEAT IT! I got no room for cheapskates!

-Alright, here's the four-one-one, let's say some gangsta' is dissin' your fly girl? You just give em' one of THESE!

And, apropos of long-ago- funny - *Ozzie Smith appears transparent and floating in the air in the team photograph*
 
TowinKarz said:
Woah, that was like some Liquid Television-tier shit from back in the day....

Speaking of back in the day. Moe used to be funny when his schtick was acidic surlyness and not self-loathing to the point he's 3 mintues from suicide all the time.

-Show of hands, who here is a designated driver? BEAT IT! I got no room for cheapskates!

-Alright, here's the four-one-one, let's say some gangsta' is dissin' your fly girl? You just give em' one of THESE!

And, apropos of long-ago- funny - *Ozzie Smith appears transparent and floating in the air in the team photograph*
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Hell yeah, man. I loved Cartoon Sushi too. Apparently that Bort Sampson guy does all sorts of weird and interesting shit, but his LEGO Shrek video is especially Liquid Television tier. Fun fact: Liquid Television was my first glimpse of Beavis & Butthead way back in the 90's.
 
Michael Jacks0n said:
Hell yeah, man. I loved Cartoon Sushi too. Apparently that Bort Sampson guy does all sorts of weird and interesting shit, but his LEGO Shrek video is especially Liquid Television tier. Fun fact: Liquid Television was my first glimpse of Beavis & Butthead way back in the 90's.
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Aeon Flux, too. And the Idiot Box. And MTV's Oddities with The Head and The Maxx.
 
TowinKarz said:
Speaking of back in the day. Moe used to be funny when his schtick was acidic surlyness and not self-loathing to the point he's 3 mintues from suicide all the time.

-Show of hands, who here is a designated driver? BEAT IT! I got no room for cheapskates!

-Alright, here's the four-one-one, let's say some gangsta' is dissin' your fly girl? You just give em' one of THESE!

And, apropos of long-ago- funny - *Ozzie Smith appears transparent and floating in the air in the team photograph*
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"When I say, 'put your beer on a coaster' I mean it!"
 
I just found this from the same animator who made the Bort Sampson video. It's a demonstration of his LEGO Homer Simpson sculpture...

...BUT, the video is him disassembling it while giving his honest opinion on when the show truly jumped the shark and died a miserable death. Holy shit, this is pretty damn based and redpilled for a LEGO builder. According to his rant, he said the show started to decline in quality at Season 8, and then went into freefall until Seasons 14/15+, which are the "Zombie Simpsons" from Dead Homers Society. He compared Season 8 of the Simpsons to the final concert performances of Led Zeppelin right before they broke up, how it was still arguably the same band as before, but Page and Bonham were so fucked up on drugs that something about it wasn't quite right. I think Season 8 was when their best writers left the show for other projects, and the writing style is definitely apparent. Comparing that to the swan song of a popular rock band makes perfect sense.

 
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