The Official Simpsons Griefing Thread

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MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
I noticed that Ralph was Flanderized pretty hard by season 6. He was kind of dumb up until this point, but everything Ralph has to say for a full episode revolves around his cat, regardless of context. He has now metamorphized into a full on smooth brain. This obviously isn't zombie territory yet, but there are notable omens/symptoms of it early on.

This is an interesting case study of where exactly the show starts its decline. The Principal and the Pauper is the one everyone points to as the turning point, but I'm of the opinion that decline begins in bits and pieces rather than as a whole, since if something performs good overall you're not likely to notice the small things beginning to slip.
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As damning as P&TP is, it's got just enough funny bits scattered throughout it to hold off the rot for what it's worth. Compare it to Homer's Enemy, which has no real redeeming moments but that you can argue that turning Homer into a monster (IE Jerkass Homer) didn't 100% drag the show down since by that point it was an ensemble and the non-Homer centric episodes still occasionally were decent.

But for me, S15's "My Big Fat Geek Wedding" was the point of no return as Al Jean nuking from orbit the Skinner/Krabappel relationship was proof that shit was never going to get better and that there would be no attempt to grow and evolve the characters PERIOD. That episode killed the show for me and I stopped watching the new episodes religiously as a result.


Calandrino said:
Has "Girls Just Want to Have Sums" been pulled from syndication yet? (TW: hate speech) Back in season 17 the show had already been bad about as long as it had been good. Now it's at roughly the midpoint of The Simpsons' run thus far. It's like looking into another dimension. 2006 really is a very very long time ago, isn't it?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aL0MuT0v6ds

Is Gil the last recurring character that even counts? If they tried to throw in any more during the last 20 years or so, I don't think they stuck.
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GJWTHS is still in rotation; it even aired on FXX recently.
 
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
This is an interesting case study of where exactly the show starts its decline. The Principal and the Pauper is the one everyone points to as the turning point, but I'm of the opinion that decline begins in bits and pieces rather than as a whole, since if something performs good overall you're not likely to notice the small things beginning to slip.
Click to expand...
I take TPatP and Homer's Enemy as signs that the writers had exhausted the show's format and maybe didn't even like the characters anymore, to the point that meta material was the only thing to really interest them. At best they make sense as episodes of a show nearing the end of its run, but then it didn't die.

ToroidalBoat said:
I think Futurama would've become "Zombie Futurama" had it continued.

Especially in Current Year Clown World.

Also the newest episodes would've been all CGI and HD.
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A lot of people would tell you that post-cancellation Futurama already sucked anyway. They had great episodes until the end, but they did drop the ball more often as the series went on, and some heavy-handed current year politics started to bleed in. If you want to know what Futurama would be like if it continued airing uninterrupted you can just (god have mercy on you) watch Disenchanted, which is woke, boring, soap opera-ish, and about as funny as an ISIS beheading. It's possibly worse than the lowest points of Zombie Simpsons, and I only say "possibly" because Disenchanted always sucked so you can't get invested enough to be mad about it.
 
Calandrino said:
A lot of people would tell you that post-cancellation Futurama already sucked anyway. They had great episodes until the end, but they did drop the ball more often as the series went on, and some heavy-handed current year politics started to bleed in. If you want to know what Futurama would be like if it continued airing uninterrupted you can just (god have mercy on you) watch Disenchanted, which is woke, boring, soap opera-ish, and about as funny as an ISIS beheading. It's possibly worse than the lowest points of Zombie Simpsons, and I only say "possibly" because Disenchanted always sucked so you can't get invested enough to be mad about it.
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Who even wrote disenchanted anyway? What point does it have? It almost reads like Matt Groening wanted to make his own Game of Thrones but nobody would throw money at one of his projects unless it was "comedy".

As an aside, I think season 6 is on the money for the beginning of the end, where they did the very SJW/Hollywood Communist thing of framing Walt Disney as a Nazi.
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Calandrino said:
Has "Girls Just Want to Have Sums" been pulled from syndication yet? (TW: hate speech) Back in season 17 the show had already been bad about as long as it had been good. Now it's at roughly the midpoint of The Simpsons' run thus far. It's like looking into another dimension. 2006 really is a very very long time ago, isn't it?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=aL0MuT0v6ds

Is Gil the last recurring character that even counts? If they tried to throw in any more during the last 20 years or so, I don't think they stuck.
Click to expand...
yeah I finally saw this a little while back and forgot how Nelson yelling TRANNY would have been considered acceptable in the long-long ago beyond CURRENT YEAR
 
will you sign my copy of watchmen babies in v for vacation?


Ironically that sin't the worse thing to happen to watchmen in the last few years
 
Calandrino said:
I take TPatP and Homer's Enemy as signs that the writers had exhausted the show's format and maybe didn't even like the characters anymore, to the point that meta material was the only thing to really interest them. At best they make sense as episodes of a show nearing the end of its run, but then it didn't die.
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That's sort of what happened. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who wrote most of the episodes for seasons 8 and 9, admitted they didn't think the show would be on for much longer and stated on the DVD commentaries that they were getting experimental.

The show was running out of gas and the writers knew this. It's just that the series, for one reason or another, didn't end when they thought it would.
 
Calandrino said:
A lot of people would tell you that post-cancellation Futurama already sucked anyway.
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MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
Who even wrote disenchanted anyway?
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I really watched Futurama only up to the original finale (the one where Fry gets the robot devil's hands). Then Futurama moved to Comedy Central and I lost access to cable TV, so I couldn't see it anymore. But I did see a bit of the movies, and a new episode here or there. What I saw didn't seem too bad, but then again, I didn't see much of post-original-finale Futurama.

Disenchantment? That fantasy Groening animation? I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Not surprised it went "woke". It was released in 2018, well into Current Year and TDS. Also not surprised it's released only on a streaming service, which is also very Current Year.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
I really watched Futurama only up to the original finale (the one where Fry gets the robot devil's hands). Then Futurama moved to Comedy Central and I lost access to cable TV, so I couldn't see it anymore. But I did see a bit of the movies, and a new episode here or there. What I saw didn't seem too bad, but then again, I didn't see much of post-original-finale Futurama.
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Post-Fox Futurama is pretty good, I'd skip the movies because fuck watching that. Look out for the "end of the universe" episode.
Duncan Hills Coffee said:
That's sort of what happened. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, who wrote most of the episodes for seasons 8 and 9, admitted they didn't think the show would be on for much longer and stated on the DVD commentaries that they were getting experimental.

The show was running out of gas and the writers knew this. It's just that the series, for one reason or another, didn't end when they thought it would.
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I'm of the opinion that the show has potential still but the people behind the wheel are just garbage writers. A competent writer would tear Zombie Simpsons apart.

Actually, here's a thunk, what about the Simpsons comics? Those were considered the most popular comics on the market while they were still in the running, aren't they considered to be significantly better than 2000's Simpsons? Why not just adapt those as episodes?
 
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MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
Isn't Homer's Enemy famous for being one of the best episodes?
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Nope. It's not only the most reviled episode of the series, but the only people who claim to like it are edgelord contrarians within the entertainment business who stan it for the same reason you have faggots inside Hollywood stan "The Last Jedi". Purely due to the fact that the the Hollywood elite can't fucking stand that fans hate said episode and that said episode (combined with the "Homer gets raped by a panda" episode and Principal and the Pauper) did serious damage to the Simpsons brand and that no fans should be allowed to harm a major franchise in such a way to make it less profitable for the Hollywood elite.

Note that Homer's Enemy came out around the time that Simpsons pretty much became a whorehouse bringing on big name celebrities for gratuitous guest spots to anyone considered "hip". Not to mention that it signified the beginning of the "Jerkass Homer" era where Mike Scully explicitly wanted Homer to be more or less evil and abusive and expected people to fucking cheer him on and not care that Homer was no longer likable or a good father and that the writers on the show (as with P&TP) were extremey pissy that fans were not taking damage the two episodes did lying down like good little doormats and actively voicing their complaints.

Ruin said:
PATP at least gave us this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vRIbogQPKws
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P&TP has just enough hilarious bits in it to keep it from full "Homer's Enemy" territory of just being a horrible episode from start to finish, that you can somewhat forgive the rape it did to the show's lore and Skinner himself. Especially since, meta nods aside, they sort of did carry out their pledge to never bring it up again whereas with Homer's Enemy, that episode was ground zero for a major changing in how a main character was presented and written and for the worse.

P&TP really should have ended with a "dream sequence" capper (say, Agnes was in a coma and it reflecting her internal struggle with loving/hating her son and literally dreaming that she could have a better son and how that would backfire on her, perhaps with the plot point that Agnes' hate for Skinner comes from his going off to fight in Vietnam against her wishes, and how she started hating him when he came back 100% stepfordized after being held prisoner in a Vietcong prison camp and not showing any rage or anger at his lost years in a POW camp and it seeding into her mind that Skinner, who was once a lovable rogue who Agnes adored, was now a sissy nerd whose POW experience humbled him and as such had to be a fake and not the real Skinner due to her not being able to accept the change) or it being revealed that the entire episode was a short story Bart wrote for a class project ala Woodland Critters episode of South Park. It would have been something of a cop-out, but it would at least have at least let the writing staff have it's cake and eat it too without damaging Skinner and drawing the wrath of fans as far as being the opening shot on the show's war on it's own lore and backstory.
 
MirrorNoir said:
Nope. It's not only the most reviled episode of the series, but the only people who claim to like it are edgelord contrarians within the entertainment business who stan it for the same reason you have faggots inside Hollywood stan "The Last Jedi". Purely due to the fact that the the Hollywood elite can't fucking stand that fans hate said episode and that said episode (combined with the "Homer gets raped by a panda" episode and Principal and the Pauper) did serious damage to the Simpsons brand and that no fans should be allowed to harm a major franchise in such a way to make it less profitable for the Hollywood elite.

Note that Homer's Enemy came out around the time that Simpsons pretty much became a whorehouse bringing on big name celebrities for gratuitous guest spots to anyone considered "hip". Not to mention that it signified the beginning of the "Jerkass Homer" era where Mike Scully explicitly wanted Homer to be more or less evil and abusive and expected people to fucking cheer him on and not care that Homer was no longer likable or a good father and that the writers on the show (as with P&TP) were extremey pissy that fans were not taking damage the two episodes did lying down like good little doormats and actively voicing their complaints.
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Here I see overwhelming positive reviews with only four low star reviews.

www.imdb.com

"The Simpsons" Homer's Enemy (TV Episode 1997) - IMDb

"The Simpsons" Homer's Enemy (TV Episode 1997) on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com
 
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
Actually, here's a thunk, what about the Simpsons comics? Those were considered the most popular comics on the market while they were still in the running, aren't they considered to be significantly better than 2000's Simpsons? Why not just adapt those as episodes?
Click to expand...
Several reasons:
1. Rights issues
2. The comic ripped off the TV show, doing their own version of certain episodes (like the boy band episode)
3. Meta issues that wouldn't translate to TV due to the writers explicitly spoofing/sending up the comic format, tropes, and business practices
4. Several issues that were very much biting towards Fox and merchandise rights holders (such as the issue dealing with Playmates and scalpers making the Simpsons toy line playsets impossible for normal kids to find/buy at retail for reasonable prices
5. The fact that the comics fully took advantage of the comic format to do stories you can't animate on the cheap or were too "out there" for the TV show
6. The fact that the Scully era writers didn't like the comics, which saw a brief upswing in popularity in the early 00s as the Simpsons first hit zombie territory
 
The post-cancellation episodes of Futurama were very hit and miss; there's some good ones, but just do yourself a favour and skip the episodes that try to tackle current year politics.

Also, I thought Mars was uninhabitable? then suddenly there's native Martians, who at the end of the episode, left Mars to find a new planet when they found out the "bead" was a giant diamond worth a fortune.... then later on, apparently native Martians still live on Mars and are forced to live on squalid reserves.... so which is it? It's pretty obvious they just retconned it to make a social commentary.
 
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