More like... Treehouse of Bore-or
I think I may have mentioned at some point already, but I have a TV now. I accepted a friend's TV as a gift when she was leaving Miami. It hasn't changed my life too much, except that I watch DVDs on a TV now instead of on a computer monitor. Although, I must admit, as much as I don't like admitting that I ever watch sports, that I've been watching some amount of NFL football most Sundays. Why? Not sure really, I guess because I can. I don't have much to say about that really - I've always kept of with sports to some extent, though the relationship between my sports-watching self and my sports-hating self shifts over time. Generally ambivalent these days. The Dolphins are a pretty fun team to watch this year, I must admit. At least their defense, anyway.
I bring it up because watching football (I guess mostly it was watching the Giants-Steelers game on Fox last weekend) caused me to see some number of commercials for the new Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" Episode. It looked like it might be funny. Transformers and the Peanuts. I liked Transformers and Peanuts. So I tuned in, for the first time in years, to a Simpsons episode as it premiered (I burned out at around the 10th season, by my recollection, which puts my decline in interest in the Simpsons at already a decade old (maybe it was more like the 12th season when I finally gave up for good...)). I should give away the TV. What an f-ing disappointment.
It may be because I'm taking a class currently on plot, but the fact that these three vignettes had barely more ideas than the average SNL skit and even less action was pretty hugely disappointing. I did enjoy them having Homer kill Neil Armstrong, but only because, as some of you might remember, I spent a brief segment of the summer speculating as to whether or not Neil Armstrong was dead while refusing to look it up on the internet (I honestly didn't know whether he was or not, and finally got an answer when a couple random citizens in Hell's Kitchen overheard me talking about it in a small coffee shop). The funny thing is, I misremembered the answer I got then (because the story of the answer-getting is more about how the people that let me and my friends about Armstrong than went off on a very strange tirade about the Soviet space program, and then Star Trek and then Vulcans which caused myself and my friends to quickly vacate the cafe), and when Neil Armstrong showed up on The Simpsons, I thought to myself that they had fucked up because he was already dead.
Beyond that, however, it was really a crappy episode. Ideas are not jokes. Some ideas are funny, but I would generally argue that successful cartoons need a combination of ideas, jokes, and plot (e.g. the first six or seven seasons of The Simpsons, or South Park (which is generally still successful even when its not funny)). Furthermore, the writers at one point have Nelson tell Milhouse that an idea of Milhouse's is "Super-gay." Certainly not the kind of joke that would have shown up in the good old days of The Simpsons. And even worse, in the sames story, when making a joke about racism, they have Nelson claim that he doesn't discriminate. What the fuck? So dismayed am I, that I'm not even sure that I'll go out to a bar tonight to watch the Steelers game on cable.
I bring it up because watching football (I guess mostly it was watching the Giants-Steelers game on Fox last weekend) caused me to see some number of commercials for the new Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" Episode. It looked like it might be funny. Transformers and the Peanuts. I liked Transformers and Peanuts. So I tuned in, for the first time in years, to a Simpsons episode as it premiered (I burned out at around the 10th season, by my recollection, which puts my decline in interest in the Simpsons at already a decade old (maybe it was more like the 12th season when I finally gave up for good...)). I should give away the TV. What an f-ing disappointment.
It may be because I'm taking a class currently on plot, but the fact that these three vignettes had barely more ideas than the average SNL skit and even less action was pretty hugely disappointing. I did enjoy them having Homer kill Neil Armstrong, but only because, as some of you might remember, I spent a brief segment of the summer speculating as to whether or not Neil Armstrong was dead while refusing to look it up on the internet (I honestly didn't know whether he was or not, and finally got an answer when a couple random citizens in Hell's Kitchen overheard me talking about it in a small coffee shop). The funny thing is, I misremembered the answer I got then (because the story of the answer-getting is more about how the people that let me and my friends about Armstrong than went off on a very strange tirade about the Soviet space program, and then Star Trek and then Vulcans which caused myself and my friends to quickly vacate the cafe), and when Neil Armstrong showed up on The Simpsons, I thought to myself that they had fucked up because he was already dead.
Beyond that, however, it was really a crappy episode. Ideas are not jokes. Some ideas are funny, but I would generally argue that successful cartoons need a combination of ideas, jokes, and plot (e.g. the first six or seven seasons of The Simpsons, or South Park (which is generally still successful even when its not funny)). Furthermore, the writers at one point have Nelson tell Milhouse that an idea of Milhouse's is "Super-gay." Certainly not the kind of joke that would have shown up in the good old days of The Simpsons. And even worse, in the sames story, when making a joke about racism, they have Nelson claim that he doesn't discriminate. What the fuck? So dismayed am I, that I'm not even sure that I'll go out to a bar tonight to watch the Steelers game on cable.
1 Comments:
Gone are the days when the Halloween episodes were the hilarious high points of the year: The Shinning, the cursed Frogurt, the end of Zombie Shakespeare, Homer in 3D, Citizen Kang . . . ah, but it was half a lifetime ago now.
Post a Comment
<< Home