Yes, it does have singing. And there’s only four Simpsons episodes with Conan credited as writer: New Kind on the Block, Marge and the Monorail, Homer Goes to College, and Treehouse of Horror IV. Although he did produce 48 episodes (including perhaps the greatest Simpsons episode ever, Cape Feare.) I’m not sure whether those include Conan in the credits or what the deal is. If production credits are included, you’re throwing out a lot of classic Simpsons episodes.
Maybe that’s why I like it. When I’m watching TV, I pay attention to every single word of the show.
No, I love the Beatles.
I spent most of my childhood watching exclusively Nickelodeon - never anything else. My favorite non-cartoon show was The Adventures of Pete and Pete, which was a surreal and extremely “hip” program that I’d sort of compare to an Arrested Development for kids. (The intro with Polaris rocking out on the Wrigley’s front lawn is forever etched into my memory and “Hey Sandy” is one of my favorite songs to this day.)
My favorite cartoon shows were Doug and Rocko’s Modern Life. Definitely preferred Doug. I never got into Ren and Stimpy - I just found it to be too…gross. Even the color palette of the show somehow seemed gross, as it it gave off a bad smell or something.
My girlfriend is a big fan of Futurama and she wanted me to watch it with her so I did. I had mixed feelings about it. I found some of it to be pretty funny - more so than the Simpsons, at least from what I’d seen of the latter, but some of the characters just really got on my nerves. Zoidberg, for instance - I can’t stand that fucking character. Everything he says or does seems to be a stupid one-off sidetrack digression from the main storyline. I got really sick of his goofy little stunts, really fast. (This is nothing compared to the Family Guy side-gags, which really drive me bonkers - I can’t even stomach 2 minutes of that show because of those damn little side-track things or flashbacks or whatever they are that seem to occur every ten seconds.)
I liked South Park when I was around 12 and 13 for the same reason I liked Marilyn Manson and Eminem - it pissed off my parents, and it relied on shock value. I can’t dig South Park anymore. I don’t find political or religious humor to be funny, and the shock thing wore off a long time ago.
My favorite cartoon show as of now is King of the Hill. I think it’s a totally unique show in that it’s almost more serious than it is comedic. Sometimes it can be downright depressing. It gives a wonderfully quirky presentation of small-town life and the characters, while exaggerated, really do come off like real people, people I know. Some of them like Gribble and Boomhauer are sort of gag characters, granted, but the main Hill family that the show centers on, I find to be very sympathetic, multi-faceted, and real.
In the episode where their dog Lady Bird runs away, there’s a scene where Hank just goes into the garage, closes the garage door, and then turns on his table saw. You think, “why is he turning on that saw?” and then, he starts to cry, because he misses his dog so much. He turned on the saw so that nobody would hear him crying. That one scene resonated with me a lot, and it’s stuff like that which makes King of the Hill my favorite cartoon.
I’m just glad he got to me in time to get me watching The Simpsons so I was already primed when King of the Hill, one of the best shows of all time, started airing.
I was reading through your post, Argent Towers, thinking “man, this guy’s tastes are just the total opposite of mine and I don’t see how he doesn’t like blah, blah blah, whatever.” But then you said
… and I wanted to reach through the screen and give you a high-five. At least you’re dead-on about one thing! King of the Hill is the most underrated show on television, and has been for years. And somehow, its last three seasons have been the best of the series (IMHO). After being on the air for a decade!
I love the Simpsons and the King of the Hill for different reasons.
I really love Lucky in KotH. He slips on pee-pee gets $15,000 and now he thinks he’s set for life and for his situation he probably is.
I love his religious philosophy as it mirrors mine. Basically wherever he is he is with God and so there is no need to go to church. Luo-Ann asks him where him and God are going to be haning out and he says, “At the Jiffy-Lube getting an oil change.” or something like that.
A show that combines *A Streetcar Named Desire[/ and i] with Ayn Rand and The Great Escape, has a “Treehouse of Fear” (Halloween) episode reciting Poe’s “The Raven”, features an episode that simultaneously references Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and The Pirates of Penzance, and works in the occasional Thomas Pynchon reference is pandering to the lowest common denominator? Phew, you must have some pretty high standards for satirical wit. Admittedly, the original marketing campaign (which mostly had Bart saying, “Eat my shorts” in various formats) was pretty inane, but hardly representative of the show’s potential. I guess the quality recent series have tailed off–I stopped watching it back in 2002 when I no longer had television–but the early series had some gut-busting moments, my favorites being Lisa’s decision to become a vegetarian (especially the propaganda film from the Meat Council narrated by Troy McClure–“If a cow got the chance he’d eat you and everyone you care about!”) and the Halloween episode where Homer falls into the mysterious “third dimension” (“This forms a three dimensional object known as a cube, or in honor of its discoverer, a Frinkahedron. Hum who hey who hey,”) a parody of an old Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost” written by Richard Matheson.
At its best, at least, it’s a brilliant show, easily smarter and funnier than pretty much anything on television. I’m going to guess that anyone who has actually watched the show a few times and still doesn’t like it is also not a fan of Arrested Development, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Hating a show that one hasn’t seen sufficiently to make a critical assessment, strictly on the contrarian basis of its mass popularity, is pretty shallow. On the other hand, if one just doesn’t like the puzzle of blink-and-you-miss it pop culture references and elliptical and sometimes self-referential storylines, well then, The Simpsons certainly wouldn’t suit.
Stranger
Another quote “We live in a society of laws, why do you think I took you to see all those Police Academy movies? For fun? Well I didn’t hear anybody laughing! Did you?”
I cannot stand the Simpsons now. I stopped watching about 10 years ago. The first 7 seasons are classics.
Don’t let Ainsley Hayes hear you say that…
You’re confusing The Pirates of Penzance with HMS Pinafore, I’m pretty sure
I always really enjoyed:
“When I was a pup, we got spanked by Presidents till the cows came home. Grover Cleveland spanked me on two nonconsecutive occasions.”
$53,000 - but he spent a lot of it on his new truck and its shiny rims.
Not as much anymore. You’re, IIRC from another thread, 22. That means you were something like 3 or 4 when The Simpsons debuted. I’m 27, been watching since the start, and I think their viewership drops off sharply with every year below me. My 23 year old sister and her friends never watched The Simpsons. The kids I go to school with (mostly 18-25 range) don’t watch The Simpsons and never did. Sure, it’s ubiquitous and everyone has seen it, but most of the hardcore fans seem to be my age and up (yeah, I know, some 19 year old is gonna come in here and say he and all his friends have been watching since the womb - I’m talking generalities here.)
I don’t think you hate The Simpsons so much as you’re post-Simpsons. You’re too young, kid ;).
(by the way, I agree with you about Hank of the Hill. I was shocked when I did a primetime cartoons thread here and it got no love.)
To be fair I wasn’t totally serious. Every once in a while I hear someone say they hate the Beatles, or they hate Star Wars, or something along those lines. Whether or not you enjoy a show is all a matter of taste, but like it or not you can’t deny it is an incredibly influential show, and any adult-aimed cartoon that came after it owes it a huge debt. To say you hate it, after seeing “maybe five episodes” is just silly.
Ah, but is he familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda?
People dismiss King of the Hill because it’s “about rednecks.”
Anyway, I can definitely hate the Simpsons after only seeing 5 episodes. There are things I hate about it that are immediately evident and that I can’t look past. I hate the way the characters look. I hate the slack jawed weak-chin look of them, physically - it does not appeal to me. I don’t like the voice acting. I especially hate Marge’s voice but I don’t like any of the others either. They’re simply too exaggerated to be pleasant to my ears. I can watch 100 episodes of the Simpsons, and it’s not going to grow on me.
I don’t mind King of the Hill, it’s a well-written, solid show, but I’ve never quite fallen in love with it. I just don’t understand why it’s a cartoon, rather than a normal sitcom with real actors. It doesn’t seem to me that using the cartoon medium really adds anything to the show.
I can laugh at the Simpsons but the South Park episode, “Simpsons Did It”, sums it up. They’ve done everything, and now it’s just a rehash of the same old again and again and again.
If it was a “normal sitcom,” it would probably have a laugh track, which would immediately make it, in my opinion, a piece of shit. I can’t watch anything with a laugh track. One of the reasons I like Arrested Development so much is that it has no laugh track. Pete and Pete, which was sort of an Arrested Development for kids, didn’t have one either. Also the fact that it’s a cartoon but done in a relatively realistic style, rather than an exaggerated one like the Simpsons, gives it sort of a timeless look, like R. Crumb’s drawings.
Yea, they don’t get it. It’s not really about Rednecks, it’s about a suburban middle-class family from Texas.