Simpsons 1/10: "Once Upon A Time In Springfield" & 20th Anniversary Special

90 minutes of Simpsons tonight, with a new episode featuring Anne Hathaway and the late Eartha Kitt and Morgan Spurlock’s one-hour documentary “The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Spectacular in 3-D on Ice!”

Warning! Football in overtime!

Damnit! :mad:

It looks like it’s over now. Hopefully Fox doesn’t insist on airing the fucking Postgame Show now.

Ah, sports events overtime. The bane of my TV viewing existence.

One of the benefits of living in the Mountain Time Zone - no late starts due to sports. :smiley:

What an ending to the game, though!

Pretty tame episode. I love Anne Hathaway’s voice, though.

Speaking of voices, Jackie Mason sounded WAY off. I had to look on IMDB to see if it was someone else doing Rabbi K’s voice.

It was a good episode, but I’d rather have had the 20th Anniversary episode focus on the Simpson family, not have Bart & Lisa play supporting roles in a Krusty episode. We did have a Homer subplot, but they left out Marge! :mad:

Can’t understand why they gave anytime to Jerry Springer but otherwise I am enjoying the 20th Anniversary Show.

I think you can tell the Simpsons staff didn’t think episode 450 was really a big deal, or this wouldn’t have been a Krusty episode. The message at the end was sweet, though. Very good guest turn from Anne Hathaway. The biggest laugh for me came from real life: one of my best friends lives in Mineola, so the dressing room conversation (and that accent) were very funny.

The special didn’t shed a lot of new light on the show, but I enjoyed it. And I won’t lie, it made me feel better about myself. :stuck_out_tongue:

“Big city like Mexico, New York”

Haha!

…And true to Fox form:

This also happened with the 300th episode and several other purported milestone airings. Anyway I’m liking this better the second time though.

The original message had a typical Simpsons twist, which had to be changed for obvious reasons (special preempting regular lineup): “Thanks for 20 years. Now stay tuned for three Seth McFarlane shows.”

The 20th anniversary special was very good. It obviously glossed over a lot of the genesis of the series and the behind-the-scenes problems (and I was surprised Tracey Ullman was willing to sit down, given the bad blood between her and the Simpsons crew), but it was a really good look at how much the show has permeated the culture of America and the world. I can’t still wrap my head around it, even though I know it. For a humorless, delusional hypocrite, I must admit Bill Donohue is a good sport. And “What would the world be like without the Simpsons” is certainly the $64 question. Like Disney animation, Sesame Street, and the New York Yankees, like it or hate it, The Simpsons has influenced so much that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. (The gag at the end referencing the special’s tongue-in-cheek title was pretty good.)

As for the episode itself: eh. Not great, but not bad either. I’m surprised they got Gary Larson to guest-voice- he’s nowhere near a Watterson-level recluse as far as cartoonists go, but he’s hardly been heard from since his retirement.

Nothing to laugh at. The capital of Mexico is often called just “Mexico.” The speaker is naming two different cities.

The Simpson’s episode had been sitting around a bit; Eartha Kitt died a year ago. I see the adjusted the dialog to account for that.

(Disclaimer - this is an attack against the show and the viewer mentality in general, not against mobo85)

sigh and this is exactly what is wrong with what used to be the best television show of all time. Famous guest stars a good episode does not make. Why do they always have to cram the fake-milestone episodes with them. The 100th episode didn’t have any - it was advertised as Bart pulling his biggest prank yet (getting Skinner fired). Were they playing themselves too? Did it have a conversation that goes

Anne: hi, I’m Anne Hathaway
Homer: waaaa! From Rachael Getting Married
Marge: and The Princess Diaries. You’re a famous actress!

etc

well I guess we can still celebrate that the show had 8.5 great seasons. I stopped watching it completely in 2003 because I just couldn’t stand how craptacular it became. I can’t believe I was Bart’s age when the show started…that documentary sounds like something worth checking out though. Assuming it doesn’t start with yet another plug for Super Size Me (Hi, I’m Morgan Spurlock! You might remember me from such documentaries as Super Size Me…and some other documentaries that nobody remembers?)

Well aware of that. Still quite funny. Very funny actually. Only funnier part was Spurlock referencing the Fox lawsuit (if such a lawsuit exists) against the Argentinian Duff beer maker.

This is why you shouldn’t critique something you didn’t watch. She played a Disney Princess character who, in real life, was a young Long Islander and in love with Krusty. Definitely not Anne Hathaway. (Gary Larson and Eartha Kitt did play themselves, but Larson was there for 30 seconds and had two lines, and Kitt’s video appearance was very funny.)

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like it much when the guest stars show up as themselves. It’s usually disappointing. But Hathaway has been on the show twice and didn’t play herself either time.

Other high points: “Son, you say that now, but when you get older, you’ll just think it,” Bart and Milhouse wearing bags over their heads like Bengals and Saints fans of yore, and Eartha Kitt.

If he actually did say that, it would have been really fitting. In a perfect world, the documentary is narrated by Troy McClure.

I miss Troy McClure.

I also enjoyed Krusty’s confusing Milhouse with Lisa i.e. Bart’s ugly sister.

My general point is I miss the old days when The Simpsons DIDN’T use stunt casting to try to get viewers. They didn’t need to, because the show was funny on its own merits! Oftentimes, celebrities would do the show without even being credited (in the early years, big name actors like Dustin Hoffman were worried that appearing on a cartoon show might make them lose credibility), and even if they WERE credited, you wouldn’t know until the credits rolled (did you even know that the likes of Willem Dafoe, Christina Ricci and Johnny Cash did guest voices in season 8?) unless you were listening very closely, because the guest actors would be on the show to ACT (i.e. play a fictional character), not get/give attention to who they are. And if a celebrity DID appear as themself, then they were at least given something relevant to do in the episode, without it feeling like the episode’s writer was kissing the actor’s feet. In the later years, it seemed like every damn big name was passing through Springfield and running into the Simpsons.

The final straw for me was Brother’s Little Helper, the episode that was heavily advertised as having Mark McGwire on the show - this was shortly after he broke the homerun record and his appearance was obviously added into the episode at the last minute. His appearance served no purpose other than publicity, made NO sense within the context of the episode, and worst of all wasn’t even funny!

And from then on, it went even further downhill. There were episodes like when the Simpsons went to a bookfair (as if HOMER would willingly go to one) JUST so that a bunch of famous authors could do the “hi, I’m XXXX and I wrote YYYYY” appearances, and then maybe get a snark joke and disappear again. Again, the Homer I grew up watching would have no idea who John Updike is, much less know enough to insult his writings.

I rest my case…wait, what? Oh, sorry… case closed.

The special was very boring. I couldn’t get through it. Who cares what a celebrity thinks about the Simpsons. Let’s get some background info, or are they saving that for the DVD commentaries so they can sell stuff?

The episode was also marginal. Gee Homer not liking his job, been done so many times before, why not think of something new? It’s not that hard really. Go to any Simpsons group and there are hundreds of ideas by non-writers that have never been done before. Why can’t writers think of new, never been done ideas?

This is what make viewing this mess so hard. The show IS capable of doing better. It reminds me of a kid that gets a “C” in school. He’s capable of doing more but doesn’t care to, 'cause getting by gets him the same benefit as getting an “A”

Why would Burns want Homer back? He sucks. He quits every other episode. There’s no real reason except some lame ass joke the writers throw in at the end. For that matter why would anyone else persue Homer?

Are we really suppose to laugh that Burns says the “special donut” is made from various things including two animals that are now extinct. And then says “You can have these donuts every day.” Oh yeah hysterical how can they have the donut everyday if the animals it’s made from are now extinct.

Yeah I bet the writers got $5,000 to come up with that gem

:frowning:

Maybe you baited the haters by describing the episode this way. But I have zero interest in either of these people, and I loved tonight’s episode: I laughed more than I have at a Simpsons episode in quite some time. (So maybe I was just in a good mood.)