How do you figure? She was very smart and a brat from the beginning. What came later was the political stuff, but I think she comes off as a takeoff on a lot of people I’ve met.
Michael Jackson. But if you mean celebrities playing themselves, that usually doesn’t add much.
That one worked for me because they did such a clever take on it. It was Michael Jackson playing a guy pretending to be Michael Jackson. It was awesome.
The one-offs that integrated themselves into the plot were good–Ringo Starr or George Harrison. Paul and Linda McCartney…eh, that felt tacked on and that’s not even a new episode. Now it’s kind of like, “GASP! [Insert someone’s name]!” and add a few jokes and that’s it. (The only time that worked for me was “David Crosby! …you’re a musician?”)
Now it just feels so interchangeable. Like, when they put the Who in to that ep about the two Springfields. It could have been any band. I did like the U2 garbage one–but it’s not really all that great.
Also loved Lisa’s Substitute–again, Dustin Hoffman wasn’t playing himself. (Er, um…I mean…Sam Etic!) But they did the little tribute to the Graduate. There was no, “GASP, you’re DUSTIN HOFFMAN!” moment. Followed by Bart making some quip about his recent flops and so on.
Mm, she was meant to be smart from the beginning, but in recent seasons she’s an insufferable know-it-all. Suspension of disbelief gone out of the window. I can easily believe that Homer is a lazy schmuck, Bart a quasi-delinquent and so on, but I can’t believe Lisa is an eight year old (or nine year old, I’ve given up on Simpsons chronology) girl. Take the recent-ish episode on Brazil, where she suddenly became an expert on Brazil all of a sudden. Pfft.
I’d be doing The Simpsons a great disservice if I claimed any celebrity voice use (Kelsey Grammar! Donald Sutherland!) was automatically crap, but where the plot is stretched to accommodate them (Kim Bassinger and that other chap, one of the Baldwins) it becomes transparent and therefore unfunny, to me at least.
Well… the episodes with Homer’s half-brother, voiced by Danny DeVito, were good. The Mel Gibson episode, with its bloodthirsty action-adventure remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, was pretty funny. Likewise the George H.W. Bush-moves-next-door episode (although it wasn’t the ex-President himself doing the voice), which IMHO was a clever take on Dennis the Menace.
The nine baseball players?
That may have been the earliest one, and its success made them believe they could build a classic episode around a celebrity appearance.
The best celebrity cameos have tended to be the ones where the celebrities didn’t play themselves - like Dustin Hoffman as Lisa’s inspirational substitute teacher or Steve Martin as the sanitation commissioner that Homer unseated. But to be fair, the Homerpalozza episode is one of my all time favorites and that featured a bunch of celebrities (Smashing Pumpkins, Peter Frampton, Cypress Hill) as themselves.
As some posters have already said, though, they just haven’t done as a good a job integrating celebrity cameos into the show as they used to. Nowadays it’s more like, “Hey it’s REM” or “Look JK Rowling,” rather than trying to construct a story around them.
“Their money is so gay!”
Aside from the occasional Lisa-centric episodes, I’ve never had any complaint.
Patrick Stewart’s Stonecutter #1 is the gold standard.
“Now let’s get drunk and play ping-pong!”
I think a lot of the difference between the great episodes and the bad episodes isn’t just the humor. But, that the stories lacked a heart. One of my favorite episodes is when they go back in time to show what it was like when Maggie was born. There was a ton of awesome jokes in that episode, but at the heart it was a story about a father who loved his kid in spite of himself. I think recent years that has been lost to just throwing a shitload of jokes out there.
Although, the past seasons haven’t been great. I still found nuggets of fun in a lot of episodes. (But, yeah, the abrupt ending is annoying. Although, the one Fenris brought up was pretty funny. Once in a while it can be ok.) This season I have found to be really good. They have surprised me by sticking the heart back in and I have enjoyed that.
I don’t think it’s the best thing on tv. But, I still prefer bad Simpsons over most of what is on tv. (What is airing currently I would put above it are The Office, and 30 Rock for sure.) Especially, the other Fox comedies. No offense to Family Guy, because it can be funny, but the funny is almost always matched by jokes that are funny because they are gross or pop culture refs that don’t really add up and it doesn’t really have much depth to it. But, still I an say it is funny. That other Seth McFarlane show about the federal agent living with an alien? Is that any good? I saw the first few episodes and it was so terrible (Yet some how it seemed copied directly from Family Guy) that I couldn’t stomach it. Hopefully it improved.
Having said that. I was on a Simpsons listserv from 97 to about 2001 (And on usenet from 92 to about 96) every single episode people would be saying it was the worst and how far the show had fallen. It was an odd phenomenon that makes when people earnestly think the show has fallen look weird because it seems as if people have been saying it since season 2 or 3.
From what I’ve heard on the DVD commentaries, I get the impression that a lot of the show’s heart (and some of the best character development and storytelling) has been due to the influence of James L. Brooks. I wonder if Brooks’s involvement diminished during the “bad” seasons.
I actually thought last Sunday’s episode was pretty funny. Nothing too outlandish or over the top. Homer didn’t act like too much of a jerk. Marge and Lisa were in the background as foils where they should be (I hate Marge episodes…except the ones where she has a drinking problem, and the gambling problem, and when she became a cop, and when she became a real estate agent).
The thing is, we’ve seen Moe in love episodes before. So why have another epsiode where he finds love but now she’s a little person?
They’ve dialed back Homer’s jerkishness pretty significantly of late. He’s not the kind of blue collar everydad he used to be, and he’s still very dumb - with an occasional exception - but on average it’s gone down.
They have done a few episodes centered around the peripheral characters like Disco Stu, Duffman and Renier Wolfcastle, but I agree this is a goldmine they don’t tap often enough, and when they do it’s usually yet another episode about Krusty or Apu.
Personally I’d like to see an episode about Marge’s father. I know he was an airline steward, but other than that I don’t think they’ve ever said much about him.
What about the one where Homer’s thumb got cut off? Deft interweaving of stories, along a fractured timeline. That was from sometime in that period.
Well, when he got out of the Navy, he cursed a lot. It nearly cost him his job as a baby photographer.
That’s American Dad. I like it. Sometimes I laugh more at it than at The Simpsons.
While I still enjoy the show, what I think I miss from its earliest years (say, 1 - 8) is the sense that it was a sitcom that happened to be animated. Of course there were elements unique to cartoons, but the stories weren’t nearly as “out there” as they’ve become over the years. Homer was dumb and often thoughtless, but not so stupid or mean one couldn’t picture why Marge loved him. Marge didn’t spout lines like “what the hello kitty?” or krump, she was sincerely and happily normal and uncool. Lisa was a gifted eight-year-old girl who still loved her Malibu Stacy and Bart was a ten-year-old hellion who could still idolize Krusty and believe his soul existed on a piece of paper. The plots back then often related to recognizable family-, neighbor- or work-related problems. The direction/writing allowed for moments of silence and observation.
Of course, after so many years, the ideas start to dry up and the writers move into the realm of fantasy. And I can like the forays into the bizarre and experimental, especially if they’re related to the characters’ histories or personalities. Like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind riff from some seasons back. But the harsher, cruder, edgier stuff–the stuff some here seem to admire so much in South Park and Family Guy–leaves me cold, and is not why I watch The Simpsons.
One of my favorite episodes has almost nothing happen: Bart vs. Thanksgiving. In one of the great understated moments, we see Maggie sitting by herself watching the half-time show of the big football game. Marge walks past on her way to setting up the table or whatever she’s doing to prepare for the meal, and we see Marge looking with pleased, mild interest at the “Hooray for America” dancer/singers. Then she disappears only to return, again glancing at the screen in distracted pleasure. The moment never fails to make me grin – her behavior is so charming and recognizable.
From the same ep, I love Bart’s little song as he discovers the can opener is hard to use. “Mom it’s bro-ken, mom it’s bro-ken, mom it’s bro-ken, mom it’s bro-ken.” Again, adorable and recognizable behavior in a little kid. Would we get anything like that, nowadays? Would it be considered too sappy? I don’t know but I wish the writers would focus more on observational humor.
I think the biggest indicator of how much better the older episodes were is that the Halloween episodes were a refreshing and surreal change of pace from the regular episodes. Now they’re not much wackier than the regular episodes.
American Dad is not quite as good as Family Guy, but it does have its moments.
That’s my all-time favorite episode.