I cannot stand the one where Bleeding Gums Murphy dies.
I don’t even know the name or season of my most hated episode. Marge and Homer were going on a vacation alone–I think it was a cruise. Bart and Lisa for some reason decided that their parents couldn’t have a vacation without them and began chasing them around the world in a weird video-game-looking sequence. That’s where I turned it off. Twice, even. I stopped watching The Simpsons for years because of that episode. What ticked me off most was how inconsistent Bart and Lisa were acting. Before if their parents left them alone they’d have a ball, but all of a sudden they don’t want to be left behind?
I’ve never seen Panda Rape.
That weird videogame sequence, I think, was supposed to be a takeoff of the opening credits to Catch Me If You Can (great movie).
Any episode centered around a celebrity guest or where the family goes to another time frame OR tells stories/fables/myths/fairytales/etc. It’s an immediate channel switch from me.
<cough>ElizabethTaylor<cough>
And I have to second the truly, truly, atrocious Lisa-as-POTUS (with Bart her Billy Carter). Not a single laugh anywhere. Ugh.
I really enjoyed Saddlesore Galactica, BGM dies, and Tanzarian. An early episode that I found totally unentertaining is the one where Bart is an exchange student in France (The Crepes of Wrath?).
But the completely least entertaining episode I can think of was one from maybe 6 years ago in which Grampa loses his driver’s license. I don’t remember anything else about the episode, except that it was totally unfunny.
“The Crepes of Wrath” is an awesome title though.
**
SpazCat**: The Panda Rape episode (god, I hated typing that) is called “Homer vs Dignity”. In the episode, Homer is made Burns’ prank monkey and ridicules himself for money (yes, one of these pranks eventually leads to Homer getting molested by a ferocious panda male). The episode is not without good jokes, I guess, but it’s pretty bad. And it makes the viewer feel bad, which I suppose is why a lot of people hate it.
The stuff about putting antifreeze in wine seemed pretty ludicrous to me at the time. Years later, though, I read about an antifreeze scandal that crippled the Austrian wine industry.
Any episode where Homer gets to say, “Please, please, kids, stop fighting. Maybe Lisa’s right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil’s got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers.” Can’t be all bad.
Ha ha. The same way Homer and Marge had Bart when they were teenagers, yet Bart is only 10, and they are in their 30s.
In response to the OP, all Lisa episodes, except for the one when she becomes a vegan. Even then, its hilarity was all non-Lisa-related. The dinner table scene (“Sure, Lisa, a wonderful *magical *animal.”) was classic.
Heathen! Simpsons Bible/Mythology/Public Domain Stories are awesome.
In fact, they’re the only Simpsons episodes that are guaranteed to be good anymore.
Ahem. Lisa’s a vegetarian, not a vegan.
I wouldn’t pick such an insignificant nit but I’m a vegetarian and I’m a little tired of people being confused about what that means, so I’m a tad touchy on the topic.
Concur. Being topical sometimes cuts both ways.
Some terrible ones here, especially the screaming caterpillar one and the Florida one.
I am surprised not to see “Alone_Again, Natura-Diddily” (where Maude dies) or “The Lastest Gun in the West” (alcoholic cowboy on Krusty’s show). These are two of the least funny episodes, but weren’t trying to be heartwarming or political either.
I thought she had switched over to full veganism judging by some of her rants on the topic.
I’m with BrandonR on this. Those episodes are uniformly weak, and I don’t think I’ve ever so much as chuckled at a single one.
What’s funny is I was going to put vegetarian, then changed it because I remembered a later episode in which Lisa mentioned something about being vegan, then some teenager she was crushing on went on about how he was a level-six vegan, and would not eat anything that casts a shadow.
Upon some Googling, it looks like Lisa said she was only thinking about becoming a vegan, and the boy was only level five. In any case, I was still inaccurate since the episode I was referencing was Lisa’s conversion to vegetarianism and not veganism. Still, stop nitpicking!
I thought overall the episode was horrible. But I did get one good laugh out of it - There’s a scene where the Comic Book Guy is sitting in his store eating Peeps. Homer walks in and says he wants to buy Spider-Man No. 1. He forks over $20,000 that Burns gave him, takes the book and starts tearing out the pages and eating them. CBG collapses and starts writhing on the floor in horror. The topper is when Homer, getting ready to leave, grabs a few Peeps and stuffs them in his mouth.
But the rest of the show, awful.
The Lisa eps tend to be lame.
I’ve seen almost every episode mentioned (somehow managed to avoid “Bart Mangled Banner”), and I have to cast another vote for “Homer vs. Dignity,” a.k.a. “Panda Rape.” If I wanted to squirm uncomfortably through a whole episode and feel dirty afterward, I’d watch Family Guy. The other episodes may have represented low points in the series but didn’t permanently lower my estimation of it, and most of them at least had entertaining moments. Any series that runs for more than a few years is going to have some stinkers.