You know, I think I’d actually prefer death over Season 11.
Oh man, I hated that too. Along those lines, I hated when Homer hits the jukebox in one episode and blood starts spraying out his wrist. Stuff like that has no place outside a Halloween episode. It’s become less a sitcom and more an irreverent version of Looney Tunes.
Abe: Deaaaaaaath!
Lisa: That’s the cat, Grandpa.
No, I’m still staying with the Vincent Price egg thing. The same episode included that bizarre ZZ Top/Catholic Church parody for no apparent reason whatsoever.
Yes, the show has been on a slow decline for the last few years. I think they are just running out of situations this family can be put through. Its really amazing they could make the show good for as long as it was considering the characters never age, but in the last few seasons they just seem to be all out of ideas. WHat really irritates me is when you read the “Best of” year end lists now and it has the Simpsons on it and the critic makes some comment about how it is still going strong after all these years. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The recents episodes are no way near as good as prior years. I personally wish Fox would cancel the show. I would be willing to bet they could put reruns on all year in the Sunday time slot and the ratings would drop very little. More shows really serve no purpose except possibly diluting the quality of a great show.
The Simpsons are going to Delaware!
The episode where Bart joined the young Braves and Milhouse was in a boy scouts knockoff and the two factions competed for charity. There’s the end when they fight in the stadium. Afterwards, the scene muddles through untill it hits this:
Milhouse:“I guess the lesson here today is war is not the answer.”
Bart: “Except to all of America’s problems”
To stay neutral here, there is also the bad “liberal guilt” part when bart’s braves go to clean up a forest.
Those lines were so awfully hammed and moronic. The anti-war stance of the episode had been rammed through enough with the charity-competition without this.
The joke about Bill Clinton having sex with pigs awful too. I don’t like Clinton, but this was so disgusting and disrespectful. Making fun him had been accomplished with his quip about meeting Marge in a garden shed behind the White House.
I think the show has started to come back a little lately.
I saw episode too! I didn’t make sense to the below average IQ tv viewer!
One more nitpick about the slow decline, I realize that the Simpsons have always like cameos… but aren’t they getting quite obsessive? Like the episode where Bart divorces his parents and he lives below not only Tony Hawk, but Blink 182 as well. But what really upsets me is now they seem to put in about 10 lines a show of short cameos or spoofs. “That is as [insert analogy of celebrity X]” Those always seem to be the worst jokes of them all. Or where they just feature the celebrity for one second, proceeded by an awful joke or something. I realize that the Simpsons have always done this, but now it seems like a filler. I also vote to cancel the show as well. It may be the longest running animation show ever, but so what, sometimes you have to let the legend die on a burning pyre… or let them starve in a cave… or… something… although that seems to remove any and all credibility for the above post…
It’s hard to remember any best lines, and much harder to remember specific groaners. Still, two things have annoyed me several times:
[ul][li]Cameos that are there just to be random, as if having celebrities on the show is funny in and out of itself. It was funnier when most of the cameos were people actually playing a role in the episode (e.g. Dustin Hoffman as Mr. Bergstrom, or Danny DeVito as Herb)[/li]
Peter Frampton: “God. Homer Simpson wrecks my pig, Cypress Hill steals my orchestra… and Sonic Youth’s in my cooler! Get out of there, you kids!” (pans over to Sonic Youth going through the cooler)
Thurston Moore: “Aw, come on, Mr. Frampton. You’re not gonna eat all that watermelon.”
…and then they don’t appear again in the episode.
[li]Utterly random violence. E.g. when a coin falls on Lenny’s head and gets stuck. As if that wasn’t poor enough, they follow it up with some woman passing by, and Lenny going “Good afternoon, ma’am” and pulling the coin out as if he was lifting his hat. Blood spurts out.[/li]
[li]Jokes where the writers are just trying to be as “wacky” as they can. [/li]
Mr. Burns, after going over a list of all the accidents and other bad stuff Homer has done while working at the power plant: “Now my voice is giving out, so I’m just going to poke you for the next hour or so.” Then he takes out a long stick and starts poking. End of the scene.[/ul]
Few Simpson moments have sucked more ass than Homer’s swashbuckling motorcycle duel with the biker.
How do you rate the jokes about how the show’s quality has declined?
No wait! I like that one!
I liked the jockey/elf episode. It was so wonderfully un-PC.
I want to visit a screen door factory!
Agreed. That whole episode pretty much sucked.
Of the ones I’ve seen I’d vote for the jockey/elf as the Worst…Episode…Ever.
Also agree the show hasn’t had quite the spark it in years past. Aside from the mentioned above one thing that irks me is when they make Homer come off as too dumb. Ok, he’s dumb but sometimes they go for a really whacky level of ultra-dumbness that just doesn’t work.
They are just… sad, I guess. They don’t even come off so much as jokes as trying to pre-empt criticism. They’d probably be funnier if the show’s quality hadn’t actually declined.
I mentioned the same thing on another thread recently, and someone pointed out that it’s not that bad until the third act, where the whole jockey/elf thing starts. So I watched it again, and by golly they were right. The first two-thirds are quality. I think I just remembered disliking it so much because that was one of the first eps to be all “zany” and it was followed by more of the same. The jockey/elf stuff was horrible, but there were some really good lines in the first part.
After Lisa’s school loses the battle of the bands at the fair:
Marge: Well, at least we all had fun at the state fair.
Lisa: You mean state UNfair.
Marge: [sarcastically] Yeah, right, state unfair.
Bart: Zing!