'The Simpsons' Thread

The Principal and the Pauper has one of my favourite gags in The Simpsons. After losing his job, Skinner rejoins the army, but Bart goes to the army base to try to get him to come back. He cycles onto a live firing range, and there's a guy with a mortar who has to pull up and fire into the air to avoid hitting Bart.

Cut to the Kwik-E-Mart and Apu is celebrating the fact that they're becoming a gas station now, with freshly-installed pumps full of petrol. Cue whistling noise, they all look into the air as something approaches.

Cut back to the army base, Bart and Skinner are walking and talking, and suddenly a flaming letter "K" from the Kwik-E-Mart sign lands, unnoticed, in the ground beside them.

I agree entirely that the premise is stupid, and I get that it maybe marked the beginning of the whole "far-too-wacky" era, but it's still got some tremendous jokes.

It has picked up again in the last few years. There’s quite a long period when it went super heavy on pop culture and guest stars which has aged really badly but they started to lay off that and it did get better.

It’s one of the reasons the classic episodes are so well regarded. They are kind of timeless. Not much dates the monorail episode other than really Lenard Nimoy and even then not by much.

The monorail episode is class mainly because of the voice acting of Phil Hartman (RIP).

I think Homer changing from a lovable moron to a brash loudmouth twat is what ruined it for me.

Bingo.

Homer went from being a sweet, well-intentioned and loving (but stupid/naive) father and husband into an absolute wanker.

Oh shit you're right! It's the episode where Flanders becomes Principal isn't it? "God has no place in these walls" and all that! God, it's been so long since I watched any Simpsons I'm totally mixing them all up now.

Oh well then, I guess Principal and the Pauper is irredeemable 

I always liked the implication in certain episodes that Homer had something to him, it's just non-conventional. He's not out-and-out stupid, he can thrive in certain situations, but doing this menial job isn't necessarily fulfilling (obviously he "does it for her" and all that). It's why I like "You Only Move Twice", because as a manager of a small team in a company with non-traditional ideas, he's actually genuinely good at his job. He was also genuinely good when he was promoted way back in the episode where he had hair. There are other examples that I forget - we've already established my Simpsons knowledge has totally fallen by the wayside in this thread...

Anyway, like you all say, somewhere along the line this changed to him being a dangerous idiot, and it's just not as funny, particularly because it loses any element of satire inherent in "nice guy drilled into depression by conforming to the American Dream".

There's a term TVtropes came up with called Flanderization, named after Ned Flanders but applicable to let much any Simpsons character, where a single action or trait of a character is exaggerated more and more over time until it completely consumes the character.

In Ned Flanders case he over time he progressed from a model, of frustrating neighbour into a religious crank. Homer's stupidly came to define him. And so on.

It's not even how the storylines became outlandish - some classic episodes have very outlandish ideas, the Bond villain riff, Itchy and Scratchy killer robots, Homer is selected for a space mission etc -but just the fact the characters become flimsy and the jokes became shit.

It was the best of times, It was the blurst of times...

Or this (the last bit of the clip): 

There's still a few more gems in Season 9 for me - Simpson Tide, King of the Hill and Trash of the Titans are all very strong episodes imo.

Edit - Lisa the Simpson is fantastic, too.

I feel like there was also a point where there was a crossover between Family Guy obviously chasing the Simpsons (S1-3) and sometime around then The Simpsons starting to get even wackier and chasing Family Guy (although without a featured rapist or quite as overt racism etc)