“The bee bit my bottom! Now my bottom’s big!” – Homer Simpson

- By Bob Mackey

When The Simpsons had its prime-time debut in 1989, the show’s animation was considered crude by most. While it’s true that the visuals improved by leaps and bounds after that first rocky year, the original 12 episodes of The Simpsons – despite their roughness – still stand as a major leap forward in the progress of television animation. And over The Simpsons’ first handful of years, talented artists like Brad Bird, David Silverman, Jeffrey Lynch, Jim Reardon, Wes Archer, and Rich Moore (amongst others) not only defined and refined the look of the show; they also raised the bar for a genre of entertainment largely considered — at the time, anyway — a brainless distraction for equally brainless children. For these visionaries, The Simpsons provided the opportunity for endless experimentation; which is why it’s no wonder that most of these folks went on to fame and fortune at outstanding animation studios like Pixar and Rough Draft.

Generally speaking, the animation on the first six-or-so years of The Simpsons is far “looser” than what it would eventually become; the art on these early seasons complemented the excellent writing, instead merely serving as just a platform for the dialogue. For lack of a better term, directors and animators on The Simpsons were once allowed to make their drawings more “cartoony,” which meant deviating from the standard design of a model sheet for the sake of drawing the strong poses necessary to create a visually interesting and, most importantly, funny image. Of course, when this is taken too far, the results can be disastrous: you only need to look at the outtakes from “Some Enchanted Evening” to see what happens when a group of animators gets The Simpsons completely wrong. But, when used correctly, brief bits of cartooniness can add vibrancy and emotion to a scene – which is something the show used to do very well.

Over the years, The Simpsons’ animation became much more conservative and homogenized, and by the end of season eight, the show had lost nearly all of its cartoon snappiness. And as a fan of the show, it’s this quality I miss the most. For my first post on Dead Homer Society, I’ve decided to visually dissect “Homer Goes to College,” which is an excellent showcase for the brilliant animation once seen on The Simpsons. For those worried, this examination isn’t going to be couched in technical terms; as an animation enthusiast, I’m going to try and break this down into terms everyone can understand.

This early scene of Homer chasing a bee down a hallway relies entirely on the animation for its humor. Sure, the idea itself is a little funny, but a sitcom-staged shot of Homer running wouldn’t be as funny as what we see here: strong, goofy poses that punctuate his haplessness.

Here’s a brief instance of some cartoony punctuation. These drawings are incredibly odd when compared to how we normally see Homer, but he quickly snaps back into his normal model once he leaps from the sewer. You can tell whoever drew this was having a lot of fun.

When was the last time The Simpsons made you laugh with a drawing alone? Here, Homer is locked in an exaggerated position that seemingly defies his anatomy, but that only adds to the hilarity of the scene. Strangely enough, Matt Groening always hated this kind of stuff; if you listen to various DVD commentaries, he claims he was always obsessed with giving the characters solid and consistent anatomy. This isn’t inherently bad, but it makes drawings like the ones throughout this post practically illegal.

This shot isn’t particularly mind-blowing, but I picked it because it shows how expressive the characters used to be. Here, Homer’s eyes and mouth are a little bigger than normal, but these small embellishments really sell his sense of panic. In general, eyes on the Simpsons used to be much bigger, and much more expressive, as we’ll see below.

One of the subtle hallmarks of Simpsons animation used to be the eye bulge; animators would sprinkle this little bit of business in dialogue heavy-scenes to accentuate certain words or ideas. Here, Burns isn’t speaking, but his eye bulge adds a little zing to his freak out. If you weren’t aware of the eye bulge, go back and check out some early episodes while keeping this little bit of acting in mind — it’s everywhere.

Again, nothing mind-blowing about the animation here, but the brief bit of squash and stretch before Homer’s standard scream makes his reaction much more expressive.

On these earlier episodes of the Simpsons, it wasn’t odd to see characters emote in ways they never had before. Instead of looking at model sheets for stock expressions, the animators in these days tailored the emotion of their drawings to the unique situation of the scene. We’ve seen Homer angry countless times before, but for some reason, this drawing feels fresh.

An excellent display of self-control from whoever laid out this scene. Later episodes would probably place the emphasis on Homer, but the composition of this shot (which goes on for a while) sells the awkwardness of the situation, and highlights Homer’s choice of seating.

More acting unique to this episode. I don’t think I’ve seen Homer in these poses before or since.

Nothing incredible happening here, but I took this screenshot to highlight how Homer was generally plumper and more retarded in Jim Reardon’s episodes. His walleye here used to be a hallmark of the shows eye acting (along with the bulge), which seems to have been lost to the mists of time.

Another expression I haven’t seen before or since. Something tells me this brief bit of self-satisfaction from Homer wouldn’t look nearly as funny if it was animated five years later.

A really strong pose from Homer. What would you call this emotion? It’s a perfect, dialogue-free reaction to the nerd revealing the reality of their road trip.

This scene begins with an amazing shot and tons of detail. Staging like this is what made The Simpsons so much more visually interesting than anything that had come before. The planning of the prank could have begun with a less complicated shot, but its current layout really sells the mock-drama of the scene.

Another bit of exaggerated animation before Homer pops back into a normal pose.

And again. The simulated motion blur of Sir Oinks-A-Lot’s face is absolutely hilarious, and really makes him seem vicious for those brief few frames. Homer’s eye bulge is equally great; I actually remember slow-mo-ing this scene back when I originally recorded the episode as a kid.

Some fantastic poses from Bart and Lisa that really sell the range of emotions they go through in this scene: from awe, to shock, to panicked urgency. You don’t even need to be aware of the scene’s context to know what they’re feeling.

A hilarious shot, from a perspective of The Simpsons I believe we’ve never seen before or since (or perhaps just not that often). The characters’ unique anatomy makes them extremely weird-looking from certain angles, but going with a strange, funny shot like this just shows how much the animators were willing to experiment.

This may be my favorite bit of animation in the entire history of The Simpsons; in fact, I look forward to this scene every time I watch Homer Goes to College. It’s incredibly brief, but the animators transformed a simple stage direction into an incredibly expressive (and impressive) bit of acting. Every little frame, from Homer’s confident slide out of this chair, to his jaunty little walk, to the way he hands in his paper, completely sells his confidence in a way that dialogue never could. If I didn’t know better — and I don’t — I’d say David Silverman did this scene.

Another great expression to end this post. You can really tell that Homer has no goddamned idea what he’s talking about, here.

Since I have no way to conclude this little article except awkwardly, I’d like to thank you for humoring me in this examination of what I feel is one of The Simpsons’ most-overlooked qualities. If I can muster up the fortitude to do this again, I’ll probably tackle “Homer’s Triple Bypass” next.

“Don’t worry, Simpson, it just so happens I have a chair at Springfield University.” – C.M. Burns

Image used under Creative Commons license from Flickr user bsabarnowl.

“Finally, the great taste of Worcestershire sauce in a soft drink.” – TV Announcer
“Ahhh, steaky.” – TV Guy

[Edited because I've been hearing what I wanted to hear since 1993.  I'm not going to stop referring to Worcestershire sauce as "stanky" though.]

“Someone squeezed all the life out of these kids.  And unless movies and teevee have lied to me, it’s a crusty, bitter old dean.” – Homer Simpson

If you Google “Zombie Simpsons”, the first result is a post I wrote last year called “The Cost of Zombie Simpsons”.  Not being familiar with anything more than the barest outlines of Google’s proprietary alchemy, I can only guess as to why it’s that one and not another.  But if I had pick of our back catalog to occupy that choice spot of search real estate (it gets more traffic than all but a handful of pages here), it’d probably be that one. 

My strained pollution metaphor was prompted by my discovery of a Futurama fan who had never seen “Marge vs. The Monorail”.  He knew of The Simpsons, but had never seen one of their most well known episodes.  I wondered how many people out there, too young to have watched the show’s decay as it happened, lived under the misunderstanding that it had always been so ordinary. 

This week I came across two blogs written by guys who fall under that age bracket.  The first is a student at Tufts University who writes about television for the campus newspaper.  In an article titled “Fox offers laughs beyond Seth MacFarlane”, he spends 769 words talking about all of the comedies currently broadcast on FOX.  (The piece is part of a series of four, one for each network.)  This is the Simpsons bit:

Outside the MacFarlane empire, "The Simpsons" is still going strong in its 22nd season. It’s not what it used to be, but it still has some smart plotting, good jokes and original stories after all these years.

I obviously agree with the part about it not being what it used to be and disagree with the part about it being “smart”, “good”, and “original”.  But that’s neither here nor there.  What’s revealing about this is the fact that the entire article is about FOX comedies, and yet those two fleeting sentences are the only part that discusses Zombie Simpsons.  The show is only mentioned one other time in the entire piece, and that’s just to note that it’s been overshadowed by MacFarlane’s television hydra.  In other words, even to people who like it, Zombie Simpsons is far less culturally interesting than every other program on FOX.  It’s a placeholder that gets brought up only for the sake of completeness. 

The second blog is brand new.  Its author is a student at the University of Arizona and the first four substantive posts are a top 25 Simpsons episode countdown.  I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of lists over the years.  Most of the time they’re either entirely or predominantly episodes from the before time, the long long ago; those are my favorite.  Sometimes they’re a jumble of The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons, with picks ranging from Season 1 to the present; I like those kind less.  But, hey, it’s somebody’s opinion and they’re certainly entitled to post it on-line. 

What’s unusual about this list is the range of episodes it covers.  The earliest episode on it is from Season 5 and the latest is from Season 14 (though only a handful are from after Season 11).  I’ve never seen a list like that before.  The explanation for this unusual selection comes in the introduction to the first part (emphasis added electronically by Channel 6):

As a dedicated (and somewhat obsessed) fan of The Simpsons, I have seen my fair share of Simpsons episodes (302 to be exact) and decided I would attempt to rank my favorite Simpsons episodes of all time. I took a lot of different factors into consideration of each episode (story,gags,overall hilarity), but mostly just picked the ones that I know I can sit through time and time again.

(The rest: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

He describes himself as a “dedicated” and “somewhat obsessed” fan who watches episodes “time and time again”, but the back catalog is so dauntingly swollen with mediocrity that he’s never sat down and plowed through it all.  At 302 episodes, itself a powerful feat of television watching, he still hasn’t seen nearly forty percent of the show. 

There are only two possibilities with the given math.  Either he’s never seen a significant chunk of the early seasons, or he gave up on the show completely right after Season 14.  Neither scenario reflects well on Zombie Simpsons, but given his list I’d be willing to bet it’s the former.  If that’s true, it means that Zombie Simpsons has deterred him from seeing some of the best things to ever grace the airwaves. 

This is precisely what I was talking about in “The Cost of Zombie Simpsons”.  In its current dilapidated state, Zombie Simpsons is hardly worth bringing up in a discussion of FOX comedies.  But its irrelevance to modern audiences doesn’t prevent it from obscuring its vastly superior predecessor.

“Wow!  They’ll never let us show that again, not in a million years!” – Krusty the Klown

Assuming that pure joy expands in a circle at the speed of light, the echo of my unbounded glee at learning that reruns of The Simpsons would be on five days a week should be somewhere between Altair and Sigma Draconis by now.  In those dark days before DVDs, DVD rips, and bottomless hard drive platters, watching old episodes wasn’t easy to do, and the news that it would be on every weeknight (and sometimes on Saturday) was literally life changing.  All those episodes that I had only seen once or twice were suddenly going to be broadcast again and again, and that meant that I could watch them again and again.  These days I never watch the syndication runs, both because they’re hopelessly polluted with Zombie Simpsons and because having episodes on my computer is vastly more convenient.  But I recognize that I’m in the minority on how I watch, and this week we have two links to demonstrate that.  One to a television station that’s broadcasting good episodes in May, and another to someone who’s still shackled to the whims of the program directors.  We’ve also got pictures of that beaded Springfield, an awesome love song, plenty of excellent usage, and a Hans Moleman video. 

Enjoy. 

Perfectly Cromulent Analysis: Mr. Plow – Smooth Charlie’s Click of the Week is a post on “Mr. Plow” by our old friend Andreas.  He extensively and rightly praises that excellent “Do you come with the car?” joke that still rings true nearly twenty years later.  Well worth reading in full. 

The Unofficial Smithers Love Song – Fan made song and video that contains 100% of your daily recommended amount of fuck yeah (via @springfieldx2). 

Electronic Arts Cancels ‘Dead Space 2′ Wii, ‘The Simpsons Game 2′ – A Simpsons related game I didn’t know was being developed has been cancelled. 

10 Best Female Voice Actors | Actors & Directors | Screen Junkies – Nancy Cartwright snags #1 here, but no one else from the show makes the cut.

The Simpsons Makes a Skit About Precious – Thanks go to Maggie C for sending in a link to this Tumblr site that noted Zombie Simpsons’ pathetic “Precious” dream sequence in “Love Is a Many Strangled Thing”.  My favorite comment got right to the point:

holy shit fuck you, simpsons

Simpsons town revealed in Forest Hills artist’s home – Pictures from the revealing of Forty Square Feet of Awesome.  The Disco Stu door prize is pretty cool.

Financial Lessons from the Final Four, Yoga, Homer Simpson, and Other Odd Sources – Prosaic advise courtesy of a copy and paste job at Time magazine.  They get the quotes right so it’s excellent usage even if it is banal to the point that Henry Luce’s corpse would blush if it still could. 

Everything I Know About Money, I Learned from Homer Simpson – And linked from the above is this, which doesn’t quote anything, but does mange to allude only to plotlines from Season 10 and earlier.

Grizzly Links: Stephen Colbert, David Lynch, The Simpsons, & a Midget in a Gorilla Costume – There’s some good stuff here, I’m especially fond of the Jaws painting (though shouldn’t one of them be on drums?).  Among the links is a montage of Hans Moleman clips, the first part is mostly from good seasons with a sprinkling of Zombie Simpsons, volume two reverses the ratio:

FOX legal will be calling in three, two, one . . .

Homer simpson Minecraft Skin – Exactly what it says.  Nicely done.

Searching for gluten-free food at Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville – Discussing watching baseball when your usual pleasures are denied you brings us this:

In a long-ago episode of “The Simpsons,” an on-the-wagon Homer sits silently sober at the ballpark while everyone around him enjoys cups of beer. After a few seconds of dead silence with his eyes wide open, Homer remarks: “I never realized how boring this game is.”

Excellent usage.

Mr Burns takes a nap – While I’m not a fan of crappy collector stuff, I am a fan of it being used creatively. 

Todays winners and Losers – From the “Losers” category:

The feeling when you get home and you flick to channel 4 and the simpsons end credits are on… gutted.

I used to hate that feeling. 

Future Finds: Computers (#74) – Speaking of creatively repurposing Simpsons stuff, this guy doesn’t sound like on of the five richest kings of Europe to me. 

Classic Simpsons In May – A UHF station in San Francisco will be running “rare” and “haven’t seen in years” episodes during the month of May, and by that they mean things from Seasons 1-10.  Fucking Zombie Simpsons has ruined syndicated Simpsons. 

Things That Will Always Guarantee Laughs – This is a list, and while I don’t agree with everything on it, this is true:

The Simpsons (seasons 3 to 8)

Oh Seasons 1 & 2, I will love you so much it will make up for the rest of the world’s indifference. 

The Origin Story – Reminisces, and a picture, of a 1990 Bart Simpson skateboard. 

Forbes Fictional 15: list – This list gets stupider every year.  How do you assign a worth to the dragon from The Hobbit?  And what the hell is Jeffery Lebowski doing on there?  He’s so poor he had to steal a million dollars from little urban achievers.  Oh, and Mr. Burns checks in at #12.

First Look: Doughnut Vault – There’s a new donut shop in downtown Chicago that sounds fantastic (albeit pricey).  This is poor usage, however:

Homer Simpson may have said it best when he called the doughnut sacrilicious.

The waffle that Bart tossed on the ceiling was sacrilicious.  The donut is just, “Mmmm” or “transcendent” (as translated by Lisa).

Release the Hounds – Silvio Berlusconi as Mr. Burns.  Heh. 

#1 of the 365 Things That Make Me Happy: The Simpsons – Ahem:

I absolutely adore The Simpsons and have ever since the shorts were used as bumpers on another favorite television show of mine; “The Tracy Ullman Show”. I know a lot of critics and fans say that the show isn’t as good as it used to be, and to some degree they are right. However, I feel that The Simpsons have given me so many great years of programming, that if they want to coast on a few episodes, I don’t mind a bit.

I used to say almost exactly that, then they kept on coasting for more than a decade.  But The Simpsons does always make me happy. 

Critics use The Simpsons to lampoon Mexico’s Slim – Somebody took out a newspaper ad in Mexico making fun of the world’s richest man, Carlos Slim, with “The Slimsons”.  Sadly, I was unable to find an image of the ad on-line. 

Weird science on the equator line – Wikipedia is skeptical of Lisa’s explanation of the Coriolis effect, but this is a first hand account of the strange things you can do at the equator, and it includes clockwise and counterclockwise draining.     

“The Simpsons” and Their Films – The image and the link from whence it came are something we’ve mentioned before around here.  But I want to wholeheartedly agree with this:

The more films I watch the more I notice that sometimes I’m approaching them backwards: I’ve often seen the parody before I’ve seen the picture itself. When I first saw Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), for example, I found it was quickly coloured yellow, as Homer Simpson’s take on George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) came to mind.

In fact, The Simpsons becomes consistently richer the more films I see. References to America’s cinematic heritage appear not only in episode-long treatments of certain pictures but also in the more fleeting echoes of a particular shot or character trait.

I’ve lost track of the number of movies I’ve watched specifically because they were mentioned on the show.  Last year that number included The Devil and Daniel Webster (thanks Andreas!), which was fantastic. 

Up and atom, veggie burger! – And finally, among an excellent looking recipe and much excellent usage is this:

It was only the Simpsons’ 7th season, so it still had writers who rolled out classic lines

Indeed.  (There’s also YouTube of “My eyes, the goggles do nothing!”.) 

“Oh, very well, it’s time for your bribe.  Now, you can either have the washer and dryer where the lovely Smithers is standing, or you can trade it all in for what’s in this box.” – C.M. Burns
“The box, the box!” – Nuclear Inspector

“It was the most I ever threw up, and it changed my life forever.” – Homer Simpson

“Now, the only antidote to a zany scheme, is an even zanier scheme!” – Homer Simpson
“Why does it have to be zany?” – Fat Nerd

Since the show had all but run out of ideas by Season 11, it’s no surprise that they had to start revisiting topics and concepts that they’d already done with increasing frequency.  And while most of “Kill the Alligator and Run” is a bizarre slideshow of the family leaping from one goofy, vaguely Southern situation to another, it gets there by transporting Homer to a raucous college party and having him run around with the drunken kids.  As it happens, Homer had tried to party with college students once before, in Season 5’s infinitely better “Homer Goes to College”.

As with so many comparisons between The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons, to really get to the heart of the matter you have to put aside most of Zombie Simpsons usual problems.  So, no, the trip to Florida doesn’t have anything to do with spring break, nor does it have much to do with Homer’s odd freakout at the beginning of the episode or the subsequent multi-act run from the law.  And, no, Homer getting down with the college kids doesn’t make any sense on its own either, from his getting to the beach with a bed tied to him to his bizarre antics at the Kid Rock concert to the sheriff happily looking the other way for Homer.  All of those typical Zombie Simpsons shortcuts distract from just how empty the comedy here really is, so while they exist and are a big part of what makes this episode so very unwatchable, they aren’t what makes their take on “spring break” so utterly empty, boring and unfunny.

On the surface, both “Homer Goes to College” and “Kill the Alligator and Run” have Homer acting like a jerk around college kids.  But if you look just a bit deeper, you can see that Zombie Simpsons wasn’t doing anything else while The Simpsons was using Homer for far more than just him running around and yelling.

Homer yelling and running, there’s a lot of this.

The premise of “Homer Goes to College” was that Homer, in his infinite stupidity, thought that all those Animal House style movies about college are what life on campus is really like.  When he actually got there, he figured that the jocks would be constantly beating the nerds, that the dean was naturally out to get everyone, and that the rest of the students would feel the same way he did.  Homer being Homer, he couldn’t see that none of that was true, and instead tried to do things like take the nerds on a beer fueled road trip and prank a nearby school that no one else on campus even cared about.  The jokes come fast and heavy, but the main idea on which everything else rests is that Homer is wildly out of place and spectacularly wrong about what college is like.

By contrast, in “Kill the Alligator and Run”, Homer isn’t wrong about anything.  In fact, he’s exactly correct about what it is all those young people are doing.  Because of this, the episode is left with hardly anything to do but exaggerate the wildness on display and hope for the best.  That’s how it gets stuck with having Homer and some kids turn over the family car, Homer ride to the beach on the top of a van, and a Kid Rock concert that features a cartoonish, Acme-sized bottle of booze and the late Joe C being fired out of a makeshift slingshot.  Like their hapless fluffing of Lady Gaga earlier this year, this is Zombie Simpsons making something look awesome and mistaking that for satire.

So while Homer is behaving like an out of control jerk in “Homer Goes to College”, there’s a point to it, namely that Homer is doing his level best to fit in with the insane depictions of college in movies and teevee.  Homer isn’t just stumbling around because that’s what he likes to do, nor is he insisting on it because he’s an invincible cartoon character, he’s just got it in his head that zany schemes and pig abduction are par for the course.  He can’t comprehend that Dean Peterson (but you can call him Bobby) isn’t some crotchety old jerk who hates fun, or that the students don’t think it’s funny that the professor dropped his notes.  He doesn’t even realize the nerds are nerds until his family tells him.

The Jerkass Homer in “Kill the Alligator and Run” is just and only that: Jerkass Homer.  He’s not interested in acting out some strange media portrayal, he just wants to run around and scream and drink for the sake of running around and screaming and drinking.  So when it ends, he just keeps it up, dragging his family along for the ride.  It’s the difference between this (which, let’s remember, is just the starting point for more insane adventures):

And let’s not even wonder where he got the airboat or why the rest of them are going along with this.

And this (which is a movie parody and occurs at the end of the episode):

And, once again, Homer learns nothing.

“We played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours, then I was slain by en elf.” – Homer Simpson
“Listen to yourself, man, you’re hanging with nerds.” – Bart Simpson
“You take that back!” – Homer Simpson
“Homer, please, these boys sound very nice, but they’re clearly nerds.” – Marge Simpson

Happy birthday Conan O’Brien!

“Marge, someone squeezed all the life out of these kids.  And unless movies and teevee have lied to me, it’s a crusty, bitter old dean.” – Homer Simpson
“Hi there, hello, I’m Dean Peterson, but you can call me Bobby.  I just want you to know, if you ever feel stressed out from studying or whatever, I’m always up for some hacky sack.  Or hey, if you just want to come by and jam, I used to be the bass player for the Pretenders.” – Dean Peterson
“Boy, I can’t wait to take some of the starch out of that stuffed shirt.” – Homer Simpson

Happy 20th Anniversary to “Homer Goes to College”!  Original airdate 14 October 1993.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Simpson, we can take care of ourselves.” – Black Nerd
“Uh, wallet inspector.” – Snake
“Oh, here you go.  I believe that’s all in order.” – Fat Nerd
“Whoa, I can’t believe that worked!” – Snake
“Hey, that’s not the wallet inspector.” – Homer Simpson

“Oh, Dean, this is what your new hip is going to look like . . . you’re going to have to go easy on it.” – Dr. Hibbert

“My first day of college.  I wish my father was alive to see this.” – Homer Simpson
“Hey!” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson
“How long have you been back there?” – Homer Simpson
“Three days.” – Abe “Grampa” Simpson

(Sorry for not getting this up yesterday.  The day got away from me.)

Season 26 picked up right where season 25 left off: a time eating guest couch gag, many needlessly self voiced celebrities, characters explaining how they feel and what they’re doing, and plenty of other boring nonsense.  The A-plot was about Krusty being sad and involved the much hyped character death, which turned out to be the nothingburger we all expected.  (The fact that the media is so easily and repeatedly trolled by Zombie Simpsons may be the funniest thing about the show these days.)

The B-plot was about Lisa being worried about Homer’s health all of a sudden.  We know this because she basically narrates the whole thing for us, including how she’s feeling and the ending that was already nonsensical before the school bus crashes into the Simpson back yard.

- Count me among those who generally like the guest couch gags.  It’s nice to get something new and interesting, and since the writing staff doesn’t have to do any plot or dialogue, they’re often very decent.  But this one was pretty bad.  It was a decent concept and had a neat look to it, but it took way too long given how little actually happened and how repetitive the images were.

- This popcorn thing is really dumb.  It was also done much, much better in “Realty Bites”.

- “Cheap to Produce” was at least quick.

- Ugh, this Wiggum crime photo thing.  I thought the Family Guy stuff was going to be during their episode.

- Hey, look: crappy jokes, self voiced celebrities, and canned laughter.

- “Nobody warned me this roast would treat me the same way as every roast I’ve seen and laughed at.” – Unnecessary exposition rolled up with a cheap excuse for the idiot nonsense they just made us sit through.  Stuff like this really demonstrates how much the show has deteriorated.  Krusty knows what a roast is.  It’d be fine to have the roast get to him, bum him out, etc.  Instead, he acts depressed and surprised from the get go because Heaven forefend characters and the story might move along in reaction to what happens rather than just because.

- That swapper joke could’ve been funny if it had made sense.

- Hey, look, Bart just showed up out of nowhere to tell Krusty what to do.  Seamless.

- This is certainly a pointless death scene.

- And now it’s time for a funeral that improbably includes the Simpson family.

- Hey, the B-plot showed up.  I’ll let Lisa explain, “Dad, I’m worried about your health.  I don’t want to lose you.”

- Remember when they only included Sideshow Bob when they had something really great and fun to do?  Long time ago, that.

- “No mimes!” is a decent sign gag.

- And “The elephant and I had our differences” is pretty good.  It’s also short, understated, and unexplained.  Not a coincidence.

- Is it technically an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon if Itchy’s not in it?

- Oh, for fuck’s sake, “Kids, I’m experiencing a crisis of conscious.”

- This is a cruel waste of Maurice LaMarche as the TV critic.

- Lisa’s back to explain what’s happening in the B-plot again.

- Did David Hyde Pierce just wander past the recording room one day?  That might have been even more pointless than the Sideshow Bob cameo.

- Past Krusty shows were a lot better when they were about collective bargaining agreements.

- Similarly, Krusty’s binges used to be more fun.  They even had the Stanley Cup.

- “Krusty, have you fulfilled the promise you made to your father in the dream you never told anyone about?”  Even by their cheat standards that’s lazy.  They weren’t even painted into a corner or anything, they just can’t move things forward without explicitly telling us what’s going on.  Then Bart appeared out of nowhere.

- And now Homer is wrapped in bubble wrap, then there was a car crash and then Lisa explained, out loud, how she was feeling for the fifth time or so.  Mercifully, this B-plot is now over.

- Bart apparently knew who Krusty’s dad’s favorite rabbi was.  No, it doesn’t make any sense.  But at least it was short.

- Oof, the “Jewish Heaven” song is really weak.  There are like three lyrics, most of which are just “Jewish Heaven”, and the rest is just visual references of famous Jews.

Anyway, the ratings are in and they are much improved.  Last night, 8.50 million people lost hope after the FXX marathon reminded them how good the show once was.  That’s way up from last year’s premier, though at least some of that is attributable to the Eagles-49ers game.  It’ll be curious to see whether or not that holds up next week when FOX doesn’t have a late NFL game.  Was it mostly football, or did all that hype actually make a few million people want to start watching the show again?

“Hello, Simpson.  My lawyers and I were in the neighborhood and thought we’d stop by.” – C.M. Burns
“Would you like to come in for tea and marshmallow squares?” – Marge Simpson
“Yes, he would.” – Blue Haired Lawyer

“The watchdog of public safety, is there any lower form of life?” – C.M. Burns

It would be one thing if Zombie Simpsons merely repeated ideas and stories that had been done on The Simpsons.  Given the enormous catalog of episodes, it’s certainly understandable that scenes and concepts would need to get recycled from time to time.  Hell, that was understandable way back in the heyday of the show.

For example, Season 2’s “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish” has a great nuclear plant inspection, where we see gum used to seal a crack in the cooling towers, a plutonium paper weight, and ankle deep toxic waste.  But all that doesn’t detract in the least from the inspection in Season 5’s “Homer Goes to College”, because instead of showing us the same things again, it gives us a completely different set of horrifying looks into Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

Looks comfy.

For starters, the inspectors show up during nap time, where meltdowns are averted by sleepy hound dogs and Smithers is curled up at Burns’ feet.  When the surprise inspection team rings the bell, Burns denies them entry and tells a pathetic lie about old fashioned cookies before the inspectors start hacking at the door with an ax.  The inspection hasn’t even started yet and already The Simpsons is at full speed, tossing off jokes and ludicrous ideas as fast as possible.

Compare that to the – ahem – “inspection” in “My Fare Lady”.  Instead of nap time and Homer falling asleep on the “Plant Destruct” button (“Please Do Not Push”), Burns just happens upon Moe, who has been hired as a janitor, mopping the floor.  (This whole thing is so inconsequential that we don’t even get an establishing shot and a crow screech.)  That immediately leads to a standard Zombie Simpsons joke, wherein the punchline takes forever to arrive, and is patiently explained to the audience:

Burns: Hey, swabbie, you missed spots there . . . another one there . . . and there!  Every other spot is begrimed!
Moe: It’s called a checkerboard floor, you unwrapped mummy.

At that, the camera helpfully pulls back to show us the aforementioned checkerboard floor.  Hi-larity.

No sooner has that happened then Smithers walks up with a bunch of inspectors in tow, “Sir, the NRC is here for a surprise inspection”.  Huh?  Even by the standards of incompetent Zombie Simpsons Burns, this is head spinning.  These guys just waltzed into the plant without Burns (or Smithers, apparently) even knowing they were there?  Somewhere, Season 5 Burns is scoffing at his successor’s haplessness.  One second they’re not there, the next they are; there’s no lie about cookies, no ax, no nothing.

In Season 5, once the inspectors do get in, we see them testing the plant employees while Burns and Smithers gaze down from above.  Except, of course, for the three workers who’ve been strategically diverted down to the basement with the important job of keeping a bee in a jar.

I always wondered what these guys did at the plant.  Accountants?

Down in the basement we see a glowing rat, dripping ooze, and several spilled barrels of toxic waste.  No other mention of them is made because it doesn’t need to be.  Moreover, the inspectors have no idea these three geniuses (and the improperly stored nuclear waste) are here.  They’re in the parking lot testing the employees.  Here’s the Zombie Simpsons version of the same thing:

See the glove?  The inspectors didn’t.

While Moe asks penetrating questions like, “You’re the head inspector, huh?”, nothing else happens except the unacknowledged gas leak and the slowly inflating glove.  It’s easily the best part of this scene, but it also makes the inspection team even more bland and boring than they already were.  (Thanks for the meandering story about your Queen cover band.)  The scene is Moe telling them they can’t come in after they’ve already come in, followed by them, despite already being inside and being, you know, federal nuclear inspectors, meekly accepting that and shuffling off screen.

This is basic stuff, the audience getting to see characters with personality do things instead of just listen to somebody we don’t know talk about something we don’t care about and can’t see.  To be fair to Zombie Simpsons, the inspection in “Homer Goes to College” is given more screen time, so things like nap time, bee guarding, and Homer causing a meltdown without any nuclear material being in the truck have a chance to breathe.  But it’s not like “My Fare Lady” was crammed with other great bits.  The episode has three different driving montages, one of which goes on for well over a minute.

Not that extra time would’ve helped.  More lines for incompetent Burns, more background jokes explained, and more of the nothingburger inspection team aren’t going to make “My Fare Lady” any better.  When the NRC shows up in Season 5, there’s a big ominous musical cue, and they begin to methodically test employees.  These nondescript cardboard cutouts (only one of them even speaks) get silence and deserve it.

“Homey, here are the responses from the colleges you applied to.” – Marge Simpson
“D’oh!  D’oh!  D’oh!  Woo-hoo, a flyer for a hardware store!” – Homer Simpson

“I’m sorry, boys, I’ve never expelled anyone before.  But, that pig had some powerful friends.” – Dean Bobby Peterson
“Oh, you’ll pay!  Don’t think you won’t pay!” – Richard Nixon

“Now, the only antidote to a zany scheme, is an even zanier scheme!” – Homer Simpson
“Why does it have to be zany?” – Fat Nerd

Since the show had all but run out of ideas by Season 11, it’s no surprise that they had to start revisiting topics and concepts that they’d already done with increasing frequency.  And while most of “Kill the Alligator and Run” is a bizarre slideshow of the family leaping from one goofy, vaguely Southern situation to another, it gets there by transporting Homer to a raucous college party and having him run around with the drunken kids.  As it happens, Homer had tried to party with college students once before, in Season 5’s infinitely better “Homer Goes to College”.

As with so many comparisons between The Simpsons and Zombie Simpsons, to really get to the heart of the matter you have to put aside most of Zombie Simpsons usual problems.  So, no, the trip to Florida doesn’t have anything to do with spring break, nor does it have much to do with Homer’s odd freakout at the beginning of the episode or the subsequent multi-act run from the law.  And, no, Homer getting down with the college kids doesn’t make any sense on its own either, from his getting to the beach with a bed tied to him to his bizarre antics at the Kid Rock concert to the sheriff happily looking the other way for Homer.  All of those typical Zombie Simpsons shortcuts distract from just how empty the comedy here really is, so while they exist and are a big part of what makes this episode so very unwatchable, they aren’t what makes their take on “spring break” so utterly empty, boring and unfunny.

On the surface, both “Homer Goes to College” and “Kill the Alligator and Run” have Homer acting like a jerk around college kids.  But if you look just a bit deeper, you can see that Zombie Simpsons wasn’t doing anything else while The Simpsons was using Homer for far more than just him running around and yelling.

Homer yelling and running, there’s a lot of this.

The premise of “Homer Goes to College” was that Homer, in his infinite stupidity, thought that all those Animal House style movies about college are what life on campus is really like.  When he actually got there, he figured that the jocks would be constantly beating the nerds, that the dean was naturally out to get everyone, and that the rest of the students would feel the same way he did.  Homer being Homer, he couldn’t see that none of that was true, and instead tried to do things like take the nerds on a beer fueled road trip and prank a nearby school that no one else on campus even cared about.  The jokes come fast and heavy, but the main idea on which everything else rests is that Homer is wildly out of place and spectacularly wrong about what college is like.

By contrast, in “Kill the Alligator and Run”, Homer isn’t wrong about anything.  In fact, he’s exactly correct about what it is all those young people are doing.  Because of this, the episode is left with hardly anything to do but exaggerate the wildness on display and hope for the best.  That’s how it gets stuck with having Homer and some kids turn over the family car, Homer ride to the beach on the top of a van, and a Kid Rock concert that features a cartoonish, Acme-sized bottle of booze and the late Joe C being fired out of a makeshift slingshot.  Like their hapless fluffing of Lady Gaga earlier this year, this is Zombie Simpsons making something look awesome and mistaking that for satire.

So while Homer is behaving like an out of control jerk in “Homer Goes to College”, there’s a point to it, namely that Homer is doing his level best to fit in with the insane depictions of college in movies and teevee.  Homer isn’t just stumbling around because that’s what he likes to do, nor is he insisting on it because he’s an invincible cartoon character, he’s just got it in his head that zany schemes and pig abduction are par for the course.  He can’t comprehend that Dean Peterson (but you can call him Bobby) isn’t some crotchety old jerk who hates fun, or that the students don’t think it’s funny that the professor dropped his notes.  He doesn’t even realize the nerds are nerds until his family tells him.

The Jerkass Homer in “Kill the Alligator and Run” is just and only that: Jerkass Homer.  He’s not interested in acting out some strange media portrayal, he just wants to run around and scream and drink for the sake of running around and screaming and drinking.  So when it ends, he just keeps it up, dragging his family along for the ride.  It’s the difference between this (which, let’s remember, is just the starting point for more insane adventures):

And let’s not even wonder where he got the airboat or why the rest of them are going along with this.

And this (which is a movie parody and occurs at the end of the episode):

And, once again, Homer learns nothing.

“We played Dungeons & Dragons for three hours, then I was slain by en elf.” – Homer Simpson
“Listen to yourself, man, you’re hanging with nerds.” – Bart Simpson
“You take that back!” – Homer Simpson
“Homer, please, these boys sound very nice, but they’re clearly nerds.” – Marge Simpson

Happy birthday Conan O’Brien!