The Simpsons List Discussion and Suggestions

[Lemmy Caution]

Forgot to mention that the S12 Treehouse of Horror is great.

The standout segment is The Night of the Dolphin, where Lisa pulls a free-willy and lets Snorky the Dolphin escape the seaworld park. Then things go wrong. I love when Snorky addresses the gathered meetinghall. Classic.

G-G-Ghost D-D-Dad -- Homer dies as his horoscope promised, and gets to sample Heaven and Hell.
The beginning is terrific and it runs out of steam a little as it goes along.

Scary Tales Can Come True -- a good Grimm's fairy tales knockoff. Tough times for The Simpsons when Homer loses his job as an oaf.

[flyonthewall2983]

"Life on the Fast Lane": Season 1, Episode 9. Airdate March 18, 1990.

This one features "A. Brooks" again, as a French bowling instructor/swinger who captivates Marge which leads to a quiet desperation between her and Homer that leads up to a nice emotional tribute to her sandwich-making. There are some funny outtakes of Brooks in character on the DVD, but his early appearances never managed to be as funny as they would later would be, but his characters certainly served a function each time out. This one even more so. I have a theory that each of the characters he has played on the show (the ones I am familiar with anyway) are meant to either directly or in-directly put the family in some kind of dire straits. This is taken to it's zenith in the movie where he plays the traditional villain.

[domino harvey]

Homer vs. Dignity -- Homer becomes Mr. Burns' "prank monkey." Resulting in Homer having sex with a giant panda. And rolling around a bathroom floor in a diaper. A terrible episode. Would make you believe the show was nearing the end of its run.

I agree this is a terrible episode (and my local syndication loved playing it, so I've seen it more times than is advisable), but it does have a great Lenny line. Though the show apparently has no shortage of brief memorable moments in the midst of mediocrity or worse, as evidenced by this popular, if peculiar exchange from the sixteenth season

[The Narrator Returns]

I'm sure it's in absolutely no danger of making my list, but as far as post-Golden Years episodes I recall enjoying, there's "Beyond Blunderdome", if nothing else for its central action-movie remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the line "Did Braveheart run away? Did Payback run away?".

[domino harvey]

Oh that's a great episode and probably one of the best celeb guest spots in the series' run. I imagine it'll make my list somewhere

[swo17]

Homer's Barbershop Quartet (S5, Ep 1)
You probably remember the main story and the Beatles references ("I'll have a single plum floating in perfume, served in a man's hat") but what about the great swap meet opening, which features Ned Flanders selling Bible character trading cards, Bart talking like a grizzled 1890s prospector, and his sad confession about not being able to remember anything that happened more than eight minutes ago thanks to television?

[thirtyframesasecond]

Homer's Barbershop Quartet (S5, Ep 1)
You probably remember the main story and the Beatles references ("I'll have a single plum floating in perfume, served in a man's hat") but what about the great swap meet opening, which features Ned Flanders selling Bible character trading cards, Bart talking like a grizzled 1890s prospector, and his sad confession about not being able to remember anything that happened more than eight minutes ago thanks to television?

Oh yeah that's a good one

You've been referred to as the funny one? Is that justified?
Yes, yes it is

[domino harvey]

Treehouse of Horror III (Season 04, Episode 05)
The first of three stellar, all-time Halloween eps from the show (with IV and V somehow getting incrementally better), I was prompted to put this in since I watched King Kong earlier in the week, and while I greatly enjoyed the parody here, especially this exchange, a spot-on criticism of the source text--

Reporter: What kind of show you got for us, Mr. Burns?
Mr. Burns: Well, the Ape's going to stand around for 3 hours or so. Then we'll close with the ethnic comedy of Duggan and Dirschwitz.
Reporter: Sensational!

--the real standout here is "Clown Without Pity," which is just line for line and beat for beat perfect, with every joke hitting. We take for granted, I think, the genius of the "Frogurt" exchange, but everything surrounding it is just as clever and witty and kudos must go to Al Jean and Mike Reiss for the script. The other two segments are good but not as strong as the first segment, but this one showed the series starting to reach its peak, one that is sustained and surpassed in TOH IV and V.

I also discovered, much to my surprise, that I do own season twelve! So, I guess I will give all these recs a spin after all!

[swo17]

Should we maybe do a concurrent mini-list where people vote for their top 10 Treehouse of Horror segments?

[matrixschmatrix]

Another suggestion- The Frinkiac, which lets you pull up the stills associated with whatever the quote is. It's pretty great for getting the full impact of a line across, since it's often diminished by losing the visuals.

[MongooseCmr]

Even though I just watched the first 11 seasons last year I've been eager to revisit some already. Now I have a reason!

They Saved Lisa's Brain, while both above average and typically uneven/wacky for season 10, has two of my favorite lines on the show. This one, and Homer calling Stephen Hawking Larry Flynt. It will probably rank low in my top 50 overall, but will make it solely for those jokes

[colinr0380]

I'm sure it's in absolutely no danger of making my list, but as far as post-Golden Years episodes I recall enjoying, there's "Beyond Blunderdome", if nothing else for its central action-movie remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the line "Did Braveheart run away? Did Payback run away?".

It also has the great scene with the ultraviolent remake of Mr Smith Goes To Washington, which sort of anticipated Quentin Tarantino's last few films!

[Manny Karp]

So I only own Seasons 1-6 on DVD, and am pretty cold on the quality of later episodes. What's the best way (is there a way) to stream Simpsons?

Think they're all on Hulu

[flyonthewall2983]

The more recent ones are. But they usually are gone after a certain period of time.

[Ribs]

The best way to stream the show is on FX NOW / Simpsons World. Assuming you have a cable package with FXX included it should have every episode in OAR, commentaries available on some early ones, with minimal commercial interruption. Might be worth dropping a link to this on the first page.

[Ribs]

Anyway. I am a firm defender of the show's continued existence and don't think it should ever need to go away. As such I'm going to make a big effort to watch as many later-season stuff as possible, because no one else here will, and I'm probably slightly more positive about the episodes than most of the rest of you.

That said...

Bart Gets a Z
S21 E09

This was terrible. The plot is that Bart puts booze in Mrs. Krabapple's coffee for some reason, and gets her fired, and she is replaced by a hyper-cool millennial teacher who gives assignments like "Tweet for 20 minutes" but it turns out he secretly hates children. There is no B-story. Maggie and Marge do not even appear as far as I can recall. Lisa appears walking in the hallway with no dialogue. Homer is in like three scenes all playing the exact characterization everyone hates him for nowadays (the first one he is playing fetch with Santa's Little Helper then circles back around having switched roles, meaning he has a bone in his teeth and is running naked while Santa's Little Helper is wearing a collared shirt and blue pants).

There's some weird joke about a self-help book called "The Answer" and this was probably some kind of parody of a pop culture fad but I have no recollection at all of any of this and it was a complete dud.

There's a montage of the kids stealing their parents' booze and literally there are four gags and the last of them is just that Bart orders some online. That is the entire joke. That is what they built towards.

There's a bit that made me chuckle where Principal Skinner is practicing for a magic show but other than that just nothing but duds. Do not recommend.

I think a really interesting thing about the show, especially in the past decade or so, is how Maggie has basically just stopped being a character and has become a decoration that rarely does anything.


Also: Whilst we're discussing home recordings, the one episode I had recorded to a VHS was "So it's Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show". Suffice to say I will likely be the only person who will end up with that in my final list.

[flyonthewall2983]

Bart the General is the only season one episode with a real shot at making my final list. There are other episodes I'm quite fond of, like Life on the Fast Lane, but I don't think they'll manage to creep in against the stiff competition from seasons three through six. fly is right that Abe isn't a very fleshed out character at this point, but I love the use they make of Herman (does he ever get another episode this good?)

"How many men do you have?"
"None."
"You'll need more!"

If I remember properly there is a gag later where they boys are drilling maneuvers and Herman stabs the sack standing for Nelson with a bayonet! You obviously couldn't get away with that in a live action comedy, it would just bring to mind how sick it is that a mentally ill war veteran is teaching children how to enact violence against each other (and would also raise questions about using a character like that for comedy in the first place)...

I think we're supposed to believe that Herman isn't a war veteran because of the line he gives Bart when he's asked about his missing arm, inferring it was a childhood accident. I know he makes appearances in later episodes (particularly in the Pulp Fiction spoof segment of "22 Short Films About Springfield"). His voice is actually based on that of George H.W. Bush, the sitting President at the time the episode aired.

"Treehouse of Horror": Season 2, Episode 3. Airdate October 25th, 1990.

The Halloween show has gotten bigger, scarier and funnier over the years. But this is still my favorite. If I were able to vote for separate segments, I would absolutely put "Bad Dream House" there. The interaction between the house and the family towards the end has the right mix of humor and terror for me, as someone who admittedly isn't a horror fan. Later learning that James Earl Jones voiced the mover in that sketch, and especially what sounds like the most ravenous alien in "Hungry are the Damned", made me appreciate it all the more. And the retelling of The Raven, with his narration, ends the show with a bit more class apart from the other segments.

[matrixschmatrix]

Also: Whilst we're discussing home recordings, the one episode I had recorded to a VHS was "So it's Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show". Suffice to say I will likely be the only person who will end up with that in my final list.

I will say, if we were going to list the commentaries, this would be one of the high ranking ones. Though I think the Simpsons later made what might be the only good clip show anyone's ever done- the 138th Episode Spectacular, which is so clever I never realized it was one until they pointed it out in the commentary.

[domino harvey]

Funniest commentary moment ever is Jon Lovitz needling Matt Groening about the Critic's crossover episode during (I think) the track for A Streetcar Named Marge

[Lemmy Caution]

Anyway. I am a firm defender of the show's continued existence and don't think it should ever need to go away. As such I'm going to make a big effort to watch as many later-season stuff as possible, because no one else here will, and I'm probably slightly more positive about the episodes than most of the rest of you.

I'm going to make an effort to pick up S21-25, and will watch them if I get them.
Around S 20-23, I used to download an episode if it got good buzz and was considered good.
So I've probably seen a few of the better episodes from that era. I think that was about 4 years ago.
________________________________________________________________________________

Season 13 is frustrating, because their are really good moments and some good scenes and ideas, but they have a lot of trouble sustaining a good or solid episode.

For instance, The Frying Game (S13:21). It starts off with great inane, absurdist bar chatter:
Lenny: Which was better, Muhammad Ali in his prime or anti-lock brakes?
Carl: Yeah, but what about Johnny Mathis v. Diet Pepsi?
Moe: Aaagh, I can't listen to this again!

Seamlessly moves to Homer installing a koi pond for Marge. Which turns out to be home to a "screamapillar" a noisy insect that seems to have a death wish, but is protected by the EPA under the "Reversal of Freedom Act of 1994."
When Homer nearly kills the endangered screamapillar, he gets convicted of "attempted insecticide and aggravated buggery" and is sentenced to 200 hours of community service.

Okay, so this episode is funny, interesting, going along great.
Homer delivers Meals on Wheels to shut-ins. So he gets to interact with some different folks and there are eating jokes at the ready. And then it gets a lot less funny, and they try for plot twists and the end has a rushed feel to it. They try to skewer reality Tv, but it's at the end and doesn't really work.

The first 3rd is terrific and then the rest is okay.

Another S13 example: Little Girl in the Big 10.
Lisa pretends to be a college student, which is fine if you can go with that.
But the other storyline, Bart as a boy in a bubble because he's contagious, is awful.
The setup is fine, with Bart getting bitten by a mosquito in a Krusty toy made in Krusty Chinese sweatshop.
But then the Bart storyline is poor and unfunny.

[kidc85]

The Computer Wore Menace Shoes -- Homer as the mysterious Mr. X who dishes dirt on the townspeople via the internet (and making shit up). I love how his website loads slowly so you see Homer's photo for a second before the paper bag with the X covers it over. The last segment gets surreal, when Homer is prisoner on a strange island. And the German guy impersonating Homer is amusing. The ending is weird. Homer returns home and greets his family, but then the drugging gas comes out of Santa's Little Helper, and the whole family gets taken to the island. Kind of playing around with odd endings and discontinuity.

Just in case you don't know this: the surreal turn the episode takes once Homer is on the island is a pastiche of classic British TV show THE PRISONER (1967). I've not seen it but it is supposed to be brilliant, the kind of thing that led to LOST et al.

[Ribs]

Midnight Rx
S16 E06

See, this is an example of a pretty good episode from a bit later. It's a B-grade episode but that's quite all right when compared with the episode I started with in my last post; jokes land, there's some good Mr. Burns stuff. There's a fun meta-joke where they cut to an office building where Marge and Lisa are sitting in a man's office and he walks in and asks why they broke in past security to see him which we didn't see and just assumed they got in through an appointment.

I'd be a little more positive about this but there's a string of jokes at the beginning of the second act that all fall flat. Several jokes me audibly cackle though and in many ways thats all that counts, though of course it doesn't really amount to all that much. If the Simpsons were like this all the time it'd be better off for it but that's just a sign of how substantially worse it has become in the past decade since this aired. There's some too-stupid-Homer stuff but that's basically expected at this point in the show.

For some strange reason "the team" in the episode is Homer, Grandpa, Apu, and Flanders, which seems only done so they could do some Apu/Flanders interaction they thought up at some point and never had the opportunity to use. There's some heavy handed Smithers-is-Gay stuff which has long passed the point of amusement and the show takes far too far every single time nowadays so it loses any of its appeal.

Again there's no B-plot and Maggie is in just a single shot of the entire episode, weirdly not even being held by Marge, just totally absent and unacknowledged during the opening convention bit.

I'd recommend it but with a yellow light - it absolutely won't make my list but it's a good episode all things considered.

___

With regards to Season 13 all I can remember is there's a weird amount of episodes where Lenny is the secondary character and a big focus. I like Lenny as much as the next guy but it was an odd turn for the show to take.

I find it oddly fascinating how pretty much every secondary character probably has enough episodes centered around them that they could concievably be their own show of just those 20-30 episodes; Burns, Moe, Skinner, and Krabapple all seem to always have at least one episode a year. A joke of how far this came is when they did an episode in Season 24 about the history of Carl's family, which is probably the silliest secondary-character-centric example yet.

(Apparently earlier this year they did an episode where Frink is involved in exactly the plot of the Nutty Professor as well. I don't really understand why this joke needs to be made.)

___

Also, yes, The Prisoner should be on anyone's radar, it's so amazing and stands for so much of what television could be. It's inevitably on sale whenever Network does their big 50-off sales for only like £10 on BD and it's a great investment. Saying it led to Lost is a bit of a misnomer as The Prisoner is considerably more experimental, as despite its short episode count it has numerous episodes that just completely break the format and take place in completely other genres and places that seemingly have no relation to anything relating to the show.

[swo17]

New Kid on the Block (S4, Ep 8)
Marge vs. the Monorail (S4, Ep 12)
Homer Goes to College (S5, Ep 3)
Treehouse of Horror IV (S5, Ep 5)

Conan O'Brien is probably the most famous alumnus of the show, but these are the only episodes for which he has a writing credit. (I don't know how involved he would have been as a producer but he's credited for almost 50 episodes that way.) In any case, this is a pretty impressive CV. New Kid on the Block is the one where Bart has a crush on his new neighbor (voiced by Sara Gilbert)/Homer sues the all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant ("Mr. Simpson, I don't use the word 'hero' lightly, but you are the greatest hero in American history") and it's an unsung classic. Strangely, despite moving next door to the Simpsons, the Powers girl is never heard from again in the series, and her divorced mom goes from relatable to unhinged in the next season's Thelma and Louise spoof.

Marge vs. the Monorail needs no introduction, though speaking of introductions, do you remember that this is the one that starts off with the parody of the Flintstones theme ("From the town of Springfield / He's about to hit a chestnut tree")? Homer Goes to College is all the more remarkable for being a one-joke episode (Homer fully buys into Hollywood stereotypes about campus life) that nonetheless feels like one of the freshest things the show has ever done. And Conan's contribution to the Halloween episode (the one where Homer sells his soul for a donut, Bart spots a gremlin outside the school bus, and Mr. Burns is Nosferatu) was apparently limited to the "Night Gallery"-inspired segment introductions, but that's still one doozy of an episode to be attached to.

I suppose this discussion would be incomplete without mentioning Bart Gets Famous (S5, Ep 12), in which Bart's catchphrase "I didn't do it" lands him on Conan's talk show ("I should warn you Bart, I'm all laughed out after Leno"). This is another fantastic episode, featuring one of my personal favorite openings: a school field trip to the box factory.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Big fan of that Treehouse of Horror, esp. Burns as Nosferatu:

"Superfunhappyslide!"

"Murder my boss? Dare I live out the American dream?"

"That's not his heart, dad"

OK, I might've got those quotes slightly wrong, but that segment is brilliant!

[thirtyframesasecond]

Lemon of Troy from season six is another favourite; whether it's Milhouse finding his double and wondering if "this is what it feels like when doves cry" or Homer's "stupid like a fox" retort.