A Simpsons short starring Maggie the Baby is being shoved in front of the fourth Ice Age movie, flying into theaters this summer. The commercial said it's in 3D except I don't know if they mean "3D" as in CGI or "3D" as in "you have to wear special glasses while Maggie throws blocks at you" or both. "The Longest Daycare" is being directed by longtime Simpsons guy David Silverman who used to animated the original Simpsons shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show twenty-five years ago.
For the past few years, Dead Homer Society has been the finest source of Simpsons criticism on the internet, dutifully diagnosing the symptoms of what it affectionately calls "Zombie Simpsons." Well, now the site's frontman Charlie Sweatpants has written a whole mini-book on the subject, Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead.
In it, he meticulously lays out not only why The Simpsons is so ridiculously bad now but also how it got that way, with charts and footnotes and stuff! The whole treatise will be parceled out chapter by chapter on the website over the next couple weeks, but if you have a Kindle you can get the whole dang thing right now for just three bucks. Do it or else a Zombie Simpson will fly into your kitchen and make a mess of your pots and pans
Check out this sneak peek preview of an upcoming episode from next season:
When Bart's love life heats up again on The Simpsons, it will involve an old flame or two. Actually, make that five. Not only will Zooey Deschanel guest-star on the animated comedy by reprising her role as Mary Spuckler -- that adorable hillbilly daughter of Cleetus [sic.] whom Bart nearly married in season 19 -- four other former girlfriends, voiced by Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Sarah Silverman, make cameos in the same episode, EW has learned.
This episode has it all: a hackneyed plot ripped off from romantic comedies, a bunch of guest stars returning to voice some of the blandest characters in the show's history (Girlfriend #4, Girlfriend #7, et al.), a clip show-like premise that emphasizes not only how long the show's been on but how repetitive and assembly line-produced it's been, Bart having what sounds like a midlife crisis at the age of 10, and a country song performed by Zooey Deschanel, who apparently played one of Cletus the slack-jawed yokel's daughter in some horrible-sounding episode I managed to avoid. Please end this show. [Entertainment Weekly]
David Foster Wallace, the celebrated author of the novel Infinite Jest and seminal anti-cruise diatribe "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," may be dead dead dead in real life, but apparently he's still alive and kickin' it in the Simpsons universe. Here's a framegrab of someone who strongly resembles him in the background of the latest Simpsons episode, cleverly entitled "A Totally Fun Thing That Bart Will Never Do Again," as spotted by No Homers Club poster Real Melvin:
The Simpsons appended this incredibly minor "jab" at Fox News to the rebroadcast of the first episode, Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, which aired as part of Fox's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration Sunday night:
Despite its severe lameness (We don't like Fox News! LOL!), it still got a bunch of press coverage from places like the Huffington Post (takes shot!), Hollywood Reporter (skewered! blasted!), and Zap2It (trashes!) ... and that was before professional pinhead Bill O'Reilly weighed in.
I can only imagine what font size they'd use for the headlines if the scene featuring CEO Rupert Murdoch in jail had aired today.
Like a bunch of lemmings jumping off a cliff, just about every news outlet from CBS News to the E! network to the gadget blog Gizmodo to the New Yorker (!) to the Los Angeles Times to the FOX Network to local newscasts around the country has regurgitated the SHOCKING news that Simpsons creator Matt Groening had finally revealed the location of the fictional cartoon town of Springfield: his home state of Oregon. Except, uh, he didn't say that at all and you'd have to be severely incompetent at basic reading comprehension to think otherwise?
I don't want to oversell this, but I've seen a lot of weird Simpsons videos, and this Armenian parody is one of my favorites. It starts out with four lads morphing into the Simpsons singing "Yesterday" in Armenian atop Stonehenge and gets stranger from there.
Seth MacFarlane, beloved by millions around the globe as the voice of Stewie The Talking Baby Who Says Naughty Things and Brian The Talking Dog Who Says Naughty Things, is ready to branch out and tackle the next big challenge of his artistic career: directing, writing, producing and starring in a live-action movie about a Talking Teddy Bear Who Says Naughty Things.
It seems a crafty teen tipster has managed to get ahold of a TOP-SECRET memo outlining the plotlines for the upcoming world-record 24th season of The Simpsons, purloined directly from the writers' room at FOX Studios! We've got the full memo after the jump.
IN THE NEWS is happy to report that comedian and former Simpsons writer Dana Gould is not a murderer.
Here's the deal: a while ago I learned from Wikipedia that Gould had used the pseudonym "Lawrence Talbot" for a Simpsons episode he'd written, Goo Goo Gai Pan, wherein the Simpsons go to China to help Aunt Selma adopt a baby. Curious about this intriguing bit of trivia, I decided to ask him about it in what I hoped was a friendly, professional e-mail:
dear mr. gouldi have a press inquiry: why did u use a pseudonym for the simpsons episode "goo goo gai pan"? or is wikipedia got it's facts wrong.
thanx
urs in christ,
adam
http://rubbercat.net/simpsons/news
Alas, a few weeks passed and there was no response from Mr. Gould. Naturally, I assumed he was attempting to dodge the question because he was hiding something nefarious, hoping the scandal would blow over before it even started. Well, I wasn't going to give up so easily. Undaunted, I e-mailed him again a couple times, but each time I was rebuffed with his stonewalling silence. That's when things got personal. How dare this Hollywood Liberal refuse to answer questions from the press! How could he so callously disregard my joke Simpsons fansite as anything less than legitimate? But I didn't let my emotions compromise my professional integrity, no sir. I knew that as a member of the vaunted Fourth Estate, my responsibility was to shake out The Truth by any means necessary. So, I decided to take the upper hand in this escalating cat-and-mouse game between reporter and subject. and play a little hardball. Utilizing a journalism strategy I learned from an imaginary book, I took the story public and spread some venomous allegations about Mr. Gould, speculating perhaps he had "murdered a teenage girl" or "shot up an entire orphanage" and was hiding behind a phony name to escape culpability for his crimes. In short, I hoped to force his hand and get him to respond. Here's the original post about it, as I reported at the time.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post's headline mistakenly said "atom" instead of "at them." IN THE NEWS regrets the error.
The most critically underrated component of the enormous Simpsons media empire is the Radioactive Man spin-off comic book series occasionally put out by creator Matt Groening's Bongo Comics, which after 18 years is finally being collected in a deluxe hardcover anthology.
First, a little backstory. The premise of Radioactive Man is simple but ingenious: each issue was purported to be a random issue from the fictional comic book series' nearly 50-history, satirizing different comic book eras (Golden Age, Silver Age, etc.) and all the superhero conventions and gimmicks that come with it. There was initially a six-issue run in 1994, starting with #1 (mostly consistent with what we saw of it in the Simpsons episode "Three Men and a Comic Book") and ending with a Spawn-tastic #1000, followed by an "80 page colossal" the following year. A second run debuted in 2000, this time written by the remarkable Batton Lash, with a noticeable improvement in the artwork. Each issue also featured faux ads from the Simpsons universe and letters from readers playing along with the joke (however, the letters in the second series were all fictional; i.e. #222 features a letter from a young Marge Bouvier). Everyone at Bongo is a giant comics nerd (the first issue of Simpsons Comics is a Fantastic Four reference, for example) and Radioactive Man really let them go hog-wild, sort of like how The Critic allowed Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss do all the movie parodies they wanted.
Writer/producer Matt Selman and former writer/murderer Dana Gould are doing a "thing" this Thursday at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. If you pay them 10 bucks, they will regale you with anecdotes about working for The Simpsons in the post-funny era, answer questions about wizard keys, as well as - and this is the important part - give you all the backstage dirt, like "Who punched a box?" If any of you readers out there end up going to this thing, please please please tell me who punched the box. I desperately need to know.
[NerdMelt]
Bill Oakley has done it again. Last Friday on Twitter, the former Simpsons showrunner revealed his personal top ten Simpsons episodes that were "pitched, discussed, [and] written," but, for whatever reason, never produced and lost to the sands of time.
Now, most of our competition would just lazily copy & paste the list and call it a day, but we here at rubbercat.net/simpsons have much more respect for you, the reader. We have attempted to dig up as much information about these would-be episodes as possible, from audio commentaries, interviews, and story outlines, to bring you the most complete picture of these extra-bonus-non-episodes as possible. Let's run through the list, shall we?
Simpsons creator Matt Groening got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today. According to KPCC, it's star #2,459 , located at 7021 Hollywood Blvd, in case you want to visit it and step all over it. Since The Simpsons themselves already have a star, you can consider this one a quiet acknowledgment of Futurama and Life in Hell.
It's been a banner couple of weeks for the Groenster - he's getting a toy modeled off of his likeness, he just celebrated the 500th episode of The Simpsons, he just created the Matt Groening Chair in Animation with a $500,000 donation to UCLA, and his birthday is tomorrow. Everything's coming up Groening!
The Hollywood Reporter did a big cover story about The Simpsons in honor its meaningless milestone of having churned out a certain number of product. Former showrunner Mike Scully used the occasion to share his death wish with the nation:
"I think the show will outlive all of us," says former producer Mike Scully. "Nothing would make me happier than some episode in the future to end with a title card that reads, 'In memory of Mike Scully.'"
Yup, Mike Scully wants to die. Nothing would make him happier. There is no other way to interpret that quote. After years of death threats from Simpsons nerds, it seems Scully has decided to embrace the icy hand of death.
The rest of the article is mostly just a rehash of the same stories they've been telling for years in interviews and audio commentaries (did you know Michael Jackson didn't do his own singing???), but nonetheless there's a few interesting tidbits I haven't heard elsewhere, if you use a charitable interpretation of "interesting."
The Country of Iran has taken the unprecedented step of banning the foreign import of Simpsons dolls, thereby throwing a wrench in peace negotiations and putting the entire international community in mortal jeopardy.
Oh, sure, the Iranian Secretary for Policy-making at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran (the Iranian equivalent of the IntelDevChiYA czar) claims they're doing it so as not to corrupt the morals of Iranian youth with Western depravity, but we all know the real reason: to strike back America for the tough economic sanctions we've been putting on them to get them to stop being so nuke-curious and weird. As we all know, the production of Simpsons crap is America's largest industry, and the loss of such a big market could really hamper our economic recovery and prolong the recession. This is Iran's way of letting us know they mean business. Diplomats are working around the clock trying to come up with an agreement, but have been met with resistance. Just yesterday, President Obama told NBC's Matt Lauer that "all options are on the table" with regards to the Simpsons ban; "I will not rest until every Iranian child has a Bart Simpson plush doll," the president vowed.
After failing to come up with any new ideas for Simpsons episodes, the writers decided to call it quits and throw in the towel... then, as they gazed upon the towel they threw, suddenly became struck with inspiration and wrote a whole episode around it. At least, that's how I imagine this rag episode came about.
I didn't see it, but I read the Wikisimpsons article about it, which is chock full of insane plot details like "Moe is part yeti," "Moe has a magical talking bar rag from the Middle Ages voiced by Jeremy Irons," "Milhouse's mom chokes on a rock and refuses the Heimlich maneuver," and "Moe is part yeti."
Judging from the feedback on the internet, "the rag episode" represents yet another low point for the series, like jockey gnomes, "the Israel episode," and whatever that Ke$ha thing was.
Simpson creator Matt Groening went to Egypt to check out the pyramid and he foolishly ignored all the hieroglyphic warnings and trespassed into the forbidden zone when all of a sudden The Mummy appeared and cast a big curse on him. As karmic retribution for all his brazen merchandising and capitalist crimes, Mr. Groening was turned into a piece of merchandise himself, how ironic. Now he is no longer human, he is just a doll and can't do human things anymore, rip.
OK but seriously now, for just fifty American dollars you can buy a toy version of the guy whose signature appears on all your other Simpsons toys. Here's what the solicitation says:
Created by legendary "Life is Hell" cartoonist Matt Groening, THE SIMPSONS is celebrating its 500th episode in February 2012, and Kidrobot is honoring the father of primetime animation in the only way we know how - making him into a 6-inch vinyl toy! Complete with goatee and glasses, director's jacket, and pad and pencil accessories, it is the first EVER Simpsons Matt Groening toy.
Essentially, if you cut out the middlemen, you can pay a guy money and he will give you a doll version of himself. This is so weird and messed up that I needed to lie down to fully contemplate the many levels of Meta this object encapsulates.
Fox hired a guy from Adult Swim to find out how to better compete with Adult Swim and his solution was for Fox to make their own Adult Swim. Brilliant! The two hour programming block will air on Saturdays at 11pm starting next year.
Basically, they're grabbing up all the "edgy" cartoons they don't have room for on Sunday nights (which I will henceforth refer to as "Animation Domination Prime") and dumping them on Saturday nights, formerly the home of MADtv, Wanda Sykes's late-night talk show, and the remaining episodes of Sit Down, Shut Up they were contractually obligated to air. Nobody knows what's on there now. The audience for this thing will primarily consist of Adult Swim viewers who forgot Saturdays are when Adult Swim airs The Animes.
Fox is always looking for new ways to encourage people to kill themselves. With their plans for an all-Simpsons channel having failed to materialize, it looked like their attempts to integrate The Simpsons into their master plan were dead on arrival.
Luckily, the Guinness Book of World Records stepped up to the plate and came up with a brilliant scheme that protects Fox from any liability: locking a bunch of people in a room and forcing them to watch all 500 episodes of The Simpsons, including the 300 or so that comprise The Bad Seasons. Whoever is still alive at the end of this charade will obtain 10,500 US dollars in hush money.