Recently in THE INSIDE SCOOP Category

A top-secret informant has come forward with the plots of several upcoming episodes that will air in the upcoming 22nd season:

The Maude Squad
Maude Flanders returns to Springfield through an emergency exit door in Heaven

My Son Is Also Named A-Bort-ion
An old flame leads Marge to make a shocking revelation. Meanwhile Homer is tricked into becoming a pissboy. Jon Lovitz reprises his role as Jay Sherman.

Now You See It, Now You Donut
A diet hypnotist makes Homer blind to fatty foods. Guest starring Mel Brooks and Rep. Joe Wilson.

Kenya Feel It?
At Grampa's urging the Simpsons travel to Hawaii to find President's birth certificate.

Love Hack
Lisa starts a successful web 2.0 startup only have her code stolen by Mark Zuckerberg. Homer constructs a tin roof. Guest starring Justin Long and Jon Hodgman, with Heidi Montag and Kim Kardashian as "shack sluts"

Feel free to send us your hot Simpsons tips by e-mail (simpsons@rubbercat.net) or by Twitter (@rubbercatsimp). We take great pains to ensure the anonymity of our sources. [Twitter.com/virgiltexas]

Hey, you! Do you know who Mark Zuckerburg is? If not, you soon will, because 2010 is the Year of Zuck! He's the cat who made the popular Friendster clone Facebook, which is currently in "hot water" for selling all of its users' personal information to the Taliban in exchange for drugs. The outrage is so widespread that it even made the cover of Time Magazine, which is apparently considered a big deal!

As the face of Facebook (I hope you enjoyed this phrase!!! I stayed up all night writing it!!!), you can expect to see the Zuckster's mug - which by the way used to be in the goddamn logo seriously what kind of weird egomaniac does that - all over the place in news story after news story as this privacy brouhaha continues into the summer. If we're lucky, we might even see him look remorseful and say he's really sorry, just like the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Toyota, and BP!

Then, in the fall, an unflattering movie based on an unflattering book about Zuckerburg, his creepy mentor The Napster Guy, and the creation of Facebook will hit theaters, bringing his extreme jerkiness and unethical behavior to the attention of general audiences. And it's in 3-D! Even if you don't plan on seeing it, Hollywood's relentless marketing juggernaut will ensure you'll see fake-Zuckerburg's face everywhere (except maybe on Facebook?).

Finally, if that wasn't enough, Zuckerburg will guest star as himself (!) on The Simpsons (possibly to soften his image after public perception of him takes a beating?). This is surprisingly timely for a show that took seven years to do an episode about 9/11! For once, The Simpsons is actually jumping on a trend while it's still sort of hot; it's pretty amazing they didn't go with Tom from MySpace. Could The Simpsons become culturally relevant again...? (Haha, no. They just did an episode about the Patriot Act, so I suspect it's only a matter of time before Bart joins a flash mob.)

Anyway, shortly thereafter The Year of Zuck will conclude with Zuckerburg being thrown into a volcano after America grows sick of him, the end.

While researching "SIMPSONS ALUMNI UPDATE 2010," I learned that former Simpsons writer Dana Gould used the pseudonym "Lawrence Talbot" on the "Simpsons Go To China" episode where Aunt Selma buys a Chinese baby who has never been mentioned since. Gould's use of a pseudonym struck me as peculiar: was it because of some legal thing? Could it be that a writer who started in the post-funny era could actually be so ashamed of his work that he would want to distance himself from it? What's the point of using a pseudonym when the genuinym is so easily findable on the Internet?

Now, IN THE NEWS is a Very Serious News Organization that takes great pride in its journalistic integrity - here is my real, actual, not-making-this-up press badge - and so, for answers, I went straight to the source: the only e-mail address I could find on his website.

From: simpsons@rubbercat.net
To: info@danagould.com
Date: Sat, Mar 20, 2010
Subj: lawrence talbot

dear mr. gould

i 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

From: simpsons@rubbercat.net
To: info@danagould.com
Date: Thu, Apr 8, 2010
Subj: press inquiry

Dear Sir Or Madam Whom It May Concern:

On the 20th of March I sent a press inquiry to this address, which as of this writing has not garnered a reply. I shall rephrase and repeat the question in hopes of an answer: why did Mr. Gould choose to use the pseudonym "Lawrence Talbot" for the The Simpsons episode entitled "Goo Goo Gai Pan" (production code #GABF06, original airdate 13 March 2005)?

I am an important member of The Press and I will not rest until I get an answer. A simple "no comment" will suffice. You may answer "off the record" if that is more palatable to you.

Yours in Christ,

Adam
Head Journalist, IN THE NEWS
http://rubbercat.net/simpsons/news

From: simpsons@rubbercat.net
To: info@danagould.com
Date: Fri, Apr 23, 2010
Subj: ultimatum

I've had it!!! Twice I have e-mailed this address for a simple answer as to why Dana Gould used the pseudonym Lawrence Talbot, and I STILL have gotten no response! WHAT ARE YOU HIDING, DANA GOULD? If I don't get a response by April 30th, I will have no choice but to go public with unfounded rumours and speculation about Mr. Gould. YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM THE PRESS.

Adam
http://rubbercat.net/simpsons/news

Needless to say, I still have yet to receive a response from Mr. Gould or his associates.

So why is this guy, Dana Gould, hiding behind a fake name and stonewalling the fourth estate? Here are my theories:

• Dana Gould murdered a teenage girl during a trip to China
• Dana Gould shot up an entire orphanage
• Dana Gould was fired from Fox because of his rampant drug abuse
• Dana Gould is the reason The Simpsons is so bad now
• Dana Gould was ashamed of his name after discovering it is an anagram for "analog dud"
• Dana Gould was incarcerated at the time (prisoners are not allowed to write for TV)
• Dana Gould is a deadbeat dad attempting to hide his TV revenue from his ex-wife
• Dana Gould was in possession of evidence that could have brought down the Bush Administration
• Dana Gould was put into witness protection after seeing a mafia guy kill a dude
• Dana Gould's body is the current soul vessel for the entity once known as "Andy Kaufman"

No denials as of yet... hmmm....

After finding out former Simpsons writer David M. Stern (Bart Gets an F, Kamp Krusty) developed Ugly Americans (watch it!! it's cool), I got curious and decided to find out what some other ex-Simpsons people are up to. DISCLAIMERS/CAVEATS: 1. I basically only looked at wikipedia and imdb, so this could be rife with inaccuracies, etc. 2. With some exceptions, I don't care about anyone who joined the show after it got bad or only wrote like one episode 3. This is essentially limited to movies/tv, since the internet assumes people fell off the face of the earth if they're not doing something for mass audiences

Richard Appel (writer): Showrunner for The Cleveland Show

Wes Archer (director): Was working on The Goode Family until it got cancelled; unclear what he's currently doing

Brad Bird (director): Doing a live-action movie for Pixar (zuh????)

Daniel Chun (writer): Now writing for The Office

David S/X. Cohen (writer): His beloved baby Futurama returns in June on Comedy Central

Jonathan Collier (writer): MIA

Jennifer Crittenden (writer): Producing mysterious project called What's Your Number?

Greg Daniels (writer): Co-creations The Office and Parks and Recreation still going strong

Brent Forrester (writer): Writer for The Office

Ken Keeler (writer): Nerding it up at Futurama

Jay Kogan (writer): Executive producer for some supernatural live-action Nickelodeon show called The Troop; writing an adaptation of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Lauren MacMullan (director): MIA

Jeff Martin (writer/clown): MIA

George Meyer (writer): Occasionally contributes to The New Yorker

Bill Oakley (showrunner, seasons 7 - 8): Writing stuff from Portland

Conan O'Brien (writer): Legally prohibited from being funny on television

Jim Reardon (director): Presumably still Pixarin' it up

Mike Reiss (showrunner, seasons 3-4): While technically still a producer for The Simpsons (I think??), he's been doing a bunch of other projects like writing children's books, computer-animated movies, and the critically-unacclaimed My Life in Ruins

David M. Stern (writer): Developed Ugly Americans, which recently debuted on Comedy Central

Mike Scully (showrunner, seasons 9-12): Writer on Parks & Recreation

John Swartzwelder (writer): Still cranking out funny books from his secret underground lair

Sam Simon (executive producer/showrunner, seasons 1-2): Doing some poker thing

Jon Vitti (writer): Co-wrote an upcoming movie starring Steve Carell; currently working on something called "Boo U."

Josh Weinstein (showrunner, seasons 7-8): MIA??? Wikipedia says he's a producer on Futurama (again), but I'm not sure if I believe that

Frank Welker (voice actor, Santa's Little Helper): Most recent voice credit is "Additional Nuts Voice"

Lona Williams (beauty pageant winner/writing assistant): MIA

Wallace Wolodarsky (writer): Voiced an opossum in Fantastic Mr. Fox; adapting a Philip K. Dick story into a Disney cartoon

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

IN THE NEWS, the news section of the beloved award-winning Simpson's fansite rubbercat.net/simpsons, is proud, albeit modestly, to announce its major refurbishment! In moving from Blogger to Movable Type, IN THE NEWS has been completely redone to look like a somewhat presentable website. Here a look at the changes:

• Small images have been added to most every post to make them look interesting, and a handful of youtubes have been embedded. I don't know why I was so averse to including pics & vids on this thing
• Individual post pages instead of awkward jump-to-an-entry monthly archives!
• Archives are searchable! Now you can find out every time Utit Choomuang has been mentioned (zero so far)
• Categories are now clickable! I could never figure out how to style tags with Blogger
• There are a handful of posts from the first few months that I deleted because they were just me quoting a bunch of paragraphs from utterly uninteresting articles without adding commentary or context or jokes, which made me feel really parasitic
• More jokes added and old bad jokes have been tweaked to make them funny!!
• Fresher news on the rubbercat.net/simpsons home page since I don't have to do that manually now

The End

###

The Simpsons turn 20 today (that is, if you don't count the Christmas special as the first episode and completely ignore the original shorts from The Tracey Ullman Show), and there's been a number of retrospectives to mark the occasion. An oft-repeated claim in many histories is that creator Matt Groening, fearing the loss of his Life in Hell characters, came up with the Simpsons in fifteen minutes before a meeting with Ullman producer James L. Brooks. But the characters actually originated nearly 40 years ago, in an unpublished novel Groening wrote in high school:

Chat Transcript (April 6, 1999):

Question hobgoblin: How old were you when you first came up with the idea for "The Simpsons"? I know that the show has been on for a long time.
[...]
Matt_G "The Simpsons" originated in high school.
Matt_G I wrote a bleak little novel called "The Mean Little Kids" starring a teenage Bart Simpson with buckteeth and a very bad complexion.

How quickly did The Simpsons gel in your mind?

I needed to come up with an idea really quickly. In the back of my mind was the idea of doing something that might possibly end up spinning off into its own TV show, so I created a family which I thought would lend itself to a lot of different kinds of stories. In high school I had written a novel, a sort of a very sour Catcher in the Rye, self pitying, adolescent novel starring Bart Simpson as a very troubled teenager. I took that family and transferred it, made them younger, and then drew. It took about 15 minutes to design the characters the first time out.

Were they all the same characters that we now know and love?

Yes, but they've been transformed.

Why didn't you leave Bart as an adolescent?

TV does children really badly, and I thought there was room for something different. Teenagers are already running rampant on television, but kids are done very unrealistically in sitcoms. Sometimes, a particular character gels with an audience and becomes the star.

Was Bart at the center all along?

Yeah. The rest of the Simpsons in my original conception were in a struggle to be normal and Bart was the one who thought that being normal was boring.

And now you know... the rest of the story.

[Twitter.com/rubbrcatsimp]

Al Gore would be proud: so far, Season 21 is the most environmentally-friendly season of The Simpsons yet. What makes this season so green? Each episode is made from a recycled plotline from an earlier episode:

Homer the Whopper: Radioactive Man but with Homer instead of Milhouse

Bart Gets A 'Z': Sweet Seymour Skinner's Baadasssss Song but with Mrs. Krabappel instead of Principal Skinner

The Great Wife Hope: The Homer They Fall but with Marge instead of Homer

Congratulations on reducing your carbon footprint, Simpsons writers! [Simpsons Archive]

Lawyers for 20th Century Fox take copyright infringement of The Simpsons very seriously. During the early 1990s, lawyers were sent to vendors who sold bootleg Bart Simpson t-shirts. Towards the end of the decade, many Simpsons sites received cease & desist orders for the grave crime of hosting framegrabs. More recently, Fox lawyers managed to take down a series of Simpsons video parodies featuring OJ Simpson. Even creator Matt Groening, who has a collection of bootleg Simpsons merchandise, personally dispatches lawyers from time to time.

Ben Jones, an artist in the art collective Paper Rad, has recieved many acclaims for his work; Paper Rad's avant-garde comics often appear in hip indie comics anthologies such as The Best American Comics and Kramer's Ergot. Following the massive Kramer's Ergot 7, of which Groening was a fellow contributor, Jones was asked to contribute to the upcoming Treehouse of Horror comic book. According to a 2003 Comics Reporter profile, this would not be his first Simpsons comic:

Effective as illustration, Ben Jones' comics demand reading. As noted by several of his fellow cartoonists, on no planet should a comic about Simpsons characters Homer and Moe taking a walk, getting high and skinny dipping ("Ho and Mo") work on any level for a single second, let alone be funny and affecting and a touch profound. In the Alfe stories, Jones' most frequent recurring feature and among the first comics the artist tried to sell through Million Year Picnic, Jones uses a sizable, extremely odd cast to pay tribute to simple pleasures and the way kindness and patience act as buttresses against life's intolerable cruelties. Jones is to the idea of friendship what the cartoonist Jack Jackson is to Texas history, its primary comics chronicler.

Yet, despite such egregious acts of copyright infringement, Jones and Paper Rad do not appear to have been punished for their actions. As far as I can tell from a Google search, the art collective has never received a cease & desist letter from Fox's attorneys. In fact, with his contribution to Simpsons Comics, Jones appears to have been rewarded for his copyright infringement!!! He is being endorsed, at least implicitly, by Bongo Comics, Groening, and Fox, who are apparently turning a blind eye to his wholesale appropriation of their intellectual property. Is Jones receiving preferential treatment simply for being a celebrity? Is this really the message Bongo Comics wants to be sending to infringers?

We've received some exclusive, never-before-seen storyboards of The Simpsons Movie from a top-secret source over at Film Roman!!! Check 'em out!!!

Wondering who or what the "top-secret character" is? Well, wonder no more, 'cause we've got the scoop!

An inside source at Gracie Films has provided us with a top-secret framegrab of a scene from The Simpsons Movie. Click here for the inside scoop!!!