Burning Down the Treehouse: Some Idiot Reviews Ninety THOH Segments in Thirty Days

Am I the only one who doesn't know what a "based and redpilled woke epic style meme boy" is?
 
#28

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It must be reasserted so that I don't come off as some no-fun-allowed grumpy puss that I'm not against Scully's fanciful nonsense in the proper context, but the Halloween segments don't really give him the time for it, and ultimately I am still rating these for how they succeed as Halloween experiences first and foremost. Again, funny jokes are a given, I'm here for the overanalyzing. So with that, onto the show! Whereas O&W's takes on specific source material would be quite straightforward and non-subversive, Scully's takes are similarly uninterested in directly subverting the material and more just cramming the framework with whatever silly shit suits them that day. That's the level we have rapidly dropped to, so be it. The original movie has some angle of karmic vendetta to it but we don't really get there with this one nor do we particularly sense the regret especially from Homer enough to unearth tension, but there are actually some effective moments of tone especially in the opening accident with all the fog and the sparsely lit home scenes with the dense shadows and outside storms, though the revolving shot with the scrawled walls is wholesale "Shinning" theft.

Still, not as flat as usual, and in service of slasher homage the joke about all four of them splitting up into four different clearly haunted locales is easy but funny. Still this one's packed to the gills with your usual goofery, some Weekend at Burnie's antics with Flanders' supposed corpse, Homer's urge to kill rising when spotting Milhouse, and uh of course werewolf Flanders. Scully's form of subversion is less incisively dissecting the material being lifted and more just carcrashing another genre into it for peak irreverence. Fine, but ending with Homer being torn to shreds and screaming bloody murder just isn't satisfying for me. Still, closer to what a THOH should be so I'll give it my certified "okay" ranking, it'd just be nice that even with all the attempted tone there was a sense of effort in the narrative structure, making these stories complete in their brief time is surely difficult but demonstrably possible.
 
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#29

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well i don't know how many more times i'll get to say this so i'll be direct: this segment has always been and remains really dang good! scully and his band of ne'er-do-wells can't seem to keep their eye on the ball long enough to concern themselves with nailing an actual spooky segment, but give them the chance to lampoon and lovingly homage campy retro superhero cartoons and they'll hit a home run. every detail aids in fleshing out a perfect mirror image of the tropes from the powers themselves to their supremely corny theme song to the extremes of them as heroes going from cleaning house to fighting saddam hussein, it's all properly ridiculous in a pitch-perfect way, but that's just the surface and for once there's more under the hood. we also get a loophole for turning what should be a lifeless guest appearance into an absurd meta crossover that exposes all of its own dorkiness at the hands of inquisitive and perverted nerds, capped off by the appearance of cbg's the collector, quite possibly his finest hour.

this alter ego is cbg's essence maximized, carrying his delusion and obsessive desire for mint-condition memorabilia into capturing the stars themselves, geeking out over capturing lucy lawless who he knows in his clogged heart to be the true xena, and of course revealing his plan to wed her in between his relentless quipping. as fun as bart and lisa are especially in the opening, they are quickly shoved in the background doing what all retro superheroes do near the end of a conflict, gradually lowering into a vat of dangerous liquid by a hook. this is cbg and lawless' short, weird as that is, and lawless herself does great, beyond the obvious stellar "a wizard did it", she plays her role with a disgust at the collector but hardly a shock having just escaped another hoard of nerds, and given her experience she uses her expertise to seduce cbg enough to whip his ass.

of course it's his own nerd hubris that does him as he opens his own 2001 phantom menace lightsaber and erodes its value, tumbling in shock and horror into the lucite, and just before his end striking an iconic battlestar galactica pose. perfect. what a shocker even with all the good memories, not just good fun but playfully cheeky satire of the fandoms such camp had birthed. it gets to be every as much a delightful comic cartoon as it does an eyeroll at the fervor over such things. rings no less true today at that. no better proof need exist that not being halloweeny doesn't mean a thoh segment can't be a great success.
 
#30

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well look at that, it took nine segments but scully finally figured out how to condense his penchant for accelerating lunacy into a thoh segment. this one goes some places man, from the comfort of the simpsons home to bart and homer's heads inflating and popping in the sweet sweet tom arnoldless vacuum of space. homer being the cause of the collapse of uh well, everything, is the sort of inflated importance of our titular family i typically have distaste for, but that's usually because it leads to braindead wish fulfillment plots, and here it leads to literal planetary doom, and homer suffers for it, so we good. taking the concept of y2k and blending it with the increasing reliance on technology gives the segment alot of comedy mileage to spare in watching basically the whole simpsons house implode, gawking as planes plummet to the earth, and krusty nearly dying in a spasm when his pacemaker is disrupted, theres alot of detail to just how much goes awry how fast, and of course in springfield it wouldn't take this much to inspire looting, but it sure does help dont it.

i wouldn't categorize the tone as horror, not in the sense thohs are known for, but it is tangibly extreme and fragile in way that suits scully's sensibility. the devastation grows and grows around our characters until it's so immense and undeniable that there's no recourse but to launch the best remaining people into space (and the worst into the sun in a great celeb-skewering scene the show wouldn't be able to muster soon. the kid gloves must make it hard to hold the skewers) and you do feel that astronomical leap in extremity as it goes. i wouldn't go so far as to label them stakes, but i don't feel i need to, point a to point b is such a ludicrous and surprisingly joke dense expedition through chaos that it's hard to care, this one's just straight up fun and for once it feels like they saw the potential in their concept and dug for every nugget of comedy gold along the way. so with that it's fair to say after my dissatisfaction with thoh ix, thoh x is pretty good, and while me saying that feels a bit like overstating the obvious, its an overall sentiment that will soon be missed.
 
Really hated Lisa at the end of that segment where she picks Marge on the spot (and apparently Maggie too) and leaves Homer & Bart to die without any regret (even though this is a Treehouse episode). A character having to choose only one family member/loved one to save (or one of two) and let the other one(s) die & then callously and bluntly picking one right away I feel gives him/her an stamp of being a monster.
 
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Eh, I don’t really have an issue with that scene. Would you have considered it more acceptable for Lisa to hem and haw a bit before picking the obvious choice? I think that would just be unnecessarily trying to soften an obvious decision. I like the bluntness. Besides, we don’t really have time to waste in a THOH segment. The Man Who Came to Be Dinner had a very similar scenario, and they took more time on that one.
 
Obvious choice? The most obvious choice for would be not to throw any of them to the wolves but try take a third option by bribing the guards, sneaking in or whatever. If you love your family like Lisa has shown to do beforehand, warts and all, I think that would be natural but here they sort of out her as someone who doesn't give a rats ass about her father and brother who have given her a lot of love and happiness despite not being the brightest of the bunch). Unless some in your family are monstrous people or something I'd expect you'd put up a fight.

I get that they don't have a lot of time in these segments and this was the point of the joke but they could at least have had a brief joke of her being forced to pick and being torn on it but pressured to hurry up & it's mostly the way she did it with the remorseless coldness in her voice and lack of empathy that did it; there was this sort of strange realism to it and almost felt like something that could happen in an non-TOH episode, especially how they twist Lisa a bit too far in some modern episodes.

Luckily it is non-canon. If they pulled it in an canon episode I don't know what I'd say.
 
#31

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this one's funnier than it has any right to be, what with careless st peter, noogieing satan, the parade of near-death cheats on homer before succumbing to the green fiend, and of course homer pining for a compliment from lenny, but this one reminds of just how deep we are, how jerkass homer has become the new canon. this entire plot is just homer struggling to not be an asshole on all fronts so he doesn't go to hell, it's so ingrained in the new simpsons dna that it's how they do their parodies now. what movie can we use to do a story about irredeemable homer that's spooky? ghost dad? sure fuck it. despite the jokes mentioned above, i tend to recall this one as being the point of no return, where needless homer antics are extraneously stuffed into every crevice once containing satire and tone and character. i tend to recall it in fact as being very jean-esque in it's overwhelming flatness, but honestly that isn't quite true.

jean would have thrown ghost homer every which way being a bellend and then randomly had him do a good deed that grants him a bland happy ending intent to erase the badwill as if there's enough consistency to earn it. scully doesn't for a moment pretend there's actual chance for redemption here, his supposed good deed is stopping a stair-toppling baby just to stop its crying and then brag about it as if it meant anything, and heaven isn't interested in said redemption anyway, sending him to hell nevertheless to be bullied by the devil for eternity. at least he properly suffers, scully knows jerkass homer isn't a hero, he's a cartoon who pays the karmic debt of his recklessness, and the payoff is better for it, even if it's a far cry from the homer we once loved. as a meaningless and bone-deep stupid scully cartoon, eh fuck it i think this one's alright. the standard has lowered and my expectations are just to be amused and don't bullshit me. the pointlessness of this segment is scully anarchy personified, and it commits.
 
#32

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the simpsons spoof grimms' fairy tales! the longer I let it stew in the cauldron the more i feel this is an idea that could've worked, but i think we're too far gone for it. i went a little easy on "easy bake coven" regarding the extremely flimsy nature of these dressup segments for getting a couple of surface-level details correct but i can't even really muster that here. every character is a complete and utter stand-in for the usual scully simpsons but stuffed into these getups and shoved into the book. homer being his usual cruel self of the era ignites the plot, bart buffoons through every scene and lisa provides *spooky sting* EXPOSITION. oh dear already driving down that path are we? yeah, lisa has the grimm fairy tales book within this grimm fairy tales spoof which i suppose is meant to be clever but it's mostly lisa explaining the story they're currently in which is not good writing and internally is so confusing my head may implode if i attempt to crack it. there is a generous wealth of source material within the grimm brothers' works but we largely graze the surface of the most well-known ones like goldilocks and three bears and hansel and gretel, and each one provides a different disconnected dead end to bounce a few jokes off the wall before darting to the next.

the direction has never yet been this flat, the only essence of thoh here is forcing some violence when goldilocks is caught and presumably eviscerated to the degree of death as her blood pours under the door to outside. scary? the hansel and gretel bit also has an ominous explained joke; bart accepting his fate as he eats his weight in filler by basting himself is dumb but worth a chuckle, but then lisa actually says "at least stop basting yourself!". thanks lisa thats joke space clogged with packing peanuts. this...is gonna keep happening. as for this segment it mostly precursors just how shallow specific sendups would become, no insight, no bite, and no character, and my sweet lord did i not need to see homer giving birth. whats especially weird is this is one production season away from "simpsons tall tales" which is actually not bad. guess they figured it out. so my mild applause will go there. this one, not awful but innocuous, and left feeling an empty air is a bad impression from a treehouse of horror segment.
 
#33

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ah, if only scully could have wrapped his less-than-gold-plated thoh run here with a segment so thrown off the spectrum of traditional bad-to-good both in regards to halloweeniness and general quality that it'd be a fool's errand to even try making normal sense of it, but for some reason scully was given two thohs in his final production season. maybe jean had too many brilliant ideas to fill s13 with to do one. yeah i'm sure that's it. oh speaking of fool's errand to make sense of it, let's make sense of it. there's farce, a common way to thread together many of the classic thohs, and there's this segment, which is so fundamentally cuckoo fuckballs (layman's term) that it dares you to question it. the conflict of the vengeance seeking dolphin army is initiated by lisa's good hearted environmentalism granting her free willy moment, and the dolphins at their leader's town hall speech is intent to mention human's thoughtless behavior toward their habitat and their undeserved takeover of land, and we even get a brilliant birds referencing sequence to hammer in those themes, it doesn't take a brain genius to understand these sources, but your brain can rest easy knowing it really doesn't matter anyway.

the writers wanted to pick the most absurdly cutesy and harmless animals to make their villains and the tonal disregard is anarchic glee, as dolphins stab their whole ass bodies through people, beach ball them to death, and other such goofy gags, a rare instance of the increasingly classless violence playing off well in just how dissonant it is. i love how quickly they take over and hold positions in human society, how apparently they overthrew all of springfield, not that it'd be the hardest group of people to outsmart even with sea-brains, but lisa implies she doomed all of mankind so clearly their tactics, whatever they are, worked on a much larger level, and that these details are essentially shrugged away is the point. it's another immense leap from point a to point d (for dolphin), and that's how i like it from full octane scully. we are four seasons beyond any hope for a genuine halloween segment so maybe the new rulebook jettisoning move is Fuck It evil dolphins, go all the way in the opposite direction. also this segment is named after a movie where a guy's attempt to teach dolphins human communication inadvertently leads to the intellectualized dolphins being pawns in a plot to assassinate the president. that's better than everything i just wrote, bar none. take that with you when you feel blue. i know i will.
 
there is indeed one more scully thoh left (the harry potter one...) but from this point onwards its time for the solo jean seasons. just offering my preemptive condolences.. cause once you start goin down the jean road theres no going back
 
#34

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Homer Simpson is an atom bomb of assholery and consequently creates a cursed reality for everyone around him, most importantly his family. But enough about the last twenty years of episodes let's discuss this segment nyuck nyuck nyuck no but seriously folks this one fucking blows, in essentially every way possible. at least in "G-G-Ghost D-D-Dad", Homer suffered his actions and not the others, even though he's drained of the human qualities that made his buffoonery find just enough foothold in his classic era follies to root for him more than not, he is at least responsible for his misery specifically. Here, Homer is an incendiary fuckbone of a human for no discernible reason and everyone else pays the price while he never does. Lenny and Carl die, Bart dies, and all Homer can do is continue to be a thickheaded buttface.

That is peak Jerkass Homer, and maybe it'd be passable if anything like, happened in this, if there was a payoff in "Life's a Glitch" style catastrophe, but for as many curses as they lay on Homer, Marge becoming a hair beast, Lisa a centaur, Lenny and Carl i remind you murdered, nothing really seems to mean anything to anyone, least of all our man of the hour, they're perturbed but live as normal. Fine ok no human reactions no stakes i'm used to it now, but they don't even take much advantage comedically of these transformations, it's just their regular day-to-day with costumes. Thrill as centaur Lisa eats cereal! Enthralling. Then there's the leprechaun. He's annoying, and he sucks, and I don't wanna talk about that ending, so I wont.

Really this just sells the true malignant ill of flanderization to me, Homer being a dick sometimes is not necessarily a big deal, it varies and narrative intent matters, howfuckingever when you water down a character so much with one ingredient all you can taste is that ingredient, eventually it's the only ingredient you remember being there, and every time you use said character their flavor is the same. When that flavor is "homer is kinda a shitbag", the stories really suffer, especially the Halloween segments, because no aloof glance at fantasy tropes is saving you from the vat of white hot liquid jerkass you have dunked it in. Worst segment so far, easily.
 
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So you basically think Night of the Dolphin is ok? I have a much higher opinion of it, but I'll accept you not thinking it's poor.
 
scully was good at thoh, one thing i'll give the rascal
 
#35

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better than the last one, though to be fair huffing a bag of hot bat guano would be better than the last one, but yeah this one's okay. sure is a shame they didn't get to 2001: a space odyssey until well past the breaking point though, and all we are really left with is phantom pierce brosnan voice wanting to fuck marge. man this show sure did get hornier, guess that's part of the package deal of the show's brain turning to soggy shredded wheat. anyway, most of what works here is, strangely enough, aesthetic, what with the eerie emanating voice of brosnan who gives a solidly charming and funny performance, balancing the suave and the sinister in the hushed asmr tone you'd expect from a hal type character, and the whole design of the futuristic and automated house is solid with all the contraptions built to be capable of evil deeds because y'know just in case!

still, the overall slithering voyeurism of the episode might would've played better if they'd taken it any degree of seriously, though brosnan's cheeky perverted lines offer much of the levity to be fair. predictably, it's mostly homer, who after displaying essentially no genuine concern for his wife he would die for, annoyingly saves the day even though toe to tip this is a marge segment argh. i'd have notched this from okay to decent (huge difference i know) if it committed to killing homer and marge was the one who killed brosnan, tying in the loss of her housework-free life and her being creeped on with the decision. so bare minimum but our big dumb oaf has to save the day with his jerkass axe. his jerkaxe. whatever, still better than the first segment, but not enough to save this thoh on its own.
 
#36

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there's one thing i like in this segment, and it's snake smithers aka SLITHERS oh my gosh that's adorable smithers as the basilisk, precious. anyway this is horrible, equally as bad or possibly worse than "hex and the city", a complete and utter dead air broadcast. if you told me i'd be giving fuckin' "scary tales can come true" credit for anything, i'd at least have assumed it would come when i hit the especially undead seasons when every agonizing minute is room temperature porridge down the gullet, when i'd be begging for taste even if its white hot liquid jerkass, but at least at ding dong dang leaaaast that segment seems to like understand the stories its slapping its yellow stickers all over, i shouldn't have to toss faint praise like a handful of insincere confetti onto a segment for the absurd bare minimum of having the characters be based on the ones in the damn story you're spoofing to the skeletal degree of "yep thats hansel and gretel", but here we are.

there's dressup segments and then there's this shit where the segment dropped two days after the philosopher's stone movie itself, which creates two possibilities: they actually read the four books out at the time which no they did not, or they saw the trailer and figured they got the gist. there is cumulatively about .5% harry potter in this. they do one joke where potter's actually in the class for some reason, that's it. this is the simpsons but springfield elementary students are magic. the jokes are all the same, nelson using magic to bully, ralph too stupid to siphon magic from, milhouse is tragic, tragic milhouse but magic, so on and so forth. the story too is the same, barts bad at magic, lisas good at it, bart tries to sabotage her, disaster strikes, they fix it, they make up, the same regressive kid's show and sitcom writing that will turn this show into a bread sandwich hold the mayo too spicy all too soon.

i miss the family stories in these segments because they gave them dimension and let you remember this is still the simpsons even if they go twisted, but this is so pre-packaged and if it does remind one of the simpsons' state it is no longer a good thing. but uh yeah that's literally it, this has about as much harry potter flavor to it as harry potter shaped fruit snacks, and you can't fool me with the shape of snape, not that they again even did That because there's no way they knew who snape was. no satire, no references, the costuming is wrong, no stand-ins for a single character in the movies, the music is wrong, everything is wrong. absolutely pitiful, and so transparently made at a quick glance and with an ever careless shrug. you coulda just left it at "night at the dolphin", this thoh is vomitously lazy, and y'know what hurts the most? it's time for fifty four al jean segments, many of which take after it. into the deep unceasing static folks, let's get zombified.
 
trying to leave thumbs on segments that i havent watched but zombie simpsons still kinda drives me nutty so i might forget... the reviews are still good nohomers content regardless

plus from the jean era ive seen clones, reaper madness, the homer blob one and thats it. at least panthers probably watched all of these at least once

also worth nothing that im pretty sure carolyn omine was the one who brought up the incredibly shitty idea of doing a harry potter parody and according to her almost no one in the writing room at the time actually knew what the fuck harry potter was to begin with. if that doesnt establish how pathetic and out of touch the zombie writing team truly is then i dont know what does
 
Tbf to Omine, Scully and the rest of the writing team, Wiz Kids was produced before the Philosopher's Stone, so it would have been hard for them to properly parody the Harry Potter universe with just the books to go by. But if Wiz Kids was part of TOH XIII, then it would justifiably have been expected to be a lot better
 
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Tbf to Omine, Scully and the rest of the writing team, Wiz Kids was produced before the Philosopher's Stone, so it would have been hard for them to properly parody the Harry Potter universe with just the books to go by. But if Wiz Kids was part of TOH XIII, then it would justifiably have been expected to be a lot better

i was not actually aware of that but still they should have at least read sorcerer's stone or something. it was probably in every single bookstore at the time (it still is :<) and its a goddamn kids book, not anna karenina
 
#37

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i won't waste your time with the formality of Could Al Jean Save The Simpsons? no. he cannot. he made it worse, and hasn't stopped doing so yet. still, i'm not gonna lie to you when i enjoy a segment, if i can call thoh x a great episode, i can very much do the same with segments in ever more fictional sounding editions of the endless movie parody parade. having said that, i do not like this one. multiplicity is a good newer source to pluck from, because it gives us a chance to play with cloning and also with the repercussions of doing so recklessly when the clones develop personas of their own and turn against homer. there is so much material within creating a field of weird new versions of homer and making the original homer contend with their failure to adhere to his desires. we neither get there nor seem interested in going there, and the wild situational inconsistency that chews up story potential like aphids on leaves is immediately present, the homers somehow all exactly like our original beer swilling numbskull but willing to do his familial chores without asking. do they or don't they have agency?

this may seem like a nitpick but it's the sort of non-conceptualization that renders events into a state of just happening rather than meaning anything. when one clone beheads flanders, we get a sense maybe they are turning. nope. upon finding their way back they just behave like homer again, and the attempt at making it a conflict by having uh the simpsons randomly in a war room sure i guess falls entirely flat. these parodies are just retellings by now but they cant even get the basic details right, and if its meant to be a subversion all i can gather is jean and his boomer boys still really find homer drinking and peeing funny as all fuckity fuck. the fact that id be satisfied with the standard of playing the movies plot straight is a testament to just how far we have fallen, and i'm not even allowed that because eh writing is hard. first segment outta the gate, an absolute dud. not so good al.
 
So nobody in the writers room knew what Harry Potter was, but somehow they were able to reference it in Trilogy of Error. Doesn't make sense..
 
I think this is one of the funniest post-classic segments. Maybe the plot structure and characterization consistency isn’t the best, but damn if it doesn’t bring the LOLs.
 
Send in the Clones is actually one of my favorites segments of the Halloween series. Probably the second, behind Time and Punishmemt. It's one of the most hilarious -the gag with Homer's variations, with Peter Griffin among them, is one of the best moments of the ThoH-. The concept is interesting, and the las plot twist was clever. Homer is in plenty form an Castellaneta did a great job.
 
#38

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did...did jean just make a better scully segment than anything in scully's last thoh? looks like he did. see i told you i'd say when i liked one, and i like one. frankly, the ruthless comical irony that turns this story again and again is so swartzweldian, and having our antagonists be old-timey trigger-happy gunslingers just adds another layer. really though, i'm kinda surprised at how solid a farce this is, first off with the immediate mob decision to shrug at having any debate and just melting all the guns down and turning them into playground equipment, but especially lisa's plight and how its soured. lisa's inspiration to end the infatuation with guns being based on the tombstone of the very undead soul just waiting to climb outta his grave so he can brandish his gun unchallenged is just mm thats tasty, and yes billy the kid and all his compatriots were buried in springfield, don't question it. this thing's ridiculous but it isn't brainless, its a series of gotchas lead by some truly silly villains as non-threatening as they are successful at threatening the bozos of springfield. they shoot literally everything in sight without reason or question, they threaten the simpsons to play them ragtime music, they're such caricatures melted down like springfield's guns to their primal essence, rabid and wild and yeehawing away as their bullets turn moe's tavern into a trypophobe's worst nightmare.

no time for that though, time travel time! this may be my favorite pendulum swing in this cuckoo clock of a segment. yeah i know two different kinds of clocks leeme lone. anyway, rather than going back to before all this gun madness to fix the timeline before it happens, homer goes just far back enough to gather the guns and bring them back to the present to mow down billy and his gang. lisa provides our message of the day: "i guess guns really are the answer". can segments only be good now if they give so little shit about rhyme and reason they just go clownfuck bananas? possibly, but there is a method to the madness here, each nauseating spin meant to contradict the last assumption until it means nothing, but it knows what it is, and it runs at you guns-a-blazin' until it runs outta ammo, and it's kinda weirdly fun. the jean era will rarely be so willing to let caution meet wind. i'll savor the lunacy here.
 
#39

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there are two jokes in this segment, and they're both reasonably cute and clever. first you have all of the animal designs of the springfeldians, most of which suit their host such as tubby piggy wiggum and bart as a mischievous spider, and then you have the ending, which is the only real commentary on the source material as a rejection of the notion that this erasure of identity is inhumane because primal life is so much more sweet, walrus homer in the beach chair is a quality visual. sadly, that is about all the drops in this bucket, another measly and extremely played-straight take on a borrowed source, hibbert's characterization too ill-defined to earn any tension, and without said tension, even the cute ending only works as a gag but not really a halloween style trick. much like "hex and the city", alot of creative designs left standing around doing nothing, maybe imbue in them some sense of horror or any reaction at all to earn the comedy of the last minute flip. everyone seems ambivalent towards their fate and drains the color from the canvas, if they don't care how am i meant to? there's cutting corners and then there's slicing so deep you hit the vital arteries and turn up a flatline. a middling affair to say the least.
 
That middle segment with the zombies, 'The Fright To Creep And Scare Harms', always struck me as one of the best early Jean segments yet it's often overlooked, often for the preceding 'Send In The Clones'.

I like that gag at the end with Moe stealing the time machine and going back in time. So random and out of place.
 
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#40

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thoh xiv's writing credit goes to beloved turn-of-the-century policeman john swartzwelder, and while most writing credits especially of these decrepit later eras feel about as meaningful as the matt groening signature on any promotional imagery, when swartzwelder puts his idiosyncratically outlandish pen to the page, the sensibility has a tendency to linger. suffice to say, somehow it did indeed linger here, but let us take this one segment at a time. in this one, homer becomes the grim reaper, and hilarity ensues. after a benny hill chase sequence, obviously, homer beans the old grim reaper with a bowling ball and leaves the world without death, a concept that wrings out a few funny jokes if less than id like for how good said concept is (and one unfunny moe suicide joke for balance) before homer pops on the grey robes and goes fingering the whole town. this plays out in a series of loosely connected vignettes that don't serve much purpose but do bring the laughs, the scene where lisa takes homer to career day and an unfortunate rused homeless man expecting a hot meal is killed offscreen to the applause of the kids is especially solid comedy direction.

i tend not to just rattle off jokes i like but the opportunity to do so at all is dwindling and frankly, just saying this s14 thoh segment is funny should grab your attention. even the quick glance towards conflict is an excuse to flippantly murder patty and have the light of god himself chase a motorcycling homer until stopped by a train. it's just chaos and jokes, even homer just opening the door and seeing the grim reaper while casually drinking a beer is great, it takes none of itself seriously but it doesn't spend too much time fooling you otherwise, its swartzwelder at a point where nobody seemed interested in curbing him (without enthusiasm). does it succeed as a halloween segment? not really no, it's really just an extravagantly silly homer gets a job short, and i would've liked to see a little more of the world without death, but at this point ill settle for homer emptying the grim reaper into his trash and killing fellow sports fans to get better seats. a fun one.
 
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