#36
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.