Selman has been kicking the experimentation into overdrive as his prominent showrunner position seems more and more of a long-term thing, and even as an outside observer its been refreshing to see. Certainly the show has already been considerably better at outlines than story execution for most of its post-classic run, I think thats alot of why I keep coming back, for all the missteps I do think The Simpsons proves that a show with a firm enough foundation could theoretically drag on forever and still come up with novel story ideas worth investigating, and Selman has always brought some of the most interesting ideas to the table, be they unique character pairings, niche satire and subculture analysis, or format benders. After twenty seven years on the air Selman showran the series' first ever canonical full-length Halloween story and against all logic it was one of the best and funniest episodes the series has produced in the last two decades, and more recently Thanksgiving of Horror provided some of the most inspired and detailed spooky shorts of the HD era, including one I'd genuinely still slot somewhere in my top thirty-ish THOH shorts, so when I found out Selman was once again set to break Halloween format I was admittedly intrigued, though tempered given the context. A thirty minute non-canon anything-goes style THOH given the potential peaks of THOHs even as short as seven minutes could be an absolute sprawl, a real opportunity to take risks and have fun, but the choice of Stephen King's It gave me pause. Not because its a poor choice for parody, it feels a bit late even for lampooning the Muschietti versions but what else is new, but because I feel like I can smell the Krusty jokes a mile away, and because it feels like it was chosen less to accentuate the no-holds-barred chaos of THOH and more so they had time to tell the story, which if you consult classic THOHs, should not be mandatory to get the job done. Classics like King Homer, the Frankenstein segment and of course The Shinning give you every detail you need and feel neither naked nor rushed, if the length only exists to serve as handicap then we have a problem.
Now I've never read nor seen It but from the lowest-effort-possible research I do for you fine folks, this is my kinda story. A little loss of innocence tale imbued into an ensemble facing untold evil tucked inside of a small town, preying upon the fears of the youth to unravel their sanity, if they're lucky and don't perish then their childhood sure does, the good of youth dies and the terrors of youth follows one into adulthood, trauma be like! Got it. From the top, one absolute positive must be addressed because heaven knows it's become increasingly rare in THOHs and the series in general, but I actually really like the establishing sense of mood here, as we drift from Springfield to Kingfield there is actually a discernible distinction in tone, this overcast small town feels as though there is a curse hanging over it, that slight unease of the haunting local folklore lurking beneath, literally in this case. Furthermore, while Krusto is a pretty predictable Simpsons version of Pennywise, less of a spoof on the material and more the question of what a Krusty as evil as Pennywise would feel like, visually the design is aided by some pretty effective elasticity, he really does feel as though he could appear from any corner and as any object, and there are a few times it caught me off guard though chalk that up to not knowing the source material beat for beat, but even if these are mimics they're a solid replication of the proper uncanniness and intensity the character demands. I can actually believe when our characters are in peril, but let's talk about that shall we? Honestly on first viewing I felt that this special was...okay, certainly more efforted and genuinely eerie than the average THOH these days, I came out with a few sensible chuckles, impressed with the animation and overall direction, and prepared to write a thoroughly boring 2.5/5 review. Lucky for me, upon second viewing all the pieces fell apart on the floor, and I do really mean all of them.
Let's be clear and honest, everything that works here is mimicry, its solid well-researched mimicry, it isn't as woefully flat and played straight as usual modern THOH fare, but my bar for THOHs has gotten so low that for a moment I mistook that as something worth crediting to the Simpsons staff. To the animators surely, Steve Moore and the storyboarders laid this thing out rather nicely, but they can only work with the writing they are given, and what they are given at its most visceral moments might enticingly mirror It, but in no way does it transcend it. Truthfully I expected the worst case scenario of a half-hour THOH to be the inverse of the usual pacing issues, that it would aimlessly drag through the three acts playing all the beats verbatim, yet somehow despite all the extra allotted time, this episode still feels extremely rushed. Perhaps due to stuffing two movies' worth of lore into the whole package but, consult my prior point about classic THOHs and do the math. Three acts should be more than enough, but when you get past the effective scares, the actual details feel half-formed top to bottom. The Losers have no real moments of meaningful chemistry nor do they feel very fleshed out in the trauma angle, they play the flashbacks straight in terms of taking their trauma seriously but Krusto's transformations have nothing really to inform the personal anxieties of the characters and instead focus on clown jokes involving seltzer, ventriloquism etc. This would be a perfect scene to inform the protagonists in funny individual ways that ground them and especially, distinguishes them from just being the Springfeldians. Which they are, and we are basically beaten over the head with this by lasering in on the poem aspect of the story to shove a Homer-Marge relationship drama clumsily into the proceedings. I understand this is from the book, it's ok to have it here, but the amount of time it wastes trying to render this, I remind you, non-canon THOH story into a by-the-numbers story about proxy Homer and proxy Marge coming together is just, what's the point? This is not the time or place, and this sort of thing doesn't inform the story's alternate characters, it forces them to be the ones they already were, it yanks you viciously out of the story. Part II is essentially dead air for focusing in on this aspect almost entirely and kills the entire tone, not to mention the town just looks like fuckin' Springfield by that point, so much for tone.
The adult Losers seem to have harbored no real trauma over dealing with the clown, they make their pact but there's no actual gravity because we don't know what power he even has over them, yeah he kills kids but the emphasis is over the specific traumas that don't die even if you escape, and that shared experience, but we have no sense of that here, even though the ending insists we do. Of course all of this could be fine if it were going for a subversion of Krusto being a traditional villain, and I swear it's trying but it never fully materializes. Krusto gets his first sincere laughs by turning himself into the joke, and it feels like its actually heading somewhere in Part II where his presence turns to that desperation for laughs, he turns the gun on himself and loses his power to be intimidating. Along with this there are many instances of outright stating how unfunny Krusto is, to bring some character-specific horror comedy to the character you could have the trauma hyperbolize the agony of enduring his comedy, Krusto is just Pennywise, admittedly this is also a half-formed idea because I don't know what would take this unfunniness to lethal levels but it could be a funny spin on the shared trauma, hell he's a phantom who has had many eclectic forms of access to the unwilling ears of Kingfield to spread his comedy for decades, the ever looming hack that won't go away, if any show knows anything about that well, y'know. There is lore in that he kills to create a captive audience for his comedy, that's pretty funny, but it's an idea that arrives at the climax so there's no chance to flesh it out, there's no commitment, sometimes the joke is that the horror of Krusto is that he's unfunny but often he's just treated like Pennywise, sometimes he seems to be acting out of desperation for his eternally doomed career but usually he's just acting out It kills.
Atop of all of this, the script is...sigh ok. Listen. Everything I've said so far is damning but nothing made me more sure that this was business as usual than enduring what this show thinks is parody now. I've prattled plenty about the perils of playing things to an awkward degree of semi-straight but the specifics are really beginning to grate on me, the way it's all cheekily constructed out of nods and winks. The issues addressed above hurt the story alot and waste time but nothing guts the mood and leaves no space for character than stuffing every motherloving line of dialogue with blunt references and wiseguy exposition on the tropes of whatever story they're doing. The way every Loser says what "type" of character they are, the way they exposit about the 27 years, the way they joke on the implausibility of the poem, the way they feel the need to have Krusto say THATS RIGHT FEEL THE TENSION at the beginning. Tommyknockers! Thats a thing I recognize by the guy who did the other thing I recognize! Nods are fine and classic THOHs have them but they've become a crutch, its no longer a little gag tucked away, its the substitute for actual parody. The story wants to be taken seriously yet at every turn is nudging in you the ribs going "eh? get it?". Immersion isn't even an option in a modern Simpsons send-up because they spend so much time reminding you they're sending it up they forget to fucking send it up! They point, raise an eyebrow, and forget to actually say anything. It's all just so weirdly condescending too, they point out the silliness bluntly without actually writing jokes, its CinemaSins disguised as a television script, and it compounds by making nothing feel internally real, everyone is in a story and nothing matters, yet they still mostly follow the source beats to the end, as if it should and must matter, but I can't buy it. I don't think they do this because they loathe the material or even think they're smarter than it, I just think it's all they got. It's the same as its been for a long long time, Selman may be giving the show some spirit and creativity in places but here it just felt like it always does, like Jean never shared his captain's chair in the first place. I appreciate the intent to go for a bigger THOH story but for me it's so very damning that with all this extra time all that can be achieved is an excess of the same old same old such that it was impossible to ignore. Maybe I should be worried for Selman's first showran THOH after all.