tyler
A Burden on Online Simpsons Fandom Since '13
TREEHOUSE OF HORROR XXVI
written by: joel h. cohen
directed by: steven dean moore
NOTES:
- okay first time i've done this in a trilogy episode, i suppose i'll just try to split everything neatly into segments instead of just making this one sloppy well of text. so we'll begin with..
OPENING
- we open with this john k. couch Experience. i actually like the first john k. couch gag, despite my seemingly endless list of issues with john k. as a human being and even as an artist at times. it kept things simple and charming in the sort of oblong elasticity of the character's movements and the warped designs and colors. it was definitely a john k. approximation of things. this however immediately throws me off with a few bizarre elements. first off those FUCKING 3D MASK AGH what is that did john k. do that it sure doesn't seem like he would do something like that, they're incredibly ill-fitting and stick out like a sore thumb. i guess if you wanted to Scare me you've already succeeded. another thing i have issue with is just how BUSY some of this animation is. i know that john k. is downright determined to show the feeble "animators" of this world how it's really done but it approaches serious sensory overload. one thing of note is when they zoom in on bart and lisa walking, lisa's color scheme is very bizarre but acceptable on it's own, what makes things become sort of disorienting is a toothpaste blue bear design on her shirt, which alone is a touch too far, but when you realize the bear also has its own details including what appears to be a pink outline of a skirt(?), THEN when you realize that combined with lisa's puke green and dusky blue and thick purples And that aforementioned mask with its own details and shiny blues and a hat with its Own details, THE FUCKING BEAR ON HER SHIRT is also moving, it all just goes from potentially dazzling to nauseating. its an immediate assault on the eyes and it's barely even started! god. also maggie is a bee. she's a bee. just actually a bee.
- so some Evil Air i guess brings some ghosts up from the ground and brings some tombstones to life (and gives one a nose?)
- boy this stuff just never sits still. i guess john k. idealizes the old OOOOOLD animation where everything truly felt alive. there's nothing wrong with this but john k. does it less with grace than just sorta making the whole cartoon feel anxious.
- so bart and lisa are bein' chased by wobbly john k. drawings aaaahhh! there's two ghosts with huge noses. one has a Stimpy Schnoz. what's with the noses john, is this a fetish thing? what are you doin, what are you really ever doin? what are you doin' right now john k. i sure hope it isn't another of these couch Experiences.
- there's a ghost with hair. i think it's a girl ghost. it has like translucent ruby hair. also there's still just a huge veritable projective vomit of bleak colors on screen but they don't so much feel spooky as they literally look like someone lost their lunch on the toon. it's all really jagged and seemingly randomly placed too. john k.'s adoration of loose spontaneous cartooning could be pegged as admirable in it's way but god nothing is posed in a way that hits the eyes comfortably at all. i don't even think about this much but it's being done very wrong here.
- tombstone with an ass. if you think i have something for that you're wrong. i wasn't prepared for that, i didn't know i'd have to prepare for that and even if i did i wouldn't know how to prepare for that.
- so a bunch of seizing see-through freaks of Not Nature Because Nature Would Not Allow This For Long are encroaching upon bart, lisa and maggie while we see FRANK GRIMES' tombstone rattling. let's see some john k. frank grimes, i ain't fuckin scared.
- it really just cannot be overstated how hideous this is. john k. is straight up desperately overcompensating to assert his place as an ANIMATOR like the legends of the medium, but it's just nothing like the old school charming jaunty movement, it's like a caffeinated jitter on fast-forward and john k. needs to be stopped!
- frank grimes arises from the earth and is a fuckin monster like a hunchback or some shit i just
- at the very least his relatively slow-paced clamber is more pleasant visually, but then he just starts fuckin' shit up and it returns to being almost inexplicably disorienting. i don't even understand john k.'s animation decisions at times, at one point Grimes(?) exhales some deadly stink breath on a couple ghosts but he's completely stiff besides some mouth and eye movements that all look very crude.
- the worst animation tho is a bit that's a genuine mistake: grimes(?) is peeling bart like a banana, and after peeling the first bit of face away, some red lining just APPEARS in an area that had not yet been touched. it looks terrible, like seriously i can't fully explain it but it just Appears, it doesn't even slightly look organic and for someone who so frequently overexerts themselves to animate this is a glaring careless error. also the pieces of his head fall down like banana peel but until they feel the background bit looks totally flat and even in places is just lining. it feels totally cheated and like i could overlook it but this guy wants to do everything perfect so i'm calling him out.
- so bart's....goo emerges from his body and grimes(??) harpoons the delicious gooey morsel and it shows a solid few seconds showing him chewing. the fuck is this shit.
- by the way there are some genuinely baffling facial transformations in this sequence. who would decide to draw this like this. i guess john k. can rest easy knowing he'll never be fully imitated, for what it's worth. which is nothing, it's worth nothing, because this is terrible and ugly.
- one good detail i will note is having bart's...goo, soul? whatever it is..having bart jump out of the grimes(???) mouth as he's about to devour lisa. i guess somewhere in his myriad overt detailing he would get something that actually made sense in there.
- not much to say about the chase sequence, john k.'s characters work more organically with some forward momentum since they reason to be so restless. some of the angles on grimes(????) are still very unappealing tho. i don't have enough time in the world or enough concrete animation knowledge to dissect all the shitty visuals in this thing so i'll leave it be here.
- except this: the kids leap through the front door, like literally THROUGH the door and it looks so bad, just doesn't even look like contact was made, goes from no hole to Hole in door. this would require you watchin it (your call) but yeah trust me it's sloppy.
- lisa is purple now. for some reason. thank god this is nearly over.
- homer has some weird animation when talking to the kids and it looks ugly and then grimes(?????) comes in and sucks out homer's ghost and it looks ugly and then marge talks and john k.'s marge has Big Ol Tits cuz fuckin john. k said so i guess, it doesn't surprise me. have you seen naked beach frenzy? get fucked john k. god this was utterly draining. i can't believe there's an episode after this.
i'm giving this couch....thing a fuckin 1/5.
WANTED: DEAD THEN ALIVE
- some good halloween names: bram shelley's dracustein, tim long-un (subject to disagreement this one i'm sure), and ereisserhead (my favorite this year)
- some bad halloween names: stink eyed frink guy (like c'mon really), overdue bill!!!, joel cohen's credit, magic mike scully xxs, uneven shteven moore and of course the worst one...*sigh* joel cohen's credit 2: the squeakquel. this man wrote this episode folks, i'm hyped as can be.
- now then this segment: opens with wendall, who i'm not sure we've seen in awhile beyond background sequences. i see that in twenty seven years his character remains kid who throws up. i'd much prefer not seeing the puke tho, especially not like this where it just drips from his nostrils. urggh.
- bart receives a text message from milhouse, who sends one message with milhouse emoji. i guess this is maybe a reference to how there's probably simpsons emoji, maybe al jean trying to do some sneaky advertising. otherwise it doesn't make any sense, and i could really do without bart saying aloud on the playground while looking at his phone Oh Man I Gotta See This. there's really just too much dialogue in this show now, you don't have to talk through everything that happens. sometimes a visual is a visual for a reason.
- anyway bart is lured to the music room under the guise of seeing largo stuck in a harp (good text couplet: "looks funny", "sounds exquisite"), but of course it's gonna be bob. which mean then it was bob who sent milhouse emoji, which...i still dont think makes sense. emoji of a random child would not exist in the simpsons world, this is a confounding and contrived stab at modern references. also why would bob send those, does he think milhouse would send them of himself? jokes just don't usually link to the story anymore in this show.
- this is maybe a strange place for bart and bob to meet for this fateful encounter. how did bob get in the building anyway, did he sneak in or pretend to be a parent or something? he's very well known in the town for his misdeeds (and brief political campaign) so that's unlikely. it's never explained. there's not much tension to the way this unfolds though.
- i like the quick visual of bob pulling a harpoon gun out of a violin case. this little moment would insinuate at the very least he concealed his weapon and doesn't just pull it from hammerspace with no regard for logic. it's something.
- pre solid line where bob attempts to describe to bart what's about to happen in "terms any young boy would understand", and then going into some flowery and verbose bob poetry about things. obviously its an easy gag, one of those Say One Thing Then Do The Opposite gags, but it works as a quick moment of pomposity from bob, who probably would be able to recite as much as a young boy and genuinely wouldn't know otherwise. it's also a nice touch of his grace before the big moment.
- after many years of his glorious failures, bart is reasonably cocky about his ability to survive this encounter as well. it begs the question why bart had to be initially frightened by him reappearing and doing the classic scream of his name. i guess because they've done it so many times that it's just obligatory, but it betrays how bart is being portrayed here, which borders on the cartoonishly dismissive but isn't without context from the show's long past of similar encounters. it also provides that tragic irony where his hubris becomes his ultimate downfall.
- i can't help but want this sequence to be more dramatic and *sigh* Epic given the general intensity of the idea. but instead it's bart gleefully dancing around and singing until bob finally skewers him. it's just a bit stiff, but i dunno maybe this was the better way to do it in a small segment? ambush him in his school and get him while he's feeling overconfident. i'm split.
- bob actually pulls bart's heart out, yikes. i guess though this show can barely muster the creepy or intense tonal shifts in these segments they don't have much issue piling on a bit of gore to make their point. also bart is talking without a heart and then does a really tame cartoony death. he might as well have gotten fucking X's for eyes, if you're gonna do this, do it up dammit!
- good line highlighting the absurdity of all of this from bob, "twenty four years of trying to kill a ten-year-old child have finally paid off!". it's meta but for once it doesn't just seem like a satisfied wink or backpat and more like an examination of the ridiculousness of what just happened and that this has been going on for years. much like when the show actually calls greater attention to homer strangling bart, these things seem so ho-hum when you get used to them happening at such a high frequency.
- bob throws on some classic music and sings a song of celebration about finally accomplishing the goal he's sought for..well, twenty four years. he plunges his hand into the cavity made by the harpoon gun and yanks out his large intestine and..just sorta plays with it and makes a scarf of it and dances around like a lunatic. also the large intestine is unscathed despite him having been harpooned like Literally Right There. just more excuse to toss in some light gore.
- sick facebook ref you fuckin
- skinner dismisses this man murdering a child because it's after school hours LOL !!!!! i guess that explains how he got into the building so easily, these fucking teachers are terrible. but no they're not that terrible, that's pretty disgusting. i'm sure skinner is acting in cowardice as opposed to ambivalence but it's still unpleasant, coulda just not put that there honestly.
- bob wraps bart's intestines around his corpse and wears bart like a backpack, then when barts head knocks against the doorframe and leaves a bloodspot, he yanks his tongue out to wipe away the stain. i don't know what i was expecting from this but its just wayyyyy too cartoony to have any effect, it feels so completely removed from reality which kills the mood it seems it was meant to have. bob using bart's corpse in a myriad ways so playfully is not much of a plot, and i dunno that i even buy him wanting to hang onto the corpse. wasn't his whole goal just to kill him? really this whole segment maybe can't work at all unless you save the kill for the end, which would make it less about the kill tho so Jeaner cant advertise it as BOB ACTUALLY KILLS BART WHOA!!!! and we can't have that can we! gotta enable the clickbait mongers out there to do their slimy business.
- i like the sign outside of bob's house that says "bob is: in prison/on parole" where one side or the other lights up. naturally at this moment, ON PAROLE is lit up.
- i also like him saving a special wine to drink for when he finally kills bart. that's the good mix of classiness and lunacy i'd expect from bob. then though he adds a bit of bart's blood to the wine and it's like hmm. this is trying too hard to be spooky, i think the reality is bob murdering bart is as gruesome as his intentions would actually be and this is stretching the logic behind how the aftermath would play out. alot of ideas could have come out of this, him just abusing the boy's body is downright ill-fitting and uncharacteristic even for a psycho like bob. he's just not That type of evil.
- remember when homer was a pretty good character last episode? not this one! he comes to the door searching for bart, revealing bob's DIE BART DIE tattoo in the process as evidence towards his suspicions. pretty good so far, but then bob retorts by showing homer a tattoo on his back that say I
BART, and homer decides to move onto his next subject, which is himself. okay FIRST OF ALL, homer should not even need to question bob at all and a Positive Tattoo should not be enough to sway him. homer is a dimwit but he's been in the thick of a few bob situations including the infamous and overrated cape feare! it is not a smidge believable that he would just back off because of some dumb joke, so that's contrived. ALSO why does bob have that tattoo, just for this joke? it's just for this joke, there's no way bob planned for this particular moment and got a tattoo to deal with it. does he have other convenient tattoos to get out of close scrapes after his deed? who knows, not unless the show makes it so for it's own deep-rooted laziness and nonsense. anyway.
- sideshow bob is knocking golf balls into the gaping maw of an increasingly greying bart corpse. this is unpleasant but also weirdly innocuous, did they intend to make this feel so silly? it just doesn't read as horror and if anything they've done lately should it would be this.
- bob says "post-bartum". boo.
- sort of interesting plot development as bob reveals he is going to be accepting an associate professorship at springfield university. i'm not totally sure if they'd hire someone like him tho? i really don't know so i can't say, also i'm not sure what this has to do with bart at all. i guess just to clear his mind before moving onto to bigger, perhaps nobler things. maybe.
- bob pats bart and he makes a noise like he's deflating like a balloon. whats going on here?do dead folks just got lotsa Surplus Air in them? bob responds with his Rake Joke Grumble which they've used just like way too many times now and it's rarely even fitting now. just leave the old good stuff alone, stop trying to dress your show's ambling corpse up in its old clothes, its weird and disrespectful.
- lol all the youths are texting and using laptops and telling each other to Forward The Link and Tweet and Text and Modern Words and Aren't We Hip. also the girl who says Text Me literally doesn't open her mouth at all like omg.
- holy shit they actually literally did another rake joke and used the Rake Joke Grumble again! fuck this segment.
- sick game of thrones reference you fuckin
- so i guess this segment was meant to highlight how the only thing that bob felt gave his life meaning was hunting bart. i think we've addressed that before? or at least it's been implied, though i'm not totally sure i buy it. i guess the professor thing was meant to be him trying to breed future intellectuals, do something noble with his life. little did he know he just wandered into The Jean Era Approximation Of Millennials and thus his dreams were never meant to be. SO he decides to try and ressurect bart i guess. let's see what happens.
- oh he uses the professor element one more way to gather various materials for his experiment. fine, but then he goes into BLACK ARTS BUILDING and drinks a potion and turns into a frog and says he feels like a bad new yorker cartoon and then he is a new yorker cartoon or something wh wh wh.
- that fucking leprechaun returns. did anyone ever ask for this, is anyone's favorite simpsons character The Goddamn Leprechaun? if you say yes i'm allowed to spit on you.
- so i guess bob's contraption worked the first time. i know bob is an intellectual but that doesn't mean you can just on a lark decide to bring the dead back to life and pull it off! yes yes this is a cartoon i just don't know who they think bob is anymore. anyway bart is alive, let's see what happens.
- the montage of bart murders is actually alot of demented fun. it dives straight into the most instant glee bob can feel and gives us some genuine creepy as well as creative imagery. at one point he just point blank shoots his fucking head off, which is intense but i'll bet satisfying for bob. this is the sadistic catharsis the episode needed, to really provide some real reason for things to be happening. i said basically all the episode could logically be is bob killing bart, and hey it actually likes they found a small way to have that work, at least for a moment. the final visual of a chopped up dead bart on the table is sort of genuinely disturbing gore that works better than just a cartoony intestine by the way.
- so slh spots bart through a window and lisa races over. you'd expect a reaction of horror seeing her brother in chunks on a table, but no she just goes I Knew It Was Bob and kinda pats herself on the back. what the fuck kinda writing is this for this moment. it's like jeaner treats the simpsons like a stage play where the characters will all just take a bow at the end but the world of the simpsons is meant to be Real regardless of the insanity on display in segments like this. even halloween segments demand the show not completely detach from reality characteristically lest it just feel hollow and insincere. there's a line of homer's, specifically, "reanimate? this animation looks good enough to me!", where i swear you could effortlessly slap in the laugh track, but the simpsons wasn't conceived as a transparently Showy show where the thin veil was intentional and even played up at times, and thats why the simpsons was better than all the fluffy stiffly set-up comedies that always, ALWAYS went for the cheap laugh and made everyone feel shallow and inhuman for the sake of getting out the easy jokes. it's confounding decision making to turn the show into this, the simpsons used to feel like humans. now they literally, most of the time, are just plain Characters. what used to be homer simpsons is now like, the dumb dad Played By Homer Simpson, or Homer Simpson played by someone else. it all feels deeply detached and even cynical. i feel like i'm bordering on repeating previous sentiments so i'll move along but jesus this is just unacceptable.
- wiggum enabling bob's right to murder the simpsons. i dunno, wiggum would surely recognize bob's voice but then again's he's the Lol Dumb Cop of the show so i have no idea how to feel. i'm gonna choose ambivalence. :|.
- so how does this reanimation machine work then, because it reanimates humans but then lisa reanimates a lamp? i'm gonna chalk it up to No Rules because this show doesn't give a shit.
- bit gruesome (albeit not unreasonable) of lisa to encourage and watch homer beat and eventually decapitate bob (somehow) with a lamp. then there's a joke about how homer doesn't care that bob tried to kill bart cuz he's a fucking monster? ha ha ha???
- bart turns bob into a goofy animal hybrid, and for some reason bob return to teaching despite admitting that it didn't bring him joy. also bart is in the university classroom for Reasons. bob grumbles for a third time then lays an egg. holy shit.
god that was exhausting, this episode is utterly draining and there's two segments left! fucking hell, well this was largely too light and silly given the central concept and a bit aimless and empty otherwise. some really bad writing throughout, baffling gags with bart's corpse and lazy Kids These Days skewering. one fun montage doesn't make up for a litany of other issues. i'm giving this segment a D -.
HOMERZILLA
- oh boy how racist we gonna get? full racist? only slightly? none? can't be none, there's no wayyyyy this is 0% racist.
- nice visuals, dig the darkened monochromatic colors to simulate the old films and the design of springfield prefecture. maybe this one will at least offer up some eye candy. also good work as usual alf. you're a gem you are, you deserve better.
- so what a quick image on a door (quickly torn through by grandpa) seems to imply is that the people of springfield prefecture have to give donuts to this homerzilla to appease him.
- wow it's Moe Just Moe That's Moe They Didn't Change Him. i guess that's better than giving them ridiculous asian accents, but this is gonna be another segment where the visual shift is hampered by a stubborn stiffness that the show cant seem to remove from itself. but at least they aren't doing ridiculous asian accents.
- except tress but that's not even segment-specific. i'm still disgusted by kamiko or whatever the fuck her name is. hire an asian VA you fucking dipshits, stop giving every female role to tress macneille. but anyway, this segment!
- a joke about how the godzilla movies have poor english dubs that hasn't been done 105,538,318 times already. boy so this is just gonna be the most dated references and gags ever? why did they do godzilla, was it because of the gareth edwards reboot? then why is this original godzilla seemingly, what is there left to mine from this. i have a feeling they realized about halfway or so Oh Shit this has all been done ah well fuck it it's their fault for watching! and mayb it is, Simpsons crew. mayb it is.
- almost sounds like julie kavner is trying to imitate the cadences in the old films. it's rather clumsy sounding tho, maybe nearing that racism i've been hoping for!
- grandpa send a donut away on a paper crane because Fucking Asia. definitely getting near that racism, i can taste it just like that donut.
- oh now they're all doing the weird stilted, and honestly pretty racist sounding cadences. lisa is talking like fuckin' uncle iroh, grandpa just sorta sounds like he's stopping and starting randomly, and bart's especially is really ridiculous and cutesy and rapid and just sounds like every lazy western approximation of anime ever and things of that ilk. it's really condescending but also super irritating to listen to because the imitation isn't even that accurate. it's just like the hack stand up comedian asian voice, a mere few steps away from south park levels of stereotype.
- also lisa is pretty much dressed as sailor moon and i can't even explain bart's getup but it sure doesn't look like what a kid would wear?
- there's a mr sparkle billboard in the background. STOP.
- there's a skinner kite that gets taken down by an agnes eagle. or something. what the fuck.
- grandpa actually details the ritual of feeding homerzilla (is that the name of the actual creature? let's find out i guess) and naturally the kids laugh at him and speak racistly some more. this is both boring and insulting, please homerzilla eat these people.
- i like the animation of the scene of the donut sinking into the ocean and homerzilla devouring it. this is how little this is doing for me, this is all i can find to give any semblance of praise. it does look nice though, it just feels like a sad reflection of what i'm dealing with.
- grandpa chokes on donut sprinkles and dies. i'm serious, i'm not lying, no i'm not i swear watch the episode..well don't but it did happen.
- ah yes an a seppuku joke. another off the checklist for ya simpsons crew? a checklist i assume has existed for decades upon decades because again these are the oldest jokes in the fucking universe.
- by the way the seppuku joke was from a spirit that was as marge said, "the spirit of my tea kettle". i suppose this is just meant to be a reference to japanese culture and the ties to spirituality and such but why is the spirit of your tea kettle dressed like a samurai. did you just decide your tea kettle's spirit couldn't be a Regular Asian Guy? man that's a weird sentence, i've never written that sentence before. probably never will again. probably. but yeah it's another example of this all just having this air of condescension and looking at japan (or just asian culture in general, its hard to tell if they even know the difference) as this fantasy land. i guess the jokes are harmless and stupid but they're just really banal and tired along with being insulting beneath that. at least, AT LEAST be offensive in a new way if you're gonna do it at all.
- cbg mentions grandpa's donuts having caused the fish to become fat and ugly, then the camera cuts to fish that look just like cbg. i get it, it's not funny but i get it. but it also makes no sense for two reasons. 1. those fish just have like facial hair now so that's impossible ya dig? and 2, and this is the big one: THERE'S NO WAY those fish were getting any morsels of that food because y'know Homerzilla. again, this show doesn't write jokes with the story in mind anymore.
- chalkboard sign gag thing that says, "FOUR SUSHI FOOD GROUPS: ICKY, UCKY, OOKY, GROSS". read the thing about condescension above, it still stands. fuckin white american losers.
- i got a smirk out of this line from hoover upon the children hearing homerzilla's screams, "alright calm down children, probably just excitement over the cherry blossoms". just the juxtaposition of that idea and the roaring worked for me. cherry blossoms are exciting tho, wish we had them.
- so homerzilla has finally risen from the Briny Deep and is naturally fucking shit up. he murders moe and frink and generally stomps around. i guess this is accurate, it's not fun tho. it should be fun, maybe it just took too long. hey maybe this is like godzilla (2014) after all! got 'em.
- the literal worst joke of all time ever when homerzilla steps on a building and exclaims "d'oh!" (as he does), before following it up with -jo. indeed we then cut to a smashed fffffuckin Dojo. fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fuc
- we cut to homerzilla still clambering about, now many buildings set on fire. guess it would have been just a bit too adjacent to Fun to actually show homerzilla set the buildings on fire, gotta cut past that, we have a precious otto scene to salvage! otto's the drugs bus driver. he crashes his bus and some rando asks, "scared by the monster?". he responds, "what monster?". i do not get it, he literally has a facial reaction of panic before toppling his bus. there's clever cheats and then there's bold-faced LIES disguised as jokes. don't play me simpsons, don't fuckin' play me.
- i assume this chalmers sequence is a reference to the actual movie, with him looking out the window and wiping his face. they don't say anymore about it so i'm gonna stick with that.
- homerzilla just uhh yo-yo's some planes for a bit. i'm sorry i'm trying but this is giving me nothing. it just goes on and on.
- not a bad line from lisa about how homerzilla could just walk on the farmland without hurting his feet because "this land is 98% rural". i may just like it because it actually sounds like someone did some semblance of research, it almost seems like a Comment on the godzilla films instead of just vague miming and referencing. i was gonna say it was a deconstruction of the film but given the allegorical nature of at least the original film and whole idea behind it i'm not really sure that's true. the monsters do always attack the nice cities tho. lucky rural folks.
- then there's some dumb joke where homerzilla breathes fire but lisa understands him (wh) and apparently the reason he goes to the city is for the Tuna Rolls and then a child insults a giant terrorizing creature's breath and my god this is stupid.
- WOW so the segment is a movie within a segment...huh. then they have some executive type shit on the original godzilla by claiming it to be So Cheap It's Funny, then immediately turn around and insult those who Remade it too. all this to drive up to these cheapest of cheap shots, oy. also to clarify, no this being Intentionally cheap doesn't make up for how shitty the comedy was. it didn't even look bad :
- i like krusty promoting the Reptile Meat Burger. i like weird food stunts. i'd eat it?
- the 'Zilla film has a few good bits, especially the inexplicable product placement of Buzz Cola and the silliness of the onlooking scientist expositing just how easy it would be to avoid 'Zilla but still lamenting and wondering what to do. this definitely exposes alot of what irritates me in action movies, where logic falls away in favor of finding the easy pathway to carnage and mayhem. also we have 'Zilla just fuckin' batting at some goofy flying turtle creature which sincerely may or may not be a monster from these films, they've done alot of ridiculous shit. either way i like how this just appears and passes with no comment.
- more skewering of the Godzilla Remake which i think did okay? someone can correct me on that if they please but this all seems not just cheap but a tad baseless. NOT DEFENDING that film by the way it's hugely flawed and generic and dreary barring a few scenes but i don't consider these criticisms particularly on-target.
- they have 'Zilla prints in french and Quebec French. i'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere but i'm not gonna find it. not today.
- remember the AWESOME/POSSUM joke from puffless? well if you like infantile humor for fucking fetuses this show has got you covered, because among various 'Zilla products that failed is fffffucking 'Zilla Nilla Wafers. that may actually be worse than Dojo somehow.
- HOMERZILLA is real wow i dont care. also apparently he will return? don't bother.
agh that was actually worse than the last segment. nearly nothing worked, it was offensive, it was lazy, it was greatly dated and the winks to that didn't do it any favors and just made it seem lazy ABOUT it's laziness. the twist was amusing at first and gave the one good scene in the segment but it just kinda droned on from there and wasn't enough in my book to make up for this wholly inert and joyless affair. i give this segment an F
TELEPATHS OF GLORY
- home stretch! (i literally typed "homer stretch" the first time this show is poisoning me deeply). so i guess we're doing a Found Footage gimmick? fine, just make it quick please.
- so lisa is filming butterflies while bart and milhouse roughhouse, then when lisa complains they haven't done anything bart whips out a bunch of dead owls causing her to freak out and bump into milhouse who falls into a well. just the facts ma'am. also there's an ice age joke in the background. the little rodent fuck gets hurt chasing the acorn. still funny, STIIIILLLL FUNNY!
- really long still shot of milhouse falling and then bart nearly abandoning him, but the first person shot when they hope into the hole look quite good, definitely has this sort of turbulence to it paired with the minimal buzzing score that works, the sort of thing that takes advantage of this motif well visually. it's sadly quite brief tho. so what's this segment about anyway.
- by the way there's a bart line where he talks about how "the important thing these days is that everything must be on film". i assume this is less about our obsession with technology and living through it and more tackling the somewhat contrived trope of found footage films. that's fine, it's a bit on-the-nose though to me. you don't need to literally say to the camera that's already running that Its Important To Get This On Film. i think it was gonna happen!
- they reach the bottom of the well and there's a wall of glowing green goop sliding towards them, which makes no sense because one is to assume that ooze was already there before they fell in? the ooze would have probably already seeped everywhere, but instead it has decidedly to politely wait for their arrival to start sliding down the walls and into the water.
- well the green ooze is, not surprisingly, nuclear waste. that's fair, but why is bart making Nuclear Waste Beards and telling lisa to relax? i guess his brain has been damaged. must be all that nuclear waste.
- a huge bubble of waste POPS and knocks out the camera, then we cut to them back outside of the wall. hmm how? well they can fly but did they fly whilst unconscious? grumble grumble.
- so the kids have telepathy. except bart cuz he's a dum-dum. they use the telepathy on the camera Once but then it just sorta moves on its own to maintain the motif. there's a montage of jokes about them using the telepathy to do just y'know Stuff. one that sticks out to me that is completely stupid is where lisa gets graded in P.E. and changes her A to an A +. now first of all, she did not see the grade because the coach holding the clipboard was just nowhere near her. second of all YOU CANNOT MAKE PLUSES SPONTANEOUSLY APPEAR OUT OF NOWHERE THAT'S LITERALLY NOT WHAT TELEPATHY IS. or is this just lazy Anything Goes simpsons magic at play again?
- i do like milhouse's scene where kearney gives him a wedgie and he flies him off and drops him in a fuckin' volcano, his last words a solid "this is not a proportional punishment!" as he careens to his doom.
- another scene where lisa's powers (whatever they actually are?) are used to magically change text, this time in barts SKINNER IS A WIENER tag into SKINNER IS A WINNER. now really what practical use would this power even have in most situations? this nuclear waste fuckin' sucks man. oh and so does this segment, which is just making shit up as it goes clearly, not a plot in sight.
- not a fan of skinner recorrecting the graffiti to say WIENER again. skinner used to like have a backbone? not a fan of him just being a spineless twerp of a character.
- good homer line when he catches lisa using telepathy to play a bunch of instruments, "god gave you this power for good, not jazz!"
- so is the found footage thing already dead in the water or after the montage are we hopping back in? i'm kinda lost on that, there's been no clear indication since.
- oh but there's a static cut for some reason even tho it barely looks like found footage anymore, maybe a bit in the actual panning but not the subtle movements.
- milhouse has used his powers to...fuse one half of each of his parents back together, and to give apu and jailbird multiple arms...why. WHAT THE FUCK are their powers?
- well i still dont know because, after saying Everything's Coming Up Milhouse (STOP!), milhouse just goddamn Raises some statues of his face from the ground. this makes so little sense i'm not even sure what to say. WHAT are these statues, WHY did he do this, WHAT ARE HIS POWERS, what is any of this!!
- so milhouse is struck down. there's some good animation when he hits the ground. this is all i got left, this is all they've given me. i'm a husk rn, i'm hollow.
- so it turns out milhouse was struck down by maggie who is holding a Nuclear Rod. then she gives a guy on a horse a shirt using telepathy I'm Fuckin Telling The Truth Here. then we homerzilla return and she turns him into a big ol' pink Barney lookalike and he hugs a building to lullaby music, dawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, and then it ends with a Weapons Grade Cute visual of maggie napping in the air as Two Rainbows form and a smiling sun rises. weird.
- oh wait we still have kang and kodos, and what do they have to say this year? they make some weird joke where it goes 4:3 and kodos exclaims "just because it looks like season 4 doesn't make it season 4!". i couldn't even possibly guess what this means, like at all. maybe i'm just to wiped out from this though. i need a fucking nap.
OH MY GOD IT'S OVER YES THANK GOD! ahem. well this segment wasn't really anything at all, the found footage idea was trashed and the powers made no sense and there was like Actually literally not a story at all. it just went on until it didn't, it was just utter filler. what do i even rate this? it didn't waste potential like the first, it didn't offend and bore like the second, it was just standard-issue white noise zombie simpsons material. i guess it was the least agonzing so i'll give this segment a D
and there it is folks, another halloween trilogy down the drain. another three shitty segments (i actually liked the s26 thoh tho), another bunch of bad jokes and lazy stories and general nonsense. each segment manages to tap into something different about the show that expresses whats wrong with it these days, all the while each just seems Crushingly lazy in the grand scheme. a totally impassionate affair. sure glad this guy is writing our trilogy again this year huh? fuck.
this episode gets an overall D-. seeya on FRIEND WITH BENEFIT!
written by: joel h. cohen
directed by: steven dean moore
NOTES:
- okay first time i've done this in a trilogy episode, i suppose i'll just try to split everything neatly into segments instead of just making this one sloppy well of text. so we'll begin with..
OPENING
- we open with this john k. couch Experience. i actually like the first john k. couch gag, despite my seemingly endless list of issues with john k. as a human being and even as an artist at times. it kept things simple and charming in the sort of oblong elasticity of the character's movements and the warped designs and colors. it was definitely a john k. approximation of things. this however immediately throws me off with a few bizarre elements. first off those FUCKING 3D MASK AGH what is that did john k. do that it sure doesn't seem like he would do something like that, they're incredibly ill-fitting and stick out like a sore thumb. i guess if you wanted to Scare me you've already succeeded. another thing i have issue with is just how BUSY some of this animation is. i know that john k. is downright determined to show the feeble "animators" of this world how it's really done but it approaches serious sensory overload. one thing of note is when they zoom in on bart and lisa walking, lisa's color scheme is very bizarre but acceptable on it's own, what makes things become sort of disorienting is a toothpaste blue bear design on her shirt, which alone is a touch too far, but when you realize the bear also has its own details including what appears to be a pink outline of a skirt(?), THEN when you realize that combined with lisa's puke green and dusky blue and thick purples And that aforementioned mask with its own details and shiny blues and a hat with its Own details, THE FUCKING BEAR ON HER SHIRT is also moving, it all just goes from potentially dazzling to nauseating. its an immediate assault on the eyes and it's barely even started! god. also maggie is a bee. she's a bee. just actually a bee.
- so some Evil Air i guess brings some ghosts up from the ground and brings some tombstones to life (and gives one a nose?)
- boy this stuff just never sits still. i guess john k. idealizes the old OOOOOLD animation where everything truly felt alive. there's nothing wrong with this but john k. does it less with grace than just sorta making the whole cartoon feel anxious.
- so bart and lisa are bein' chased by wobbly john k. drawings aaaahhh! there's two ghosts with huge noses. one has a Stimpy Schnoz. what's with the noses john, is this a fetish thing? what are you doin, what are you really ever doin? what are you doin' right now john k. i sure hope it isn't another of these couch Experiences.
- there's a ghost with hair. i think it's a girl ghost. it has like translucent ruby hair. also there's still just a huge veritable projective vomit of bleak colors on screen but they don't so much feel spooky as they literally look like someone lost their lunch on the toon. it's all really jagged and seemingly randomly placed too. john k.'s adoration of loose spontaneous cartooning could be pegged as admirable in it's way but god nothing is posed in a way that hits the eyes comfortably at all. i don't even think about this much but it's being done very wrong here.
- tombstone with an ass. if you think i have something for that you're wrong. i wasn't prepared for that, i didn't know i'd have to prepare for that and even if i did i wouldn't know how to prepare for that.
- so a bunch of seizing see-through freaks of Not Nature Because Nature Would Not Allow This For Long are encroaching upon bart, lisa and maggie while we see FRANK GRIMES' tombstone rattling. let's see some john k. frank grimes, i ain't fuckin scared.
- it really just cannot be overstated how hideous this is. john k. is straight up desperately overcompensating to assert his place as an ANIMATOR like the legends of the medium, but it's just nothing like the old school charming jaunty movement, it's like a caffeinated jitter on fast-forward and john k. needs to be stopped!
- frank grimes arises from the earth and is a fuckin monster like a hunchback or some shit i just
- at the very least his relatively slow-paced clamber is more pleasant visually, but then he just starts fuckin' shit up and it returns to being almost inexplicably disorienting. i don't even understand john k.'s animation decisions at times, at one point Grimes(?) exhales some deadly stink breath on a couple ghosts but he's completely stiff besides some mouth and eye movements that all look very crude.
- the worst animation tho is a bit that's a genuine mistake: grimes(?) is peeling bart like a banana, and after peeling the first bit of face away, some red lining just APPEARS in an area that had not yet been touched. it looks terrible, like seriously i can't fully explain it but it just Appears, it doesn't even slightly look organic and for someone who so frequently overexerts themselves to animate this is a glaring careless error. also the pieces of his head fall down like banana peel but until they feel the background bit looks totally flat and even in places is just lining. it feels totally cheated and like i could overlook it but this guy wants to do everything perfect so i'm calling him out.
- so bart's....goo emerges from his body and grimes(??) harpoons the delicious gooey morsel and it shows a solid few seconds showing him chewing. the fuck is this shit.
- by the way there are some genuinely baffling facial transformations in this sequence. who would decide to draw this like this. i guess john k. can rest easy knowing he'll never be fully imitated, for what it's worth. which is nothing, it's worth nothing, because this is terrible and ugly.
- one good detail i will note is having bart's...goo, soul? whatever it is..having bart jump out of the grimes(???) mouth as he's about to devour lisa. i guess somewhere in his myriad overt detailing he would get something that actually made sense in there.
- not much to say about the chase sequence, john k.'s characters work more organically with some forward momentum since they reason to be so restless. some of the angles on grimes(????) are still very unappealing tho. i don't have enough time in the world or enough concrete animation knowledge to dissect all the shitty visuals in this thing so i'll leave it be here.
- except this: the kids leap through the front door, like literally THROUGH the door and it looks so bad, just doesn't even look like contact was made, goes from no hole to Hole in door. this would require you watchin it (your call) but yeah trust me it's sloppy.
- lisa is purple now. for some reason. thank god this is nearly over.
- homer has some weird animation when talking to the kids and it looks ugly and then grimes(?????) comes in and sucks out homer's ghost and it looks ugly and then marge talks and john k.'s marge has Big Ol Tits cuz fuckin john. k said so i guess, it doesn't surprise me. have you seen naked beach frenzy? get fucked john k. god this was utterly draining. i can't believe there's an episode after this.
i'm giving this couch....thing a fuckin 1/5.
WANTED: DEAD THEN ALIVE
- some good halloween names: bram shelley's dracustein, tim long-un (subject to disagreement this one i'm sure), and ereisserhead (my favorite this year)
- some bad halloween names: stink eyed frink guy (like c'mon really), overdue bill!!!, joel cohen's credit, magic mike scully xxs, uneven shteven moore and of course the worst one...*sigh* joel cohen's credit 2: the squeakquel. this man wrote this episode folks, i'm hyped as can be.
- now then this segment: opens with wendall, who i'm not sure we've seen in awhile beyond background sequences. i see that in twenty seven years his character remains kid who throws up. i'd much prefer not seeing the puke tho, especially not like this where it just drips from his nostrils. urggh.
- bart receives a text message from milhouse, who sends one message with milhouse emoji. i guess this is maybe a reference to how there's probably simpsons emoji, maybe al jean trying to do some sneaky advertising. otherwise it doesn't make any sense, and i could really do without bart saying aloud on the playground while looking at his phone Oh Man I Gotta See This. there's really just too much dialogue in this show now, you don't have to talk through everything that happens. sometimes a visual is a visual for a reason.
- anyway bart is lured to the music room under the guise of seeing largo stuck in a harp (good text couplet: "looks funny", "sounds exquisite"), but of course it's gonna be bob. which mean then it was bob who sent milhouse emoji, which...i still dont think makes sense. emoji of a random child would not exist in the simpsons world, this is a confounding and contrived stab at modern references. also why would bob send those, does he think milhouse would send them of himself? jokes just don't usually link to the story anymore in this show.
- this is maybe a strange place for bart and bob to meet for this fateful encounter. how did bob get in the building anyway, did he sneak in or pretend to be a parent or something? he's very well known in the town for his misdeeds (and brief political campaign) so that's unlikely. it's never explained. there's not much tension to the way this unfolds though.
- i like the quick visual of bob pulling a harpoon gun out of a violin case. this little moment would insinuate at the very least he concealed his weapon and doesn't just pull it from hammerspace with no regard for logic. it's something.
- pre solid line where bob attempts to describe to bart what's about to happen in "terms any young boy would understand", and then going into some flowery and verbose bob poetry about things. obviously its an easy gag, one of those Say One Thing Then Do The Opposite gags, but it works as a quick moment of pomposity from bob, who probably would be able to recite as much as a young boy and genuinely wouldn't know otherwise. it's also a nice touch of his grace before the big moment.
- after many years of his glorious failures, bart is reasonably cocky about his ability to survive this encounter as well. it begs the question why bart had to be initially frightened by him reappearing and doing the classic scream of his name. i guess because they've done it so many times that it's just obligatory, but it betrays how bart is being portrayed here, which borders on the cartoonishly dismissive but isn't without context from the show's long past of similar encounters. it also provides that tragic irony where his hubris becomes his ultimate downfall.
- i can't help but want this sequence to be more dramatic and *sigh* Epic given the general intensity of the idea. but instead it's bart gleefully dancing around and singing until bob finally skewers him. it's just a bit stiff, but i dunno maybe this was the better way to do it in a small segment? ambush him in his school and get him while he's feeling overconfident. i'm split.
- bob actually pulls bart's heart out, yikes. i guess though this show can barely muster the creepy or intense tonal shifts in these segments they don't have much issue piling on a bit of gore to make their point. also bart is talking without a heart and then does a really tame cartoony death. he might as well have gotten fucking X's for eyes, if you're gonna do this, do it up dammit!
- good line highlighting the absurdity of all of this from bob, "twenty four years of trying to kill a ten-year-old child have finally paid off!". it's meta but for once it doesn't just seem like a satisfied wink or backpat and more like an examination of the ridiculousness of what just happened and that this has been going on for years. much like when the show actually calls greater attention to homer strangling bart, these things seem so ho-hum when you get used to them happening at such a high frequency.
- bob throws on some classic music and sings a song of celebration about finally accomplishing the goal he's sought for..well, twenty four years. he plunges his hand into the cavity made by the harpoon gun and yanks out his large intestine and..just sorta plays with it and makes a scarf of it and dances around like a lunatic. also the large intestine is unscathed despite him having been harpooned like Literally Right There. just more excuse to toss in some light gore.
- sick facebook ref you fuckin
- skinner dismisses this man murdering a child because it's after school hours LOL !!!!! i guess that explains how he got into the building so easily, these fucking teachers are terrible. but no they're not that terrible, that's pretty disgusting. i'm sure skinner is acting in cowardice as opposed to ambivalence but it's still unpleasant, coulda just not put that there honestly.
- bob wraps bart's intestines around his corpse and wears bart like a backpack, then when barts head knocks against the doorframe and leaves a bloodspot, he yanks his tongue out to wipe away the stain. i don't know what i was expecting from this but its just wayyyyy too cartoony to have any effect, it feels so completely removed from reality which kills the mood it seems it was meant to have. bob using bart's corpse in a myriad ways so playfully is not much of a plot, and i dunno that i even buy him wanting to hang onto the corpse. wasn't his whole goal just to kill him? really this whole segment maybe can't work at all unless you save the kill for the end, which would make it less about the kill tho so Jeaner cant advertise it as BOB ACTUALLY KILLS BART WHOA!!!! and we can't have that can we! gotta enable the clickbait mongers out there to do their slimy business.
- i like the sign outside of bob's house that says "bob is: in prison/on parole" where one side or the other lights up. naturally at this moment, ON PAROLE is lit up.
- i also like him saving a special wine to drink for when he finally kills bart. that's the good mix of classiness and lunacy i'd expect from bob. then though he adds a bit of bart's blood to the wine and it's like hmm. this is trying too hard to be spooky, i think the reality is bob murdering bart is as gruesome as his intentions would actually be and this is stretching the logic behind how the aftermath would play out. alot of ideas could have come out of this, him just abusing the boy's body is downright ill-fitting and uncharacteristic even for a psycho like bob. he's just not That type of evil.
- remember when homer was a pretty good character last episode? not this one! he comes to the door searching for bart, revealing bob's DIE BART DIE tattoo in the process as evidence towards his suspicions. pretty good so far, but then bob retorts by showing homer a tattoo on his back that say I
BART, and homer decides to move onto his next subject, which is himself. okay FIRST OF ALL, homer should not even need to question bob at all and a Positive Tattoo should not be enough to sway him. homer is a dimwit but he's been in the thick of a few bob situations including the infamous and overrated cape feare! it is not a smidge believable that he would just back off because of some dumb joke, so that's contrived. ALSO why does bob have that tattoo, just for this joke? it's just for this joke, there's no way bob planned for this particular moment and got a tattoo to deal with it. does he have other convenient tattoos to get out of close scrapes after his deed? who knows, not unless the show makes it so for it's own deep-rooted laziness and nonsense. anyway.- sideshow bob is knocking golf balls into the gaping maw of an increasingly greying bart corpse. this is unpleasant but also weirdly innocuous, did they intend to make this feel so silly? it just doesn't read as horror and if anything they've done lately should it would be this.
- bob says "post-bartum". boo.
- sort of interesting plot development as bob reveals he is going to be accepting an associate professorship at springfield university. i'm not totally sure if they'd hire someone like him tho? i really don't know so i can't say, also i'm not sure what this has to do with bart at all. i guess just to clear his mind before moving onto to bigger, perhaps nobler things. maybe.
- bob pats bart and he makes a noise like he's deflating like a balloon. whats going on here?do dead folks just got lotsa Surplus Air in them? bob responds with his Rake Joke Grumble which they've used just like way too many times now and it's rarely even fitting now. just leave the old good stuff alone, stop trying to dress your show's ambling corpse up in its old clothes, its weird and disrespectful.
- lol all the youths are texting and using laptops and telling each other to Forward The Link and Tweet and Text and Modern Words and Aren't We Hip. also the girl who says Text Me literally doesn't open her mouth at all like omg.
- holy shit they actually literally did another rake joke and used the Rake Joke Grumble again! fuck this segment.
- sick game of thrones reference you fuckin
- so i guess this segment was meant to highlight how the only thing that bob felt gave his life meaning was hunting bart. i think we've addressed that before? or at least it's been implied, though i'm not totally sure i buy it. i guess the professor thing was meant to be him trying to breed future intellectuals, do something noble with his life. little did he know he just wandered into The Jean Era Approximation Of Millennials and thus his dreams were never meant to be. SO he decides to try and ressurect bart i guess. let's see what happens.
- oh he uses the professor element one more way to gather various materials for his experiment. fine, but then he goes into BLACK ARTS BUILDING and drinks a potion and turns into a frog and says he feels like a bad new yorker cartoon and then he is a new yorker cartoon or something wh wh wh.
- that fucking leprechaun returns. did anyone ever ask for this, is anyone's favorite simpsons character The Goddamn Leprechaun? if you say yes i'm allowed to spit on you.
- so i guess bob's contraption worked the first time. i know bob is an intellectual but that doesn't mean you can just on a lark decide to bring the dead back to life and pull it off! yes yes this is a cartoon i just don't know who they think bob is anymore. anyway bart is alive, let's see what happens.
- the montage of bart murders is actually alot of demented fun. it dives straight into the most instant glee bob can feel and gives us some genuine creepy as well as creative imagery. at one point he just point blank shoots his fucking head off, which is intense but i'll bet satisfying for bob. this is the sadistic catharsis the episode needed, to really provide some real reason for things to be happening. i said basically all the episode could logically be is bob killing bart, and hey it actually likes they found a small way to have that work, at least for a moment. the final visual of a chopped up dead bart on the table is sort of genuinely disturbing gore that works better than just a cartoony intestine by the way.
- so slh spots bart through a window and lisa races over. you'd expect a reaction of horror seeing her brother in chunks on a table, but no she just goes I Knew It Was Bob and kinda pats herself on the back. what the fuck kinda writing is this for this moment. it's like jeaner treats the simpsons like a stage play where the characters will all just take a bow at the end but the world of the simpsons is meant to be Real regardless of the insanity on display in segments like this. even halloween segments demand the show not completely detach from reality characteristically lest it just feel hollow and insincere. there's a line of homer's, specifically, "reanimate? this animation looks good enough to me!", where i swear you could effortlessly slap in the laugh track, but the simpsons wasn't conceived as a transparently Showy show where the thin veil was intentional and even played up at times, and thats why the simpsons was better than all the fluffy stiffly set-up comedies that always, ALWAYS went for the cheap laugh and made everyone feel shallow and inhuman for the sake of getting out the easy jokes. it's confounding decision making to turn the show into this, the simpsons used to feel like humans. now they literally, most of the time, are just plain Characters. what used to be homer simpsons is now like, the dumb dad Played By Homer Simpson, or Homer Simpson played by someone else. it all feels deeply detached and even cynical. i feel like i'm bordering on repeating previous sentiments so i'll move along but jesus this is just unacceptable.
- wiggum enabling bob's right to murder the simpsons. i dunno, wiggum would surely recognize bob's voice but then again's he's the Lol Dumb Cop of the show so i have no idea how to feel. i'm gonna choose ambivalence. :|.
- so how does this reanimation machine work then, because it reanimates humans but then lisa reanimates a lamp? i'm gonna chalk it up to No Rules because this show doesn't give a shit.
- bit gruesome (albeit not unreasonable) of lisa to encourage and watch homer beat and eventually decapitate bob (somehow) with a lamp. then there's a joke about how homer doesn't care that bob tried to kill bart cuz he's a fucking monster? ha ha ha???
- bart turns bob into a goofy animal hybrid, and for some reason bob return to teaching despite admitting that it didn't bring him joy. also bart is in the university classroom for Reasons. bob grumbles for a third time then lays an egg. holy shit.
god that was exhausting, this episode is utterly draining and there's two segments left! fucking hell, well this was largely too light and silly given the central concept and a bit aimless and empty otherwise. some really bad writing throughout, baffling gags with bart's corpse and lazy Kids These Days skewering. one fun montage doesn't make up for a litany of other issues. i'm giving this segment a D -.
HOMERZILLA
- oh boy how racist we gonna get? full racist? only slightly? none? can't be none, there's no wayyyyy this is 0% racist.
- nice visuals, dig the darkened monochromatic colors to simulate the old films and the design of springfield prefecture. maybe this one will at least offer up some eye candy. also good work as usual alf. you're a gem you are, you deserve better.
- so what a quick image on a door (quickly torn through by grandpa) seems to imply is that the people of springfield prefecture have to give donuts to this homerzilla to appease him.
- wow it's Moe Just Moe That's Moe They Didn't Change Him. i guess that's better than giving them ridiculous asian accents, but this is gonna be another segment where the visual shift is hampered by a stubborn stiffness that the show cant seem to remove from itself. but at least they aren't doing ridiculous asian accents.
- except tress but that's not even segment-specific. i'm still disgusted by kamiko or whatever the fuck her name is. hire an asian VA you fucking dipshits, stop giving every female role to tress macneille. but anyway, this segment!
- a joke about how the godzilla movies have poor english dubs that hasn't been done 105,538,318 times already. boy so this is just gonna be the most dated references and gags ever? why did they do godzilla, was it because of the gareth edwards reboot? then why is this original godzilla seemingly, what is there left to mine from this. i have a feeling they realized about halfway or so Oh Shit this has all been done ah well fuck it it's their fault for watching! and mayb it is, Simpsons crew. mayb it is.
- almost sounds like julie kavner is trying to imitate the cadences in the old films. it's rather clumsy sounding tho, maybe nearing that racism i've been hoping for!
- grandpa send a donut away on a paper crane because Fucking Asia. definitely getting near that racism, i can taste it just like that donut.
- oh now they're all doing the weird stilted, and honestly pretty racist sounding cadences. lisa is talking like fuckin' uncle iroh, grandpa just sorta sounds like he's stopping and starting randomly, and bart's especially is really ridiculous and cutesy and rapid and just sounds like every lazy western approximation of anime ever and things of that ilk. it's really condescending but also super irritating to listen to because the imitation isn't even that accurate. it's just like the hack stand up comedian asian voice, a mere few steps away from south park levels of stereotype.
- also lisa is pretty much dressed as sailor moon and i can't even explain bart's getup but it sure doesn't look like what a kid would wear?
- there's a mr sparkle billboard in the background. STOP.
- there's a skinner kite that gets taken down by an agnes eagle. or something. what the fuck.
- grandpa actually details the ritual of feeding homerzilla (is that the name of the actual creature? let's find out i guess) and naturally the kids laugh at him and speak racistly some more. this is both boring and insulting, please homerzilla eat these people.
- i like the animation of the scene of the donut sinking into the ocean and homerzilla devouring it. this is how little this is doing for me, this is all i can find to give any semblance of praise. it does look nice though, it just feels like a sad reflection of what i'm dealing with.
- grandpa chokes on donut sprinkles and dies. i'm serious, i'm not lying, no i'm not i swear watch the episode..well don't but it did happen.
- ah yes an a seppuku joke. another off the checklist for ya simpsons crew? a checklist i assume has existed for decades upon decades because again these are the oldest jokes in the fucking universe.
- by the way the seppuku joke was from a spirit that was as marge said, "the spirit of my tea kettle". i suppose this is just meant to be a reference to japanese culture and the ties to spirituality and such but why is the spirit of your tea kettle dressed like a samurai. did you just decide your tea kettle's spirit couldn't be a Regular Asian Guy? man that's a weird sentence, i've never written that sentence before. probably never will again. probably. but yeah it's another example of this all just having this air of condescension and looking at japan (or just asian culture in general, its hard to tell if they even know the difference) as this fantasy land. i guess the jokes are harmless and stupid but they're just really banal and tired along with being insulting beneath that. at least, AT LEAST be offensive in a new way if you're gonna do it at all.
- cbg mentions grandpa's donuts having caused the fish to become fat and ugly, then the camera cuts to fish that look just like cbg. i get it, it's not funny but i get it. but it also makes no sense for two reasons. 1. those fish just have like facial hair now so that's impossible ya dig? and 2, and this is the big one: THERE'S NO WAY those fish were getting any morsels of that food because y'know Homerzilla. again, this show doesn't write jokes with the story in mind anymore.
- chalkboard sign gag thing that says, "FOUR SUSHI FOOD GROUPS: ICKY, UCKY, OOKY, GROSS". read the thing about condescension above, it still stands. fuckin white american losers.
- i got a smirk out of this line from hoover upon the children hearing homerzilla's screams, "alright calm down children, probably just excitement over the cherry blossoms". just the juxtaposition of that idea and the roaring worked for me. cherry blossoms are exciting tho, wish we had them.
- so homerzilla has finally risen from the Briny Deep and is naturally fucking shit up. he murders moe and frink and generally stomps around. i guess this is accurate, it's not fun tho. it should be fun, maybe it just took too long. hey maybe this is like godzilla (2014) after all! got 'em.
- the literal worst joke of all time ever when homerzilla steps on a building and exclaims "d'oh!" (as he does), before following it up with -jo. indeed we then cut to a smashed fffffuckin Dojo. fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking fuc
- we cut to homerzilla still clambering about, now many buildings set on fire. guess it would have been just a bit too adjacent to Fun to actually show homerzilla set the buildings on fire, gotta cut past that, we have a precious otto scene to salvage! otto's the drugs bus driver. he crashes his bus and some rando asks, "scared by the monster?". he responds, "what monster?". i do not get it, he literally has a facial reaction of panic before toppling his bus. there's clever cheats and then there's bold-faced LIES disguised as jokes. don't play me simpsons, don't fuckin' play me.
- i assume this chalmers sequence is a reference to the actual movie, with him looking out the window and wiping his face. they don't say anymore about it so i'm gonna stick with that.
- homerzilla just uhh yo-yo's some planes for a bit. i'm sorry i'm trying but this is giving me nothing. it just goes on and on.
- not a bad line from lisa about how homerzilla could just walk on the farmland without hurting his feet because "this land is 98% rural". i may just like it because it actually sounds like someone did some semblance of research, it almost seems like a Comment on the godzilla films instead of just vague miming and referencing. i was gonna say it was a deconstruction of the film but given the allegorical nature of at least the original film and whole idea behind it i'm not really sure that's true. the monsters do always attack the nice cities tho. lucky rural folks.
- then there's some dumb joke where homerzilla breathes fire but lisa understands him (wh) and apparently the reason he goes to the city is for the Tuna Rolls and then a child insults a giant terrorizing creature's breath and my god this is stupid.
- WOW so the segment is a movie within a segment...huh. then they have some executive type shit on the original godzilla by claiming it to be So Cheap It's Funny, then immediately turn around and insult those who Remade it too. all this to drive up to these cheapest of cheap shots, oy. also to clarify, no this being Intentionally cheap doesn't make up for how shitty the comedy was. it didn't even look bad :
- i like krusty promoting the Reptile Meat Burger. i like weird food stunts. i'd eat it?
- the 'Zilla film has a few good bits, especially the inexplicable product placement of Buzz Cola and the silliness of the onlooking scientist expositing just how easy it would be to avoid 'Zilla but still lamenting and wondering what to do. this definitely exposes alot of what irritates me in action movies, where logic falls away in favor of finding the easy pathway to carnage and mayhem. also we have 'Zilla just fuckin' batting at some goofy flying turtle creature which sincerely may or may not be a monster from these films, they've done alot of ridiculous shit. either way i like how this just appears and passes with no comment.
- more skewering of the Godzilla Remake which i think did okay? someone can correct me on that if they please but this all seems not just cheap but a tad baseless. NOT DEFENDING that film by the way it's hugely flawed and generic and dreary barring a few scenes but i don't consider these criticisms particularly on-target.
- they have 'Zilla prints in french and Quebec French. i'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere but i'm not gonna find it. not today.
- remember the AWESOME/POSSUM joke from puffless? well if you like infantile humor for fucking fetuses this show has got you covered, because among various 'Zilla products that failed is fffffucking 'Zilla Nilla Wafers. that may actually be worse than Dojo somehow.
- HOMERZILLA is real wow i dont care. also apparently he will return? don't bother.
agh that was actually worse than the last segment. nearly nothing worked, it was offensive, it was lazy, it was greatly dated and the winks to that didn't do it any favors and just made it seem lazy ABOUT it's laziness. the twist was amusing at first and gave the one good scene in the segment but it just kinda droned on from there and wasn't enough in my book to make up for this wholly inert and joyless affair. i give this segment an F
TELEPATHS OF GLORY
- home stretch! (i literally typed "homer stretch" the first time this show is poisoning me deeply). so i guess we're doing a Found Footage gimmick? fine, just make it quick please.
- so lisa is filming butterflies while bart and milhouse roughhouse, then when lisa complains they haven't done anything bart whips out a bunch of dead owls causing her to freak out and bump into milhouse who falls into a well. just the facts ma'am. also there's an ice age joke in the background. the little rodent fuck gets hurt chasing the acorn. still funny, STIIIILLLL FUNNY!
- really long still shot of milhouse falling and then bart nearly abandoning him, but the first person shot when they hope into the hole look quite good, definitely has this sort of turbulence to it paired with the minimal buzzing score that works, the sort of thing that takes advantage of this motif well visually. it's sadly quite brief tho. so what's this segment about anyway.
- by the way there's a bart line where he talks about how "the important thing these days is that everything must be on film". i assume this is less about our obsession with technology and living through it and more tackling the somewhat contrived trope of found footage films. that's fine, it's a bit on-the-nose though to me. you don't need to literally say to the camera that's already running that Its Important To Get This On Film. i think it was gonna happen!
- they reach the bottom of the well and there's a wall of glowing green goop sliding towards them, which makes no sense because one is to assume that ooze was already there before they fell in? the ooze would have probably already seeped everywhere, but instead it has decidedly to politely wait for their arrival to start sliding down the walls and into the water.
- well the green ooze is, not surprisingly, nuclear waste. that's fair, but why is bart making Nuclear Waste Beards and telling lisa to relax? i guess his brain has been damaged. must be all that nuclear waste.
- a huge bubble of waste POPS and knocks out the camera, then we cut to them back outside of the wall. hmm how? well they can fly but did they fly whilst unconscious? grumble grumble.
- so the kids have telepathy. except bart cuz he's a dum-dum. they use the telepathy on the camera Once but then it just sorta moves on its own to maintain the motif. there's a montage of jokes about them using the telepathy to do just y'know Stuff. one that sticks out to me that is completely stupid is where lisa gets graded in P.E. and changes her A to an A +. now first of all, she did not see the grade because the coach holding the clipboard was just nowhere near her. second of all YOU CANNOT MAKE PLUSES SPONTANEOUSLY APPEAR OUT OF NOWHERE THAT'S LITERALLY NOT WHAT TELEPATHY IS. or is this just lazy Anything Goes simpsons magic at play again?
- i do like milhouse's scene where kearney gives him a wedgie and he flies him off and drops him in a fuckin' volcano, his last words a solid "this is not a proportional punishment!" as he careens to his doom.
- another scene where lisa's powers (whatever they actually are?) are used to magically change text, this time in barts SKINNER IS A WIENER tag into SKINNER IS A WINNER. now really what practical use would this power even have in most situations? this nuclear waste fuckin' sucks man. oh and so does this segment, which is just making shit up as it goes clearly, not a plot in sight.
- not a fan of skinner recorrecting the graffiti to say WIENER again. skinner used to like have a backbone? not a fan of him just being a spineless twerp of a character.
- good homer line when he catches lisa using telepathy to play a bunch of instruments, "god gave you this power for good, not jazz!"
- so is the found footage thing already dead in the water or after the montage are we hopping back in? i'm kinda lost on that, there's been no clear indication since.
- oh but there's a static cut for some reason even tho it barely looks like found footage anymore, maybe a bit in the actual panning but not the subtle movements.
- milhouse has used his powers to...fuse one half of each of his parents back together, and to give apu and jailbird multiple arms...why. WHAT THE FUCK are their powers?
- well i still dont know because, after saying Everything's Coming Up Milhouse (STOP!), milhouse just goddamn Raises some statues of his face from the ground. this makes so little sense i'm not even sure what to say. WHAT are these statues, WHY did he do this, WHAT ARE HIS POWERS, what is any of this!!
- so milhouse is struck down. there's some good animation when he hits the ground. this is all i got left, this is all they've given me. i'm a husk rn, i'm hollow.
- so it turns out milhouse was struck down by maggie who is holding a Nuclear Rod. then she gives a guy on a horse a shirt using telepathy I'm Fuckin Telling The Truth Here. then we homerzilla return and she turns him into a big ol' pink Barney lookalike and he hugs a building to lullaby music, dawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, and then it ends with a Weapons Grade Cute visual of maggie napping in the air as Two Rainbows form and a smiling sun rises. weird.
- oh wait we still have kang and kodos, and what do they have to say this year? they make some weird joke where it goes 4:3 and kodos exclaims "just because it looks like season 4 doesn't make it season 4!". i couldn't even possibly guess what this means, like at all. maybe i'm just to wiped out from this though. i need a fucking nap.
OH MY GOD IT'S OVER YES THANK GOD! ahem. well this segment wasn't really anything at all, the found footage idea was trashed and the powers made no sense and there was like Actually literally not a story at all. it just went on until it didn't, it was just utter filler. what do i even rate this? it didn't waste potential like the first, it didn't offend and bore like the second, it was just standard-issue white noise zombie simpsons material. i guess it was the least agonzing so i'll give this segment a D
and there it is folks, another halloween trilogy down the drain. another three shitty segments (i actually liked the s26 thoh tho), another bunch of bad jokes and lazy stories and general nonsense. each segment manages to tap into something different about the show that expresses whats wrong with it these days, all the while each just seems Crushingly lazy in the grand scheme. a totally impassionate affair. sure glad this guy is writing our trilogy again this year huh? fuck.
this episode gets an overall D-. seeya on FRIEND WITH BENEFIT!
Anyway, 