These young Disney+ whippersnappers…

dsparsons said:
Seasons 5-8 was hated on the SNPP capsules in the 1990s = who knows what later episodes will be vindicated by history/hindsight?
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That’s because the episode reviewers had no idea how long and how awful the show would become. If you could pull a modern episode and show it to one of those reviewers, they would be writing an apology letter to Sherry Bobbins.
 
I remember 20 years ago when we would download episodes of the simpsons in realmedia format, those videos were the size of postage stamps. buffering.... buffering....

It's certainly nice to be able to watch anything you want so easily nowadays, even if "Stark Raving Dad" has been erased from the official Simpsons library. I have seen a few videos on youtube involving "Zoomers" and the simpsons, while most of them declared themselves as fans they missed most of the references in the episodes. It's hard to judge them harshly because as a child I know I missed a whole lot but the strength of the Simpsons was that it managed to appropriate those references.

I remember before youtube or even high speed internet when you would trade live music recordings and show or "rare" movies you couldn't easily find in some countries or simply because they were very limited in distribution or out of print. It's always a trip to see videos like these so readily available considering how much I struggled to find them before youtube


or even a pro-shot of this band in the early 90s

 
@Financial Panther be like:


That said, I can understand the points made with the opening post this thread.

To some, it can definitely feel a bit unusual to having the show so easily and quickly available at the tip of your fingers by going onto Disney+ (and with some typing, entering passwords and whatnot) and sure, having pretty much all the seasons available with easy quick access to the episodes of your choice is definitely quite the opposite to yesteryear when there was pretty much only the DVDs, TV airings and recordings and pirated online versons and now the shows is mainly presented like this in a digital catalog of sorts.

Having all the episodes (well, most of them at least) on a widely available streaming service may, to some older fans, feel like it makes the show and episodes less special (on top of maybe being a little weird and scary?), but I do think it's a good thing the show has been made easily accessible and it sure has been (and still is) a great way for new fans to discover the series. Maybe it does "simplify" the series as "just another popular streaming show" but even it that would be the case, I don't think it really matters: There's still tons of people who thing it is special (much due to those classic seasons) and heck, even many new viewers discovering it via D+ may also find it to be special: I don't think it can be boiled down to people thinking the 'The Simpsons' is not "special" anymore due to streaming, not by a long shot.

There is the downsides of streaming though: It can be fleeting and episodes can be taken away/censored, the service can get unavailable due to server/internet issues and whatnot or even go down permanently (in a very worst case scenario for Simpsons-goers) so the physical media with the show that one own will still be a thing, but experiencing the show on D+ while the service is there is no crying shame so yeah, in short (and to sum it up): It is only a good thing the show is as easily available as it is and helps make more discover it.
 
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I don't see the issue with it being so easily or readily available, there are things I wish were as easily accessible as The Simpsons. Not even half of the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series is available on a streaming service, for instance. Would love for most if not all(not even talking about the overtly racist ones like the Censored Eleven, it's completely understandable why those aren't on a streamer) of those cartoons to be easily pulled up on HBO Max on a whim, but alas.

Don't even see how it would make the show "less special", it's still a rerun mainstay on television, albeit on cable. Again using the Looney Tunes they were replayed endlessly on TV for over four decades and they never were regarded as anything less than some of the best and most important animated works of all time. No amount of ease of access is going to make The Simpsons, at least the classic seasons, less special.

And even then it still is behind a paywall, you do have to pay for it. and D+ ain't no 5 bucks anymore.
 
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Financial Panther said:
I used to be proud of having seen every Simpsons episode. I’d watch all the classic episodes on DVDs and use old illegal sites like WatchTheSimpsonsOnline to watch the episodes that weren’t on DVD yet. But it was a roll of the die whether that site would work. The Simpsons was a show that I pretty much dedicated my life to for many years. But watching every episode wasn’t really my goal; it just naturally happened since I was so completely obsessed with the show.

Now I’m seeing a lot of people trying to watch every episode on Disney+, and it just doesn’t feel right. It feels like people are minimizing The Simpsons into just “that show with a ton of episodes” and are watching every episode just to mark some sort of achievement. I guess it’s good that people are discovering the episodes that made the show so great, but are they actually appreciating them, or are they just counting down the episodes until they can mark the show complete?

I shouldn’t care about this; I probably sound like a gatekeeper. But the way many people are watching the show now just feels so…artificial to me.
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I'm doing exactly that, watching every episode as a goal. Though of course I'm massively enjoying it.
 
D'ohnut King said:
I'm doing exactly that, watching every episode as a goal. Though of course I'm massively enjoying it.
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i've said it before and i'll say it again, dont treat a show or comic or movie as a challenge to overcome, because if you treat it like a chore you'll never truly enjoy it, watch it at your own pace, watch as many episodes as you wanna watch and skip whatever episodes you wanna skip
 
Meko said:
i've said it before and i'll say it again, dont treat a show or comic or movie as a challenge, because if you treat it like a chore you'll never truly enjoy it, watch it at your own pace, watch as many episodes as you wanna watch and skip whatever episodes you wanna skip
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I love the show so much that blazing through it is the speed I want to go. And I would never want to skip any episodes (unless there are any more clip shows after the ones in seasons 4 and 6, I want nothing to do with those).
 
chalo24a said:
I guess it’s good that people are discovering the episodes that made the show so great, but are they actually appreciating them, or are they just counting down the episodes until they can mark the show complete?
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Both for me.
 
They have long reached the "Bewitched" thing of reusing old ideas but what if they redid old episodes with a new hat - erm a twist:

teefy.jpg

teefy 2.jpg
 
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