[How does Spongebob rip itself off?]

Yeah it's hard to keep tract of what plot has been done before when you've been making episodes for almost 15 years. I wouldn't even consider those two examples as being "rip-offs". Despite everything, I still feel like The Other Patty is just a rehash of Best Frenemies. The plot is literally the same. "Mr. Krabs and Plankton put their differences aside so they can take the formula of a new, competing restaurant." Except they don't work together until towards the end and SpongeBob has a bigger role in it than Best Frenemies. So yeah some episodes are really similar to each other, but you can't always blame the writers for it.

 

Thank you! Exactly. I wouldn't blame them if they kinda lost track of what ideas have already been done with all those episodes that have been made before. It must be a pain trying to come up with new stuff that hasn't been done on the show which they still do from time to time and also taking in account for how long the show has been on and what kinds of tight deadlines they probably have to put up with too.

[Simpsons 12 Day Marathon on FXX]

So, we've arrived at the current period of the show. These later seasons are when I started watching, and as much as I want to say out of nostalgia that they're good, after seeing the absolute fire streak of 10/10 episodes that lasted for multiple Seasons back in the day, I just can't bring myself to do it.

 

Make no mistake. These episodes aren't terrible, or even really bad. In fact, they're a lot better than a lot of early Jean's stuff. Somewhere along the way, near the time of the movie, the show learned how to effectively tell a story again, and they're actually trying for emotion again. However, in re-learning to do that, the show lost a big part of itself, and that's the humor. The original Simpsons was that snarky guy in class. That original stretch of fantastic episodes was a show that knew exactly what it wanted to be- An alligator that bit and tore into anything in pop culture and either absolutely slaughtered it, lampooning it's stupidity or fallacies, or parodied it, and mercilessly did the same thing anyway. At the same time, this was also a show that was great at characterization, knew how far a joke or a character could go before it became unfunny or unlike the character, and the show also knew when to slow down and establish plot points, stories, and just give out good vibes and have emotional resonance. That era was a group of incredibly smart, funny, and self-confident people who were so sure of themselves that they could write a smart, funny, heartwarming comedy that could also satirize and parody everything as well, that they did it, with all the bells and whistles.

 

Scully's not a bad showrunner, I don't think. He wrote a lot of good episodes in the classic era. I think the decline in Scully's era is because Scully saw the show as one thing and pushed it too far into one direction- A comedic and cartoony direction. Under Scully, the show did lose it's ability to tell a coherent story, yeah. Episodes like "Kill The Alligator And Run" jump from plot point to plot point like the writers were playing hopscotch. Things aren't really interconnected and everything kinda just spills out in a gargle of things happening but not always making sense. However, what makes these episodes tolerable (mostly the early Scully years. Most stuff past Season 10 is just flat-out not good) is that they were still funny. The emotional aspect of the show was mostly gone, and the actual writing and plots got shoddier, but in many episodes I could overlook that because so many just made me laugh. The show was still this spiteful biting thing, and even if Homer acted like a jackass to his whole family and town, and even if half the shit in the episode made no sense, the episode being funny just trumped a lot for me.

 

Over the course of Jean's era, it's felt more like a regrowth, a recovery period. The show started off bad with him, as I said, as it contained stories that made no fucking sense and were zany and cuh-razzzzyyy, but then had boring-ass plots and a lot of the time, the episodes weren't that funny. As the show continued, actual plots and structure slowly returned. Episodes began to make sense and stuff started to actually happen again. Emotional resonance came back as well. The plots weren't as amazing as they could be (show had been on for like 17 years at that point, there's not too much left for you to do), but they were decent. Jean's episodes are a definite improvement from the Scully episodes....From a writing standpoint.

 

However, while Scully's era lost the heartwarming and strong writing half of Simpsons (which Jean managed to bring back), Al Jean lost the biting satire half of the Simpsons. And that's a much bigger blow than it sounds. As the show has continued, it's efforts to stay relevant and up with the times have been kinda laughable, and one of the reasons for this is that their parodies and commentary on things, whether they were pop culture, technology or politics, lost a lot of that wit and bite. Mike Amato has used this word to describe the show a lot on his blog, and it's very fitting. Toothless.

 

The show is biting at things, but it's sort of pointless. Is there supposed to be a joke in the "Zii", or the "MyPod"? Are those funny? Is it funny to make a joke about George Bush being the president and doing a trash job at it, when the joke is so vague you barely know it's about him? The show used to be able to fucking destroy and satirize things by name so hard that you wouldn't believe what you were watching, or parody things and make them so ridiculous that while you knew exactly what it was referencing, it was still hilarious on it's own. This new era can do neither, just make vague gestures towards things and replace certain words in products because that's just hilarious, right? It's not. The witty satire is just gone, and that's one half of the show right there.

 

One last thing about Jean's era is that the characters still have the propensity to teeter into jerkass or just flat out OOC territory at any moment, which is kinda scary, and that so many of his episodes have such an airless, "nothing even happened. what" feel to them. The show can't piss me off anymore like a lot of S9/S13-16 episodes can, but the show just barely elicits a reaction from me at all sometimes, and I don't know if feeling nothing is necessarily better than not being pissed off. One good point is that around Season 21 or so, the animation got much better. Which is always good for an animated show. 

This isn't to say that the show can't be funny, because the handful of great, classic-level episodes does grow with each Season, imo. The show just isn't always funny, and it can't bite anything. It's not as culturally relevant. Although, Steal This Episode was actually good with how biting it was. 

 

All in all, a great marathon. Crazy how different the show became. I still love it, regardless of the quality drop-off. It was just such a great show, and those glimpses back to the classic era like the movie, Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind, Holidays Of Future Passed, make it worth it sometimes. This show taught me a ton about writing.

 

also fuck tim long dude needs to just fucking stop writing trash episodes 

 

I think that's why I stopped watching the marathon days ago. Didn't wanna have to bother with mediocrity later on and if I really want to check any of those episodes out, I'll do it on my own time.

[A few reasons why I think Dunces and Dragons is one of the Greatest Spongebob Specials]

I haven't seen this episode in years since like 2006. I really gotta rewatch it soon.

[Breadwinners]

I'm very very reluctant to watch another episode of this. I saw a bit of a particular episode on YouTube and it was just abysmal in my opinion. I just can't get over the fact that the characters don't even look like ducks for crying out loud!

[Squidwardisawesome22's top 50 season 7 episodes!]

God, I hate The Cent of Money. Thank you for having that one here. I don't get why it doesn't get more criticism.