Simpsons 12 Day Marathon on FXX

[CyanideFishbone]

I'm getting in to the show, well, the older episodes. Seasons 4-10. 

[CyanideFishbone]

"Oh man, you kissed a girl? That is so gay!" Classic.

[SpongeOddFan]

"Oh man, you kissed a girl? That is so gay!" Classic.

which episode was it?

[CyanideFishbone]

which episode was it?

The one where Lisa dates Nelson. I forget what it's called. I think it's like "Lisa's date with destiny" or something like that.

[WhoBibbles]

I wish I would watch the marathon in FXX, If I lived in USA and my parents let me watch TV because It has been a long time since I haven't seen old episodes in a long time. I know the marathon hasn't ended yet but still, I'd like to thank everyone who watched the marathon and the people who still watches now. I just love The Simpsons so much. This show always make me and my brother laugh with a lot great character moments. It also hearwarms me too, I don't only talk about some classic ones, also a few episodes after season 10 as well. Sure, the show has lost It's charm a little but at least tries to be funny and creative, unlike modern Family Guy (I don't hate modern FG though) and It works %70 of the time. The main characters, while they are a little flanderized, they still act like their oldselves most of the time. The recent season, season 25, has some really creative episodes like The War of Art and The Man Who Grew Too Much. and 3 heartwarming episodes (Labor Pains, You Don't Have to Live Like a Refree, Brick Like Me). If you ask me, I suggest you to watch some episodes from post-season 10 era too. Sure, you will definetly find some bad episodess but there are also a lot good ones that can make you smile.

 

An one more thing: Here's some of my favortie episodes from the classic era (season 1-9): Krusty Gets Busted, Some Enchanted Eveniing, Itchy & Stratchy & Marge, The Way He Was, Three Men and a Comic Book, When Flanders Failed, Radio Bart, Flaming Moe's Brother Can You Spare Two Times (a lot better than Oh Brother Where Art Thou, If you ask me), Kamp Krusty, Lisa's First Word, Last Exit to Springfield, Duffless, Cape Feare, Homer Goes to College, $pringfield, Homer and Apu, Deep Space Homer, Bart of Darkness, Treehouse of Horror V, Lisa on Ice, Lisa's Wedding, Who Shot Mr. Burns (two parts), Home Sweet Homediddly -Dum-Doodily, Treehouse of Horror VI, Mother Simpson, Raging Abe, You Only Move Twice, The Springfield Files, Homer's Phobia, Newyork vs. Homer Simpson, This Little Wiggy, The Joy of Sec.

[WhoBibbles]

The one where Lisa dates Nelson. I forget what it's called. I think it's like "Lisa's date with destiny" or something like that.

You corrected the name of the episode.

[Wumbo]

It's actually "Lisa's Date with Density".

[CyanideFishbone]

It's actually "Lisa's Date with Density".

Oh, thanks.

 

 

We're pretty much out of what i consider the "Golden Era" which is seasons 4-10. 

[Wumbo]

I'd go a little earlier than you, personally. The Golden era is 1-8 for me. 9's close, but not quite there.

[WhoBibbles]

To me the golden era is between 2 and 8. Season 9 is great though but that's when the show start having bad episodes. Season had one bad episode, which is Homer's Oddsey but that's becauase I find the episode boring. There is nothing bad I can about the episode honestly.

[abisert]

 

I wish I would watch the marathon in FXX, If I lived in USA and my parents let me watch TV because It has been a long time since I haven't seen old episodes in a long time. I know the marathon hasn't ended yet but still, I'd like to thank everyone who watched the marathon and the people who still watches now. I just love The Simpsons so much. This show always make me and my brother laugh with a lot great character moments. It also hearwarms me too, I don't only talk about some classic ones, also a few episodes after season 10 as well. Sure, the show has lost It's charm a little but at least tries to be funny and creative, unlike modern Family Guy (I don't hate modern FG though) and It works %70 of the time. The main characters, while they are a little flanderized, they still act like their oldselves most of the time. The recent season, season 25, has some really creative episodes like The War of Art and The Man Who Grew Too Much. and 3 heartwarming episodes (Labor Pains, You Don't Have to Live Like a Refree, Brick Like Me). If you ask me, I suggest you to watch some episodes from post-season 10 era too. Sure, you will definetly find some bad episodess but there are also a lot good ones that can make you smile.

 

An one more thing: Here's some of my favortie episodes from the classic era (season 1-9): Krusty Gets Busted, Some Enchanted Eveniing, Itchy & Stratchy & Marge, The Way He Was, Three Men and a Comic Book, When Flanders Failed, Radio Bart, Flaming Moe's Brother Can You Spare Two Times (a lot better than Oh Brother Where Art Thou, If you ask me), Kamp Krusty, Lisa's First Word, Last Exit to Springfield, Duffless, Cape Feare, Homer Goes to College, $pringfield, Homer and Apu, Deep Space Homer, Bart of Darkness, Treehouse of Horror V, Lisa on Ice, Lisa's Wedding, Who Shot Mr. Burns (two parts), Home Sweet Homediddly -Dum-Doodily, Treehouse of Horror VI, Mother Simpson, Raging Abe, You Only Move Twice, The Springfield Files, Homer's Phobia, Newyork vs. Homer Simpson, This Little Wiggy, The Joy of Sec.

Wow,I've never seen someone who loves this show so much,That's nice.How about i cheer you up with a good old Simpsons quote?

 

"No children have ever meddled with the Republican party and lived to tell about it?" -Sideshow Bob (S6 E5)

[Metal Snake]

I'd go a little earlier than you, personally. The Golden era is 1-8 for me. 9's close, but not quite there.

 

Yeah, this. Seasons 13-17 have a special place in my heart too though for nostalgia value.

[Wumbo]

Yeah, I gotta have some place in my heart for Season 16. I don't think the episodes are that good, but they do bring back memories.

[abisert]

My favorite episode of this marathon would be "The Crepes of Wrath"

 

P.S "Shoplifting is a victimless crime,like punching someone in the dark" -Nelson (S7 E11)

[Young Nug]

So I'm watching Moe Baby Blues right now. I completely missed the series drop-off, sadly, so this was a jump from Season 7 straight into Season 14, meaning I missed all of Scully's run, which sucked, since I was looking forward in a grim way to some of the worst episodes in that era, like "Kill The Alligator And Run". But anyway, apparently MBB is regarded as one of the better/best episodes from the Post-Classic era, and...

Wow.

I was honestly shocked at how hard everything fell off, especially if this is considered one of the better episodes. It's definitely been funny and sweet so far, but so much is off. The jokes hit nowhere near as hard as they did. So many of them are really stupid. The pacing is so wonky in places and the direction is very very.... Weird. It might be because Lauren MacMullan is directing and her wonderful sense of movement and perspective just feels off for this show, but everything moves just really weirdly. The way the episodes move from point to point oftentimes feels forced. It's a weird feeling, and the show isn't outright trash ATM, but I'll be damned if there isn't a lot wrong. I heard that Al Jean's first few seasons were an awful mix of the hyper-cartoony elements and trash plotting from Scully's run and the airless/boring/nothing happens that matters elements from Jean's later seasons so they're not as good, and that was definitely the case here. It seems like no one (bar Ian Maxtone-Graham, great writer) really knows what made the show what it was and that everyone's kinda just writing.

I know that this show got bad for a while, but like. Just wow. It just lost literally everything. Crazy. And this was one of the better episodes apparently! The show as it is now, at Season 25, is actually a lot closer to the classic seasons in feel than I realized. What I'm watching rn is just what.

[SpongeOddFan]

Day 11, folks!

[Young Nug]

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 

[SpongeOddFan]

remember, the marathon will end at 12am ET

[Popeye Q. Krabs]

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.

[NegiSpongie]

Even though I never really watched the Simpsons, I've really enjoyed watching the marathon the past 12 days. I definitely think the Simpsons is a great show now.