Cartoon Central

Went to see The Simpsons Movie last night at midnight. Now. I know that it's fashionable to talk about how the Simpsons isn't as good a show as it once was, and how Family Guy and South Park have edged it out as the envelope-pushing animated sitcoms, but dammit, give me Homer any day. The thing that is unspoken in all the talk about the Simpsons' decline is that it's no longer novelty.

SITUATION 3: We all know that The Simpsons is maybe the most quoted show around. So you’re sitting at a table with some friends and they start tossing out their favorite quotes. You say:

This evening is also the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, which isn’t coming back until January (!!), and great shocks and surprises are promised. (Entertainment Weekly had the following irritating description: “Of all the characters I thought would be a Cylon: him??” Ugh.) After The Sopranos ends, there won’t be anything to look forward to on Sunday nights anymore. I can’t go back to The Simpsons …

Have you seen the Indian edition of The Simpsons? It’s called the Singhsons. Now, that’s how the Simpsons family would look like if they were from India!

If you’re a fan of The Simpsons (as I am), you have to check this out. It’s a map of Springfield complete with Evergreen Terrace. It’s best viewed on flickr, so you can see all the notes. You can view a much larger version on flickr as well.

I think one of us was supposed to write something about The Simpsons' portrayal of Christianity but some how we just forgot about it. But worry not -- the good folks at 4Simpsons.com got us started.

How did I survive in the days before things like the Guide to Springfield, an attempt to map the entire hometown of the Simpsons?

This is not surprising as much of American theology comes not from the biblical presentation of Christ but rather from the historic drawings of a weak, casper milktoast, effeminate Jesus who is some sort of divine doormat; helplessly ignored and trampled upon. A contemporary example of an auxiliary to this is the satirical portrayal of evangelicals through the character Ned Flanders in The Simpsons.

The Simpsons are such a mainstream staple of our lives these days, that i have even managed to squeeze Simpsons quotes into academic essays. Check it out here

Check out this cool real-life version of the Simpsons opening. Not sure who, how, or why this was created, but it’s pretty amazing.

*The Simpsons allow me to turn off my brain and laugh for 20something minutes a week.

After watching 200 episodes of The Simpsons last weekend I now feel twice as smart as before. Hmmmmm the best lessons in life are taught by our surrogate parent – TV through cartoon network and nickelodeon. Here are some of Homer Simpson’s wisdom for you to enjoy.

On another occasion, they sent a Bob The Builder cookie making kit in place of the Simpsons one I'd ordered for a fanatical friend. I snapped at him that day, I think, handing him it back and telling him, not a jot uncertainly, that Bob The Builder was of no use to me at a time like that.

Our very first glimpse of The Simpsons, these are short clips which aired on the Tracey Ullman Show 1987-1989, before and after ad breaks. Click the image to download. More will be added soon.

I have the day off next Saturday, so I'm definitely going to head down for this. I'm really looking forward to the Lost panel, the Superman Returns panel with Bryan Singer, Kevin Smith and Richard Kelly (woot!) together, Joss Whedon and company at the Serenity panel, Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and Forrerest Ackerman, The Simpsons panel, Tenacious D, and Comic Book: The Movie. Whew! It's going to be a super fun day and I will definitely be getting some great pics, audio clips, and other good stuff!

This past Sunday I was watching the Simpsons on Fox. It was actually a pretty unusual event, due to the fact I normally just watch repeats during the week and haven’t caught it on it’s official time in… probably about a year. Before the episode was a parental advisory that read:

This episode contains discussions on same-sex marriages. Viewer Discretion is Advised.

So, the most important television program in the last 15 years has finally been bitten by the infectious bug that is Hollywood temptation. The Simpsons are finally going to be making a movie, and I, for one, couldn't be any happier. There's no doubt in my mind that it'll be done right. No Simpsons episode has ever not been good. Yes, some are better than others, but all episodes are entertaining, and, therefore, I can only imagine that the time and effort put into a movie will produce something extremely worthwhile and enjoyable.

Nancy Cartwright, better known to a whole generation as the voice of Bart Simpson, did a one-woman show entitled ‘My Life as a Ten Year Old Boy’ in London last week. Plans for a feature length cartoon based on “The Simpsons” were unveiled at the Cannes film festival in mid-May, and Nancy told The BBC that things are moving along:

“The Simpsons” will begin its seventeenth season on the air later this year.

Ever wonder what the Simpsons would be like without pictures? Like everything else about the Simpsons, it turns out to be unexpectedly strange.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of the Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet every failure was freeing, and today I’m as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good. So that’s what I wish for all of you-the bad as well as the good. Fall down. Make a mess. Break something occasionally. Know that your mistakes are your own unique way of getting to where you need to be. And remember that the story is never over.

The only really odd pick was to use The Simpsons and Philosophy to talk about postmodernism. There's a couple decent articles in it on irony and allusion, and the very idea of using it transgresses the high/low culture divide. So I thought it would be an interesting approach. Plus I like one of the articles about whether The Simpsons actually teaches traditional family values; it tells something of the screwiness of standard left/right debate in the US. There's also a chapter on Marx that I'll use to talk about Marx's legacy, and an interesting cultural piece on how responses to Lisa mirror America's anti-intellectualism.

Seth MacFarlane is back. Big time. You have to admire the guts it takes to start the first new episode of a previously cancelled show by attacking your own network. Sure, the Simpsons have done it, but not with MacFarlane's panache. The show starts with Peter telling everyone they've been cancelled. Lois asks if there's any hope. "Well, they have to make way for a bunch of other shows." He then rattles off no fewer than three dozen Fox failures, from Wonderfalls to Wanda at Large, and finishes with, "So if any of those shows get cancelled, we've...

"The Simpsons" passed its 350th episode tonight. They aired two new episodes and, to my surprise, both were pretty funny. I thought they should have stopped three years ago, but the writing has gotten much better this season. The left-wing political snobbery from a couple years ago seems to have diminished a bit.

Seth MacFarlane created something amazing. It’s an animated program with more pop culture references than The Simpsons and with a slightly more twisted sense of humor. Maybe it’s not fair to compare the two, but while I find The Simpsons funny, I find Family Guy laugh-out-loud funny every single time. Even on repeat viewings.

As you’d expect, it is very much like Family Guy, in the same way that Futurama had quite a bit in common with The Simpsons (dude, Fox, a fifth season of Futurama would really rock, you know?), but I’m not so sure if I found it quite as funny. That might be because I watched one of the better episodes of Family Guy yesterday and still had that fresh in my mind, but in comparison I think Family Guy was the more humourous.

” As the legendary Fox series wraps up its 16th season, the denizens of Springfield are wading in some uncharted prime-time waters. When executive producer Al Jean boasts that “The Simpsons” “just enjoyed the best 16th season of any comedy ever,” that’s because no other comedy has ever made it this far.”

Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation by Chris Turner explores the first 15 seasons from The Simpsons. There's a sprinkling of funny quotes and trivia but they're really secondary to the book's "mission", namely, to relate the rise of the cartoon to the political, social and cultural realities of the 1990s and early 2000s."

"I needed something to do after school," 12-year-old Thomas Bent, a Grade 6 student, said as he pedalled furiously to propel The Simpsons Road Rage game, his brown hair plastered to his forehead with sweat.