Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that I’ve seldom seen an entire episode of The Simpsons.
(Once they learn my last name, even people who don’t know me take it on faith that I must be a fan. When I was living in Virginia, pre-The Missus, I had a Saturday-night ritual which in part involved placing a pizza order at the Domino’s in the center of town, and then driving in to pick it up a few minutes later. The first time the kid who took phone orders asked my name, he busted out laughing. “Bart,” he said without explanation, “is that you?” I probably went to that Domino’s at least fifty times thereafter and every time — whether taking my order or when I arrived to pick it up — he greeted me with a hearty “Bart!” When I moved away, I should have stopped by Domino’s one last time to give him a token of some kind — a used copy of Crossed Wires, at least, the pages marked here and there with greasy thumbprints and a bookmark of crust or pepperoni. But, duh, I didn’t.)
Anyway, although I haven’t seen the show that much, I have picked up plenty of the in-jokes and recurring elements which have made their way into the general culture, elements like the very last view of the family, sitting on the couch at the end of the opening credits, in an apparently infinite number of variations of the same pose(s). I’ve seen plenty of Simpsons quotes used in email and forum sigs. I know that the exclamation “D’oh!” doesn’t translate to Duh, as one might expect, but more like something on the order of Oh, CRAP.
(Naturally, I’m expecting to be descended upon by show geeks to point out the nuances — why Homer doesn’t, for instance, simply say Oh, CRAP because in Season 2, Episode 11, he was etc. etc. etc.; and/or why, for another instance, D’oh! doesn’t mean Oh, CRAP! exactly, as I certainly could have figured out on my own if I’d just done some simple research, even Wiki-freaking-pedia got that much right, dude!)
Anyway, again, at least I knew enough about the show to be surprised that no one else, using one of the online time-sink toys at hetemeel.com, had apparently thought of this:
Jules says
I’m one of *those* geeky Simpsons fans, but honestly, since having had children, my husband and I, who used to watch it religiously every week, haven’t seen a single episode. We are purchasing the DVDs, though, and plan to get caught up….sigh….one day.
John says
Jules: From some of your kids’-book selections over at 7-Imp, it has occasionally amazed me that any library ever granted you the power to make purchasing selections for Little Ones. :) I mean, *I* like the subversive stuff, like mad, but still… So it’s not really surprising to learn here that you’re a “Simpsons” fan, too!
Jules says
Hee.
Henning says
When you DO get around to tackling The Simpsons, I’d recommend going only as far as season ten. The last eight (or nine? ten?) seasons, while still better than 95% of the programs out there, have only been disappointing. As much Springfield exploration as the show’s premise might allow, there are only so many stories to tell. 400+ episodes is way more than enough.
marta says
As much as I love The Simpsons, I never actually thought of them when I saw your name. Go figure. Anyway, I had to put words in Einstein’s mouth (or on his chalkboard as the case may be). Thanks for the distraction.
cuff says
I consider myself a big simpsons fan, having started watching them when they were shorts on the Tracy Ullman show (that’s back when Fox had about five original programs and filled the rest of the time with movies from their vault), but for the last decade I haven’t watched the shows except in reruns and DVD. In fact, that’s true of pretty much every weekly show I used to watch (I watched a lot more evening television when I had a desk job in the AV center of a library).
John says
Henning: The Missus and I had, for a while (until they moved away and got swallowed up somewhere in America), a couple of excellent friends who were Simpsons obsessives for sure. They taped every freaking episode; numerous bookshelves in their house were given over to nothing but those tapes. This was in the early to mid-’90s; I sometimes wonder what became of those tapes when the DVD era hit.
Knowing how long it has taken The Missus and me just to get through, say, six seasons of The Sopranos, I’d say the odds are pretty good I’ll never watch more than a few seasons of Springfield!
marta: In light of your month-long novelpalooza, I’m not sure to whom the “I” refers in your own version of the blackboard. Einstein? or marta, talking to herself? :)
cuff: The hell of it is, the episodes I’ve watched have been without exception hilarious. I can totally see why people get into the show. (Funnily enough, I had seen one or two of those bits on Ullman’s show.) And even Matt Groening himself — I knew and was a “Life in Hell” fanboy for years.
Hard for me to imagine a job with cooler extracurricular fringe benefits than one in a well-stocked library AV center.
I think I remember reading somewhere that The Simpsons and Married with Children were, by themselves, the only reason Fox made it through its early years. Hmm.