Review: 'Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television-And America-Forever''

When a schoolmate convinced me that The Simpsons was more than just some fad prime-time kid's cartoon/T-shirt sales device, and I actually watched the show, I was hooked and I was amazed. Even three decades later, having watched all of the episodes from its eight-season "golden age" countless times, The Simpsons still seems like magic to me. How did the writers pack so many jokes into those first 178 episodes? How did the rhythm seemingly never go slack (especially when we're talking about seasons 2 through 7)? How did it pile in so much wit, originality, and genuine hilarity when every other comedy on TV was lucky to squeak out a couple of good laughs over the course of an entire season? Were its writers some sort of alien beings like Kang and Kodos? Had they been enchanted like some sort of pacifier-producing monkey's paw? Were they the biggest men in the world and covered in gold...14-karat gold?

Review: 'Collecting The Simpsons'

As soon as The Simpsons went from being the thing that made people watch The Tracy Ullman Show to its own weekly entity in early 1990, the merchandising began. After all, no one new how long the bugged-eyed, yellow-faced dysfunctional family would last, so might as well strike while the inanimate carbon rod was still aglow. 

Five billion years later, The Simpsons is still on television, running half-assed Disco Stu cameos into the ground for the remaining cockroaches and a landfill full of plastic Bart Simpsons. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the year 2023, we are merely on the series' thirty-fifth season, and there are probably still a few humans watching the current crop of half-assed Disco Stu cameos. Not too much to get excited about there. But for those of us who remember when you could tune in on Thursday night and watch a spot-on Beatles parody called "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", and on the following one, take in Sideshow Bob stepping on rake after rake in "Cape Feare", and just seven days later see a bee bite Homer's bottom and make his bottom big in "Homer Goes to College", and do it all while snuggling a Bart Simpson doll, it seemed as though The Simpsons could pump out sheer comic brilliance and colorful, bug-eyed merchandise forever.

While the first part of that statement is wrong, the second one is right, although by Warren Evans's estimate in Collecting The Simpsons, "50 percent of the Simpsons merchandise that is still in circulation today was created and released within the first three years of the series existence. That's just one of the fascinating factoids his and James and Lydia Hicks's book coughs up. Want to know why so much early Bart Simpson merch depicted the kid who only owns orange shirts in blue ones? It's in here. Want to know what happened to that life-sized Simpsons house that actually got built in Nevada in 1997? It's in here. Want to know Matt Groening's feelings about African-American appropriation of Bart Simpson as a cultural icon? It's in here. Want to know who really wrote "Do the Bartman"? It's in here. Want to know where you can get an actually edible, Simpsons-accurate donuts the size of a small-child's head? It's in here.

That Collecting The Simpsons is more than just brilliantly colorful images of brilliantly colorful toys, banned T-shirts, fast-food premiums, Doritos bags, theme-park rides, kitchenware, bath products, games, books, comics, CDs, and clocks really justifies its existence, but those full-color pictures are what makes it an absolute joy. The writers' enthusiasm for and sense of humor about all this stuff doesn't hurt either. It's been 25 years since I've seen a new Simpsons episode that was really worth getting excited over, but Collecting The Simpsons definitely is. 

Review: 'The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Ominous Omnibus 2: Deadtime Stories for Boos & Ghouls'

1993 was a big year for The Simpsons. It was when the series' finest season, number four, aired and when Matt Groening started Bongo Comics to continue the Springfieldians' antics off the small screen. 

The key to The Simpsons' comedic success, way back when the show actually was comedically successful, was its constant barrage of sharp, insightful, and/or outrageously silly jokes that went by so quickly you had to watch the best episodes a dozen times for everything to register. It all comes down to writing, pacing, and editing, most of which goes out the window in the transition from TV to comics. Frankly, The Simpsons comics were not really funny. With their over-reliance on trotting out obscure characters, lazy self-references, lazy puns, and slack pacing, they're not too different from what the TV series would start becoming during its spotty eighth season. 

Review: 'Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night'

A week into November, Halloween is not exactly the number one thing on my mind, and I tend to have Halloween on my mind more than most people. However, reading the new edition of Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night helped me catch that spooky wave again. 

Playing the ever affable tour guide, Bannatyne focuses on the people who make Halloween an all-year obsession by devoting their lives to growing monstrous pumpkins, building their own elaborate decorations, running haunted attractions, prepping for costume parades, performing in creepy burlesque shows, playing trick-or-treat pranks, participating in zombie-invasion recreation societies, and crafting installments of The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” (hiya, Mike Reiss!). They’re the people who really draw every oozing bit of fun out of the funnest holiday. And I thought I was obsessed because I start decorating my apartment in September and spend the days leading up to October 31 watching several monster movies a day. I’m a rank amateur compared to the cat who collected so much jack-o’-lantern paraphernalia that he was able to put a down payment open a house by selling $200,000 worth of his stuff. And, yes, he still owned thousands of dollars worth of leftovers as of the book’s original publication in 2011 (the new edition features a fresh introduction by the author).

 

Bannatyne also covers people who identify as real-life ghost conjurers and spell-casting witches. I found that stuff less interesting because those people are not necessarily enamored with Halloween and because it isn’t 2011 anymore. Back then, I might have found folks who believe they have magical powers charmingly kooky. Today, when people who believe Democrats are baby-eating lizard people from outer space can actually win seats in Congress, I have a lot less tolerance for fantasy.

Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes: Day 1

Does the mere idea of stepping into another mall, watching It’s a Wonderful Life for the zillionth time, or talking to your loved ones make you throw up? Then settle your bowlful of jelly into the La-Z-Boy® and deck your hall with today’s installment of Psychobabble’s 12 Days of X-Mas Episodes instead! Merry vegetating!

Series: The Simpsons

Episode: “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, in which the residents of 742 Evergreen Terrace make their full-length debut and acquire a family dog after Scroogey Mr. Burns denies Homer his Christmas bonus. It took The Simpsons a year or so to reach peak hilarity (by my estimation, it really kicked in with “Brush with Greatness”, and not just because I love Ringo), so don’t expect to crap yourself laughing. But the early Simpsons episodes still pack a primitive charm and the tattooist who takes Bart’s word when the kid says he’s 21 is an early hint that the show could be really funny.

Review: 'The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia'

The Twilight Zone ran for 156 episodes written by 40-something different writers and featuring way more actors and actresses than I’m willing to count. You can literally fill an encyclopedia with this stuff, and that’s just what Steven Jay Rubin literally did with The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia.

Running for 424 packed pages, Rubin’s book discusses every episode, every writer, every director, every major theme (aliens, children, time travel, etc.), every significant location or item (Sunnyvale Rest home from “Kick the Can”, Talky Tina from “Living Doll”, etc.), and nearly every actor and actress who appeared in the series’ original run (understandably, people like Phil Arnold, who played “Man” in “Mr. Dingle, the Strong” and Jimmy Baird, who played “Boy” in “The Changing of the Guard” are a bit too much for our valiant author). And the original run is Rubin’s main concern, which he makes very clear in his book’s introduction, although he still manages to slip in a good deal of information about, for example, Twilight Zone: The Movie in his entry on “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”.

Rubin doesn’t make room for potential entries about such original series-related items as all the merchandise The Twilight Zone spawned or The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episodes that so wonderfully parody so many classic Zones, but we do get a lot that saves the book from being redundant in light of The Twilight Zone Companion, Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic, IMDB, and Wikipedia. There are quotes from new interviews with a slew of people involved with the original series, odd bits of trivia (example: Russ Meyer was a still photographer for the series! Nina Roman-Rhodes, who played the maid in “Miniature”, was one of the few people who reported seeing a second gunman at the site of JFK’s assassination!), and quite a few unusual photos (my favorite: Gary Crosby of “Come Wander with Me” monkeying with an electric bass). Ten pages of Rod Serling’s final interview is a cool addition too even though the creator barely mentions The Twilight Zone at all.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 31

Series: The Simpsons

Episode: “Treehouse of Horror IV”, in which the annual Halloween episode of The Simpsons hits its peak with a scarifying trio of terror tales presented by Bart à la Rod Serling on Night Gallery. First up is a spin on The Devil and Daniel Webster in which corpulent Homer Simpson barters his soul for one doughnut and Satan assumes the form of pious neighborino Ned Flanders. Next is the traditional Twilight Zone parody in which Bart plays a junior Bill Shatner who discovers a gremlin saboteur messing with his school bus. Finally, there’s the lavish “Bart Simpson’s Dracula”, in which Count Mr. Burns keeps an undead army of the undead at the bottom of his Super Happy Fun Slide and neither Francis Ford Coppola nor Stephen King make it out alive. Back when The Simpsons was still funny, nobody did Halloween episodes like they did, and no Halloween is complete without watching one. Happy viewing and happy Halloween!

Review: 'Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003'

Oh, how many of us misspent our youth by rushing home from school and forgetting all about our homework to vegetate in front of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” or ancient reruns of “The Flintstones”? Well, the idea of reading a hernia-inducing, two-volume encyclopedia of such animated trifles may actually seem like homework. At least it might until you delve into Hal Erickson’s delightful though dryly titled Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003. The great surprise of these books is not that their 950-plus pages bulge with history (I was unaware of how troubled the first season of “The Simpsons” was…or that “Ren & Stimpy” creator John Kricfalusi, who’d address his Nickelodeon bosses as “scum-sucking pigs,” was as irreverently outrageous as his dog and cat team), production info, trivia (Wait… “Scooby Doo” was patterned after “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”? Jodie Foster voiced Pugsley on the “Addams Family” cartoon? Belgium produced nine Smurfs feature films in the sixties?), and criticism; it’s that Erickson captures the fun of his topic with writing that is polished and informative but also cracks wise quite regularly. What a relief.

I defy anyone to pick up these books and not immediately leap to her or his favorite shows, and Erickson generally does not disappoint by giving due room and attention to cult items such as “Duck Man” and “Liquid Television” as well as perennial favorites like “Space Ghost” and “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”. If there’s a significant flaw to this collection it's that it does not live up to its “Illustrated” designation a bit more, but I guess more pictures would have necessitated a third volume, and I’m not sure my puny, sunshine and exercise-deprived, “Groovie Goolies”-weakened muscles would be capable of lifting it.

Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia, 1949-2003 was originally published in 2005, and it is now going be reissued in its third revised edition. I received the second edition for review, so I'm not sure about what those new revisions entail.

It's the Psychobabble Halloween Special!

With its rituals of begging for candy, playing dress up, and believing in the kinds of things you should stop believing in at age seven—Flying witches! Ghosts! Werewolves! Pumpkins!—Halloween is definitely a kids holiday. I admit that even as I get more into Halloween the older I get. That’s because adult children such as myself can indulge in a month-long orgy of horror movies with content way to axe-centric for Trick-or-Treating tykes. When it comes to feature films, the kids are mostly shut out despite a few seasonal kid-friendly flicks like Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Mad Monster Party (am I dating myself with my references? Nah.). Kids generally need to turn to the small screen for their Halloween entertainment. Fortunately, there’s plenty of Halloween entertainment on TV to eliminate the dangers of playing outside in the late-October fresh air. At least there have been since the late 1970s when annually aired Halloween specials really became a thing on TV. Before that period, specials popped up pretty infrequently outside of spooky episodes of “Bewitched”  (“Trick or Treat”; “Twitch or Treat”) or “The Beverly Hillbillies” (“Trick or Treat”—are you sensing a lack of imagination here?). Other shows like “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Monkees” really blew it by airing episodes such as “Ghost a Go-Go” and “The Monstrous Monkee Mash” far removed from the holiday (and both series aired shows on October 31^st during their runs, so the scheduling was extra stupid).

This April, You Too Can Play with The Who! (sort of)

Principal Skinner: Ooh, now we're into the dregs.  Here's Ralph Wiggum's entry. [pulls sheet off] Pre-packaged "The Who" characters, still in their display box?  Are those the limited-edition action figures?

Ralph Wiggum: What's a Who?

Principal Skinner: Why it's John, and Roger, and my favorite, Pete!  They're all here (except for Keith)!  [to Miss Hoover] What do you think?

Miss Hoover: I think it's lunch time.

Principal Skinner: We have a winner!

...and this April, you can be a winner too when NECA toys releases tiny John Entwistle, Roger Daltrey, and Pete Townshend as part of its second wave of action figures based on celebrity guest stars from "The Simpsons". The likenesses are based on The Who's guest appearance in the "A Tale of Two Springfields" episode in which the band performs atop a sort of Berlin Wall dividing the hometown of Homer, Marge, Bart, Skinner, Wiggum, and the rest.

Ten Mysterious and Imaginative Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations

According to imdb, Edgar Allan Poe’s works have been adapted 287 times as of this writing. With eight of those not even seeing release yet, the penner of weird and gloomy tales hasn’t fallen off the radar of film and TV creators one iota. That’s a lot of stuff to sift through, and I won’t pretend I’ve seen all of those adaptations. I have seen enough to put together a short list of unmissable realizations of Poe stories, the faithful and the far out, the straight and the surreal, the subtle, the hilarious, the animated, and the bloody. Here are ten great Edgar Allan Poe adaptations you might want to cram in today in honor of his 205^th birthday.

1. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928- dir. Jean Epstein)

Edgar Allan Poe is unquestionably among the most popular writers in history, which accounts for why he’s been adapted so many times. However, his work usually doesn’t lend itself to faithful adaptation. He’s often a lot more interested in piling on the words to fashion a mood than he is in telling a story. Perhaps this too is a reason for his popularity among filmmakers. An oft-adapted story such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” is so lacking in plot that it allows an interpreter to take it in any number of interesting directions. French filmmaker Jean Epstein did that in his silent adaptation from 1928, using spare surreal imagery to convey the dread Poe labors to conjure in his story. With assistance from co-writer Luis Buñuel, then making Un Chien Andalou with Salvador Dali, Epstein welds together an assortment of fantastical, unforgettable images. The odd ones—disorienting POV shots, nightmarish sets, screwing frogs—pack as much power as the ones that are now regarded as spooky movie clichés—mysteriously extinguishing candles, billowing curtains, reanimated corpses. Even as the story takes its liberties with the source material, the presentation conveys the atmosphere of a Poe story uncannily, which is really the most important thing.

2. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932- dir. Robert Florey)

After reworking Dracula and Frankenstein into films that don’t rely too heavily on Stoker or Shelley in 1931, Universal treated Poe with a similar lack of respect with its adaptation of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” the following year. The film works mainly as a vehicle for Karl Freund’s expressionistic cinematography, Bela Lugosi’s sinister mugging and line readings, and Robert Florey’s totally wacko plot developments, such as Lugosi’s plot to prove the theory of evolution by shooting up women with gorilla blood. That twist surely would have tickled Poe, whose macabre sense of humor is lost on all those readers who just think of him as a purveyor of opium-spiked horror. Despite the fact that it didn’t quake box offices, Murders in the Rue Morgue set off a mini cycle of Poe movies for Universal. Ironically, this unfaithful adaptation was the closest thing to a faithful adaptation the studio produced…

3. The Black Cat (1934- dir. Edgar G. Ulmer)

…and for proof of that, check out The Black Cat. The story is actually one of Poe’s clearest, and more faithful adaptations would come in later years (and later on this list too), but Universal was always pretty revision happy, and writer Peter Ruric and director Edgar G. Ulmer get downright slap-happy with “The Black Cat”. So long to the simple plot of marital mania and revenge. Hello to a psycho chess match between Satanic war criminal Boris Karloff and sadistic “hero” Bela Lugosi. Karloff’s ailurophobia allows the film to very, very, very tangentially relate to Poe, but his story has no bearing on Ulmer’s masterpiece otherwise. Karloff and Lugosi have never been better matched, both relishing every line of peculiar dialogue, and with its art deco style and insane brew of Satanism, torture, and head games, The Black Cat may be the best film on this list even if its pretty spurious as an adaptation.

4. The Tell-Tale Heart (1953- dir. Ted Parmelee)

Monsterology: Babies

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Last September, my wife, Elise, and I received the terrifying news. We were told that in nine months, a creature would be bursting out of Elise’s body to menace us for the next eighteen years… perhaps more if it decides not to go away to college. How could this be? Elise hadn’t been exposed to any alien eggs. She hadn’t been visited by Satan after taking a dose of drugged chocolate mousse. At least I don’t think she had. We don’t spend every minute of the day together, you know.

As many, many years of devouring horror movies has taught me, Elise’s pregnancy could have happened any number of ways. After all, a lot of monstrous babies have crawled across the screen. Yet the monster baby is a relatively recent phenomenon. While monstrous children peaked in the early sixties amidst “juvenile delinquency” hysteria with items such as Village of the Damned and the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” it was not until 1968 that Roman Polanski explicitly monsterized the first stage of life. I say “explicitly” because one could argue that the monster baby was delivered during the haunted summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. Though we are privy to the Monster’s sketchily described birth in the book, he spends most of it in a state of rebellious and ornery adolescence, pissed off at his inattentive doctor daddy. And we certainly never witness him as a bald little diaper-wearing thing.

Monsterology: The Devil (666th post!)

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

“Please allow me to introduce myself... ”

Dracula? The Wolf Man? Freddy Kruger? The Mummy? They’re a bunch of petty criminals. Even a whole army of drooling, shuffling zombies just don’t measure up. This cat isn’t capable of evil; he is evil. He is the very embodiment of the thing without which there would be no monster movies, no nasty ghost stories, no Frankenberry, and no Bible, which is where the Devil made his debut in Christian culture. Depending on your interpretation of that story, he may not have starred in as many scenes as is often thought. Was the snake that tempted Eve to eat the apple supposed to be the Devil? Or was he just one of those talking snakes that live in apple trees? One thing is for sure: the result of his temptation was way direr than anything Jason Voorhees ever did. That guy just killed some horny teenagers. The snake turned paradise on Earth into Earth on Earth, a craphole congested with war, pestilence, the NRA, and iPhones. Of course, we shouldn’t absolve Eve of all blame, because as the Bible teaches us, women are very bad. 
 

Some have also interpreted the character of Lucifer as the Devil. An angel or man, depending on your interpretation of the King James edition, Lucifer got too big for his britches and aspired to raise his “throne above the stars of God.” God hates that kind of shit, and he kicked Lucifer, the “morning star,” out of heaven to become the concierge of Hell.

 
The Devil has also been identified as the guy who tempted Jesus during his forty-day fast with the sweet ability to make bread out of rocks, free himself from a pinnacle, and gain control of all the kingdoms in the world. That last one doesn’t sound like much of a prize. What kind of idiot would want all that responsibility? The Devil may also be the dragon of Revelations, a big snake with sheep horns who will rise out of the sea to help get the apocalypse started. The dragon is not named Lucifer or Satan. In fact, the Bible plays coy about who this giant sheep-dragon is, only cluing us in that his name corresponds with the number 666. 
 

The Bible is one of those books that everyone thinks they’ve read but haven’t. Kind of like Moby Dick. So the assumptions about who the Devil is in that book have taken precedence over the fact that many editions of The Bible are reluctant to finger him. Consequently, it’s basically assumed that all the bad shit that goes down in that book of wall-to-wall bad shit is the Devil’s doing. It’s all tremendously hard to swallow, of course, but what a villain! Naturally, the Devil has found his way into many, many other works of fiction, and the depiction of him, and sometimes her, is even more varied than it is in the Bible.

The most popular portrayal of Old Scratch is the most endearing. The baddest guy in the universe is regularly portrayed as a fellow in red pajamas with horns and a pointy tail. According to Jim Steinmeyer in his upcoming book Who Was Dracula? (more about that here on Psychobabble soon), the red Devil can be traced to actor Henry Irving’s portrayal of Mephistopheles in a lavish production of Faust at the Lyceum Theater in 1885. Before then he usually wore black. The horns and tail stem from the devil’s association with sheep and goats and other horrid beasties found in petting zoos. This is the tongue-wagging Devil of Häxan and the one on vintage jars of Red Hots candy and in episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and “The Simpsons.” He is the Devil it’s OK to dress up as on Halloween.

In more legitimately terrifying versions of this Devil, the horns become more antelope or bull-like, he grows to giant proportions, and his muscles get bigger than Glenn Danzig’s. This is the title terror of Night of the Demon, the massive Satan of Fantasia, and the Lord of Darkness of Legend. Scarier still are the devils who bridge the human and the bizarre, the hooded, hairless creatures of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Mel Gibson’s belligerent, torture-porn odyssey, The Passion of the Christ, in which the devil and its devil baby take in the floor show that is Jesus getting the bloody shit beaten out of him for eighteen hours.

In this form, how tempting can the Devil be? How can you concentrate enough to decide whether or not to sell your soul when you’re busy crapping your pants? The more insidious Devil is the one who takes on pleasing, or at least non-monstrous, shapes. These more human Devils tends to take such stock shapes as the unthreatening elderly gentlemen of All That Money Can Buy and the “Printer’s Devil” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” or more in keeping with The Bible’s very healthy view of female sexuality, the temptresses of Bedazzled 1967 and 2000. Movies such as The Witches of Eastwick, Angel Heart, and The Devil’s Advocate have given the big-marquee names Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, and Al Pacino opportunities to chew scenery as the biggest evil of them all.

Most unlikely of all is the Devil as he appears in The Exorcist, both because he controls the body of a nice little girl and because his urbane, seductive persona has devolved to straight-up crassness. This devil pukes, pulls faces, belches, and unleashes a string of expletives and toilet insults that Andrew “Dice” Clay might agree push the limits of good taste. This is a Devil smacking of desperation, one that may have read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, in which the author admitted, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”

In truth, The Exorcist manages to terrify, horrify, and gross us out, though it is at its most terrifying when The Devil is off screen, when we hear bumps in the attic or weird tape recordings of his backwards legion of babblers. When he steps into frame to make Regan MacNeil puke and stab herself in the crotch with a crucifix and spin her head and tell a priest that his “mother sucks cocks in Hell,” the Devil has been reduced to a less fearful creation, a purveyor of gross-out shtick. In this most famous and often-believed terrifying of Devil movies, he merely menaces one mother and daughter, their friends, and a couple of Van Helsing-wannabe priests. In a modern world with greater concerns than fictions such as him, the Devil has become just another movie monster.