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Analysis of "The Simpsons" - Decline Post-Golden Age

in my previous video about The Simpsons on the early years in the Golden Age I began with the assertion that it can't just be Simpsons fatigue that caused the show's decline in critical and audience appreciation around the season 9 mark because if that were true then surely the Golden Age itself would get boring for people when that's never been the case there must be some measurable qualitative difference between what the show was producing during the '90s and what came afterwards people often say the characters changed the style changed but if so what about the characters was it and what about the style was it that changed in this video I'm going to talk about common fan complaints and criticisms of post Golden Age Simpsons not necessarily agreeing with all of them just addressing them I wanted to come at this rewatch seeing if these complaints hold up to scrutiny because I feel people tend to just agree with stuff on the internet before thinking about it too deeply and I've always prided myself on forming my own opinions instead of just blindly regurgitating other peoples which I encourage you to do with me as well for the record if any of what I'm about to say sounds off to you the comments sections there have at it I should also note that I'm not going to be name dropping specific show Runners that much like lots of people do because ultimately Mike Scully and Al jeene are people that I've never met I wasn't in those writers rooms and I think getting too bogged down on one individual person's perceived style is more likely to distract us from the mechanical differences between Golden Age Simpsons and later Simpsons than give us some deeper insight into what it is that makes people say it's not as good now the author is dead let's move on and anyway I've now rewatched everything between season 10 and The Simpsons movie or in the cases of season 17 and 18 for the first time because 16 was where I fell off the first time Round And while I noticed a lot more misses than I did during the 1-9 period the solid stuff is still solid I reckon you're all fond of at least a handful of episodes from this period in the show's Lifetime and that conversely there's a few episodes from the golden age that you don't even remember watching as happened with me when I ran into the one where Patty dates Principal Skinner or the one where Lisa helps home a gamble on football I didn't remember either of those ones at all the 1 through n period is almost completely solid gold but you can't hold an equal amount of affection for over 200 episodes that's just impossible I did remember Bart versus Australia but I never really liked it that much none of these are Bad episodes so to speak just my point is that there are always going to be episodes that you're not too fond of and I think one of the reasons this became more apparent in the late '90s to early 2000s was because before the release of season box sets this was the ER in which reruns started being aired not just occasionally but pretty much around the clock I was never that fond of season 10 and always counted it as the first post Golden Age season in my vague malformed understanding of what Golden Age Simpsons actually is and the reason I did that was because BBC 2 repeated these episodes at nauseum when I was a kid and I got sick of them yeah does anyone remember when you had to tune into actual broadcast TV for a random Simpsons episode you couldn't choose which one you watched and they always played the same one yay I get to watch The Simpsons after school I wonder if they're going to play the one where Homer gets obsessed with Thomas Edison for the 56th time and the Thomas Edison one's not even a Bad episode it's got the emotional call The Simpsons always had about Homer's midlife crisis and it's absurd and random just like the best of The Simpsons I was just never fond of it because BBC 2 played it too much just as they did with some of the weaker episodes that I'm about to talk about the reason I bring this up is because if your broadcaster is playing the weaker episodes as often as bbc2 repeated season 10 while yes in theory the stronger episodes will get broadcast just as often but if there are more misses than there were before if you're watching these things over and over again the problem is going to seem like it's bigger than it actually is and I do think that fed into just how aggressive the opinion people formed about The Simpsons post golden age was alleging that it's basically an entirely different show now and yet kind of is but if you watch this middle period all the way through from A to B well yes as I said the number of Misses is higher in this period that doesn't offset the high points for me like Bart the mother behind the laughter or the crayon in the brain one but the problem does seem bigger in 2003 if you taped a marathon of six episodes off the TV a rewatching it on a lazy weekend and you run into the slightly weaker entries more often than before that being said now I've made that point I am now going to have to pick out some episodes that are symptomatic of this period where the show's reception was on the decline and it's going to seem like I'm saying this period is worse than it actually is so just bear in mind that for every bad example of these types of episodes that gave the impression of a broad and Ms there's usually at least two good examples to counterbalance them usually prior to this rewatch my personal understanding of golden age Simpsons was always cut off at season 10 mostly for the aforementioned reason and that's more bbc2's fault than the simps 's fault and looking back it does seem a bit arbitrary of me to make such a clean cut between Natural Born kisses at the end of season 9 and L of the dance at the start of season 10 but I kind of understand why this idea formed in my head because something always felt a bit off about lard of the dance in particular to me so guest star Lisa kudro famous from that show that you know about don't be such a Phoebe is a new kid at Springfield Elementary and she's very grownup and finds all of Lisa's typical 8-year-old girl interests like ponies to be stupid and lame and Lisa feels inferior it's very similar to Lisa's rival from season 6 except instead of being intellectually Superior like Allison was Alex is cooler and convinces all of Lisa's friends to start acting more like teenagers than the 8-year-olds they are meanwhile Homer randomly decides to start selling grease because he hears that it can make money a bit like that time he came across a truck full of sugar that had crashed and decided he could use that to make money and hang on a second that was the B plot from Lisa's rival as well um is is this a rerun now it feels like chat GPT wrote the script has become a new stock phrase among film and TV critics much like it's like a video game was a stock phrase for a movie or TV show that feels like a dispassionate series of set pieces was in the mid to late 2000s personally I really dislike this criticism because it's essentially alleging a lack of humanity in what is ultimately a writer or ERS trying to do their best with what they've got and Hell Writers Do use formulas kind of like machines that's not a criticism what's a threea structure if not a formula and sometimes some of the stuff that's been put into that formula whereby Lisa feels bad because of X while Homer is trying to get rich by selling why might just not work and yet it's very very hard not to say that L of the dance feels like it was assembled by algorith Rhythm because the presence of stuff that we'd seen before in one specific episode made it feel like a computer program had had past Simpsons episodes fed into it and have been told to make something like that and the result was something reminiscent of a past Simpsons episode but without the human understanding of why these elements worked in this specific formula in the first place Alex makes Lisa feel insecure in a different way to Allison but Lisa's rival hit much harder than this because Allison challenged Lisa's sense of self Alex doesn't she's just a kid that that makes Lisa feel like an outsider but Lisa already felt like an outsider so this doesn't change anything or challenge the status quo in any way I didn't feel anything for Lisa as she struggles for popularity at school and Homer's grease plot was a poor imitation of the sugar plot I'm sitting there unengaged and not feeling anything because I'm just seeing the formula with random items pasted into it sometimes they strike gold by just pasting random objects into the show's formulas as in eiie I do where after the episodes has been about Homer getting obsessed with challenging people to a duel for 5 minutes someone says yes and he runs off and starts a farm where he starts growing radioactive mutant tomato tobacco hybrids boiled down it's basically just Homer has a stupid money-making scheme with random items pasted into it and probably the result of a writer finding it funny that tomato and tobacco are similar words and what do you get if you combine the two and on this occasion it's just insane enough to stand out but most of the episodes from this era that you don't remember watching have had random items pasted into them but just aren't interesting enough to hold your attention Homer's new crise this week is motorcycles and a motorcycle gang comes to live with them Homer starts his own security company to rival the cops gee a bit like that time he formed a vigilante group even an episode that seems like it should be a big deal where Selmer adopts a daughter in season 16 isn't because the entire framework of this episode is built around a mix of The Simpsons go abroad and clash with the culture and Homer has to pretend that selus is one wife to impress the authorities which is a bit like that time where Marge had to pretend to be ao's wife to impress his mother we've seen the show do both of these things before so it's not the big deal that Selma adopting a daughter and being one of the few changes to the show that sticks really should be however the show is at least aware of the fact it's recycling itself or just throwing random stuff at its tried and tested formulas and that's why I respect it in spite of this I'll need someone to watch my house who's that fell who always screws up and creates Havoc Homer Simpsons sir yes the way I figure it he's due for a good performance when you show is over a decade old you will inevitably end up recycling yourself and the best way to get people to not hate you for it is to either take ownership of it or just do something completely stupid and look at the audience and go come on we've been on the air for over a decade what else am I supposed to do that's why I forget Saddles s Galactica from season 11 an Infamous The Simpsons jumps the shark episode because on its own the plot about The Simpsons getting a racehorse just isn't interesting enough and as Comic Book Guy points out derivative of past Adventures excuse me but I believe this family already had a horse and the expense forced Homer to work at the cookie Mart with hilarious consequences and yes I will take being the butt of the joke here anybody care what this guy thinks no while revealing that jockeys are a sort of leprechaun subspecies that live underground is incredibly stupid at least it's something interesting on its own Saddles saw Galactica would have just been another disposable episode wouldn't it and it doesn't even have the emotional core of Lisa's Pony where she has to give it up when hom gets a second job because he can't afford it and Lisa sees how much stress it puts him under Saddles saw Galactica had to have something to offer so why not something utterly deranged for me at least batshit stuff like that made it a bit easier to forgive them for the occasional episode where it feels like the Well's running dry as South Park famously observed when a show has been running for as long as The Simpsons it's only natural you'll run into the same ideas basically being done again if not verbatim but fairly similar a criticism which itself is now over 20 years old and I am surprised that saddow Soul Galactica is the one that people single out for this criticism just a year before it there was an episode where Mr Burns realizes people hate him while they love this quote unquote fun billionaire Arthur Fortune so Burns randomly decides he's going to make people love him by finding the Loch Ness monster and he does and they decide to get at a job working as an usher at a casino in Las Vegas okay okay want to trim cocktail no yeah a that great really why did everyone say yep fine with that but the jockeys are too far why is this one held up as a particularly egregious example out of dozens of episodes that play exactly like it it's quite easy for me to let the odd uninspired episode slide but for myself and The Wider viewership there is a more important type of episode that needs to be done right or it's going to give the impression the show's falling off so let's move on to what I highlighted last time as the Lynch pin of Prior [Music] Seasons if we exclude principal in the poer which I am doing because shut up I like it the earliest episode people remember these days that a wide number of people had major concerns about was the season 10 episode Homer Simpson in kidney trouble after day out at a ghost town on the car ride home Homer won't let Grandpa go to the bathroom for basically no reason at all and as a result Grandpa's kidneys explode and he needs a donor Homer initially offers but then he has his doubts the operation could be fatal his quality of life will be significantly diminished and so he runs away and leaves Grandpa to die people claim this is the start of a long pattern of hom turning from a stupid but sincere loyal husband who cares about his family into a massive jerk and well yes he is I disagree about this being a problem because a character doesn't have to be likable in order to be compelling and I also disagree that this is a new development because even in Seasons everyone loves he always had a pattern of being a selfish jerk and a coward but like people some of them are just jerks stop Mr Simpson that's how the comedy happens Homer does something stupid and we work towards a resolution usually displaying homos sincerity along the way and a lot of the time he will admit that he was in the wrong I'll give get more into what people call jerk ass Homer in the later section and granted this is a life or dead situation for the man who raised him so it's much harder to forgive Homer for his actions in kidney trouble but donating a kidney actually is a legitimately difficult thing for people to do so I actually think people are being kind of unreasonable here to expect him to not have his doubts but to demonstrate why this crosses a line in terms of the episode structure I'm going to have to explain a legitimate way this story could have worked with the emotional depth reminiscent of Prior seasons and gotten away with it now there is one flashback in kidney trouble where we see what Abe was like with Homer as a child and it sits completely wrong alongside everything we've already seen about what Abe was like as Homer was growing up good oh I love you son I your dead so much well giving him a kidney is a wonderful way to show him how you feel you're right Mar but um um doesn't Homer hate Abe for being a terrible father Homer you're dumb as a mule and twice as ugly if a strange man offers you a ride I say take it lousy traumatic childhood the reason the opening joke where the family accidentally stop outside the old folks home and reveal they were about to not visit Grandpa on his birthday and react in Terror at the idea of bringing him with them is in character with all the other times Homer is treated his father with contempt is not because Grandpa's boring although he is it's that the bitterness that Homer has towards his bad childhood is unresolved Homer still sees Abe as the monster that he was and not as the harmless old man that he is now so what this episode should be doing instead is using the fact there has always been this tension between Homer and Abe to resolve Homer's bitterness towards his father and Desperation to avoid spending time with him granted he had already learned this lesson in Prior episodes like Grandpa versus sexual in adequacy but as I established in my golden age video lessons don't really stick in The Simpsons so I think you using this as the key to getting the plot working would have made H's cowardice much easier for audiences to swallow now that his father is dying can hom put his pass behind him and do an incredibly Brave thing to save the life of a man who spent his entire format of years making him feel worthless imagine that that would have been incredibly powerful hell it might have even made for a new favorite but instead we go all in on making Homer into this horrible coward who did a terrible thing and left his father on his deathbed Abe is a sweet and innocent old man who was a good father to Homer and Homer is bad for running out on him there's no moral gray area here none is this to say that Abe deserves what happens to him for being a terrible father but some kind of gray area would offer this story Dimension where even if Homer's actions were exactly the same people wouldn't come out of it feeling disgusted at Homer's Behavior it's a structural error and a mischaracterization of Grandpa that screwed this episode over Homer himself is not the problem here there are moments where this episode shows how it could have been a thoughtful exploration of how a fractured relationship can be repaired but because of the flaws at the foundation they don't work at all that's the best sand castle we've ever built Dad we make a great team son I wish I had that kind of relationship with my father or my kids if this episode were about Homer re-evaluating the Lost relationship with his father this moment here would be incredibly powerful but it's not about that because it's in service of further reinforcing this episode's thesis that Homer is a coward and a terrible human being for running out on AE when he needed him which just isn't nearly as interesting as exploring the nuance and gray areas in Homer and ab's relationship on rewatch I legitimately forgot how the episode ended and I realized that the reason for that was the way I imagined this episode ending was my better rewrite of it my idea was that Homer getting to the operation getting cold feet and running out the window was all an elaborate dream that he had while the operation was taking place and when he wakes up he's relieved that he just naturally did the right thing without even thinking about it he was raised by Abe to have a low opinion of himself so the idea he could do something as selfless as save the life of the father who mistreated him growing up is Unthinkable to him so his brain constructs this fantasy that confirms all of the worst things people have ever told him about himself and that he's internalized it's one of very few cases where and he woke up and it was all a dream would have been the better ending but instead Homer returns agrees to the operation now chickens out again runs out the window gets hit by a car and then they [Music] um they they steal his kidney while he's unconscious hey while we were setting your broken bones and putting your blood back in we helped ourselves to a kidney and gave it to your father so yeah I don't really think anyone comes across well in this episode not just hom but my point is he could have been a jerk and also sincere if this episode was structured differently and the writers remembered almost every single flashback to H's childhood throughout the series this actually becomes an ongoing problem they keep forgetting that Abe was meant to be an abusive father but they do remember that Homer tries to avoid AE at all costs if you don't make this mutual and have both of these things at the same time sh home is not justified in the way he treats Abe but he ends up looking even worse than he would do otherwise you can have these jokes but without the counterbalance they don't work as well they make the exact same mistake as kidney trouble 7 years later in Homer's paternity Co there's a possibility that Abe might not be Homer's biological father and Homer's eagerness to ditch him for this charismatic stranger makes Homer the [ __ ] and the flashback in this episode shows just how much Abe has sacrificed for Homer and Abe does a selfless thing when he sees how happy the idea that he's not his real dad is making Homer and so he fakes the DNA result and it's hard to really go oh how sweet at this reveal like is clearly intended if you make Abe into a saint Homer looks worse and so this attempt at emotional sincerity Falls completely flat this is not to say that there aren't still examples of the show doing emotional episodes right post season 9 Bart the mother a spiritual successor to Marge be not proud is a standout episode for me like most of the best Bart Centric episodes it draws into Focus how B isn't quite the little psychopath that people make him out to be he has bad impulses and gets excited at the thought of being bad but he can't quite go through with something that fully crosses the line and when he does and kills a bird after encouragement from Nelson it's this devastating moment where he feels like nothing will ever be the same again what's the point Bart I punish and I punish and I punish but it never sinks in do what you want you want to play with little hoodlums fine have fun killing things the eggs in the nest that Bart cares for after killing their mother could have just hatched and that's it but the episode's ingenious twist where they're actually illegal carnivorous tree lizards and Bart still wants to take care of them is truly inspired everyone thinks they're monsters but I rais them and I love them I know that's hard to understand not as hard as you [Music] think that little exchange there might just be one of The Simpsons overall best and they continue with these decent High emotion episodes well into the post Golden Age there's the blunder years which is basically a standby Me parody where we explore Homer's trauma at the first time he saw a dead body the already mentioned Homer where they remove a crayon stuck in his brain and reveal that he was smart all along and he really connects with Lisa the post Golden Age isn't just a bunch of random formula episodes and the Golden Age itself wasn't complete emotional sincerity with no random formula episodes it just seems that way because the emotionally sincere episodes start being half good half not around this point in the show's lifetime you'd think incidents like alone again natural or didly where the show kills off M Flanders for good would be a shining example of emotional episodes done right in this period but but this one's main problem was trying to cram the death of mud Ned's grief moving on and starting dating again all in the space of about 20 minutes we're not allowed any breathing room because home has got to start annoying Ned again and delivering his jokes even though his wife has just died there's too many obstacles for Ned to overcome for you to really feel for him in this situation while The Simpsons has a very long history of blending silly and serious moments into the same scenes Homer triple bypass is full of these but the actual legitimate death of a character is just too big to deal with in 22 minutes conversely in when Flanders failed from season 3 when his left-handed shot goes bankrupt and he and his kids end up living in his car it's a much smaller problem than the death of his wife but it feels about 20 times more devastating because the impact of his failing business has ramped up over the course of the episode even the good book can't help me now why not I sold it to you for 7 cents oh alone again natur didly starts with a random Simpsons to an event scenario has the bad thing happened right near the beginning and immediately it just goes right now let's move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing move on with your life now Ned there is no time to stop and grieve move on now it's a about about him losing his sweet wife but now it's time to get on with his life the fact M's death comes right out of nowhere is admittedly quite powerful you think you're just watching a random Simpsons episode and then that happens but following that nothing sticks with you the intended shock doesn't have any impact it doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy the death of a long-running character has got to feel real as I outlined in my golden age video These are supposed to feel like real people and in this episode I didn't feel like I was watching a father of two mourn the death of his wife all right yeah Pro that probably is too to heavy a concept for a 22-minute comedy show but like I said when I covered life on the fast thing there's funny bits but the key to it was that I felt like I was watching a real marriage fall apart and that's why that episode stuck with me that being said the knock on effects of M's death are at least interesting it's one of the small group of changes that The Simpsons has allowed to its core characters over the years and it usually comes up whenever they deal with Ned from this point Ned episodes are usually about grief just like when there's a mhouse episode we deal with divorce and who's eight kids mean his stories mostly end up being about the stress of parenting and we add him having an affair into the mix we settle into these new sitcom status quo based on these slight changes where the show can essentially tell the same stories over and over again to at least keep things fresh to some degree but you would think the episode that introduces the heaviest of these changes would hit much harder than it did if the show was starting to wobble in its emotional Lynch pin episodes that's a sign of trouble because if the occasional episodes that really get me to feel something and succeed become less frequent the characters stop feeling like real people that I care about and it's just another episode of some cartoon that I watch without the solid reminders of The Simpsons emotional sincerity the off-the-wall episodes will start to feel more grating and the overindulgent celebrity cameos will start to undermine the core of the [Music] show the first episode that I would have just skipped if I hadn't committed to this full rewatch was the season 10 episode when you dish upon a star guest starring Ron Howard Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin this episode was the progenitor of almost every big celebrity guest episode in the following Seasons that people have complained about where the point is wow a celebrity has come to Springfield isn't it funny that this celebrity I have heard of is on a television program that I also watch a common opinion that even I held for a while was that the show Mostly stopped being good when celebrities began appearing as themselves instead of the characters in The Golden Age they used to write characters for celebrity guests that's not Michelle feifer that's Mindy the coworker that's not Danny DeVito that's her PO this is Ron Howard Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin but then I thought to myself wait that can't be it they had big guest stars honors themselves before during the Golden Age and not just musical guests crusty gets cancelled is full of them and they do still write characters for the celebrity guest stars in the post Golden Age period Reese Witherspoon is rer Wolf Castle's daughter Eric idle is documentary filmmaker Dean Desmond Simon cowl is essentially himself but his character is supposed to be called Henry the difference between celebrity cameos you love and celebrity cameos you hate is that the ones you love are where the guests are there to support a plot about a simpsons's character and the ones you hate Are where the Simpsons character is a vehicle for the celebrity themselves this is a very fine line that when you dish upon a star crosses look at almost every other case prior to this episode like when George Harrison shows up hello homer I'm George Harrison oh my God oh my God where did you get that brownie over there there's a big pile of them see there a supporting role in which the Simpsons is just too cool to give a [ __ ] that some of the most famous people ever to have walked the Earth have just shown up in their lives and they still do that in this middle period of the show and treat their guests in a very dismissive manner they lock Elton Jon up in a dog cage they had Britney Spears on the show at the height of her Fame and she's just an award show host and she doesn't even sing in when you dish upon a star though the plot involves Homer agreeing to be the handyman of these big Hollywood stars who come to a small town to escape the attention they get from people going oh my God it's a celebrity it's a human being who has been in a thing that I have seen and that makes them in some way better than me this episode made itly be a send up of celebrity obsessed culture and the episode May recognize how ludicrous it is that people would actually pay money to see a museum of Alec Balwin and Kim basing his dirty laundry we love celebrities oh yeah what have they ever done for you when was the last time Barber strian cleaned out your garage but the Simpsons can't really claim to be above that sort of behavior when that's what the show is doing here the plot is that Homer is working for the stars the show is Basking in the fact that big celebrity guest stars are on it oh my God I'm such a huge huge fan of yours Miss benger thanks the problem is not that they have big celebrity guests at all it's the way the celebrity guests are treated The Simpsons always used to be able to get big guest stars on like Michael jacksson to prove just how much of a cultural Behemoth it was and episodes like that one can be built around the guest stars but the show managed to retain its status as a down toar cartoon about a real family in spite of having these big names Stark rving dad is ultim Ely the story of Homer needing a sympathetic ear and that sympathetic ear just so happens to be a man in a mental hospital who thinks he's Michael Jackson played by the real Michael Jackson the episode is about how the guest affects the family whereas when you dish Upon A Star is about how the family affects the guests this is the same problem with Beyond blunderdome from season 11 with Mel Gibson it almost retains The Simpsons too cool to care attitude of Prior Seasons but the dialogue then slaps it down and goes no you must worship the guest star no GI is just a guy Mar no different than me or Lenny were you or Lenny ever named sexiest man alive I'm not certain about Lenny oh so not a criticism on my end but I need to bring it out for my next point when watching some of you might have picked up on the point that Beyond blunderdome is functionally the same as Brother Where Art Thou from season 2 Danny DeVito playing Homer's half brother runs a successful car company he gets Homer to design a car because Homer is a down toe every man Homer has stupid ideas and it tanks his company Mel Gibb wants Homer to improve his Oscar baate film because Homer is a downto Earth every man Homer has stupid ideas and it ruins the film The jokes in Beyond blunder do are mostly solid but I'm distracted because it's Mel Gibson in Brother Where Art Thou they wrote a character for the big celebrity guest and gave it a really strong emotional basis they didn't do that here and so I wasn't nearly as invested because the celebrity Factor should just be a cool little addition cuz I'm not impressed by just the fact they got a big celebrity guest start it's using them in an emotional capacity as with Danny DeVito or a funny and dismissive capacity as with George Harrison that has made The Simpsons celebrity guest castings work before that said they do still use celebrity guests in the way I like in many episodes in this period in Sunday crudy Sunday Dolly Parton is literally just a plot device to get the characters from A to B and they even point out how bizarre the show's usage of her was in a fourth wall break at the end of the episode did it strike you as odd that in a Super Bowl show with Dolly Parton we didn't see any foot or singing another of my favorite uses of the guest star in this period was when they did a parody of the prisoner in the computer War Menace shoes and they cast Patrick McAn as number six his character from the show I'm number six I'm Number 15 what number are you I am not a number I am a man oh wait I'm number five in your face number six they don't even say the words The Prisoner and you might not even know it's apparently the prisoner at first as I didn't when I first saw it when I was a kid and then looked the episode up on the Internet The Simpsons was how I first heard about the prisoner and subsequently watched it and became a fan clearly someone on staff was a fan of the prisoner and wanted to pay tribute to it they contacted muan and he agreed to appear in it but it would have just been a dismissable gimmick if the episode had been more upfront about what it was doing I wouldn't have been nearly as interested if it had been openly stated to be a parody of the prisoner a show I hadn't heard of at the time because then it becomes more like a commercial for a related celebrity or product which admittedly the computer Warman issues is to some degree this episode got me to check out the guest stars work so job done point is though it didn't address Patrick MCG by name and it didn't wave the DVD box set in my face and say this is a show you should check out it built the guest star's appearance around the story about Homer starting a conspiracy theory website if a guest casting is understated it makes more of an impact and that is something they started to forget about in the following years which I'll get on to when I reached the modern era [Music] international travel has always been a component of The Simpsons but in later years it becomes a problem because the reasoning behind it becomes kind of spurious the first time a Simpson goes abroad is way back in season one in the Crepes of Wrath where Bart gets sent on an exchange program to France while an Albanian kid gets to Springfield The Simpsons are a lower middle-class American Family who don't make much money and a lot of episodes see Homer doing wacky things because he needs a quick bit of cash the house is sinking he starts driving cabs to make extra money Homer wants to buy Lisa a pony but it's too expensive so he has to get a second job and international travel is expensive so they need a reason to have the Simpsons go overseas so in Crepes of Wrath it's a foreign exchange program in Bart versus Australia Bart causes a diplomatic in incident stupid yes but not beyond the Realms of what you could reasonably get away with and they still retain this framework in episodes like 30 minutes over Tokyo from season 10 where their Japanese holiday as a result of them following some moneys saving tips from some Financial Guru and the plot of this episode ends up being about the fact they don't have the money to get home so you see there is still that residual idea about the Simpsons being a real family there in the background even if this episode Ends by revealing that Godzilla exists in The Simpsons Universe put your seat belts back on when we get to 35,000 ft he usually does let go after this episode though the reasons for international travel become a case of well why not what typically starts happening is we have a 5-minute sequence where someone does something that gets them some money and they decide to go to a country with a slight relevance to that money in Simpson Safari Homer finds an ancient prize winning cracker in the Attic in blame it on Lisa it's just this it's awfully expensive to fly to Brazil it's really cheap if we change ples in Phoenix Honolulu Sun City and East St Louis spend the night in a haunted house and leave right now my point is you don't really get much of a sense of struggle and that there's obstacles for The Simpsons to overcome anymore it's literally just we want to send them to this country this week how do we come up with a mechanic that lets them do that that's what exempts 30 minutes over Tokyo from this criticism it's about money how do they afford to go abroad how do they afford to get home money would be an actual issue if this was a real family but if we just send our characters to another country because we feel like it that removes any residual basis in reality that The Simpsons had left at this stage another problem which be honest you knew would come up is that the countries they visit get reduced to stereotypes not totally a problem as The Simpsons has always kind of traded in stereotypes of foreign Nations to some degree but it used to be a case where the audience can tell that this is a generalized representation of what a foreign nation is actually like it's not legitimately saying that for example 30 minutes over Tokyo is a depiction of what Japan is actually like it's an exaggeration of the sort of stuff that people in the west know about Japan the famous joke in this episode about the Japanese cartoon that causes seizures is actually based on a real incident that happened in the '90s isn't this that cartoon that causes seizures W yeah go and Google electric Porygon this actually happened thing is though there is a point where just straight up ignorance of your subject matter becomes a problem I mean it's kind of obvious that if you're poking fun of something you've got to you know actually know what you're talking about but when your audience doesn't really know what you're talking about either then you've got a problem sure if you've never been to Brazil and don't know much about it then you might find blame it on Lisa funny but the Brazilian government didn't find it funny did they the main problem that's been pointed out with blame it on Lisa is that that they even get the cultural stereotyping that they were engaging in wrong and reading reports like this you just end up wondering if you don't really know much about your subject matter why are you writing about it what's the point what did you hope to accomplish with this it starts feeling like a case where someone has said we need one international episode a year someone gets out a globe spins it and whatever country their finger lands on that's where we send the Simpsons this year this can become extra grating when they get to your own country as The Simpsons did with my home country the UK in the season 15 episode The Regina monologues which personally I always thought was rubbish not because it's offensive to me so much as it is just lazy the Regina monologues ends up playing like a list of facts about a country that someone who's never been here printed off some website the British prime minister at this moment in time is Tony Blair um yeah and you've got to write you know a a joke there's so much to see here Parliament Stratford on aen the White Cliffs of DOA oh and new Americans love castles there's a huge one in Edinburgh the city where I was born a lot of people get angry these days just by the continued existence of Tony Blair because of that thing he did but aging poorly isn't the main problem with this Cameo I remember watching this episode at the time and thinking where's the joke is the funny thing supposed to just be thing British LOL is isn't it funny that a thing is British hey wouldn't it have been funny if this episode had been made while Liz truss was prime minister and naturally not broadcast until about 6 months later hey Marge who is that no one Homer it's no one anyway these were all mistakes The Simpsons started to make with specific types of episodes that it always did even back during its height but I should clarify that one of the reasons the show started falling off in public perceptions during this period wasn't entirely its fault [Music] Western animation for an adult audience was always a concept before The Simpsons both animations specifically for adults and occupying the nebulous Middle Ground of intended for all age groups as in parents can watch it with their children without getting bored however prior to the Simpsons there existed this rigid cultural idea that still lives on to this day to some degree the animation along with heavy metal and video games are things that people just grow out of they're not for adults and you will ditch them when you grow up The Simpsons being openly an adult show and an evening thought that was successful among mainstream audiences proved to everybody that it was fine for adults to watch cartoons and it opened this door for more animated shows to tackle mature topics not just that they can make sex jokes through more direct language than just inuendo now cartoons could now address the day-to-day grind career problems s relationship difficulties infidelity stuff that adults could relate to problem was that then some cartoons came along that still discussed mature topics but didn't do it through the Simpsons lens of emotional depth don't get me wrong I loved early South Park like loads of '90s kids but South Park was the point at which adult animation clearly shifted gears The Simpsons had reworked the idea of a cartoon that would be fun for adults and children prior cartoons in the all ages mold had had the parents watching with the child as the afterthoughts they were sold as fun for kids and adults whereas The Simpsons swapped the order of preference and made it fun for adults and it's appropriate for kids to watch it too with South Park on the other hand while it was made with an adult audience in mind so it could tackle sex drugs and violence openly it also had the toilet humor factor that just makes me think come on you made this with the firm idea in mind that it was more likely going to be kids that were going to find this stuff appealing right an adult in the '90s working their 9-to-5 office shop or warehouse job having relationship issues struggling to raise their kids is going to relate to Homer and March they're going to see bits of their kids in Lisa and Bart and find comfort and humor in the sorts of things they get up to a lot of it was quite out there of course like Bart getting an elephant but stories like a 10-year-old son getting busted for shoplifting or an ignored housewife getting seduced by a stranger are going to really speak to that '90s adult whereas with South Park sure that ' 90s adult might find humor in an episode where an elephant makes love to a pig but they're not going to relate to it well depends on what you're into I suppose before anyone gets on my case this is not to say South Park was bad South Park was incredibly successful at what it did but there is something about the period of The Simpsons just after South Park exploded that feels like the show had noticed the competition and started upping the edge factor and paid a bit less attention to the emotional sincerity that made The Simpsons the cultural Behemoth that it was while the shows couldn't be more different in terms of style comparisons between Bart Simpson and Eric Cartman were inevitable what's the worst thing you've ever done I stole the head off a statue once that's like this one time when I didn't like a kid so I ground his parents up into chili and fed it to him South Park really was a sign of how things had changed and adult animated comedy was trending more and more towards the extreme and the scatter logical and a similar rival started a couple of years after South Park Family Guy a lot of which was made at the time that Family Guy was basically just The Simpsons but edgier it's about an overweight dumb Suburban dad who gets into wacky situations he's got a dumb son ignored daughter and a housewife you get the picture and if you found Family Guy style of humor to obnoxious which I always did the Seth McFarland Empire came out with American Dad a few years later which again was basically The Simpsons in concept animated Suburban midle middle class family in their Wacky Adventures but American Dad also had the emotional sincerity of golden age Simpsons as well which was why I personally felt like it was the strongest Contender to The Simpsons Throne one of the best early examples of American Dad aping The Simpsons style and reframing it for a more scatological adult animated environment was this episode A Smith in hand Stan is a stereotype of a Bible Basher and he tells his son that masturbation is wrong but through ridiculous circumstances he finds himself trying it for the first time and finds that he likes it things get out of control and we get it underscored to us that Stan's beliefs are rooted in his own flawed sexual development I'm sorry that 30 years ago you got some lousy advice about sex that screwed you up but I cannot let you do the same thing to our son I'm not screwing him up so you see like South Park it's scatological in terms of its humor but like The Simpsons it frames its characters as if they were real people all of these cartoons while they were made possible by by The Simpsons they served to make The Simpsons itself look like a thinner version of them if the Simpsons was going to remain a force it would need to keep up with the likes of South Park and Family Guy and so you do notice a marked increase in edgy humor during this period so from now on anything caught in your zipper will be handled by the school nurse and not me okay principal and the poper is the most offensive thing in the world and that isn't this also led to episodes like home of versus dignity which like sadur Galactica shows up all the time in lists of worst Simpsons episodes ever basically the plot is that Homer desperately needs money and Mr Burns starts paying him to humiliate himself in public for the LOLs basically this episode can be seen as a critique of our capitalist system in which the means of production are dictated by the upper class okay so it's a basic Homer getting hurt episode you get the point the main thing that makes this episode so famous though and that pisses people off is one joke in it where Mr Burns makes Homer dress up as a panda and go into the panda enclosure at the zoo the zookeepers think that he's the real female Panda so they send in the mail Panda and oh look she's presenting we thought this would take years to happen and it leads to an extended joke implying that the panda assaulted Homer The Simpsons had done dark jokes before but this one sticks out to people as a pretty poor example because it's much more in line with family gu style of humor where the point is that I'm supposed to be physically revolted by it this isn't like a Treehouse of Horror which Treads the line between funny and scary this is directly just a Family Guy oh my God I can't believe that just happened type of joke that just never really fit with the Simpsons style but it's not just edgy jokes that people take issue with in this era a lot of people complain about the family showcasing much more extreme Behavior Than The Simpsons used to there's episodes like on a clear day I can't see my sister where Lisa gets a restraining order against Bart and torments him over the course of the episode she's much more cruel than she had ever been before and this episode serves to make her much less The Lovable Underdog than she had been up until this point there's also the season 18 episode The Boys of bummer where Bart makes a mistake that costs the baseball team a game and people take such offense to this that the entire town turns on him and it drives him to the point of insanity I hate me too now we can be friends again I hate bir Simpson I can kind of see this because the boys of bummer is based on The Simpsons formula of matcho exaggeration I mentioned the formula of life is [ __ ] to the extreme in my golden age video where the Simpsons comically OV exaggerates reality as part of the joke and that is what they're doing in the boys ofmer but it's much more cruel than the show had been in the past personally I don't think this episode is nearly as bad as people say it is but I do agree that it's a result of the show developing this need to increase in extreme Behavior to keep up with the likes of South Park American Dad and Family Guy it had essentially opened the door for these shows but now it was taking notes from them I actually think it's quite hypocritical of the show during this period where it calls out Family Guy for allegedly ripping it off when The Simpsons actively starts taking cues from it and starts doing the same kind of nonse cutway gangs how come I can't join the Army but Lisa gets to be in Peta hey F murder not much changed overall but these were all signs of the show's identity becoming questionable in this period it left audiences confused as to the purpose of The Simpsons continued existence it just started to sit wrong in the Contemporary environment of adult animation and this identity crisis is what leads me on to [Music] this if you don't know what the word flanderization means that surprises me because I'm a YouTube video essayist and if you're watching me chances are you watch a lot of us and that word gets used all the time outside of Simpsons discussions it's even got its own Wikipedia page flanderization is supposed to be a process whereby a character started out complex but then one aspect of their personality became exaggerated and oversimplified to the point where it became their entire personality personally I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this term as I mentioned with Homer in the kidney episode I don't think that was a sign of him changing in terms of his core personality he was always a Jerk It's just the structure of the show became weaker and that exposed us to the flaws that were always there but were less obvious it was less a case of the character changing and more the show changing around him so the sincere and heartfelt moments are less of a focus and so the collective blind spot that we always had to the selfish and pathetic parts of Homer's personality became much harder to maintain but I'll get into a deeper analysis of that in a moment the case for flanderization is much stronger with the character that gives the effect its name Ned Flanders I understand how this opinion has evolved because Ned himself has evolved of course Ned himself might not think that evolution is real but he has evolved he starts out the series as the perfect neighbor who makes Homer feel inadequate by comparison oh my what a little mess we've got here well which ones are yours and which ones are mine well let's see oh this one's mine H this one's mine this one's mine but over the course of this post Golden Age period we start f focusing on the fact that Ned has some backwards views that people associate with fundamentalist Christianity okay but don't let our hands touch it's gay what's gay mean it means you used to be afraid but now you're not I'm gay daddy I'm gay I believe he's saying he's okay here's the thing though the definition of this Theory frames flanderization as a series of mistakes made over time but here's one question that no one seems to be asking how sure are we that the focus with Ned shifting away from his status as the perfect neighbor and towards his Christianity as a way of satirization of fundamentalists was not deliberate are these mistakes or are they genuine creative decisions and if they are creative decisions what were the reasons for these decisions to be made in the first place because they can't have just come from nowhere if you look at the stats the '90s were when Christianity started seeing a slow Cline in the US and I don't think it's a coincidence that in the earliest section of the show's lifetime Flanders was the perfect neighbor that Homer irrationally thinks is a jerk and he happens to be the most upstanding morally perfect Christian you've ever met Flanders represented a moral ideal Homer is the sort of American that you are but Flanders is the sort of American you aspire to be he's got a good job a loving family his kids are perfect and he's a good Christian who's definitely going to heaven whereas with you it's a gray area isn't it this comedic formula only made sense while being a good church-going Christian was seen as a moral ideal that most people failed to live up to in the early years of the show's lifetime while The Simpsons was critical of religion the series maintained a certain degree of respect for religious institutions it framed its criticism of religion in a sincere okay we can agree to disagree kind of way I'm not a bad guy I work hard and I love my kids so why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to hell Homer the heretic is actually a perfect example of The Simpsons being cynical of but largely at peace with religion Homer is supposed to be wrong for forsaking the church entirely but it ends with him coming to the conclusion that being an imperfect Christian Who falls asleep at church is better than nothing would you give church another try I'll be there next Sunday front row Center this made sense while American society was largely Christian The Simpsons is being being playful with Christianity not openly contemptuous that's why teachers would stick on Homer versus Lisa in the eth commandment and Simpson's Bible stories all the time in religious studies as a way of getting us to think about religious arguments the show is not setting out to disprove religion or say that religion is bad it's engaging with the subject with a critical lens that previously dogmatic American society might have been less eager to do the idea that Flanders is perfect because he's the perfect Christian still lasted a while after this period the show is supposed to have gone downhill as well if you must know I'm well I'm I'm 60 what's your secret Flanders I just follow the three C's clean living chewing thoroughly and a daily dose of vitamin Church however as American society started to become more open to the idea that being a good Christian isn't the moral ideal it used to be I can see why the idea that Flanders is perfect because he's a good Christian started to feel a bit outdated added to that the increase in mass media around the mid 2000s probably had a lot to do with the decline in attitudes towards Christianity the westro Baptist Church started gaining a lot of media attention which highlighted to mainstream Society the damage that a particularly extreme form of Christianity can do and I do understand comedy writers wanting to skew this point of view through satire and who's the most Christian man in Springfield Ned Flanders okay so it's 200 2005 Passion of the Christ was one of last year's biggest Blockbusters obviously being a topical comedy show The Simpsons wants to comment on that and the obvious point a satire would want to make is that the only reason Christians are letting a movie with this much violent slide is because it's religious would it have made sense to use any other character than Ned to make this point I have found favor with the Lord so shall my KN find favor with thy belly I don't think Homer and Ned's Hail Mary pass is great or anything but if I was in The Writer's room that day I wouldn't pass up this idea just because it's not true to the original vision for Ned another thing I'd like to point out is that flanders's intolerance is also a presence in the Golden Age even if it's not too pronounced in home sweet home diddly Dum doodly he almost has a fit over Bart and Lisa not being baptized we are never [Music] baptized another problem I have with the flanderization argument using Ned as its basis is that the argument suggests the character starts out complex and becomes simple through exaggeration of one character trait but if Ned's core definition is that he's too good a neighbor doesn't that make him simple was Ned actually all that complex to begin with wasn't he always a tool used to characterize Homer people are going to point to Hurricane NY of course where we fully psychoanalyze how holding his anger back has damaged Ned's emotional growth but prior to that I'm not to toally convinced he was ever that complex even in more emotional episodes like when Flanders failed his failure is used to draw H's personal failings into sharper definition M okay ready yes oh yet and by the way this is not a criticism of golden age net em forer once outlined the difference between flat and round characters thus L flat characters are constructed round a single idea or quality the really flat character character can be expressed in one sentence so when people point out that Ned's purpose used to be that he was the perfect neighbor aren't they essentially saying he used to be flat I should also note here that the TV troes page is allegedly where this term originates and it doesn't actually use the words complex or decline those words have been added to the theory by whoever wrote the Wikipedia page and I do often see those words used when people have talked about this Theory would I be totally out of line to suggest that as people have reused this argument they've inferred that old Flanders is complex by nature of being well-received while new Flanders is basic by nature of not being well received you can have a flat character flat characters serve a purpose complexity isn't a barrier for being good or bad the TV tr's page on flanderization itself acknowledges this Ned used to exist as a way of showing us H as imperfections but by giving him flawed and bigoted views aren't the writers actually making Ned more complex or by drawing more attention to his bigoted worldviews than they were before aren't they just making him flat in a different way also you got to remember latterday Ned has lost his wife it could have been that M was a calming influence on him and with her gone the mediator of his negative impulses is also gone it is entirely possible that what everybody sees as a mistake is actually character development Daddy what are you doing pling people I never met to pressure a government with better things to do to punish a man who meant no harm for something nobody even saw that's what I'm doing doing Daddy we think you need a new mommy first things first the TV Tropes page claims that flanderization is the opposite of character development if that's the case then as ludicrous as it sounds I don't actually think Flanders is a very good example of it I understand not liking the changes made to Ned and I agree it's quite easy to hate new Ned and find him annoying but he was always supposed to be kind of annoying before he was annoyingly perfect now he's annoyingly bigoted the impression I always got was that the higher number of emotional episode misses around this period did the same to Ned as it did to Homer it made the flaws that were always there to begin with more obvious and it's not as if we knew that Ned did or didn't hold bigoted views they just never appeared before so their addition in later Seasons to use Ned as a cipher for real world commentary on religious extremism isn't quite as out of nowhere as this argument makes it seem it would look kind of odd if the show was still holding up morally perfect Flanders as the ideal Christian in say 2010 cuz when people make this point about the Simpsons style in the characters changing after the Golden Age they seem to be admitting the fact that the Simpsons exists in the context of the world in which we live the show is a satire it's a means of commentary on the real world and it always has been a lot of people don't know this but the antifreeze in the wine in the Crepes of Wrath in season 1 is actually based on a real news story that was around at the time the case for flanderization is actually much more justified in the case of Dr Hibbert who in season 4 in hom triple bypass is an understated accurate depiction of the flaws in America's healthare system this procedure will cost you upwards of $30,000 I'm afraid it's now 40,000 and hibbit doesn't enjoy this hibbit doesn't relish this it's just the way it is but by season 14 someone's decided that hibbit is just completely and totally evil my husband has our card no problem now you stay Shackled to that radiator until you come up with some Insurance obviously this is rooted in the fact that by 2004 the point about America's healthc care system being profit focused was a hot topic of conversation leading up to the Affordable Care Act in 2010 so the change in satirization of America's Healthcare System by way of Dr Hibbert from light touch to Sledgehammer was because the topic was seen as more Urgent by this point so like Ned there is a reason for this change but if you want to argue that a character became a caricature of themselves as time went by this is the one I'd make that argument with of course hepatization doesn't exactly have the same ring to it does it the reason I'm unpicking these arguments is because I see them repeated a lot without the real world context and when you remove the real world context you never get to the root of the problem people keep saying the same things over and over again about the Simpsons in its modern State I could just sit here and say old version of character good new version of character bad like most people do but that wouldn't be productive and it wouldn't explain why these decisions were made and of course you could say well right old Flanders doesn't make sense in a modern context but people do still enjoy the Golden Age even if old Ned doesn't make sense anymore and yes that's true too and lends much more Credence to the quality of writing is just worse argument however The Simpsons is a continuous series designed for real world Sati that wanted to do all it could to keep going indefinitely and any show no matter how solid the framework is if it's just been running for too long the framework is not going to look the same a decade down the line which is what leads me on to [Music] this if you type jerk ass Homer into Google you'll find endless articles about how Homer becomes a massive jerk in the latest Seasons but I think that all that really happened was it just became more obvious how much of a jerk Homer is cuz really revealing his and marg's deepest secrets to the whole of the town at the end of season 5 should have been GRS for divorce from where I'm sitting okay March things were said mistakes were made let's end this madness and get on with our lives you just don't get it do you Homer and yet Jass Homer according to everybody only becomes apparent in the later years but why is that out of my way jerk ass as said the sincerity framework created this blind spot for everybody where we all forgave Homer for incidents like secrets of a successful marriage but there is also another Factor there kind of comes a point where you realize that there is nothing hom could do that would break the family up reason for that of course is that the series needs to keep going and in order to do that Marge and Homer need to stay together and I think it assumes a naivity on the part of the writers to believe that they didn't realize that people were going to Cotton onto this eventually Homer did a lot of unforgivable things over the course of the golden age that are arguably equal to or worse than framing March for drunk driving in season 15's codependence day and other similar incidents from this period that everyone spent years holding up as evidence for jerk as Homer but if everyone's now noticed that he's a jerk then it kind of makes a warped amount of sense to just embrace it and not give a [ __ ] how far he goes this is the worst thing you've ever done you say that so much it's lost all meaning although what this does mean is that the realism at the family Dynamic becomes basically impossible to maintain I said in my golden age video that The Simpsons success was rooted in the fact that you do believe that these characters are real people you relate to them as a real family but the fact Homer does all of these hor things and it doesn't break the family up is counterbalanced by the pure untempered emotional episodes so you still kind of believe he's a real person who has feelings just like you do but if you've got to the point where your audience has realized that nothing he does impacts anything longterm Homer stops being a real person and becomes a metafictional comedic entity Homer isn't a character anymore he's the blurry outline of a man that can be twisted into whatever shape the story requires him to be in and there are some fairly interesting moments in this period where the characters almost break the fourth wall and point that out brawling the family from season 13 isn't a particularly good episode but this point where the social worker basically says exactly what Homer is to his face stands out to me Homer your problem is quite simple you're a drunken childish buffoon but Homer doesn't acknowledge it at all which is society's fault because because he always gets his own way because he's not a person anymore he's a comedic tool for causing chaos and that is what people don't like about this Homer later in this episode they bring back his Vegas wife as a way of pointing out to everybody look at how unforgivable he is Homer it's okay we're married you and Ned married a couple of floes and it looks like maybe Homer's about to have some consequences for one of his more egregious errors for about half a second but then Mars Just forgives him and they come up with a scheme to get rid of his Vegas wife because if everything didn't get easily fixed in 22 minutes so we can do something like this again next week then the show would end yep our family is as functional as all get out could this be the end of our series of events my point is Golden Age Homer couldn't be maintained indefinitely someone was eventually going to coton on to this or watch back episodes like secrets of a successful marriage and say hey wait a minute Marge should have left this guy a long time ago oh good Reverend Lovejoy will make March take me back dead a divorce mhm and by over 200 episodes in if they do something similar to secrets of a successful marriage but counterbalance it with yeah but he cares about his family though like I said last time there is still a niggling thought at the back of your mind that goes yes but Homer never changes he can say sorry all he likes but he never learns and improves and his yes but look how sincere I am though feels much more Hollow 10 years down the line but the thing people don't give the show credit for is they do know that and I'd also like to know why your hand is in that cast because you look even more beautiful now than the day I married you there are still moments of sincerity with Homer in this era but it just doesn't work anymore in Jaws wire chart in season 13 Homer breaks his jaw and not being able to open his mouth for weeks on end while it heals causes him to become a perfect listener and it is charming and heartwarming until you remember every single thing that Homer has done up until this point and this episode actually Embraces that by having him change back into the impulsive slob that he actually is at the end of the episode and makes the argument that this is actually a good thing there she is Dad you've got to do something but bold moves are no longer my forte wait I know they're here sure sunny be saved her isn't it great to have the old dad back I thought you liked the new dad this family needs alive wire but it's just not me that's okay Marge you're a good wet blanket owning Homer's cowardly jerkish Behavior was the only way the show would be able to continue on and make him make sense in the 21st century long after we've been able to look back at some of the horrible stuff he said and did to Bart during the Golden Age and realized um yeah Homer was always an abusive monster would you say this to a child in real life I'm not going to kill you but you ruined your father you crippled your family well yes post Golden Age Homer is nowhere near as effective as Golden Age Homer The Show by embracing his selfish jerky actually kind of makes a point about how out ofpl Homer Simpson is in the modern TV environment where there's nothing he could say or do that should justify his actions and yet in the Golden Age his actions are Justified all all the time so the only way for this family to keep making sense in the 21st century is to own it and use metah humor to say to the audience yeah we've noticed it too we know what we're doing and there is a desensitizing effect to Homer's jerk Behavior after a while it's all very well for us to re-evaluate specific episodes like codependence day and make a point of how awful Homer is in this episode and maybe someone else is here and maybe he'll step forward and admit to being the real culprit oh this is a new love for me but when you're watching 22 episodes of season straight through I must admit that I didn't really bat an IID when I got to this one would you right is kind of unhealthy in itself I saw Home frame March for drunk driving and I just thought yeah he's a selfish coward makes sense he would do something like that personally I was kind of vibing with codependence day in this watch through though I enjoyed watching Homer and March reconnect over a drinking bender and I wasn't too bothered when Homer does unforgivable act number 328 sure it looks worse when a list or an article has taken one episode and presented his action in isolation which is the same thing that happens when people talk about Saddles saw Galactica and not the Loess monster one but in context of the series it doesn't even make an impact on me because by this point it's been 14 and a half seasons of incidents like this including in episodes from the era that everybody loves he uses his daughter for gambling in season 3 he punches an old man in the face he falls asleep at Frank Grim's funeral after driving him to have a breakdown where he kills himself I disagree with the assertion that Homer becomes a jerk in later Seasons because to be a jerk he would have to be at least shocking but it got to a point post golden age where I genuinely wasn't shocked by anything he did you become inured to anything eyebrow raising which I'm not saying is a good thing for the record this was the problem that led me to ultimately fall off the series entirely about season 16 back in the day they even make this point for me in held a shelter from season 14 the family goes on a reality show where they have to live like it's the 1890s and it's horrible for them for a while but then they get used to it and the audience finds it boring he's patrols toor the take a punch this is boring however because Homer isn't a real person anymore does that hold true for the rest of the [Music] family well Homer becomes chaos in man form the residual idea that this is a show about a real family that just so happens to be a cartoon left over from the seasons one and two days where emotional sincerity had much more importance placed on it than straight up gags does still linger in these Seasons they almost completely give up with Homer but Lisa Bart and Marge all have moments in episodes in this period that genuinely surprised me the only problem is that lessons never stick in The Simpsons and so the same thing that happened with Homer starts happening with the others too Milhouse doesn't live here anymore from season 15 is a surprisingly touching episode where Milhouse moves away you can't move that far you're my best friend what's your mom making I'll match it this scene here where Bart's crying at the TV as he remembers Milhouse activated a deeper emotional connection with my own inner child it brought back memories of when I was a kid and my friends would move away and I thought I'd never see them again and in some cases I never did B honey it's a nice day why don't you play outside side that's where me and Milhouse played and now that Bart's friendless he starts taking more of an interest in Lisa and they hang out and become genuine friends but then when Milhouse moves back Lisa gets insecure and thinks that this has ruined the Newfound Dimension to the brother sister relationship that a blossom between them while he was away but Bart comes to her at the end of the episode and reassures her that this hasn't changed anything oh Bart that's really sweet just because I have milh house back doesn't mean I haven't learned a few things about being a brother [Music] really as well as being funny Milhouse doesn't live here anymore was sweet and wholesome like many an episode from seasons 2 and three that people cling on to thing is though it doesn't stick just one year later in the season 16 episode I already mentioned on a clear day I can't see my sister Bart is obnoxious to leis her on a field trip and she takes out a restraining order against him and she goes out of her way to be unnecessarily cruel to him over the course of the episode all that development of the brother sister relationship Dynamic completely gone by this point I mean yeah right nothing ever changes in The Simpsons the formulas have to stay the same comedic formulas as well as emotional ones need to be elastic to some degree Bart and Lisa have to drive each other crazy and then make up and then future episodes have to break them apart again that and I should note here that these episodes weren't really made for binge watching from A to B like I was doing the idea that people watching this are going to have the entire series context in their heads and even remember Milhouse doesn't live here any anymore by the time of season 16 isn't even going to be considered in the writing process people say The Simpsons predicted things like 9/11 and Trump becoming president but they didn't predict the way box sets and streaming media completely changed the way people engage with TV shows and for the sake of the show's reputation that's probably an area where the crystal ball that the writers apparently have would have come in handy at the same time as old episodes not really mattering though the show does do some loose ongoing story arcs running in the background through multiple seasons edner and Skinner's secret relationship runs all the way through grade school confidential in season 8 to them almost getting married in season 15 L with Mor's death episodes do impact each other in cases with other characters but with the family dynamics of The Simpsons themselves they don't stuff just happens and then it gets forgotten about so while Milhouse doesn't live here anymore genuinely moved me emotionally in a way The Simpsons hadn't done for many many seasons by this stage that didn't stop me feeling kind of used when I got to w clear day I can't see my sister where it basically draws a line under the fact that the events of milh housee doesn't live here anymore don't really mean anything he's done good things for you too name three B will make your bed for a week what really yep pick up another one but it's not my turn I'm trying to do something nice you dink so it's not really just Homer they all become outlines of characters to be twisted and molded into whatever shape the story requires them to be in The Simpsons just have to sort of resemble a dumb overweight Airhead an innocent housewife a rebellious 10-year-old boy a neglected 8-year-old girl and a baby they stock characters now they're not real people the realization of this for Homer came much earlier than it did for the others but it did happen for me at about midseason 16 about here is where the Simpsons stopped being a real family which is exactly where I fell off the show back in the day and this is probably why and them no longer feeling like a real family is a dangerous Prospect for The Simpsons because while yes it's an off-the-wall cartoon where anything can happen the emotional realism of the characters was what drove its success in the first place if from this point it can't make me believe for at least 20 minutes that Bart and Lisa are real siblings and that Homer and March's marriage is still solid because I have the context of Prior events in my head I become completely desensitized to it it stops making an emotional impact and becomes just another episode of some cartoon that I watch yeah it can still be funny and Homer himself is still funny during this period even though not a real person anymore but funny isn't really enough cuz if I've Seen It All Before I'd stop really giving a [ __ ] and this process of desensitization leads me on to [Music] this in a video I made a little while back about a season 34 episode I suggested the show should start incorporating more of the Treehouse of Horror style into the main show as a way of attracting people's attention back to The Simpsons again I realized the flaws in this Viewpoint now that I've rewatched the Golden Age and this middle period back to back because I've now realized the show did already do that and it basically ruined treeh house of horror itself I argued in my golden age video that there's not actually that much difference between the Treehouse of Horror universe and the main show because the main show still has all of the Treehouse fixtures in it aliens exist in the main Simpsons Universe characters die or get severely injured with no consequences cool costume it's not a costume they found me inside a meteor the main show is not as in yourf face about how none of the rules of the conventional Universe apply but in this period it goes into overdrive in bleeding the style of Treehouse of Horror into the main show in order to grab attention what is the reveal of the jockeys in Saddles saw Galactica if not a Treehouse of Horror twist to a run-of-the-mill story about bart and Homer training a racehorse EI eii do has got talking psychotic animals in IT Major League Baseball is spying on people for some unspecified reason then we should call a doctor about this how did the badger do that without ripping your shirt what am I a tailor and cut away and we don't address the consequences of this scene at all just like in a Treehouse of Horror but what this meant was that when Treehouse of Horror came around they weren't special occasions anymore treeh house of horror can't be as shocking as it once was if the surrounding episodes have indulged in these bizarre or shocking outer reaches like there's a radioactive Legoland Full Of Monsters And Godzilla is real the increase in bizarre elements in the main Simpsons Universe wasn't totally a Bad Thing even though I've had a couple of negative things to say about eii do it's one of the more fun entries in this period And as said I totally love the computer War Menace shoes but all of this did serve to make treeh house of horror itself a much less special occasion stylistically too it just started to blend into the background with the main show a little bit too easily watch back the Golden Age and when you get to a treehouse episode you'll notice a slight stylistic change Treehouse of Horror forum in particular has a slightly more exaggerated art style to go with its Night Gallery Theme by contrast Treehouse 10 looks like any other episode of The Simpsons I do love the dolphin story from Treehouse 11 like most people do probably because it's one of the more violent Treehouse segments from this period but it's not that much of a stretch of the imagination if the rest of the show has taken on the nature of treeh House of Horror this one works because while stupid it is at least a Horror Story the biggest problem for treeh House of Horror that starts becoming more apparent in the middle period is they're just not scary like at all and this isn't even in a criticism of the sense of fear being a subjective reaction they actively stop trying to be scary the superhero parody in treeh house 10 where Bart and Leisa become stretch dude and clover girl was where they start to stray from the purpose of treeh House of Horror to freak the audience out and it continues with stuff like this with a Harry Potter parody oh slithers H yes Lord martimort let's capture that girl and steal her magical Essence yes The Simpsons is first and foremost a comedy and Harry Potter was incredibly popular at the time and where else are they going to do a Simpsons parody of Harry Potter but Treehouse of Horror was special to people because it freaked them out Treehouse was trying to scare people as well as make them laugh a lot of the time it did that by having characters react to scary situations as if it's no big deal oh a that Cutie's trying to claw my eyes out see he does that you find it funny but then I be nightmare cafeteria genuinely freaked me out as a kid it contains hilarious dark jokes but it made an impact on me because it scared the [ __ ] out of me granted I'm not a kid anymore but when I watched it back for this project I still got chills as the grown-ups started eating the kids tra of horror was so aggressive in its weirdness during this period there's a few segments in post Golden Age Simpsons that are aggressively weird the dolphin slasher film as I mentioned but it felt like the Halloween episodes weren't even trying to freak you out anymore I was expecting Reaper Madness in treehouse 14 where Homer becomes the Grim Reaper to be a return to freaky Treehouse episodes but then it does a yakety sack sequence and I just let out a massive disappointed sign but even though the Treehouse segment started blending into the background of the main show admittedly at least some episodes didn't if you don't know what I mean when I say out of character episode I could easily substitute it with the word gimmick but the word gimmick has negative connotations so let's just say I mean episodes told with a narrative device outside the Norms of a Simpsons episode the one you all think of when I talk about this is behind the laughter a mockumentary about Homer apparently a real person making The Simpsons as a show about his real family and the episode goes deep matter in it to prolong the run of the series I was secretly given anti growth hormones what behind the laughter is doing with jokes like that is it's enhancing the experience of The Simpsons as a continuous show by addressing fan complaints over things like the bizarre timeline and the fact that kids never age by offering an outlandish sort of explanation in the form of a joke I will be the first to admit that some complaints over things like the timeline are admittedly silly but they will inevitably start being made by the real life comic book guys Among Us when a Show's been running for so long in one of my previous videos I did a breakdown of the mechanics of meta fiction and why it's used and this episode is a brilliant demonstration of how a show can convince fans to forgive its Flaws by essentially admitting to them and owning them within the text itself of course in regular episodes the show is peppered with matter jokes here and there where it basically turns to face the audience and say you know we can can see you this is where your show slight declin in quality over the years but having one full episode laying its entire universe bare like this makes it a more sophisticated means of getting us nitpicking Fanboys who've been on its case about its various failures over the years to actually be more likely to be sympathetic towards it behind the laughter uses meta fiction to own up to the show's flaws it basically admits that it's stuck Barton Lisa in this bizarre purgatorial state where they're never allowed to grow up this episode even calls out the prince in the poper for being a step too far with the family in disarray episodes increasingly resorted to gimmicky premises and nonsensical plots I'm an impostor behind the laughter is still just as great as it always was and arguably should have been the final Simpsons episode Homer even admits in it the show's run out of steam I can't believe it we wanton another contest The Simpsons are going to Delaware this will be the last season I remember watching behind the laughter back in the early 2000s and thinking wait are they actually ending it and then I was watching season 12 waiting for the episode where the Simpsons go to Delaware I can't believe it we won another contest The Simpsons are going to Delaware oh right that's it that's it that's the end right imagine thinking The Simpsons was about to end in 2001 seriously 12-year-old me was an idiot there is an episode from Modern Eros Simpsons that everyone says should have been the final episode but I think behind the laughter would have been more suited because what better way to end a subversion of the standard American sitcom family that uses metah humor all the time than by breaking the entire universe apart like this especially since as said Homer has essentially become a comedic entity by this point rather than a legitimate character I do find it interesting that when I bring up the topic of out of character episodes the first one that most people are going to think of is behind the laughter but the Simpsons has never been a stranger to out of character Concepts that's what treeh house of horror always was 22 short films about Springfield too and I think it's interesting that people do have positive vibes towards this one in spite of the fact it's post Golden Age same with the flashforward episodes which started out in the Golden Age 2 people like BART to the Future even though it's a season 11 episode they start spreading these different approaches to storytelling a lot more widely in this middle period to mixed results they usually do the three story Anthology format of treeh House of but for other topics simpsons's Bible stories has aged incredibly well and it's much better now that it's been 20 years since I would be sat in religious studies at school and the teachers would put it on for the 20th time when they couldn't think of anything to do that Weg one interesting narrative device episode that always got rated highly was Trilogy of error from season 12 and watching it now I find that really weird because even though yes it is funny it's kind of symptomatic of all the issues that people have had about The Simpsons during this period in case you never saw it tells three stories Marge accidentally Cuts Homer's Thumb off and has to take him to the hospital the story reaches an end point and then we restart the same day but from Lisa's perspective tell a story restart the day do it from Bart's perspective and the family story is All intersect it's interesting and fun but the reason its reception confuses me is because the Simpsons themselves are even more openly stock characters than they usually were in this period the layout of the story is more like a blueprint for The Simpsons Hit and Run which was a few years away from dropping at this stage and it features the characters just doing stuff without thinking of the consequences mom where'd you get that car I stole it from McBane after I cut off your Father's son Trilogy of eror is this chaotic Splurge of stuff where it doesn't really matter if a character would actually genuinely behave this way they just have to do it like this so the story can intersect at the right points it's not even logical by the Warped standard that a naturally illogical format like an adult animated cartoon would usually hold to there's one of these from season 17 that I really liked called the seemingly Never Ending Story which Rivals community in terms of metah humor The Simpsons get stuck in a cave and to kill time Lisa tells a story within a story within another story well my best recollection of Burns's paraphrasing of what he read in Mo's letter is the kople told Mo the out character episodes do stand out there aren't that many of them but they usually make people's lists of Simpsons episodes from this period that are actually good and everyone's always shocked by them for some reason oh my God The Simpsons can still be interesting and inventive because the stylistic Chang has made the quality increase obvious it's much harder to give the show credit for the standout episodes which look and feel stylistically similar to the Bland and uninspired ones cuz your average viewers just become desensitized to The Simpsons by this stage so they probably won't notice them so let's talk about those episodes now [Music] I feel like I've been unfair in this video I feel like everyone's been unfair to this middle period of The Simpsons it's much harder to forgive the show for the obviously Bad episodes like Lisa go gaggar and the Elon Musk one than it is for this middle period between the Golden Age and the movie which I feel is very much overhated I really don't think people realize just how good most of these seasons are as I mentioned last time a common thing I do is search up random Simpsons jokes that get stuck in my head on YouTube and throughout this period I was still doing it and I kept seeing people in the comment sections reflecting my surprise that these are moments from episodes after the period where people started saying the show wasn't good anymore there's a ton of big Simpsons memes that everybody uses that are postseason 9 it's always weird whenever you're watching a show and you run into a meme in the wild and that happened with me in this period on several occasions wait old man yells at Cloud is from a season 13 episode I could have sworn it was season 6 while yeah there are a lot more misses this period isn't really that much worse than the Golden Age and I recognize the regular appearance of a certain type of psychological episode on a pretty frequent basis that continues Beyond this middle period it's a mad mad mad mad Marge from season 11 is one of those episodes where I swear if you make the picture quality slightly worse remove a couple of date stamping references and play it alongside any episode from season 6 and 7 I don't think most people would notice the difference so feels like she's being usurped by this incidental character who's trying to steal her family and she's paranoid and on edge that this character is trying to kill her I like the idea of the show basically laying traps for its characters that play on their emotional pressure points and their deepest fears and anxieties and the resulting way they react to this situation being so true to their character that if this same thing happened to anyone else they would not react in the same way why do I always think of the perfect thing to say when it's too late shut up Becky oh that would have been sweet truly psychological episodes where they play with the characters perceptions and do big and out there plot twists became a highlight of this period for me they're almost like mini Hitchcock films Don't Fear the roofer from season 16 is another of these where Homer makes friends with a roofer named Ray only to be told about halfway through the episode that Ray never existed we'll let you go when you admit there is no Ry minini fine I it help me Ray appear and strike them down it's always compelling to watch a character's World being turned completely on its head and I find it odd that people don't talk about these episodes that much or when I look up the average IMDb scores these highlights just blend into the background and just sit alongside unremarkable episodes as another Simpsons episode that I watched once I really enjoyed regarding Margie near the end of season 17 Marge gets amnesia and she can remember everyone except homer I'm lucky to have such a kind and uh Uncle I'm your husband what it was really nice and sweet and reminded me of earlier Seasons I still don't remember you but for the first time since this happened I wish I did Homer then a look up reviews and regarding Margie got the exact same reception as any other episode during this period maybe it's just the fact of watching the same characters do basically the same things over and over again for 22 episodes in a row that just boils your brain to some degree I said I became desensitized to quote unquote jerk ass homer so similarly your audience just doesn't notice when the show's done something actually interesting and psychological for a change so you need other people like me to point at a decent episode for you and explain why it's good if it didn't make it completely obvious by way of a format change like behind the laughter did sometimes people do notice when an episode's broken out of the show's routine but the result is usually people complain about it because it's different like with saddles saw Galactica and a personal favorite from season 13 the frying game which apparently people don't like that much in the frying game margin hom are wrongly accused of murdering a horrible old lady and they're actually sentenced to death it plays it not completely straight but the viewer believes the premise that this is it Homer and Marge are actually about to die I just keep thinking about everything we're going to miss the kids growing up grandchildren and Homer sacrifices himself to save Marge Ju Just how can you not be moved by this I killed and robbed the old lady all by myself Marge is completely innocent the only thing she's guilty of is loving too much the murder I did all right the frying game is horrible and hard to watch and part of this increased Edge and cruelty that I mentioned earlier that's out of kilter with the type of show that The Simpsons had been up until this point but the thing is though and this is the killer question that I can't actually answer answer what else was the show supposed to do they know it's past its peak at this point the meta jokes that were always there during the Golden Age mostly start focusing on how weird it is that the show's been running for so long and that there's no end in sight well I think it's good for a show to go off the air before it becomes stale and repetitive Maggie shot Mr Burns again the alternative to the show trying to do something different like with the frying game is to just keep doing the same old routine but if you take out the controversial joke hom versus dignity is a run-of-the-mill homer gets hurt episode and people hated it there's dozens of run-of-the-mill episodes from this era that you probably hated or don't remember watching but I appreciate episodes like the frying game because it's actively trying to mess with your head it's recognizing that the show is getting older now and it's got to try and entertain people in different ways and personally I think it really works sure the sance is meant to be continuous but I kind of see why they started employing these new tactics codependence day didn't piss me off like it did with lots of people because Homer went much further than he had ever done before the biggest problem with codependence day is the Star Wars subplot where Lisa and B go and talk to a George Lucas standing to complain about the episode's Phantom Menace standing in the most hypocritical sequence I have ever seen in anything your early movies are Timeless Classics Please Mr Curtis go back to what made your first film so great yeah people say the same thing about the show you're in Lisa and you're meant to be the smart and perceptive one and people do the exact same thing that you're doing right now where they can't adequately explain what made it good before and what makes it bad now it's just you used to be good now you're bad why can't you go back to what made you good whatever that was granted the main plot of codependence day doesn't work either cuz it has to resolve Homer and marg's marriage for something even more extreme than usual and is again grants for a divorce and the schaly ending just doesn't J justify it but in terms of let's try it and see what we can reasonably get away with in the context of this show has just been running for too long and we've exhausted most of the samean scenarios it's an attitude towards storytelling that I don't think gets the credit it deserves similarly Days of Wine and does from season 11 makes Barney go sober sure complain about that all you want they changed the character's core trait that made him who he was for so long but that's why this episode was interesting to me da of one and dozes is surprisingly meta it's a sitcom character looking up one day and realizing oh I'm a stereotype aren't I my function in this narrative is to be the butt of cheap laughs so I'm a tanked up loser is that how you see me then I'm going to quit drinking no I mean it you won't see me here again I didn't remember Days of Wine and doses that well but that scene and Barney's Journey towards sobriety really stuck out to me watching this now that I've grown up and know a lot more about alcoholism and interestingly they have Barney stay sober for the next couple of years before he relapses almost like he's a real person unlike homo we've always had some distance from Barney but that actually presents the show with an opportunity to explore a minor character with depth and Nuance that it used to be able to do with Homer before the viewer stopped being able to forgive Homer for being a jug I bet when most of you watched days of one and doses back in the day it blended into the background as it did for me when I was a kid but when I watched it back as an adult I was very hardpressed to think of a whole lot that was actually wrong with it it happened again with worst episode ever in season 12 where they actually spend a decent amount of time characterizing comic book guy he's not just a cutaway gag for the show to go what a pathetic loser anymore by having an episode about him having a heart attack and realizing he has no friends or loved ones it sends Comic Book Guy on this journey where a guy with such a jagged personality tries to fit in and he ends up finding a connection with one of Springfield's other hateful characters Agnes Skinner why you ill-mannered sack of crap oh goodie now I know what ever happened to Baby Jane [Music] oh this was the show taking a bit character that they've never done anything interesting with before and trying to imagine what existing as this person would feel like it's proof that 12 seasons in there are still stories for the show to tell in this town with its already established cast of characters when I got to episodes like this one the line that everyone seems to think divides Golden Age Simpsons with post Golden Age Simpsons started to make less sense worst episode ever does exactly what the golden age did it treated these catchphrase spouting characters as if they were real people another one I liked quite a lot was Pokémon from season 12 it seems like another fairly unremarkable episode about Marge volunteering to run an art class for convicts at a local jail where she takes a shine to one of the convicts play played by Michael Keaton it's a nice and simple downto Earth Marge story that if you swapped a few jokes around could fit right alongside episodes like Colonel Homer from season 3 and it's an understated celebrity Cameo where they've written an actual character for him really this is the Simpson's doing basically everything it should be doing that it had made mistakes with during this period but look it still knows how to do it granted this story doesn't have the threat of infidelity to it so it's nowhere near as urgent as Colonel Homer it probably would have helped if there was some hint of that instead Homer's B plot in this episode is about him inventing a cure for back pain another random Homer money-making scheme Pokémon probably would have worked better if Homer's plot balanced out marges instead of being totally unrelated and speaking of that it's strange how stories with no B plot start to disappear around this period sometimes you get an episode like behind the laughter with one narrative through line for 20 minutes and there's the odd one or two here and there but prior to this period if a story was about Homer buying a gun it was just about hom buying a gun and how it affects the family there's this episode from season 15 called I doot where the a plot is about Homer making B a robot that he's secretly inside operating dad what I'm sorry you fought all those robots affirmative that is so cool any point extra can throw some nuts and bolts together you risked your own life and the B plot is about Lisa adopting a new cat after snowball I dies but then every pet she adopts after after that gets killed in horrible ways col train you were with us only briefly but we'll always have the ride home from the shelter hey hey these cats I'd rather take their chances in the back room than go home with you both of these plots are solid but they would have been so much more effective as two separate episodes instead of stitched into one like this but still there is at least some kind of emotional heat to these episodes desperate to get out and I did stop and notice that in this run through as opposed to when I watched these episodes all those years ago and they just went in through my eyeballs and write out my ears never to be given a passing thought again I went into this project skeptical of the idea that it's just Simpsons fatigue that sent the general perception of the show into decline as I think that's a bit too convenient and lets the show after hook for some genuinely poor decision making but the fact I never stopped and realized just how many episodes from this period are either functionally sound or explore minor characters in interesting ways reminiscent of the golden age does lend at least a little bit of credence to the idea that it's not the show that changed we just got tired of it we all tend to think of this period as being composed of a bunch of dumb situations and the Deep rooted character focus of The Simpsons being basically dead at this stage but it's really not sometimes sure it just doesn't work but the show is still clearly trying to make its characters emotionally function that's why in spite of all the complaints I've been making throughout this video and yes there's a good reason why the previous period is considered the Golden Age and this one is the Silver age of anything I do still respect these Seasons I don't think it's just the extreme Goodwill the show still had left in the golden age that carried into the massive success of the next thing we have to talk [Music] about numerous attempts have been made by people to try and explain why the Simpsons movie is so good despite it coming in a period when the show's reception was on the decline and I would like to point out to people that you do see the common complaints about the show in its post Golden Age form reflected in the movie what Homer does to Bart in the movie where he dares him to skateboard to crusty bger naked and then blames Bart for it when the cops get involved is arguably equal to or worse than what he does to Marin codependence day but for some reason this doesn't end up in examples of jerk ass Homer because the movie is commonly understood to be good even though this behavior is on the same extreme level as all the other examples of jerk ass Homer maybe excluding kidney trouble however I will admit that this is not a totally fair comparison because the movie's expanded length and scale does lend more authenticity to H's character Arc where he makes amends for his wrongdoing still though I do think the reason people come at the movie wanting to separate it from the period of the show when it came out is more because it's commonly understood to be good Simpsons as opposed to bad Simpsons again it's just people taking a popular opinion as red and absorbing it as their own almost like it's Cannon rather than allowing them M themselves to come to their own conclusions based on the material they've watched I did recognize the DNA of quote unquote bad Simpsons in the movie I came at this directly off the back of watching the whole thing through Seasons 10 to 18 and the style of humor in the movie is more concurrent with post Golden Age Simpsons than Golden Age Simpsons Golden Age Simpsons is cynical of but at peace with organized religion post Golden Age Simpsons isn't and the movie does this they can hear you inside relax those Pious morons are too busy talking to their phony baloney guard the reason the movie gets away with Homer being a jerk though is because having a character Arc that's blown up to giant size means they can explore jerk ass Homer on a much deeper level and the movie is very much a Simpsons episode blown up to giant size as opposed to what I and lots of people were fearing the movie would be at the time basically four episodes of the show super glued together no the movie is one huge Simpsons episode with the stakes and character arcs of a movie but it also importantly translates the emotional sincerity of earlier Simpsons into this new context some of the more heartfelt moments with Bart are surprisingly poignant in a way that's reminiscent of seasons 2 and [Music] three h so that's what snug is there's also a metafictional dimension to the characters in the movie where they've realized by this point that there is a pattern in their lives when Bart goes on a fishing trip with Ned and loses Ned's rod he assumes the position because he expects the adult he's with to start strangling him but Ned doesn't because he's a normal father the movie recognizes that Homer is basically an abusive monster that always gets away with his bad behavior with a simple emotionally manipulative line that melts marg's heart and by Bart being pushed past his limit to a point where he realizes that Flanders would be a better father than Homer that means that Bart can actually provide a voice for the audience who realized that this family Dynamic is broken and never changes March in every marriage you get one chance to say I need you to do this with me okay homie I'm with you Mom yes honey you just bought another load of crap from the world's fattest fertilizer salesman previously Marge would have just bought home's line Bart would have forgotten why he's pissed at Homer and we would have just reset again but the bigger apparatus of stuff that the movie has to play with means that Bart calling Marge out here is just one of many cracks in the relationship that starts breaking them apart over the course of the runtime in the show it has to have Homer say something emotionally manipulative and be done with it because it's only got 20 minutes to play with but the movie's bigger scale means that he can be jerk ass Homer and a character we root for and want to succeed because the movie has him work much harder to make amends to everyone by Saving Springfield so Homer being a seemingly irredeemable monster is actually kind of conducive to the story when it's blown up to giant size like this even though Homer does something as bad as codependence day it works because it's not just done in a 20-minute chunk where we see him frame Marge for drunk driving and just say but I love you though and Marge realizes oh I love him though and that's the end of that so arguably if they were going to go in this direction where home's Behavior gets more and more extreme the episodes needed to actually be longer and bigger in order to fully justify the reset of the status quo like I said in my golden age video people developed such a strong attachment to these characters because they felt real but by this point in the show's lifetime they do feel a lot less real when there's just a simple but I love you though at the end which justifies what we just watched so's got to have to do more to earn that love and respect back when he's done something appalling by making him really work to win back Marge Lisa and Bart Homer ends up being sympathetic in the movie even after we've seen him blame Bart when he's handcuffed naked outside crusty bger and say that he just doesn't care if his friends and neighbors die the Homer and Bart story was incredibly strong and it actually made me feel one of those emotion things that apparently stories are supposed to be about I can't do it I want a father who's the same in the morning as he is at night oh what's that word consist thanks losers it's really the BART and Marge stories that act as the emotional hooks for the movie and marges is just a spot on as Barts she's followed Homer through everything right up until the point where she realizes the entire Town's going to be destroyed and everyone's going to die and H just doesn't care yes they're going to destroy Springfield but we're going to stop them homie I'm happy here screw Springfield which is what prompts her to tape her goodbye to Homer over their wedding video in easily the best performance in all of The Simpsons and given how huge it is that's really saying something Julie kavner has always been the strongest actress out of the regulars and what she does to her voice in this sequence is just jawdropping and I overlook these things because well that's the thing I I just don't know how to finish that sentence anymore of course we know that this is the end of the second act darkest point in the movie just before the Redemption so something at the back of your mind that's familiar with movie structure does know what's coming but you need to believe in that moment that March has left Homer and that this is it for them another incredibly interesting thing about the movie is just how ahead of its time it was on the Environmental ISM message and it's actually surprisingly subtler than you would expect of a movie that basically has the government locking an entire town in a dome because it's an environmental hazard and leaving them all to Die the key to the biting bit of this Sati is in this line Springfield has become Springfield the most polluted city in the history of the planet to prevent your poisons from spreading your government has sealed you all within this Dome believe me it's the last thing we wanted to do I do want the company that makes the dome but that's beside the point basically what the EPA has done is put the bonus for saving the environment on random members of the public or local authorities instead of the national political bodies or corporations which could Institute systemic change necessary to deal with environmental catastrophes but if they did that how would Russ cargill's Dome company make money and this isn't me reaching here this is an explicit message in the text itself just you might not have noticed it because it's been delivered via the medium of one of the most recognizable TV franchises ever basically the power structures of our capitalist system can be understood through the relationship between Comic Book Guy and Agnes Skinner the movie was basically this great summation of everything The Simpsons did right and that short of Homer and Marge riding off through the Autumn Leaves near the end would have been another potentially great note to end the show on I kind of see why a rumored sequel has been such a long time coming because the movie hits all the notes you would have wanted from a Simpsons Movie adaptation and what would be the point in a sequel if the first one did everything right the first time which yes all right is kind of an argument in favor of the show ending about season 9 which I've spent quite a lot of this video making the argument against but still in terms of the movie being an actual end to the show ending on that shot would have left everyone with this incredibly warm feeling where they go okay I'm going to miss it sure but I feel satisfied with the experience by season 18 everyone had settled into this opinion that the show had been on too long and was starting to wonder whether it had outstayed its welcome and the longer a show out stays it's welcome the harder an ending is to pull off but if the movie had been the ending I don't think anyone would have complained all that much but as you all know it wasn't and there's been more than 16 Seasons since then yeah look at that Jesus Christ so yeah join me in a while for the next one of these oh god what have I done anyway before I finish up let's make a quick top 10 of the best episodes from this period number 10 regarding Margie this one's probably going to end up being a loadbearing episode moving into my next video on the modern era because it does an excellent job in underscoring just how unhealthy the continuation of the Marge Homer relationship is when Marge has Amnesia and recognizes everyone except Homer he looks like the most off-putting person in the world here's me fighting with former President Bush me fighting with current President Bush I'm sorry you seem like a colorful character but I just don't remember you it kind of defies my analysis of hom sincerity being basically ruined by this stage in the show's lifetime because despite my knowledge of his awful Behavior I did still smile and Nod my head when Marge warms to him again at the end of the episode in spite of not knowing who he is number nine the seemingly Neverending Story while the show is basically just putting its characters into interchangeable situations with random nouns pasted into the script at this stage The Meta framework in this episode is truly inspired I'm not going to tell you to watch everything from this period because there genuinely is no point but if my fellow pretentious hipsters who love metah humor feel like trying a post Golden Age Simpsons episode they'd never seen before then I'd recommend this one number eight the frying game it's annoying it's extreme and symptomatic of everything people complain about during this era and while Homer had stopped being a real human being by this point I can see the heartbeat of the show it used to be in moments like the the one where he takes full blame to get Marge off death row I find it genuinely beautiful and it's why it's probably the episode from this period that I've rewatched the most over the years goodbye March I'll Always Love You number seven Milhouse doesn't live here anymore I'm not going to tell you this episode's a game changer or anything if this episode happened back during the Golden Age it probably wouldn't have even been that remarkable but in this specific watch through it hit a particular sweet spot for me that hadn't been hit for a while as I was becoming desensitized to the show it made me feel wistful for my childhood growing up riding my bike around the neighborhood with forgotten friends given the Simpsons had become Nostalgia for people even while it was still going this is probably the model of episode it should have started following if it wanted to retain people's respect and for the show to embrace its age with dignity number six Simpsons Bible stories as mentioned this one got played all the time in school during Rel just studies lessons when the teachers couldn't be bothered putting together a lesson plan that week the fact I've had some distance from it has only made it better it depiction of Genesis was hilarious and bizarre its reframing of David and Goliath as an action movie sequel worked incredibly well and its Treehouse of Horror likee ending where the Rapture happens features some OnPoint jokes about Homer's idea of Hell oo I smell barbecue hey look oh there are the hot dog number five the computer War Mena shoes at the time this episode was one of the most insane things I'd ever seen starts out as Homer has a website where he reports on Shady dealings in Springfield then it goes completely off the deep end and morphs into a parody of the prisoner I have a lot of nostalgia for this episode and for me it still holds up incredibly well number four it's a mad mad mad mad March as I said earlier it's like a mini Hitchcock film and Marge is a character who I've always found to be completely adorable and I love that we get to spend almost the entire episode with the plot driving her towards a psychological [Music] breakdown oh I'm sorry did I wake you I wanted to return your hair dryer number three the movie yeah as I just said it basically does everything The Simpsons should be doing transposed into the scale of a movie it's still just as good as it was in 2007 don't need to say any more than that number two okay I'm kind of cheating here because it's so close to the golden age but B the mother it's just as touching as The Simpsons always was and if any episodes from the post principal and the POA period don't deserve to be lumped in with this Collective belief in the Divide between good Simpsons and bad Simpsons it's this one and my number one which I bet you all know what it is number one yes of course it's behind the laughter what's so good is that the characters aren't basically exactly the same as they usually are but with the layer of fiction added on top of it that treats the show as a show within a show it's such a sophisticated piece of meta fiction that even though this is one of the more respected post Golden Age episodes I still don't think it's given enough credit that and this episode leaves me with a nice for boing visual metaphor for the next video on the modern era but behind the streamers in confetti storm clouds were gathering figurative storm clouds thanks for watching Everybody if you'd like regular update videos or to see chunks of bigger projects that I'm working on while they're in development you can subscribe to my patreon link in the description I'd like to thank the following generous people a Maxwell Alistair mcferson aniron hunt Brandon Kelly Captain Greer Chris Lim Chris P Dave Sanders Jennifer Milligan Joel Louise Wade Matthew Branch Max Kennedy Oxo isami Pastor witch Robert Conley the hicker and Tony Thompson cheers everybody see you next time