JEAN MACHINE

al jean

Simpsons showruner Al Jean recently joined the social dating app “Twitter,” and has already committed many a faux pas. It’s always funny to see new users struggle with the learning curve, doubly so if it’s someone semi-famous.

Here’s a DEVASTATING TAKEDOWN of his initial tweets from friend-of-the-site hammster, with links added:

his first tweet he refers to joining twitter as “entering twitter”. entering.
his second tweet tells me to watch a couch gag on youtube without linking to it
his third tweet he misspells excited as “exicted”
the only tweet he has favourited is a manual retweet of a tweet from the official simpsons account RATHER THAN THE ACTUAL TWEET

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MY TWO CENTS, SPRINGFIELD SHOPPER

armour hot dogs

Shocking news for Simpsons fans concerned about the artistic integrity of an episode based entirely around a name-brand product: it turns out The Simpsons‘s upcoming 30 minute LEGO commercial was partially funded and essentially proposed by The LEGO Group.

Entertainment Weekly casually mentioned The LEGO Group’s financial stake in the episode in an interview with producers Matt Selman and Brian Kelley:

Lego helped pay for the episode. How much input did the company have into the creative side? I understand that there was a sex scene between Lego Homer and Lego Marge that they wanted to tone down.


KELLEY:

Let’s say we had a lot of fun with the Lego sex scene, and I’m not surprised that it was a little too risque. But we’ll always treasure the memory. [Laughs] They were good partners. Our audience is slightly older than their audience, so they would occasionally have concerns, but all the words in the episode are ours. If they had an objection, which they did on very rare occasions, we’d find a way around it.

Good to know that a show with “a near-total absence of network interference” (virtually unheard of in the industry) is now taking notes from a toy company.

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BROOKS BLOTTER

Spanglish director and Simpsons head honcho James “Jimbo” Brooks recently teased an upcoming guest star on Twitter, claiming it’s on par with Michael Jackson’s appearance in 1991:

It’s gotta be Obama, right? Dude’s willing to do a Funny or Die sketch, but not the venerable American institution known as The Simpsons? They’ve already gotten three Beatles, a sitting prime minister, a reclusive author, AND telephone voice Joan Kenley; who else is even notable enough to get these old grizzled comedy writers all jazzed up?

Other guesses I’m throwing out there:

  • Bob Dylan – Turned them down before, maybe he relented?
  • The Game of Thrones guy – All the writers are horrible nerds, so…
  • Pope Francis – Hey, it could happen.
  • Ella Fitzgerald – Maybe Brooks discovered a way to revive the dead during his time at My Mother The Car?

Speculate away in the non-existent comment section below.

WHAA...?!

Lunchlady Doris

After Simpsons voice actress Doris Grau passed away in 1995, her character Lunchlady Doris remained in the show. Or so we thought! It turns out that at some point in the series Doris was silently replaced with a pod person named “Lunchlady Dora,” who just happens to look and sound exactly like her.

Out of respect for the late Phil Hartman, his characters Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure were completely retired from the show (well, eventually… they still made occasional background appearances until 2003). This wasn’t the case for Lunchlady Doris, who lurked silently in the background for years.

Her silence was broken in a 2009 episode, when Tress MacNeille took over the role with a pretty dead-on impression. Some viewers felt recasting the character was disrespectful to Grau. However, it turns out it was actually a “new” character, “Lunchlady Dora,” a loophole that made the move perfectly ethical. Although MacNeille was credited as Lunchlady Dora in that episode’s press release, this little change was not mentioned in the actual show until 2013, when Groundskeeper Willie casually mentioned making sweet love to Lunchlady Dora (my fanfic came true!), and a second time in last night’s episode, where Dora is mentioned in the school newspaper. AV Club writer Sean O’Neal tweeted about it, assuming it was a typo, which lead Michael Price to set the record straight and confirm it’s a “different” character:

Well, now that there’s precedent for döppelganger replacement, we can all look forward to the never-ending adventures of Mr. Kurns, Jed Flanders and Principal Skynnyr once Harry Shearer decides to quit.

[Twitter via No Homers Club]

WRITER WATCH

wagon train

Former union kingpin Patric Verrone, who wrote for Futurama and The Simpsons, and has a thriving historical figurines business, is running for California State Senate. If elected, he would be the second Simpsons writer to hold public office, following John Swartzwelder’s disastrous coup in Guyana.

As president of the Writers Guild of America, West, Verrone led the 2007-2008 writers strike that lead to higher wages and longer beards. Now he’s hitting up people for money by namedropping the shows he worked on:

“At ‘Futurama,’ I wrote a lot about the future,” he said. “For California, the future is still being written. In the script we write together, there’s a happy ending. Please join me in in this cause. We’re still in this together.”

Get it? He wrote Futurama, so now he’s going to write the future, with everyone, banging away on the typewriters of Democracy. Wait a minute… he wants to write a happy ending? He wants to end California?!? This mad man must be stopped at all costs.

[Variety]

MY TWO CENTS

Mrs. Krabappel

Mrs. Krabappel made her final speaking appearance last Sunday in an episode that also featured Sideshow Bob using animal DNA to obtain gills and stepping on a rake underwater. Spoiler: Ned Flanders is cursed, and his Vegas wife should fear for her life.

Other than that, the producers still aren’t totally sure what to do about Bart’s lack of a teacher:

So who will replace Mrs. Kabrappel [sic.] in the fourth-grade classroom? For the time being, no one. The rest of this season’s episodes — which already have been completed — do not involve Bart with his teacher.

It appears they’ve already been removing her from classroom scenes. There’s a recent episode where a still image of Groundskeeper Willie is just pasted in the background of a scene (I’m pretty sure he doesn’t blink).

As for season 26, “we have some ideas,” says Jean. “It’s also possible both given the way the show works and the state of public schools there won’t be a permanent teacher. We can get some great guest stars here and there before we settle on somebody. We’re looking at it from different angles.”

So, basically it’ll be like the post-Steve Carell episodes of The Office, then. Great!

While my preference would be for the show to cease production immediately, my worthless, hacky suggestion is to just have Principal Skinner take over. It’d give the show more chances to focus on his adversarial relationship with Bart and, as a bonus, isolate him from his mother, who’s easily my least favorite character. Meanwhile, Superintendent Chalmers would naturally become principal, since he’s already at the school all the time anyway.

Either that, or it’s finally time for Nameless Ponytail Teacher to step into the spotlight.

[Entertainment Weekly]

COMING ATTRACTIONS

As previously guessed, the Simpsons character fated to die in an upcoming Simpsons episode next season is almost certainly Krusty the Clown’s formerly-estranged father, Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky.

A recently-added copyright record for an episode entitled “Clown in the Dumps” simply confirms it:

clown in the dumps

Who’s the only clown we know of in the Simpsons universe? Krusty, of course (Sideshows Mel and Bob are mere assistant clowns, in my estimation). Why would Krusty be in the dumps? Because his father just died, that’s why. The clues are piling up, and they all point to a dead rabbi.

I would bet my remaining bitcoin on it!

[United States Copyright Office via No Homers Club]

ANIMOTION MACHINE

Otaku My Wife... Please!

The Simpsons homage to legendary anime director Hayao Miyazaki that delighted the internet a month or two ago was apparently ten years in the making:

The Simpsons executive producer Al Jean said his team had been trying to work in an homage to Miyazaki on their show for at least a decade, but the eventual episode — in which Comic Book Guy marries a woman from Japan — was well underway before the filmmaker announced his retirement.

In the episode, Homer gets drunk with the Japanese woman’s father for no apparent reason, they have an anime dream because Japan, and the father realizes he should let his daughter be with Comic Book Guy because he sees his face on No-Face from Spirited Away. The whole sequence is rather disjointed from the rest of the episode, and the awkward attempt to justify its inclusion by making it the story’s climax makes for a weird, lazy plot progression (problem → get drunk → problem solved). If the episode was created just so the writers could finally put in a Miyazaki tribute they’d been wanting to put in for over a decade, you’d think they could’ve worked it in better.

Oh, and Miyazaki hasn’t even seen it.

[BuzzFeed]

D'OH REPORT

doh

Whoops!!! It looks like Bart Simpson’s carbon rod accidentally made a repeat appearance for a few frames in last night’s Simpsons episode, “Specs in the City.” An editor on Wikisimpsons took a screencap to preserve this watershed moment in network television history for future generations. Those frames have yet to be censored or removed from the Hulu version of the episode (in the name of journalistic integrity, this reporter had to redeem his hard-earned Bing rewards points to get a Hulu Plus subscription in order to confirm it wasn’t a hoax).

Presumably, this means either Fox’s ban on butts has been lifted, or some rogue animator is getting fired for that blunder.

[Specs and the City via No Homers Club]

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

oj

OJ Simpson’s ending soon. According to The National Enquirer, the athlete-turned-murderer says he “feel[s] the end coming” and has requested an early release from prison so he won’t die “like common jailhouse scum.”

This could be Simpson’s final season:

“OJ’s doctors have told him he could be dead in as little as three months because of his out-of-control blood sugar and blood pressure,” said an unnamed source.

Created in 1947 by Eunice and Jimmy Lee Simpson, the long-running former running back was popular for many years, but in recent decades has become largely reviled by all but the most fervent of fans.

[Yahoo! News]