SUDDENLY SIMON

This past Monday, Simpsons producer emertius and animal activist Sam Simon went on Jon Leiberman’s Leiberman Live at Five radio show and publicly revealed he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Sam’s good friend Howard Stern played a few clips of that interview yesterday, which you can listen to below:.

Simon had been strongly hinting at the diagnosis for a while on Twitter: last month, he tweeted a photo of his medications, including one for chemotherapy, as well as a photo of all the “medical” marijuana people have been giving him.

Simon, of course, played an enormous role in forming the tone and voice of The Simpsons as it evolved into a series.

AZTEC THEATRE

Harlem Shake! I still don’t really know what the hell it is because I try to avoid these global phenomenon internet meme things like the plague. Sometimes a guy likes to preserve a little mystery and be blissfully unaware of all internet traditions, y’know? About a week after “Harlem Shake” starting creeping up on my radar I started seeing blog headlines declaring it dead, and I breathed a sigh of a relief that maybe it really did die before becoming a year-long “thing” like Gangnam Style ended up being and I wouldn’t have to eventually learn what it is. But, of course, nothing can truly be dead until after Modern Simpsons has had their “take” on it. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you “Homer Shake.”

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MY TWO CENTS, TOON BEAT

Well, the Maggie Simpson short lost in its bid for an Academy Award, and the world was robbed of the opportunity to see director David Silverman’s majestic beard. Here’s a photopic of Silverman, Matt Groening, and writer Michael Price looking dapper on the red carpet (apparently Silverman and Groening didn’t get the memo to wear this Maggie button):


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UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

Alan K. SimpsonYes, you heard right. After years of anticipation and speculation, 81-year old former senator Alan K. Simpson and his youthful ward Erskine Bowles have finally announced and released a long-awaited followup to their 2010 megahit, The Simpson-Bowles Plan.

The new plan, Simpson-Bowles 2: Escape from Necron 7, goes even further than the original plan in reducing the nation’s deficit. While the original had a semblance of balance between spending cuts and revenue increases, the new plan is much more heavily tilted towards extreme austerity (which mostly involves cuts from Medicare and Medicaid), thanks in large part to the deficit hawkish Simpson, who once called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”

The plan is also supposed to somehow serve as an “outline for a new grand bargain” between Republicans and Democrats, despite the fact even Bowles thinks the idea of a grand bargain is “at best on life support.”

Critics are calling the sequel “lame,” “vague,” “unbalanced,” and “a waste of everyone’s time.”

[Salon]

SCULLY DUGGERY

Mike ScullySplitsider has another typically enlightening interview with a Simpsons writer, this time with the generally-reviled former showrunner Mike Scully. He talks about writing for the Golden Globes, his occasional acting on Parks & Recreation (I didn’t know his character had a name), and his short-lived series The Pitts (I only remember Fox’s obnoxious promos for it, which focused primarily on the girl getting a pipe stuck in her head and saying “I’ve got a freakin’ pipe stuck in my head!” or something similiar. Or maybe that was his other show, The Mullets, who knows).

The stuff about his tenure on The Simpsons is interesting – he had the choice of doing either that or Coach (I wonder what the inevitable “Craig T. Nelson gets leprosy” episode would’ve been like), met Conan right before he got sucked away by NBC, and rose from being a 1-day college dropout intimidated by the Ivy League-infested writers’ room to running it just a few years later.

He also lectures a bit about the importance of putting characters before jokes, which is a little galling coming from the guy who brought us panda rape and jockey elves. But he does give an apology, of sorts:

It’s funny going back and doing these DVD commentaries 10 years later. You get a chance to relive every bad decision you made. There are times when you wish you could fast-forward the DVD and just say, “Sorry folks, I don’t know what I was thinking on that one.”

Finally, some closure. [Splitsider]

NEWS ROUNDUP

police dog

  • The Simpsons lost every Annie Award it was nominated for (including one for the infamous rag episode), but Simpsons alumni Rich Moore won Best Director and his film Wreck-It Ralph won Best Feature, so good for him!
  • My Google Alert for “Yeardley Smith sex tape” has finally beared fruit! Here is a photo of Lisa Simpson’s voice actress cavorting with a naked man in broad daylight.
  • Simpsons producer James L. Brooks is literally on the National Rifle Association’s enemies list. No word on Matt “NRA4EVER” Groening, though.
  • Speaking of Brooks, looks like he got his Twitter hacked, with little success at stopping it. He appears to be waging a hilarious battle with the Twitter-jacker over which one is the real one. Just goes to show you, even if you’re a big-time Hollywood mega-producer, you can still get your stuff hacked. Stay protected, yo. [via @vmcampos]
  • Former showrunner Bill Oakley posted the pre-distortion audio file of Ned Flanders from Homer’s chili-induced hallucination. Much respect for Harry Shearer.
  • UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS: 81-year old ex-senator Alan Simpson, namesake of the Simpson-Bowles commission, attempted to perform the Gangnam Style dance in a bid to turn young people into granny-starving deficit hawks. [via kushibo]
ANIMOTION MACHINE

Longest Daycare The Simpsons theatrical short shoved in front of Ice Age 4 last summer, Maggie Simpson in: “The Longest Daycare” (yes, that’s the full title), has been nominated for what’s known in the streets as an “Oscar” award.

Good for them, I suppose. It was definitely one of the better outputs emanating from the Simpsons Franchise Factory this decade. The fact no one had to recite terrible Modern Simpsons dialogue certainly helped. Even those haters at Dead Homers Society enjoyed it. And it was nice to see director and longtime Simpsons drawer-person David Silverman gobsmacked and thanking everybody on Twitter this morning (hey idiot, save the thanks for your acceptance speech!).

It’s the first Oscar nomination for The Simpsons. When The Simpsons Movie was announced, creator Matt Groening quipped “Come next Oscars, we think it’s going to be Milhouse’s night.” Now, I don’t know if they were intentionally gunning for an Oscar then; James L. Brooks just wanted a hit to rebound from Spanglish, and as far as I can tell they never put out one of those “For Your Consideration” advertisements in trade magazines (though voice actor Harry Shearer’s role in For Your Consideration really messes up the search results). But falling short of garnering a nomination in the Best Animated Feature category – deemed not good enough to compete with a movie about a surfing penguin – certainly had to sting. So perhaps this nomination provides some validation for bruised egos, and maybe a win could convince the producers to finally end the show since there’d be no more mountains for the franchise to climb (hahaha, just kidding, this show will go on forever). Win or lose, I’m betting there’ll be more of these shorts, which won’t have to rely on those pesky voice actors and their dumb mortality.

Other notable nominations this year include Wreck-It Ralph, directed by Simpsons alum Rich Moore and written by Simpsons alum Jim Reardon, for Best Animated Feature, and Simpsons arch enemy Seth MacFarlane for a song he wrote for Ted (he’s also hosting the ceremony, if you hadn’t heard). Yes, both The Simpsons and the Family Guy guy are nominated for Oscars this year. Will these Cartoon Wars never cease???

[The Oscars (part of the Go Network)]

THE INSIDE SCOOP


Jay Westcott/POLITICO

While America was distracted by all the news about the fiscal cliff and the deficit rag, a shifty scenester scoopster broke into Fox TV Headquarters and burgled the whole dang place, stealing Gordon Ramsay’s collection of Taco Bell hot sauces,New Girl‘s wig, and yet another top-secret memo outlining a bunch of future Simpsons episodes for the upcoming world record 25th season, which the shifty scenester sneakthief gave to us for a low fee. Check out the NONEXCLUSIVE memo below:

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SUDDENLY SIMON

Sam SimonFormer Simpsons writer/producer/showrunner/developer/character designer Sam Simon, who still rakes in more than $10 million from the show every year, secretly bought a $2 million ship for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a superteam of anti-whaling activists who are engaged in a war with Japanese whalers. The SSS Sam Simon, which is the group’s fourth ship, will be used to tie up the Japanese whalers’ ships (somehow?) and prevent them from harpooning any whales for supposed “scientific” reasons. So, basically Charlie’s Angels with Simon as Charlie, I guess?

[The Christian Science Monitor]

GABBIN' ABOUT GOD

dohGood news, they’re finally fining The Simpsons for making bad episodes! Well, ok, not The Simpsons directly. And it’s for blasphemy, not quality. But we can at least pretend!!!

Last week, Turkey’s Supreme Board of Radio and Television fined the Turkish broacaster CNBC-E (which I assume is not affiliated with the CNBC that employs Joey Ramone’s muse Maria Bartiromo) 52,951 Turkish Liras – or $29,593.15 in actual money – for airing last year’s Simpsons Halloween special, which featured a blasphemous depiction of God in a parody of Dexter. Here is a description of the segment courtesy of Wikisimpsons:

Ned Flanders drives through a seedy district of Springfield and starts doing lots of good chores, until he dumps a severed body into a local lake. Mr. Burns then drives up to dump nuclear waste in the lake and a large booming voice tells Ned to kill him. Ned does so and dumps the body in the lake too. Back at home, Ned gets ready to kill again when asked by who he thinks is God and also kills Sideshow Bob and Patty and Selma. He eventually finds out that Homer has been ordering these deaths, not God, and goes to kill Homer. Homer then burns Ned’s Bible and the real God comes along and strangles Homer to death. When Marge walks in, God blames Ned for the death. Marge asks God to put everything right but he says that the Devil wouldn’t like it, when he suddenly comes along and asks God to make him tea. Then, Maude Flanders comes along and asks the Devil to come back to bed, annoying Ned greatly.

Um, yeah.

This doesn’t bode well for the upcoming Turkish adaptation of God, The Devil, and Bob.

[The Hurriyet via BBC News]