According to the French Simpsons site The Simpsons Park, the French networks W9 and Canal + have been blurring Duff Beer in Simpsons reruns. Why? Because a German brewer somehow won a trademark dispute with Fox and now they can legally sell Duff Beer, complete with a logo completely ripped off from the show. Although Fox had two Duff Beer trademarks filed in the European Union, a Belgian court annulled them “because they weren’t registered for an actual beverage” (the German brewer, Duff Beer UG, has applied for their own trademark, which takes a lot of chutzpah). And now that Duff Beer is available in France, French TV has to blur Duff Beer because advertising alcohol is apparently illegal there, and showing this fictional beer that’s been around for over two decades could be seen as an advertisement for this insane rip-off beer that brazenly stole its name and logo and has nothing to do with The Simpsons. Europe is weird.
Basically, All The Other Simpsons Websites Are Dying
Three big Simpsons fansites have gone offline just in the past month or so. Normally, I’d be ecstatic that three of my competitors have been knocked off in one fell swoop, but instead I’m perturbed. Is someone picking off Simpsons fansites? Who could it be? Why are they doing this? And who’s next?
Back in the late 90s, Simpsons fansites were a dime a dozen. Some, like the character sites, had their niches, but most were pretty generalized, meaning they had a little bit of everything: some character bios, episode guides, some .WAV files, some grainy framegrabs that would occasionally rouse Fox lawyers into sending threatening letters to teenagers, maybe some fanart and reviews, and ever-popular “grabpics,” which were framegrabs that were traced over in Illustrator or something and put on white backgrounds. But as time went on, webmasters grew up and moved on, the show got steadily worse, the dynamics of the internet changed, and the number of sites dwindled. That number dwindled even further this month as three Simpsons fansite fixtures met their frosty fate.
There’s 682 Million Unsold Simpsons Stamps Just Waiting To Be Destroyed
Remember those cool-ass Simpsons stamps that I was raving about two years ago? Well it turns out the Postal Service completely misjudged the popularity of The Simpsons Franchise by about, oh, seven hundred million.
According to Bloomberg, all those beautiful, beautiful stamps are now just sitting in a stamp warehouse somewhere waiting to be disposed of, which is a real tragedy:
Bloomberg’s Dominic Chu reports that the money-losing U.S. Postal Service guessed that TV cartoon character Homer Simpson and his family were twice as popular as Elvis Presley when it came to sales of commemorative stamps. The service produced 1 billion of “The Simpsons ” stamps and sold 318 million with the remainder being disposed at a loss.
Justin Bieber Already Ashamed of Simpsons Guest Spot
It was only a matter of time before tween heartthrob Justin Bieber did a guest voice for The Simpsons. And now the inevitable has become reality, and the show’s producers are surely confident it’ll give them a huge ratings boost. It didn’t work last time with Lady Gaga – just the opposite, in fact – but, dog gone it, they’re nothing if not persistent.
The Biebster tweeted the news himself earlier this evening. Here’s his Tweet, embedded below…
Homer Simpson Is The Face Of Slavery
Hey, uh, do you own that pair of slippers that look like Homer’s face? Are you perhaps wearing them right now?? Well, you’ll no doubt be thrilled to learn they were produced with state-sponsored Chinese slave labor.
Al-Jazeera has a 30-minute documentary on their site (use YouTube if it’s not loading) that uncovers how China throws political and religious dissidents into prison camps and forces them to manufacture consumer goods. It specifically highlights these Homer slippers, which were manufactured in Nanjing Prison near Shanghai for the New Jersey company SG Footwear. The company claimed (via Fox for some inexplicable reason) “it has never knowingly utilized involuntary labor.” Ha ha not only do they not deny it but they made their comment through a second company. Anyway, just something to think about next time your browsing the novelty slipper aisle at your local shoe store.
[Al Jazeera via Tumblr]
The Simpsons Gives Up On Episode Titles
We’ve made fun of episode titles in the past for being exceptionally lazy or recycled puns, but at least those took a modicum of effort and at least ten seconds to come up with. This one, however, takes the cake:
SIMPSONS GOING FULL CGI NEXT SEASON????!!!!???
It’s not everyday that a big scoop lands right in your lap, but sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time. Someone… or something… threw a brick through the window of our offices (why people can’t just deliver bricks to the door I’ll never know). Tied to the brick was an Iomega Zip disk. Immediately I knew this was big, and not just because the disk has about 100 times more storage capacity than a normal floppy disk. A week later, after having secured an Iomega Zip drive from eBay, I looked at the disk’s files, or should I say file, because there was only one file: a single JPEG, which you can see below…
There it is. Solid, rock-hard confirmation that Simpsons Studio, the studio that makes The Simpsons, is abandoning the second dimension behind and going Full 3-D CGI for the next few seasons. Needless to say, this will definitely prove controversial… we haven’t heard anything about this until now, so therefore logistically the producers must be trying to keep things under wraps, afraid of what the bad people on the internet will say on the computer at them.
Personally I don’t think they have anything to worry about. Sure, some “purists” out there will whine about how it’s different from Old Simpsons, but I for one applaud the show-makers for taking such a bold leap into the future, and at great expense too. I await the upcoming Simpsons Season 24 with baited breath, and not just because I ate a bunch of fried worms.
No response from FOX or the producers as of yet, probably because I’ve made no attempt to contact them… Developing…
International Tourists Disappointed With Lack of Simpsons Stuff in Springfield, Oregon
Remember a few months ago when everyone thought the fictional cartoon town of Springfield was in Oregon thanks to an egregious misunderstanding on the part of the media? Well, apparently tourists from AROUND THE WORLD have been flocking to the town, evidentially hoping to snap a few photos of their favorite cartoon characters in their natural habitat, at least according to some guy:
“I’ve had people from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland – they’re coming here because this was declared Simpsontown, Springfield, the town of the Simpsons, so people are coming here,” he said.
I don’t really believe this guy, but if just one person from the other side of the world spent a thousand bucks to fly to America because of a misquote, that’s one too many in my estimation.
Anyway, the guy in question put up a few tacky Simpsons statues in front of his yogurt shop, which is apparently the full extent of The Simpsons Experience in Springfield. It’s been leaving tourists disappointed, because I guess they were expecting to see full-fledged Kwik-E-Marts or something? So now the yogurt guy is proposing the city take “just five or 10 blocks” and turn it into a Simpsons-themed shopping center. Now that’ll get people excited! And by “people” I mean copyright lawyers.
[KVAL via Seattle P-I]
John Swartzwelder Joined Twitter
UPDATE: It’s all a cruel hoax by a creative writing student in London. But he did manage to fool a bunch of Swartzwelder’s former co-workers which is pretty damn awesome.
The notoriously reclusive, Ron Swansonesque Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder joined the notoriously narcissistic social microblogging platform known as “Twitter” under the username @SwartzwelderJ.
Bongo Making Comics For Coldplay Now
Bongo Comics, makers of fine Simpsons comics and distributor of SpongeBob comics, is branching out again with Mylo Xyloto (get it, like xylophone??), a six-issue comic book miniseries thunk up and co-written by the band Coldplay. What’s it about? Judging from the book’s cover, it’s about some TRON-like cyberbabe who can emit magic beams from her fingers or something. I guess this is the band’s attempt at doing their own Yellow Submarine? (FUN FACT: A few Bongo Comics people were working on an adaptation of Yellow Submarine but it got abandoned.) Or perhaps this whole “making music and becoming really famous” thing was just Phase 1 of an elaborate scheme for Chris Martin to achieve his true calling, making comic books. Hmm!
Here’s how co-collaborator Mark Osbourne (probably the guy doing most of the actual work) describes it:
The comic is the latest expression of a music-driven feature animated film that the band and I started developing several years ago. It is the story of Mylo Xyloto, a young Silencer on the front lines of a war against sound and color in the world of Silencia. Mylo discovers that the enemy he’s been trained to hate his whole life might not be the enemy after all.
Blah blah blah, etc. Look, if a band is making a comic book and they’re not putting their blood in the ink, then I don’t give a hoot.