“Spinoff!” Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul? Well, today billionaire tyrant Rupert Murdoch, CEO of FOX’s parent company News Corp., confirmed he’s splitting his baby in half and spinning off his cherished print assets (including the publishing company HarperCollins, which has published almost all Simpsons books) into a separate company within the next 12 months. Although Murdoch denies it has anything to do with the phone hacking scandal, this move will help insulate FOX News from the British tabloids that done did the hacking, allowing the cable news channel to maintain its high standards and journalistic integrithahahaha
Matt Groening: “It’s pretty obvious that I ran out of jokes a couple of decades ago”
Matt Groening gave a brief interview with Rolling Stone about ending his long-running comic strip Life in Hell that’s worth reading. He reveals that it was only running in 38 papers, compared to its zenith of 250 or so, which is pretty sad. I did make an effort to check it out every week in the LA Weekly, but when they dropped it there were no other LA-based papers to pick up the slack (at least, as far as I could find) so I haven’t been able to read it on a regular basis for years. I did find out fairly late it was running in The Oregonian, though.
Some choice quotes:
Why pull the plug on Life in Hell now? Did you simply run out of jokes?
It’s pretty obvious that I ran out of jokes a couple of decades ago – but that doesn’t stop any cartoonist!
[A] TV producer sneered at the strip and said, “Why do you bother? Give it up.” Because of that, I dug in my heels and kept it going two decades longer than I might have. I also liked the idea of having one slice of my creative output being completely solo, unlike TV animation. It’s very satisfying to sit down at a drawing table by yourself and solve a puzzle with a deadline.
War is Over! Simpsons, Family Guy Writers Band Together To Stop Community From Winning An Emmy
Can critically-‘cclaimed cult college comedy caper Community compete in cartoon and comedy categories? No, according to a bunch of incensed cartoon writers – including all 537 Simpsons writers as well as the Family Guy manatees – who wrote a strongly-worded letter to the esteemed representatives of television to protest Community stepping on their turf (their turf being the Emmy categories Best Animated Program and Short-Form Animated Program). See, once again Community is eligible for an Emmy or two in animated categories thanks to a special animated episode – last year it was the stop-motion “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” (which won Individual Achievement in Animation, the show’s only Emmy so far), this year it’s “Digital Estate Planning,” an excellent video game-based episode. But since Community is normally a live-action show, it’s also eligible for the usual live-action categories that animated shows are apparently ineligible for, including Outstanding Writing in a Comedy.
Matt Groening Quits Life in Hell
Matt Groening announced he’s quit his legendary long-running weekly comic strip Life in Hell just a couple hours ago at The Illustration Conference (ICON) in Rhode Island, according to this guy on Twitter:
Matt Groening just announced that he’s quit Life in Hell. #icon7
— Adam Rex (@MrAdamRex) June 15, 2012
June 22 Will Be Your Last Chance To See Matt Groening Play A Cowbell
For the past twenty years, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Goosebumps author Stephen King, New York Times economist Dave Barry, and a bunch of other folk have been a part of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a dorky all-author band that mostly plays at bookseller conventions. But now, they’re saying “adios amigos” to the hectic rockstar lifestyle and calling it quits. What could have prompted the retirement of these rock legends?? Did they get Yokoed? Were they tired of all the sex and drugs? Is there even still a book industry now that you can look up cat videos on the web? Well, whatever the reason, your last chance to see Matt Groening – a multi-millionaire cartoonist who’s almost 60 – play a cowbell will be at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles on June 22.
WRECK-IT RALPH POISED TO WRECK ALL BOX OFFICE RECORDS!!!
I am real excited about Wreck-It Ralph, an upcoming Disney movie about video game characters, or as I like to think of it, Tron With Jokes. It’s written by former Simpsons director Jim Reardon (he appears in The Simpsons nearly every time there’s a scene at a train station) and directed by former Simpsons director Rich Moore (he’s the first guy on The Escalator to Nowhere). It’s good to see Simpsons alums doing well!
TAG Blog says the animators working on Ralph are “psyched” about it, because as one guy points out, “[t]he company lawyers could have just had us do parodies of other characters, but they went and got the rights to use actual personalities from other video games.” Bowser! Robotnik! All the Street Fighter guys! Clyde the ghost from Pac-Man! Q*bert! Some other guys I don’t recognize! You can see ’em in this trailer Disney released today…
Season 23 Recap
If you missed out on the historic twenty-third season of TV’s The Simpsons, have no fear! This handy recap will get you up to speed in no time.
Dead Homer Society Gives Up
Like I said a couple posts ago, Dead Homer Society is the finest source of Simpsons criticism on the internet, but apparently even they have their breaking point. If you’re unfamiliar with their process, here’s how it goes: after a new episode airs, they parcel out a week’s worth of features including “Ratings FAIL” (which could really use a less-memeish name), where frontman Charlie Sweatpants talks about one particular aspect that bugged him; Crazy Noises, which is basically just a chatlog of the team and sometimes odds & ends; and my favorite feature, the incomparable Compare & Contrast, a comprehensive Glenn Greenwaldian takedown of the episode by simply comparing it to a good episode. It’s a good process that runs the gamut between formal and informal, snap judgments and prudent deliberation.
Well, Mr. Sweatpants has announced next season will get a much less comprehensive treatment, because (shocker) the show is really bad:
For all its manic bumbling and endless stream of pointless cameos, the only enduring characteristic about Zombie Simpsons is how blandly repetitive it is. Episodes consistently have no coherent story, few jokes, fewer funny jokes, wasted guest voices, hacktacular pop culture references, and all manner of things poorly lifted from old episodes. […] I’ve begun to get the sense that we’re often doing little more than citing examples of the same kinds of things each week: it sucked when they made Homer do this, that joke went on too long, that’s not even a joke, this voice sounds terrible, that was done better years ago, this made no sense, etcetera etcetera. […] In short, it seems very unlikely that most of the episodes in Season 24 (or Season 25, or Season 26, or Season Whatever) are going to be worth a close examination and serious criticism.
The rationale is pretty meta – we’re talking about the repetitiveness and general quality of reviews – but it’s true. You could go to any Simpsons forum, click on an episode review from ten years ago, and the complaints would still be applicable to the current season. My guess is there’ll still be Crazy Noises, because it seems easy to do, but no (or a heavily reduced amount of) Compare & Contrasts, which is a shame but understandable for the sake of Charlie’s mental sanity.
Simpsons Now Providing The Opening Act To An Ice Age Sequel
A Simpsons short starring Maggie the Baby is being shoved in front of the fourth Ice Age movie, flying into theaters this summer. The commercial said it’s in 3D except I don’t know if they mean “3D” as in CGI or “3D” as in “you have to wear special glasses while Maggie throws blocks at you” or both. “The Longest Daycare” is being directed by longtime Simpsons guy David Silverman who used to animate the original Simpsons shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show twenty-five years ago.
Dead Homer Society Spawns A Book
For the past few years, Dead Homer Society has been the finest source of Simpsons criticism on the internet, dutifully diagnosing the symptoms of what it affectionately calls “Zombie Simpsons.” Well, now the site’s frontman Charlie Sweatpants has written a whole mini-book on the subject, Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead.
In it, he meticulously lays out not only why The Simpsons is so ridiculously bad now but also how it got that way, with charts and footnotes and stuff! The whole treatise will be parceled out chapter by chapter on the website over the next couple weeks, but if you have a Kindle you can get the whole dang thing right now for just three bucks. Do it or else a Zombie Simpson will fly into your kitchen and make a mess of your pots and pans