WEB-WATCH

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

IN THE NEWS, the news section of the beloved award-winning Simpson’s fansite rubbercat.net/simpsons, is proud, albeit modestly, to announce its major refurbishment! In moving from Blogger to Movable Type, IN THE NEWS has been completely redone to look like a somewhat presentable website. Here a look at the changes:

  • Small images have been added to most every post to make them look interesting, and a handful of youtubes have been embedded. I don’t know why I was so averse to including pics & vids on this thing
  • Individual post pages instead of awkward jump-to-an-entry monthly archives!
  • Archives are searchable! Now you can find out every time Utit Choomuang has been mentioned (zero so far)
  • Categories are now clickable! I could never figure out how to style tags with Blogger
  • There are a handful of posts from the first few months that I deleted because they were just me quoting a bunch of paragraphs from utterly uninteresting articles without adding commentary or context or jokes, which made me feel really parasitic
  • More jokes added and old bad jokes have been tweaked to make them funny!!
  • Fresher news on the rubbercat.net/simpsons home page since I don’t have to do that manually now

The End

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EXCLUSIVE

The Simpsons turn 20 today (that is, if you don’t count the Christmas special as the first episode and completely ignore the original shorts from The Tracey Ullman Show), and there’s been a number of retrospectives to mark the occasion. An oft-repeated claim in many histories is that creator Matt Groening, fearing the loss of his Life in Hell characters, came up with the Simpsons in fifteen minutes before a meeting with Ullman producer James L. Brooks. But the characters actually originated nearly 40 years ago, in an unpublished novel Groening wrote in high school:

Chat Transcript (April 6, 1999):

Question hobgoblin: How old were you when you first came up with the idea for “The Simpsons”? I know that the show has been on for a long time.
[…]
Matt_G “The Simpsons” originated in high school.
Matt_G I wrote a bleak little novel called “The Mean Little Kids” starring a teenage Bart Simpson with buckteeth and a very bad complexion.

Interview with Robert William Kubey, published in Creating Television: Conversations with the People Behind 50 Years of American TV (Late 1991):

How quickly did The Simpsons gel in your mind?

I needed to come up with an idea really quickly. In the back of my mind was the idea of doing something that might possibly end up spinning off into its own TV show, so I created a family which I thought would lend itself to a lot of different kinds of stories. In high school I had written a novel, a sort of a very sour Catcher in the Rye, self pitying, adolescent novel starring Bart Simpson as a very troubled teenager. I took that family and transferred it, made them younger, and then drew. It took about 15 minutes to design the characters the first time out.

Were they all the same characters that we now know and love?

Yes, but they’ve been transformed.

Why didn’t you leave Bart as an adolescent?

TV does children really badly, and I thought there was room for something different. Teenagers are already running rampant on television, but kids are done very unrealistically in sitcoms. Sometimes, a particular character gels with an audience and becomes the star.

Was Bart at the center all along?

Yeah. The rest of the Simpsons in my original conception were in a struggle to be normal and Bart was the one who thought that being normal was boring.

And now you know… the rest of the story.

KANCELLATION KOUNTDOWN

When asked how long The Simpsons has left, Fox bigwig Kevin Reilly said “We have it for two more seasons and then we’ll sit down and see where we are,” leaving the door open to the possibility that the show may not be renewed during the next contract renegotiations. [iF Magazine]
WEB-WATCH

Simpsons Channel has returned from the dead, and it’s mad as hell!!! In a departure from the normally staid tone of the site, site owner Adam Wolf posted 10 reasons why readers should not buy the recently released Season 20 DVD/Blu-ray set. He even encourages readers to BREAK THE LAW by providing a link to a torrent site. Is nothing sacred??? [Simpsons Channel]
KANCELLATION KOUNTDOWN

my two centsI’m going to go out on a limb and declare that The Simpsons will finally, mercifully end in 2011, after twenty-two seasons.

  • The show has yet to be renewed beyond the 2010-2011 season (season 22), so there’s no guarantee there’ll be a Season 23.
  • In November, the Animation Guild blog mentioned that the writers were working on “another thirteen episodes”. Each production season, the last couple of episodes become the first episodes of the next season; these are called “holdovers.” The current season (season 21) has eight holdovers – notice the production codes in this chart. Presumably, this means next season will also have eight holdovers, which when coupled with the aforementioned thirteen episodes will fulfill a complete season order of twenty-one episodes, with no holdovers for a 23rd season.
  • The show has been losing a million viewers each season for the past couple seasons with no end in sight. It often gets lower ratings than Family Guy. Each episode costs somewhere around $3 million. All of these must be major concerns for Fox executives… but then again The Simpsons is the sixth-highest earner on television, and makes like a billion dollars from merchandise and syndication, so ratings are probably irrelevant.
  • The 20th anniversary hoopla feels like a final victory parade to me, a last hurrah before they ride into the sunset. It’s probably wise to end it while goodwill is high.
  • I just want to be right so I can look prophetic.
NOISELAND ARCADE

binky2009 was the year of “fixing” beloved Simpsons things that weren’t broke to begin with, starting with the godawful new HD title sequence and ending with an iPhone version of the Simpsons Arcade Game from 1991, one of the very few Simpsons video games that is still remembered fondly.

What’s different: The storyline (no more Smithers stealing Maggie for some bizarre reason), you can only play as Homer, you can slap him to revive him, new design (as far as I can tell, it looks like a modern episode and not all pixelated), and characters/locations that weren’t around or as iconic in 1991 (including the Republican Party Headquarters and Rich Texan).

What’s the same: The basic controls (I think?), and the dated Binky-with-a-ghetto-blaster level transistions (which I like). [United Simpsons]