ANNOYED GRUNTS, SPRINGFIELD SHOPPER

TVShowsOnDVD.com wrote a bunch of words about the horrible DVD packaging of the equally horrible season 11. Here’s an excerpt:

How would you get the discs out of such a tight space then? You have to reach in with two fingers and pinch the edge… making it virtually impossible to not smudge your fingerprints on the “don’t touch!” side of the DVD. Also, it’s a cinch that the discs will get scratched up sooner or later, inserting them and removing them this way since 100% of the disc makes contact with the cardboard. It’s a travesty.

[TVShowsOnDVD.com]

COMING ATTRACTIONS, JEAN MACHINE, MY TWO CENTS

In the opening of the upcoming annual “Treehouse of Horror” episode, Homer attempts to vote for Barack Obama, remarking that “it’s time for change,” but his EVIL ELECTRONIC VOTING MACHINE marks it as a vote for John McCain. A scuffle ensues, and the machine ends up killing him. (SPOILER ALERT: The previous two sentences may have contained spoilers).

In an eerie parallel, Al Jean has entered his eighth consecutive season of running the show, more than any other showrunner’s “term of office” in the show’s history. If his two years co-running the show with Mike Reiss during seasons 3 and 4 are taken into account, Jean will have been a showrunner for half the show’s run by the end of this season. Is it time for change? Even Homer thinks so. [Wonkette]

GROEN DRAIN

matt groeningSimpsons creator Matt Groening has always enjoyed a favorable relationship with the press. Serving as a sort-of go-to cultural commentator, the head of Fox’s billion-dollar cartoon franchise is often quoted on everything from animation to music to high school to Olympic mascots. These days, however, he is often asked to comment on Fox’s other billion-dollar cartoon franchise, Family Guy. In a Wall Street Journal article about Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, MacFarlane’s contemporary is relegated to a handful of sentences, including a paragraph which curiously reads like a line from a Fox press release:

Cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” says, “He’s laid the groundwork with this smash hit show and now, with new media opening up and Seth’s specific kind of rapid-fire visual humor, how to exploit it just depends on how ambitious he wants to be.”

Given that Fox and the Journal are corporate siblings, could this be another sign of The Simpsons‘s diminishing stature in the eyes of Fox executives? [Wall Street Journal]

COMING ATTRACTIONS, WHAA...?!

According to The New York Post, Homer is going to undergo a colonoscopy this season. Actually, it’s not going to be part of the long-running FOX show, it’s going to be part of the multi-network cancer benefit on September 5 titled Stand Up To Cancer. The Post even quotes a line from the segment that already has me laughing, from Marge: “There’s his wedding band! He told me he was having it polished!”

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

THE SIMPSONS

[TV Squad]

ANNOYED GRUNTS

Huell Howser is a big-time TV guy who was parodied in the gay marriage episode (the guy at the beginning who falls off a turnip truck). Upon finding about the parody, he did the following:

I got into the office the next morning and called Matt Groening and said, ‘This is Huell Howser,’ and there was this quiet on the other end of the phone because I knew he thought I was upset. I said, ‘If you’re going to do a parody of me, I could use the money and the exposure. If you’re gonna continue, just let me be my own voice next time.

It is unknown if Howser had any hostages at the time. [Pasadena Weekly]

ANNOYED GRUNTS

A critic at a Television Critics Association panel asked a panel of nine FOX animated show producers why they’re so white:

A critic gets a laugh by starting a question with,”Here’s a question for the women and people of color up there” (there are none) … and asks about the lack of diversity in the genre.

[Family Guy creator Seth] MacFarlane: “There’s something about the medium of animation that it’s male dominated … might also have something to do with the demographics of animation also skewing male.”

[The Live Feed]

ROCK BOTTOM

In an episode aired in early 2003, Homer’s e-mail address is revealed to be Chunkylover53@aol.com. E-mails sent to that address would receive a response from “Homer,” which was actually written by writer Matt Selman (see some of the responses here). That account has remained largely dormant until recently, when it resurfaced on AIM to spread malware to those who had added “Homer” to their buddy list:

Since then, the screen name has been inactive, until a few days ago when Chunkylover53’s “Away” message appeared, prompting people to click on a link and run an executable in order to see “a *new* Internet-only exclusive Simpson’s episode.”

Of course, the file doesn’t show a Simpsons video. It infects the machine with a Trojan that throws up error messages, crashes the computer when attempting to open Windows Explorer and drops other nasty files onto the machine, making it part of what is believed to be a Turkish botnet, according to FaceTime, which secures IM, collaboration and Web apps for corporations.

The real question: why are Matt Selman and his Simpsons co-workers spreading viruses to their fans??? Developing… [CNET]

SUDDENLY SIMON

Apparently The Simpsons was not the only show where former executive producer Sam Simon, whom Matt Groening once called “mentally unbalanced,” was difficult to work with. Hot off the heels of quitting The Simpsons and subsequent court proceedings, Simon created The George Carlin Show, a sitcom starring the late George Carlin, which ran for 27 episodes on FOX in 1994. Later, in a timeline page on his website, Carlin wrote the following reflection: “Lesson learned: always check mental health of creative partner beforehand.” [Macleans.ca]