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stoned simpsons

Twitter user @Homer_Marijuana‘s gripping Simpsons weedpunk saga that took cyberspace by storm has come to an end, and is a must-read for anyone who’s a fan of The Simpsons, irony, millennial angst, and/or illicit activity.

First, a little backstory: after allegedly losing some sort of bet with internet mogul vrunt, the Twitter user formerly known as collatingbones was forced to reconfigure his brand around the concept of “what if homer simpson smokes weed.” For the first couple of weeks, @Homer_Marijuana posted musings about the concept of beloved cartoon icon Homer Simpson smoking the marijuana drug and unrelated tweets.

Then on June 29th it shifted gears and settled into a narrative, told almost solely in short bursts of dialogue one tweet at a time, about the Simpsons and their unliked son Ken smoking weed on a gazebo known as the “Herb Fortress.” The stakes grew higher the next day: after America is attacked on 9/11, Bart (age 19) is deployed to Iraq and becomes a remorseless killer. As Homer tries to stop the war, the Simpson men become mixed up with Al Qaeda and international drug lord Circus Bob. The family becomes torn apart, and Lisa temporarily moves in with the twin aunts Thelma and Selma. Sonic the Hedgehog grapples with the death of his father and rival dealer Bender moving into his territory. Nelson searches for a surrogate father. Apu is discovered to be very valuable. Flanders tries to learn how to be like Homer, but ends up draining the Simpsons’s gravity bong by mistake. Maggie is briefly disowned for accidentally feeding thirty years of kief to the dog.

Later, Bart returns home and has trouble re-assimilating back into society. Maggie becomes obsessed with megabats. Moe’s efforts to get a family has tragic consequences. Global drug magnate Mr. Burns plans something shady, and his former ally Officer Wiggum becomes determined to crack down on the drugs that have turned Simpson City into a den of iniquity. Throughout the story, characters lament their fate, Lenny, Carl, and Moe (later, Bumblebee Man) comment on story developments like a Greek chorus, and it becomes a musical towards the end.

Sound intriguing??? The whole story has been collected and reformatted into screenplay format on Scribd for your perusal.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

What do you do if you’re a long-running show that’s totally out of ideas? Do you scrounge up long-discarded episode ideas from the Trash Co. waste disposal unit and try to pass them off as new? What if you’ve completely exhausted that avenue? What’s your next recourse? Well, if you’re The Simpsons, you do the next best thing – scrounge up long-discarded fanfiction.

A little while ago, comedy movie king Judd Apatow told Slashfilm he wrote a fanscript for The Simpsons way back in 1990 after only five or six episodes had aired, which he described like so:

And what it was about was they went to see a hypnotism show and at the hypnotism show, they made Homer think he was the same age as Bart. And then the hypnotist had a heart attack. So now Homer and Bart became best friends and they spent the rest of the show running away because Homer didn’t want responsibility and didn’t want to be brought back to his real age. So I basically copied that for every movie I’ve made since.

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COMING ATTRACTIONS, MY TWO CENTS

Seddie by KarlaRockangelMy biggest beef with The Simpsons nowadays is how much it feels like fan fiction. Characters speak in the same stilted voice, their personality traits are either ignored or sacrificed so they can be crammed into a ridiculous situation, and storylines tend to revolve around shocking new revelations, origin stories, and pairing characters together. So I’m not surprised that the show is actually giving control to shippers.

This Sunday, after a new episode where Mrs. Krabappel (she and Mr. K should really get that divorce finalized) starts dating Ned Flanders, viewers will get to decide whether their relationship continues, in a half-assed attempt to generate “buzz.” It’s exactly like that Batman thing from the 1980s where readers decided whether Robin lived or died, except with “Nedna.” Yes, they’ve already coined a name for it.

The Simpsons has a good track record of cleverly subverting their shameless stunts: Mr. Burns was shot by the least likely suspect; a fan-created character was killed instantly. But I highly doubt even a hilarious twist could salvage this desperate gimmick. Will it be a forgettable waste of time? Or will it be a forgettable waste of time? (Answer: It will be a forgettable waste of time.) [TVbytheNumbers]

THOSE CLOWNS IN CONGRESS, WHAA...?!

Your Elected Representatives are using Your Tax Dollars to write Simpsons fanfiction. There is no explanation for this.

Republican Senate hopeful Montgomery Burns today joined with Mayor Joe Quimby, D-Springfield, to support the Senate’s gazillion-dollar SCHIP bill.

“If the poor children can get a piece of the action, why can’t I?” explained Burns at a MoveOn.org rally in Capital City. “The little darlings are needy? Me, too. I need somebody to pay. Quimby here says he knows a bunch of low-income nobodies who are ripe for the picking. Excellent.”

Read the rest, it gets better. [House Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans via Wonkette]