fansites

WEB-WATCH

duff beer

While there’s a million Simpsons blogs on Tumblr now, the community of general-purpose Simpsons fansites has diminished greatly over the past few years. Long-time heavyweights like Simpsons Folder and Simpsons Channel have abdicated their thrones, as have smaller sites like The Springfield Connection, Simpsons Zip, Go Simpsonic!, and the listserv Simpsons-L. Clearly, this is because they were all too weak to compete against the likes of rubbercat.net/simpsons, cyberspace’s #1 Simpsons fansite in the world and undisputed champion of the Bortosphere.

Now, in a “Man Bites Dog”-style change of pace, a new fansite has risen: Drink Duff, a throwback to fansites of yore boasting “the latest news, great archives and original content.”

One of its latest posts is the discovery of an alternate ending to The Telltale Head, featuring a few lines that were cut in its second airing and thought to be lost forever (check The Simpsons Archive’s Syndication Cuts Guide). Oh wow… unearthed Simpsons arcana… that’s cool… I’m not scared of this new threat at all…

WEB-WATCH

simpsons channel

*pantomimes swinging a golf club* Looks like I’ve knocked off yet another competitor!

For years, Simpsons Channel was the main news source for the Simpsons fansite community, and one of the few sites dedicated solely to Simpsons news. It provided a script to allow other Simpsons fansites to put its headlines on their own pages. Bam, instant news section.

I can’t say it was particularly interesting – it was mostly just press releases and that sort of thing – but it did what it did well, always had a nice, clean design and, unlike a lot of its peers, kept going long after site owner Adam Wolf lost interest in the show. It did, however, have something of a Walter Cronkite moment back in 2010 when Wolf slammed the cheap, cash-in Season 20 DVD set and even encouraged people to torrent the season instead.

Not to sound overly self-serving, but IN THE NEWS would not exist if not for Simpsons Channel. I used to find “quirky” Simpsons news articles and submit them to Simpsons Channel, but they would never run them. So, I figured if I had my own news blog I could run all the weird overlooked Simpsons news items I wanted. Furthermore, I decided that if Simpsons Channel was the Simpsons fansite equivalent of The New York Times (authoritative, trustworthy, dry), then IN THE NEWS should be its Drudge Report/Gawker equivalent (gossipy, opinionated, snarky). I’d like to think of it as an unrequited Batman/Joker relationship.

And so, after a long 16 years, we bid adieu to Simpsons Channel, which joins Simpsons Zip, Simpsons-L, Simpsons Folder, Go Simpsonic!, and The Springfield Connection in the big web server in the sky.

MY TWO CENTS, WEB-WATCH

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.

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