The Simpsons Archive

WEB-WATCH

comic book guyIf you’ve been using the internet for the past five years, mayhaps you’ve noticed a growing trend of episode-by-episode recaps and reviews of television shows. Virtually every major blog does a recap of Mad Men, Girls is considered “fantastically popular” to those within that New York media bubble, and even The Gray Lady has gotten in on the action. The epicenter for the TV recap industry is of course The A.V. Club, which greatly expanded its television section in an insane quest to review every episode of every TV show, with a (self-admitted) tendency to lapse into “pretentious twaddle” in the course of explaining what episode 702 of The Big Bang Theory says about the human condition.

Who’s responsible for all this? Slate places the blame squarely on alt.tv.simpsons, the infamous nerdy Simpsons newsgroup personified by the Comic Book Guy:

Long before the rise of TV recap culture, its best and worst elements commingled in the alt.tv.simpsons laboratory. The content ranged from meticulous (a list of the show’s blackboard and couch gags) to smart (a later-proven theory that Maggie shot Mr. Burns) to overcritical (in the middle the unimpeachably great Season 4, somebody started the thread “Simpsons in decline?” in which one poster claimed that “Marge vs. the Monorail,” a classic episode, “had 0 good quotes”) to offensive (e.g., “Lisa has a proto-dyke Marxist Jew agenda”).

Yep, sounds the internet all right. I’m sure whatever the big Star Trek newsgroup was at the time also played a big role – Trekkies are responsible for slash fiction and fandoms, mind you – but here it merits only a throwaway reference.

The rest of the article talks about the Simpsons producers’ relationship to the alt.tv.simpsons, which is mildly interesting. It doesn’t mention this, but there’s a Life in Hell strip I’d very much like to see that pretty much just quotes a scathing review of the Republican-bashing episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts” verbatim (there’s a transcript in this episode capsule; Control+F “Galvanek”), including this choice quote:

I would get such a kick right about now in seeing Groening writhing in pain as he dangled by a section of his intestine from a tree. At the very least I’m hoping for a sloooooow painful death via some horrible illness of his nervous system, on that allows him to remain fully aware until his very last breath.

Hmm, kinda makes you wonder why Matt Groening isn’t on Twitter.

Also, not that it was ever in any doubt, but Slate links to irrefutable proof that Alan Sepinwall, king of the TV recap industry, is a wiener: a post on alt.tv.simpsons where he complains about a continuity error. Haw, haw! nelson

[Slate]

TREEHOUSE OF ERROR

SpringfieldLike a bunch of lemmings jumping off a cliff, just about every news outlet from CBS News to the E! network to the gadget blog Gizmodo to the New Yorker (!) to the Los Angeles Times to the FOX Network to local newscasts around the country has regurgitated the SHOCKING news that Simpsons creator Matt Groening had finally revealed the location of the fictional cartoon town of Springfield: his home state of Oregon. Except, uh, he didn’t say that at all and you’d have to be severely incompetent at basic reading comprehension to think otherwise?

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WEB-WATCH

barty, it’s your birthday / happy birthday, bartyFor some inexplicable reason, the internet randomly decided that yesterday (or today, depending on who you ask) would be Bart Simpsons’s 32nd birthday, if he were capable of aging and also not a made-up character.

As far as I can tell from Google’s incredibly imprecise realtime search, the news of Bart’s mortality appears to have originated from the Twitter account of record label Moodgadget, which got more than a hundred “retweets.” Soon, “Bart Simpson” became a “Trending Topic” on Twitter for quite a while and news of his birthday spread like a funny cat video through Facebook and the rest of the internet.

The date isn’t based on any premiere date (as every Simpsons fan knows, The Simpsons first appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987; the Christmas special aired on December 17, 1989; and the series proper premiered on January 14, 1990), any explicit date given in the series, nor the birthdates of his voice actress, Nancy Cartwright (October 25th), or would-be namesake, creator Matt Groening (February 15th).

So, when is Bart’s birthday? The good people over at the Simpsons Archive already determined it years ago. According to the 1992 episode “Lisa’s First Word,” Lisa was born during the 1984 Summer Olympics. Specifically, Marge started going into labor during the women’s 100 meter butterfly, which was scheduled on August 2nd. In the 1997 episode “My Sister, My Sitter,” Bart exclaims that he is “two years and thirty-eight days” older than Lisa, which would put Bart’s birthday on or around June 25th.

WEB-WATCH

Simpsons-L was a listserv dedicated to a show that hasn’t been consistently funny since the late 1990s, run by The Simpsons Archive, a website launched in 1994 before most people had PCs, maintained mostly by people from a usenet newsgroup created in 1990. With three levels of obsoleteness batting against it, I suppose it was only a matter of time before it joined Geocities in the great internet boneyard. But the news of its demise was still a little surprising to me, like finding out telegrams still existed.

I subscribed to it a few years back in order to to stay abreast of the latest Simpsons news and views, delivered instantly to my inbox at the lightning-fast pace of about once a month. If my Gmail label is accurate, there have been only 21 messages this year, so far. Chalk it up to yet another online Simpsons community that got sick of this lumbering zombie of a TV show.

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NOISELAND ARCADE

street viewNo, of course not, but watching this video from GameSpot (specifically, from 3:43 onward) sorta reminded me of it. Lately, I’ve been nostalgic for Virtual Springfield, which I used to “play” in middle school. If you’re unfamiliar with this classic 1997 Simpsons CD-ROM time-waster, you should totally read this article Bob “bobservo” Mackey wrote about it.

I appreciate how the game makers managed to place pretty much every location that had appeared in the series to that point into a geographical layout that actually made sense, instead of randomly chucking districts together in the face of all logic. If Fox Interactive got their shit together, they could re-use this stuff, add new places from the subsequent 30 seasons of the show, and throw it up on the web with a Google Maps-like interface as a neat web-bonus thing. It would totally blow this fan-made map of Springfield out of the water in terms of sheer coolness.

Also, I’m pretty pleased that the aforementioned video contains a a mostly uninterrupted version of Troy McClure’s welcoming introduction (skip to 1:04), Phil Hartman’s only appearance in a Simpsons video game, because people on YouTube skip over all the dialogue parts for some inexplicable reason. It’s a good Simpsons quote, despite being written by some intern for a point-and-click CD-ROM non-game:

Welcome to Springfield! I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me as town spokesman from such computer travel guides as {Smother Me In Shreveport} and {Living, Loving and Lubbock}. Of course, we all know Springfield for its award-winning dandelions and as birthplace of the glove compartment. But that’s merely scratching the surface of a place the great Calvin Coolidge once labelled, “a pea-sized town with lima bean-sized dreams.” So, warm up your clicking finger and let’s explore a land the poets call Springfield, USA!

The titles of the two other travel guides would vary each time. Here’s a complete (?) list of the other titles, which are curiously omitted from The Simpsons Archive (yet they include stuff from a screensaver???):

  • Eeney-Meeney-Miney Murphreesborough
  • Yuma: It’s Seniorific
  • Smother Me In Shreveport
  • Living, Loving and Lubbock
  • Duluth, It’ll Grow On You
  • Suddenly Tulsa
  • Freedonia: Gateway to Wichita
  • Fairbanks Needs Women
  • I Left My Soul In Sacramento
  • Tender Lovin’ Newark
  • Hats Off To Fargo
  • Pinch Me, I’m In Boise

I think I speak for everyone when I say it’s time we stop fetishizing 8-bit Nintendo games and start a virtual storybook revival.

TORTURE LAND

Lest you think The Simpsons Archive, the holy grail of Simpsons nerdery, has been slacking (it is currently seven years behind on its encyclopedic episode capsules), contributor Tim Reardon [?!] has written an incredibly thorough 18,719- word summary, transcript, and review of The Simpsons Ride, including every line in the queue videos, the pictures on the walls, and a list of every character who appears in it. Why pay $50 to go on the ride when you can read this instead? [The Simpsons Archive]

AZTEC THEATRE

For years, The Simpsons Archive has had a page documenting a long-lost Simpsons short called “Nazis on Tap” involving Hitler, Stalin, and talking dogs. It was supposed to air in Season 2, but was never animated and apparently forgotten about. I always assumed it was a joke, but apparently it’s very real — Simpsons Archive webmaster Jouni Paakkinen recently discovered the long-lost audio track on YouTube, probably uploaded by some disgruntled show staffer who’s about to get 20 years of jailtime.

“Aye carumba, the Fuhrer!” [YouTube via Simpsons-L]