Well, no. They’d have to be “good again” for, like, a few years before anyone believed it, and they’d have to be really good.
When an episode is half decent it does ripple through the hardcore community.
Like, there was talk about the Christmas episode a year or three ago, which was a kind of ambitious seasonal episode. But I still thought it was too “off” to be “good,” and it was kind of joke poor.
no joke, the weird time dilation that always happens on animated shows makes it very difficult for me to handle watching them
i don’t know why, it just really bothers me. if i think about it too much it actually become kind of unsettling. maggie has been a baby for 30 years. that’s so fucked up.
also equally disturbing but in a more surreal way is how flashbacks to homer and marge’s youth keep taking place in different decades. right? or do they not? in 2018 are they somehow like (presumably) late 30’s parents of young children who went to high school in the 70s
That’s, like, season 10, you philistine! 
I also consider Bart vs Australia to be a premature post-classic episode. Like, there’s something about stringing together a bunch of lame outsider Australia jokes without a B-plot that makes it feel a lot like a season 10 episode. There are a lot of very heightened jokes that are more lame than funny. I hate when you see a joke in a show, and you can imagine the writers laughing about it in a forced way, convincing themselves it’s funny. The Simpsons writers room was always the opposite. They were miserable and actively trying to play goalie against decent jokes.
PTA disbands is a good one, though!
Imagine if Star Trek: TNG had just kept airing every week to this day instead of rotating through different spaceships and crews as they did.
apparently there’s an episode called That '90s Show that flashes back to the 90s to before Bart and Lisa were born. Which seems super disorienting if you’ve been watching the show for several decades and are used to them being born in like, the early 80s and Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear (over here, over there?).
I’m not only imagining it, I’m imagining a TNG episode about it in which Wesley Crusher is having the best day of his life and then he gets a space genie’s lamp and wishes that it could be like this forever, and then it cuts to the whole crew with terrible old age make-up (except Data just has repairs and a Max Headroom twitch), and they’re gradually figuring out that something is wrong, and then at the end Picard gives a hearfelt speech to a very glassy-eyed Wesley Crusher, and I guess it’s a season 2 episode, because it’s terrible and makes no sense.
Yeah that is nightmare inducing weirdness.
I thought you were describing a real episode for a moment there
I watched that one for the novelty, and it’s awful, but they do a decent job of justifying it.
Like, fans hated it on its face, because the flashback episodes are some of the little canon the show has, and they’re all so well done. But the explanation they give at the beginning is pretty good.
Lisa basically points out that the timeline doesn’t quite add up (below). Of course, in older episodes, Homer is actually 29, not 39, but that was (accidentally?) retconned toward the end of the classic era, so I’ll give it to 'em. Way to shoehorn it in!
Urgh that coat-into-fire joke was so painfully predictable
Contrast with the classic “I hate every ape I see, from Chimpan-A…” gag which was funny because it’s predictable. They were like multiple tiers of comedy wisdom higher in those days
Does this trip for you in shows like The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch in which life action actors are playing, like, a ten year old when they’re 20 for the same reason?
Actually, I think before the latest flashback episode, it kind of worked, because they’re seniors in high school sometimes after 1977 (“You Light Up My Life” is on the radio), and Bart is 2 during the 1984 Olympics and Lisa is a baby (Lisa’s First Word). Bart’s first day of school is in 1990 (Lisa’s Sax), and Lisa is age appropriate to that. Maggie is born in '93, which puts Lisa and Bart at the right ages, and Homer’s Barbershop Quartet is in '85 and parallel to events between Lisa’s First Word and Lisa’s Sax.
So yeah: actually it’s dead-on during the classic years. They clearly paid a rare amount of attention to the canon (for The Simpsons).
I actually didn’t buy that explanation from the article. To me that joke is funny, because they established that this is a terrible musical with lame Vaudeville jokes, and that one line so perfectly hits both tones (which are both inappropriate to the source material). Also, while clearly being a very stupid joke, it’s kind of a clever line, in that not anyone could think of it. So yeah: I think that’s why it works. It’s perfectly in context.
Again, in terms of every throw-away joke building a world, I also love that song as a whole. Even though it’s one of only two song snippets you see, you can tell from the musical presentation and through the premise of the lyrics that “you’ll never make a monkey out of me” is a refrain from an earlier song. So the actual theme of this stupid musical was, “you’ll never make a monkey out of me,” which is just such an idiotic and bad-musical-y way to boil down the events of Planet of the Apes.
Comparing it to something you’d see in a contemporary Simpsons episode, the joke isn’t really a parody of Planet of the Apes or a condescending send up of the musical form. It’s about a particular musical that is awful in the way awful musicals are awful. It speaks to how the hypothetical librettist had no respect for the source material. It kind of evokes 70’s cartoon adaptations of hit movies that had no concern for how sensically the TV show connected to the actual movie. And taking the time to make your dumb joke feel real is what makes it funny. “Dur dur dur musicals are dumb” might get a chuckle out of someone who thinks musicals are dumb, but to actually imply through subtle allusion the full scope of an ill-advised Planet of the Apes musical creates a classic chunk of comedy that twelve year olds will download from Limewire to watch on its own.
an idea i had long ago and never did was to start a blog watching every episode in order, and working on the assumption that simpsons roasting on an open fire ends on xmas day 1989, count how much time passes in each episode’s story to discover the true Simpsons Date
surely someone’s already been striken with mania enough to do this
deep understanding of theater
I forget the exact details, but there’s some crazy factoid about that episode. I think it wasn’t going to be a musical version for a while, maybe even into early production.
The Bart Simpson generation has become the Homer Simpson generation.
Am I the only one who annually reads the wikipedia synopses for current Simpsons episodes? They have been hilarious bad and insane for years, some are like those self-generating neural network bots.
“Mr. Burns builds a doomsday ark, after he believes that the end of the world is near when he sees an old Orson Welles show about Nostradamus. Professor Frink comes up with a new way of testing everyone in Springfield after Burns wants a test to determine who should go on a spaceship with him.”
“After getting hearing aids, Grampa finally figures out what everyone says about him. Meanwhile, Principal Skinner discovers that his mother hid an admission letter from Ohio State from him, sabotaging his burgeoning marching band career.”
“Homer discovers Maggie can whistle. Meanwhile, Marge designs Fat Tony’s brothel.”
“Marge and Lisa have creative differences after creating a graphic novel together.”
Are those real?