After a long weekend in South Bend it is slightly difficult for me to think of a blog topic. Even my standby rant about the time change doesn’t come into play this year. I was eternally grateful for the extra hour of sleep this morning and since I immediately lost that hour when I flew from Chicago to Philadelphia my body feels pretty much exactly like it should. Though I do fully expect to be complaining about how dark it is in tomorrow’s post.
I guess what I’ll write about instead is the Simpsons Halloween Special and the Simpsons in general. Now I had heard talk that this was going to be one of the best Halloween specials ever and after watching it I really have to wonder what those people were watching. True, the opening bit of Homer trying to vote for Obama only to have the machine constantly count the votes for McCain was quite good. The problem is I had already seen the bit. They had it on YouTube and I watched it weeks ago.
The rest of the episode was really ho hum. We had a Transformers parody a year after people gave a damn about Transformers. It was another “weird stuff happening as a result of a gift purchase” but it did not have the humor of say, the evil Krusty doll. (Ok, the nacho machine crying was funny.) We then had a few minutes on Homer killing celebrities which barely caused a chuckle though the opening image was really good. The ending with the retelling of the Charlie Brown Halloween episode was awesome though and probably could have been built upon. That was actually funny.
But in all honesty for what is typically one of the funniest episodes of the year there really wasn’t much humor in it at all. This has been true of the show a lot over the past few seasons. They’ve seemed to really have run out of things to do with the characters. Given that the show first came on the air in 1990 that really isn’t surprising. Not only have the fleshed out the story of all the main characters they also have full stories for Krusty, Chief Wiggum and a host of secondary characters. We’re now at the point where maybe we’ll give Jasper or Disco Stu an episode just for something different.
This makes the fact that the cast has all signed on for another three seasons all the more amazing and worrisome. It is amazing in that it is so far and away the longest running show on television that it is astounding. And it is still some of the best stuff on the air. It is just that it has lost a lot of its punch. You can’t be the voice of the alternative when you are the longest running show in history. At some point you become the mainstream. Plus, you simply run out of stories to tell. That is why they are now rewriting the past in some episodes much to the dismay of fans like me. I’ve watched every episode the show has had and I didn’t have to rent DVDs to do so. Messing with things like continuity pisses me off. I don’t want to have the show disappear from my Sunday nights but I’m not sure that I want to be watching it a decade from now if it loses everything that made it special.
Best of 120 Minutes: Yes! Social F’ing Distortion! Screw you Sony, MTV lets me embed this now. One of my favorite bands though no one will ever believe me on this point. I’ve even gone to their shows and if you know me you will wonder exactly how much I stand out. Punk rock the way I like it to be.
The five random CDs for the week:
1) The Iguanas “Live at Wolf Trap”
2) Rhett Miller “The Instigator”
3) Old 97’s “Fight Songs”
4) Josh Ritter “In the Dark”
5) Alejandro Escovedo “Real Animal”
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