Sunday, December 16, 2007

Daaaaaaaaaaang Simpsons tonight was good!!

Simpsons tonight was reaaaaaaaaaaaally good. Man they have turned it up a notch. Last season and this one (18 and 19) have really stepped it up a notch. It's brilliant. They are going for some really reaaaaaaally crazy stuff, and I love it. The focus of Simpsons for quite some time seemed to be guest star after guest star, nonsensical plots that just involved Homer doing something stupid, just pure randomness without a major payoff story-wise. Recently I've noticed a really massive shift in the writing and general storytelling, and it is SO good. Last Season almost every single episode had a fierce Anti-War message, with almost every episode having some commentary on the war or making fun of the government's foreign policy. Pretty interesting to see Simpsons get so political again, you wonder what kind of effect this has on the viewers. I wonder if kids/teenagers/young adults watching the show get the message and start asking their own questions about it. Pretty cool.

This season is quite good so far, more randomness but generally it's been pretty funny. Tonight's episode although was exceptional. The way they "played with the medium" was just fantastic, they really made use out of the fact that you can really do ANYTHING in Animation, and although it is supposed to be rooted in things that humans understand, you can really push the boundaries of animation into some wild and far-out fantastical worlds. Pretty cool stuff tonight, Homer travels between his memories in this device that Professor Frink invents. It was really hilarious but also the animation was super cool. My favourite part was when Bart and Lisa are in the "time bubble" with Homer, going between his memories, and they drop out of it and try to alter his memory by "jogging his memory" by jumping up and down on the frame (on the screen!!) It's so unique and cool and kinda hard to describe... just hilarious concepts though.

There was a really funny YouTube moment there too, where they have a very well-done piece of animation showing a video of Homer for every year of his life, and then at the end of the video a YouTube-style UI pops up and shows Homer's video with ratings (and the view count is 4000 people for his video) and then right underneath it is something totally ridiculous, a supposed video of a cat smoking while sitting on a toilet, haha, and the view count on that is 63,000,000. :) Pretty hilarious and sharp pop-culture joke about how much junk there is on YouTube
and how those ridiculous videos are what people actually watch.

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