Watching Simpsons

So, after all these years, The Simpsons are still going strong. Last Sunday’s season opener featured Stephen Colbert, and, one can argue, that the season is starting off after a strong summer that saw the success of the first feature length Simpsons film. This time around, rating wise, The Simpsons didn’t boast of the highest numbers, but if one takes into mind that it’s football season, the show didn’t fare that badly. According to Reuters:

Primetime began with Fox getting a 15.3 million NFL runover between 7 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., which seemed to dampen the first half-hour of the season premiere of “60 Minutes”

The Simpsons didn’t do half bad:

The season premieres of “The Simpsons” (9.4 million, 4.7/12) and “King of the Hill” (7.7 million, 3.7/9) prevailed against CBS’ “Power of 10″ (7.5 million, 1.7/4) and the second hour of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” (7.8 million, 2.5/6).

According to some recent polls findings listed by The Press Association, Scotland is not faring well, if it all, in the imaginations of America:

Forget Sean Connery, Ewan McGregor or even Rod Stewart - for many Americans, Scotland is summed up by a character from The Simpsons.

For all the promotional efforts by the Scottish Government to put the country in a good light, it is groundskeeper Willie that strikes a chord with the Americans.

Research has also found that some see Scotland as a rural backwater.

And it revealed that overseas visitors do not like the “best small country in the world” tag.

The findings came in Executive-funded research on the impact of efforts to promote Scotland in the US and elsewhere.

So, imagine that. Americans think the Scots are a bunch of backwoods types. I remember Groundskeeper Willie once remarking, “Brothers and sisters are natural enemies, like the English and the Scots, or like Scots and other Scots.” Certainly, that just adds to the problem. Of course, having a program that’s been around for more then a decade and a half and has been translated, via voice over, in many different languages doesn’t help either.

Sometimes, pollsters think up wacky things. Sometimes, teachers think up wacky assignments. Ken Palmer, in The Flint Journal, reports this alarming bit of news:

About 25 fourth- and fifth-graders at Grand Blanc City School spent part of Monday - Constitution Day - posing those questions to passers-by at several locations in Flint, including college campuses.

Their results? Most people can identify the Simpsons but can’t name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Of most TV shows, the Simpsons can boast of having one of the most memorable musical intros. The show has been on the air for so long, it’s easy to understand how that might have happened. Yet, there’s more to the music of the show then just the intro. As Wayne Bledsoe points out in Knoxnews.com:

Clausen is a little frustrated that Danny Elfman sometimes gets credit for creating the music for the television show “The Simpsons.”

“Danny was there for one day,” says Clausen. “I’ve been there for 17 years.”

Elfman composed “The Simpsons’” main theme, but it is Clausen who writes the music for each episode, including writing music for all the songs on the new album “Testify,” the third release of original music from “The Simpsons.”

Of course, The Show has had lots of memorable songs — Mr. Burn’s “See My vest” immediately comes to mind. That’s why, the forthcoming CD is going to be great. Basically, it’s likely to be a “greatest hits.”

As for Clausen’s song writing process, Bledsoe quotes him as:

“The songs always originate from lyrics in the script,” says Clausen. “The original scriptwriter will come up with the first draft of the lyric, which, hopefully, will carry the story ahead. And once the script is turned in to our group of writers, they’ll probably do six drafts of the script before it’s released. Then I get a copy of the lyrics they’ve come up with and I compose the song to the lyrics, record a demo of the song with a small instrumental group and studio singers, so everybody knows how the song is supposed to go. We’ll record the cast voices on that track and make a composite mix of that and send it to the animators, and the animators animate to that track. Then it will come back to me about six or eight months later. I will then throw away that small rhythm section track and replace it with a full orchestra. And that will happen about two weeks before air time.”

Just when many were starting to expect, or even fear, an ongoing Simpsons film franchise, Al Jean shows up to splash cold water on them. According to a Josh Tyler article in Cinema Blend:

Simpsons producer Al Jean recently spoke on the whole sequel thing, and admitted we have a wait on our hands if we want more big screen Homer. He tells The New York Post “We would only do a sequel if we believed it was a movie that had to be made, just like we did with the first one.” See what I mean about the long wait?

If they do one, he says it’ll be for the right reasons. In other words non-monetary ones, which I’m sure should make the execs at Fox happy. Jean says, “We wouldn’t want to do it just because the first one was successful, or because we wanted to make money off of a movie. We’d only do it if we had a script that we thought was great [and] there’s no script at this point.”

This is another moment from the Tracy Ullman show. Given the nature of the shorts, it’s interesting how the dynamic changed with the format. Shorter bits are not great places for developing character, and as such, all the characters seem a lot more one dimensional. After all, the point of a shorter bit is basically to convey one elaborately set up joke. In this case, we have another “Bart the Brat” segment.

Again, probing through Simpsons prehistory proves fascinating. Not only is the animation cruder, different, but the characters and the universe is more chaotic and unmapped the the established Springfield universe in place. Still, some of the good points have always been there and just needed more development. Take, for example, Itchy and Scratchy, the mouse and cat duo also appeared, if but for a second, on the Tracy Ullman show…

Well, Mr. Burns had a show-tunes ditty in “See My Vest.” The Simpsons, all around, have had a varied musical output, in terms of what’s been featured on the show. Homer went to band camp with Kenny Loggins, and in this clip, he’s with David Byrne, singing nothing but sweet character assassination.

Another Professor Frink moment, with Comic Book Guy in tow. Both characters are two of the unsung heros of the lesser characters.

I think part of the reason why the simpsons has been around for so long is the writing. Basically, the show has almost over type of joke in it, and there’s always a variety. You have Itchy and Scratchy violent slap stick, word play, situational comedy, and then, the writers throw in brainy stuff like this…

This will be one of the dvd bonus features, once the dvd is released.