Next Episode? I'm tempted to make it Some Enchanted Evening so I can talk about the core of the animation issues and how bad it almost was even though its the last episode of the season.
Next Episode? I'm tempted to make it Some Enchanted Evening so I can talk about the core of the animation issues and how bad it almost was even though its the last episode of the season.
I'm reminded of when Harmon and Ising left Warner Bros cartoons in 1933, (or more precisely Schlesinger Studios, the affiliated animation house) taking their character Bosco the Talk-Ink Kid with them, and the remaining animators scrambled to come up with a replacement. They came up with Buddy (Bosco! Only white! And with even less personality!), and animated two or three shorts with him.
These were so bad, that WB rejected them out of hand, and Schlesinger Studios was on the verge of collapse, until they lured Fritz Freleng back to the studio. He managed to take two of the cartoons and cobble together a usable one from them that WB accepted.
Though it still stank. Every frickin' Buddy cartoon stank.
Being enough of a Simpsons veteran that I'm listening to a commentary where they refuse to name someone because of the history involved but then all do very obvious Gábor Csupó impressions.
Obviously, the studio went on to better things shortly thereafter, but even at their height, it's startling how UGLY Gabor Csupo work always was throughout the entire 90s.
Episode 1x13: Some Enchanted Evening
Directed by Kent Butterworth (Bad version), David Silverman (Good version)
Written By: Al Jean and Mike Reiss
Original Airdate: May 13, 1990
Summary: Feeling neglected by her family, Marge calls into Dr Marvin Monroe's show to get advice. He recommends that Marge make an ultimatum and potentially leave Homer for his neglect and mistreatment of her as soon as he gets home from his job. By coincidence, Homer has been listening at work and despondent goes to Moe's, afraid to face her. Moe recommends that he show her how much he appreciates her with dinner, dancing and the best sex you can have at a hotel just off the freeway. Homer goes home with a big bouquet of flowers and woos Marge. They go out for a night on the town and some motel sex but meanwhile, they've left the kids with a babysitter who an America's Most Wanted parody tells them is the Babysitter Bandit. After a fraught struggle they manage to subdue her as Homer comes home and finds her tied up. He apologizes and pays her triple her rate, letting her go before a news crew and police show up to the house looking for the infamous criminal the kids had caught. Homer in a panic insists she subdued him in a karate battle and it cuts to them watching the coverage in bed. Homer laments that he's not that bright but Marge assures him that anyone who can raise kids that can subdue and capture a total stranger on a moment's notice can't be all that bad. They agree to "make up" again.
Brad Storch. No, Betty Symington: Hoo boy, buckle up for later sections.
Episode impressions: As I get older, the Bart and Lisa hijinks in some episodes become less interesting and the Homer and Marge bits get way better. They go to the relationship problems well a lot during the show, but fundamentally, at their best, Marge and Homer are great together as far as TV couples go. So while there's some fun with the Babysitter Bandit, I would much rather just see Homer and Marge be a sweet, imperfect middle aged couple. Homer annihilating his knee trying to be romantic, the sex jokes, the essential awkwardness of being older. Its all so good.
Audio Commentary Impressions: So the story according from the audio commentary is, they're watching the completed animation on Some Enchanted Evening and its getting really quiet because its very obvious that the final animation they just got back from Korea is absolutely wrong for the Simpsons.
Finally, James L Brooks angrily says: "This is shit"
[Matt Groening Gábor Csupó Impression]: "What do you mean shit?"
James L Brooks: "A foul substance that causes disease"
The room goes silent and people start very quickly finding any excuse to be anywhere but there until its "only the people most responsible"
[Matt Groening Gábor Csupó Impression]: "Maybe your script is not sooo funny? Maybe the Scriiiipt is Shiiit? HMMMMM?"
*room explodes in argument*
They had to wait a week for Bart The Genius to come back to know if they even had a show they could air. David Silverman tried to assure them that his was much better but Groening talks about not being able to sleep for an entire week. This episode was a disaster and it sincerely almost killed the show. A very large part of the commentary is devoted to the crisis of this episode and talks about how much they had to fix, with them pointing out new and old animation. For many parts they kept the old animation but changed the background, but many parts had to be completely redone and end up looking more conventionally Simpsons in quality. There are some mea culpas involved here that I'll go over in a bit, but this was truly the sky falling in on their head and it was in many ways their own fault.
This is absolutely an amazing commentary with everyone having much more energy. A lot of it is spent talking about bizarre choices that happened, including a cartoon elf being decapitated and its blood drank by a bear, which David Silverman swears has to be a legend but Matt Groening has all the original animation and says its real. Another great bit is Matt talking about how he and his sisters Lisa and Maggie (yes) had a parade of babysitters, including one that when the door closed, pulled out a book called Psycho-Cybernetics and said "My life is based around this book and I'm going to teach you how to live it too" and spent two weeks micromanaging everything they did down to what hands they did certain tasks with. He named the Babysitter Bandit after the only good babysitter he ever had. Also a great line by Al Jean that the original animation has been declared a Superfund.
Hank Azaria Ethnic Stereotype Alert Level: Low, he wasn't originally in this episode, they recast him as Moe after the fact.
He looks like some kind of Moleman: Ahah. Ahahahaha. AHAHAHAHA. *coughs* Sorry, yeah, this one. This is why I'm skipping to this one real fast, because I realized that I would have to write a lot of duplicate notes or leave things unsaid on other reviews, because this one is so integral to the problems of the first season. To start with, the Simpsons were pursuing a more original, grounded style of animation than was typical on TV at the time and they couldn't simply hire Simpsons veterans like a lot of other shows pursuing the same style later. A lot of people simply did not understand the assignment and shit got weird. Shit got very fucking weird. While he seems to be virtually unpersoned on accounts of what happened since a lot of the conflict was at the top, the director of this episode went on to direct 66 episodes of the bad Sonic The Hedgehog animated show and basically nothing else, so I guess that's all that needs to be said there.
To make matters worse, they were subcontracting to AKOM who were playing fast and loose on the inbetweening and color. Akom is a bit weird in that the Simpsons swear by them but DC fired them after they got back episodes so bad the animators cried seeing what had been done to their work and X-Men had a list of things that AKOM just couldn't animate, so don't even try. Other commentaries later in the series indicate that they really ride them and are basically their number one client, but they did not have a great reputation at the time.
But its a bit shortsighted to not point out that it was a problem with management that resulted in the episode turning out so badly originally. The show was extremely rushed with them ramping up extremely quickly to the point that they were finishing scripts before they had even clearly established characterization or even the names of some major characters. Many important positions to establish consistency were missing and the supervising director Gábor Csupó very clearly did not understand the assignment. If you know animation, you might be wondering "How did they not spot these issues? There would be storyboards, animatics, etc?" and the answer is simply: Matt Groening and James L Brooks didn't know what they were looking at. Matt Groening as he makes clear, is not an animator. To see a character he's created animated, he describes as being basically like magic to him because he simply isn't able to do so. So they looked at everything leading up to this and were like "Yep, that's animation baby" and signed off on it and only when it came back from Korea fully animated did they go "Jesus Christ, JESUS CHRIST". I don't even mean at the time, we have the original animation with commentary and they still get infuriated by it ten years later. Someone uploaded it to youtube so I can actually share it.
Please ignore all the "this looks better than animation now!" people in the comments who will be the first against the-
But it was a top to bottom problem and you can see the rush, overwork and lack of refinement across the season, this one is just the worst about it. Season 2 has issues but they had really improved their pipeline and had more controls in place, and were starting to hum along. Certainly not an environment where someone could slip in a bear drinking the blood of a decapitated elf.
Although there is no change in my patrician facade, I can assure you my heart is breaking: You know, I'm just happy when there's a heterosexual comedy couple that actually fucks.
The single best animation of the episode is in fact, the ending where they made sure to let you know, yeah, this couple fucks in case you missed it and I love it.
Wallowing in my Own Crapulence Scale: This one isn't even on the chart, this is the aftermath of a Fiasco session. They react to the episode the way people react to photos of their own car crashes, there's no crapulence to be found aside from someone mentioning that people tell him its their favorite episode of the season.
It felt crass and manipulative to post this after Homer's Odyssey but much like early season Simpsons, I too am a poor working class family. My partner got laid off and has been out of work for a while and we've really been struggling. While it doesn't effect whether I'm going to do these or not, if you like these and want to throw something in it sure is appreciated. Sorry to uh, make it weird, I feel bad about that. Sorry.
Hmm. I tent like better examples of the animation style in several 80s cartoons that I still enjoy but it's really it's it's not Simpsons. I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that the people doing it didn't understand the assignment
Got reminded of a video also taking a look back at the classic era of The Simpsons (apparently there's gonna be a follow-up on 00s Simpsons onwards), which could eventually serve as a good contrast, given he particularly focuses on Season 1. The video is over an hour and a half long, but that makes sense when you're covering a whole decade of the show and analysing each of the main family:
Which kinda compliments the episode a little bit because it's supposed to make her scary. Though you can see how bart's eye turns yellow quickly because I believe they messed up on that part.
Even ms.botz eye turns a little pink too.
Edit: It was not shown in the earlier video, but in this one, it shows it:
Were you watching the deleted animation or the actual episode?
Because the deleted animation is completely off model, very childish, highly exaggerated, extremely out of tone and very much not even close to the standard that they were looking for. Like, it's very bad across the board by the standards they were looking for and tonal inconsistency in animation can completely kill a show. They were looking for a grounded animated sitcom and got rubber hose animation and not even very consistent rubber hose at that with how many errors it had.
30% was still useable, albeit often with different backgrounds. Or in some cases, backgrounds at all since they were often missing anything behind them.
I forgot to address this, but Groening says that a lot of the early focus for Homer would be him obsessing over money, status and optics. Now, there's a lot about why you can say this shifted. While his family wasn't poor, Matt Groening comes from a different socioeconomic background than a lot of the people who wrote for the show later and certainly didn't have the pipeline that the Ivy League writers had, with his success coming from his underground comics from a period where he absolutely was not doing very well in LA, selling comics in the corner of a record store. He went from moderately successful to incredibly rich with the Simpsons, while the writers were all making really good money at the time, and a lot of the stories being drawn from personal experiences. There's an entire episode based on everyone's New England Beach Resort Town Nostalgia, for example, which is very hyper specific.
But also, in the main part they really drastically expanded the kind of stories they could and wanted to do and the economic status of the Simpsons was very constraining, leading to arguments in the writers room about it in some episodes. You can't have an episode based around a pool if they can't reasonably afford it, so with Flexible Reality (Something I will have to talk about when the show gets a reality lol), how poor or successful they were was dependent on the plot of the episode rather than being a constant issue. If I can keep going, I can definitely talk about how they even made fun of this in some seasons with bits like "Can we have $183,000?" and Homer pulling that much out of his wallet until asking what its for.
Some Enchanted Evening. Such a chaotic little episode. The animation is so unique and bizarre to the point where I think no episode of the show is like this. I think is the episode that encapsulates Season One the best just for that alone.
Also, the episode kinda overlooks that Marge also helped the fake babysitter to get away, because it frames it as "Homer screwed it up" lol
If there's any Season 1 review I'm looking forward to in due time, it'd be for Life in the Fast Lane, since the analysis I posted above ranked it the best Simpsons episode.
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