[0] "Tell me a bedtime story about a light cobblestone and a heavy cobblestone". It was already late and I was out of ideas for improvised tales.
A lot of people say Family Guy copied the Simpsons, but in reality I actually found that the Simpsons tried to copy Family Guy's style of humor and did a very terrible job at it.
If you watch The Simpsons DVD commentary on the very first season DVDs, they talk about how Matt Groening's team would draw the key frames and then they would ship them to an asian animation studio to provide the animation frames. The very first time they did this, they got an animation style that was all over the place - not just the quality of drawing, but the actual animation style was jello-y and way more wobbly than they wanted. You can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-wjF5AMmk
The main reason that they sent it back was that the style and physics represented in the cartoon wasn't the one they were going for, and it changed how the show felt. I feel like the rapid cut references they adopted from Family Guy did a very similar thing. It changed the flow of the show, which, maybe (?) is actually more of a sign of the times and attention span than animated show style, but still, I wasn't a fan and I didn't feel like The Simpsons did it naturally or that it fit, and it takes me out of the narrative every time they do it.
Family guy debuted in 1999. It's hard to say Simpsons tried to copy family guy's style. Family Guy is really known for its cutaways (usually to some non sequitur) & somewhat crude humor. A lot of the jokes at this time hinged on Stewie not being understood by anyone but Brian, Brian himself being a dog. There were also a lot of references to musical theater. The Simpsons was different from this.
You want aspirational, look to Family Guy. Somehow Peter Griffin can afford a helicopter, a jet pack, and whatever expenses are required to obtain the foot of the statue of liberty.
>maintaining a 90s style of living is just not realistic in the 2020s
I think even in 1989, when the show debuted, two income families were starting to be (or already had been) pretty typical. I think the Simpsons might have been poking fun at the 1960s and 1970s family sitcoms where the dad went to work and the wife stayed home.
Edit: But you're right that in the 80s and 90s you would have a decent chance of buying a house (on those two incomes).
It isn't - especially if you watch the original first season of the Simpsons [0] (Homer's Odyssey - the 3rd episode of the Simpsons written right as the 1990 recession was kicking off) as well as that Frank Grimes episode back in 1997 [1].
The older Simpsons episodes weren't that common on syndication from what I can remember growing up - at most you might see an episode from 1994 in the early 2000s.
Simpsons in it's original iteration during it's golden age (1989-1999) was essentially lampooning the 1960s-70s American dream being punctuated by the harsh realities of America at the time.
What I've noticed from the comments on HN (as well as the viciousness of the community when I point this out) is most HNers grew up in middle and upper-middle class households in the 1980s-90s that in most cases weren't representative of the lives the median American would have lived then, and a lot of the rose tinted glasses appear to betray that upbringing.
For example, from 1989 to 1994, household incomes in the US dropped at the same rate as they did during the Great Recession and the COVID Pandemic [2] and didn't recover until 1997, but because most HN users today weren't the head of a household during that period they view the 1990s as a golden age.
[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu1W8O-CKNw
[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNj2nlFttCM&t=71s&pp=2AFHkAIB
Very few shows, show actually living situations (flight of the choncords is the only other I can think of).
I'm personally more of a KOTH fan - I found it to be a much more grounded example of middle class life in the late 1990s and early 2000s while also recognizing that the Hills had it good. I find a similar strain of authenticity in Bob's Burgers (unsurprising since much of the team worked on KOTH).
> Frank Grimes is one of the best characters on TV
I remember getting enraged as an elementary schooler watching that episode because his statement hit true, but we were also a family of 4 living in a 1 bedroom apartment at the time and newly immigrated, and even then I felt similar to Grimes when watching the Simpsons.
When I reached my teens, I finally understood it was a callout by the writers trying to remind viewers that the Simpsons wasn't reality.
They do have a history, because in the Grimes episode he talks about things Homer did in other episodes, and the characters themselves sometimes make reference to things in the past.
But it must be a fun writing challenge to take characters that don't age but somehow seem to rack up a lifetime of experience.
It is now simply an extremely cost-efficient form of content relative to the value of the ad slots and licensing of the IP. People working on it now are technicians delivering a product to spec that is basically a perfect use case for generative AI.
"Hey claude, write me an episode of the simpsons where Homer starts investing in NFTs while Lisa and Bart goes to a comedically sinister horseback riding summer camp with a guest star that has a movie coming out this summer."
Or even:
"Write a skill that creates standard length 22 minute new simpsons episodes scripts and scene video prompts by combining a trending news topic with two or more simpsons characters. IMPORTANT: make it wacky!"
Zombie Simpsons has been on longer than the golden and silver age of the Simpsons. They really need to let it go.
foxfired•1h ago
Anyway, they also improved the way the characters are drawn so much that it lost it's crude nature.