We’re continuing our talk with Patrick Johnson, and we’re waxing nostalgic.
We look back at the sliding timeline of The Simpsons and try to count the anachronisms as they pile up. But nothing could prepare us for the existential crisis triggered as we realize that under current show continuity, Homer Simpson is now a Gen-Xer.
We also reminisce about our brief time as public access TV producers on the Seattle Community Access Network. We dealt with shoddy equipment, a menagerie of conspiracy-minded weirdos, and a city council budget crunch that ultimately killed the station. We’ve got boxes full of Pepe!
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Garbage in, gold out. Sam the alchemist.
Some of the better episodes of the later “The Simpsons” seasons are the time-advanced ones. The very best is “Barthood”, where he’s multiple ages. That could’ve been an entire season’s worth of episodes. At least. Since there’s not much going in the other episodes. If they have to do a celebrity episode, they could make it the B-plot in an episode where Bart and Lisa are back in school and have actually started in a new grade.
They could’ve done “Treehouse of Horror” with them as teenagers, and age-appropriate characters for the roles they’re portraying.
Although maybe the episode I’d most like to see, is one where adult Bart pulverizes Homer. Since the show has never really honestly dealt with the topic of the abuse that Bart has suffered. They even made Lisa into one of his abusers, in more than one episode. And Marge has been complicit for years, based on the different in-universe times we’ve seen it happen. She finally leaves Homer and kicks him out for good in the future, but it doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the domestic violence. He’s not a violent drunk. He has a drinking problem, and he’s a child abuser. Those are two separate issues, but only the first one has been acknowledged by all parties.