Pop culture is vast, and it is impossible for any one person to catch every important Movie, Show, or Game that comes down the pipeline. However, some pop culture works are just too crucial to miss, and blind spots must be corrected. That is where this feature will come in. Every once in a while, one of the nerds will catch up on something that has been, up until this time, a huge gap in their cultural knowledge. Essentially, they have been living in a cave, and have missed something important. This feature is inspired by the Onion AV Club's
Better Late Than Never.
For the inaugural entry into this series, I will be covering one of the largest pop culture phenomenons of the past 20 years, The Simpsons. Now, I am by no means finished with the Simpsons... there are almost 500 episodes and a film for me to watch through, but I currently am standing on the precipice of what is considered the show's Golden Age (Seasons 3-8), and felt that this was an appropriate time to reflect on what I have seen so far.
The first seasons of the Simpsons was... different. The animation was crude, the stories simple, and the characters not yet fully formed. There were a few quality episodes (the show's Pilot/Christmas episode springs to mind) but by and large it felt like a prologue, a taste of things to come.
The second season is where things started to get stronger. This is the season that introduced one of the show's big traditions, the Halloween anthology "Treehouse of Horror." This collection of three scary stories loosely tied together with a framing story, is where the series came together for me. The episode was fun, fresh (for its time), and had some amusing allusions to other horror anthology shows.
Also notable in the second season was "The Way We Was" a flashback story that tells the story of how Marge and Homer met and fell in love. The episode managed to capture what has become a hallmark of Matt Groening shows, the melding of humor and sentiment. This echoes on in his other show, Futurama.
The slightly sentimental trend continued in the episode "Lisa's Substitute" which explores the strained relationship between Lisa and her father, a theme that has shown itself a couple of times in what I've seen of the third season.
Finally, before I conclude this post I'd like to make a list, a list of my favorite characters thus far. I imagine, with a cast this large, the list will not stay the same for very long, but here goes.
Patty and Selma Bouvier - Marge's chain smoking, raspy voiced, bitterly sarcastic twin sisters. Thus far the twins (who cannot be separated even for this list) have had one of episode dedicated to them, and while not a fantastic episode, it was good for some laughs. Patty and Selma, for me at least, provide some of the best humor on the show. Their borderline evil quips at Homer's expense have me rolling nearly every time.
Bart - Probably no list would be complete without the show's breakout character. At first, based on my limited experience, I expected Bart to be something like Eric Cartman from South Park, devious, sociopathic, and pure evil. Instead, I got something a lot more complex. Bart is a troublemaker, for sure, but he's also a realistic child. He has fears, he cares for his family, and he doesn't always come out on top. It probably helps that Bart, along with Homer, has the most episodes dedicated to expanding his character. Plus, his antics are just funny.
Lisa - I have a feeling this one might be considered odd, but as of my current point in Season 3, Lisa is my favorite character. She is clearly meant to be the moral center of the show. Lisa is always willing to stand up for her principles, and is the member of the core family most likely to make sacrifices for the family. Despite this maturity, she also has a number of childlike qualities, such as her constant desire to own a pony and her enjoyment of the Itchy and Scratchy show that make her a realistic character.
So... that's all for now, but not forever. I'm not out of the cave yet, there are still hundreds of episodes for me to catch up on, and this means further write ups in the future. Until then, Tom out.
