The Golden Age Was Actually A Vibrant Yellow (The Simpsons) [Seasons 1-2]

(All screencaps courtesy of Frinkiac. Any accompanying texts are direct quotes from the episode.)

(Continued from Introduction)

Having established all of that business about the legend of The Simpsons undercutting the typical saccharine sitcom structure, now we get to fuck with it. Because, to a degree, it is bullshit. I sat down with 30-odd episodes of vintage Simpsons and I can tell you that it is not a cynical mean-spirited show where nobody gives a shit about anyone. At the end of the day, this family cares about each other a great deal. What sets them apart from their contemporaries are the difficulties they have in showing it. Things are going to evolve and change over the course of this journey, but we have to plant a flag in this particular era, so here goes. The Simpsons, at this stage, is a cartoon that somehow feels more real than the shows that surround it. The same forces that drew the 18-34 demographic to the Bundy family drew them to The Simpsons, but on a scale beyond anything that could be imagined. This is the era of The Simpsons which exploded in popularity, so it must be doing something right. What, then, is it doing?

It all comes down to class and attitude. The Simpsons are not an upper class rich family with first world problems who uphold the noble virtues of the Typical Sitcom. They are blessed enough to have a roof over their heads (a damn good roof compared to those struggling with income in these times) and good health, but that's about all they have. Money is tight, as even a one-two punch of a denied bonus plus a sudden expense is enough to ruin the material Christmas for them in the first episode. They have each other, yes, but they are far from perfect and those imperfections routinely bubble forth and threaten the stability of the family unit. Their patriarch is an easily riled buffoon who often finds himself either vexed by or vexing his wife and children. The kids can devolve into being little brats (yes, even Lisa Simpson this early on). The matriarch is just about holding things together but can be just as problematic herself in ways, such as getting drunk off her ass at a work get-together or nearly cheating on her husband with a fucking French bowling man. The Simpsons are not a shining bastion of Americana, but they are an honest reflection of it. Average, unremarkable, making ends meet, and more than a little dysfunctional. They're animated, but there's a truth to life here that most other sitcoms would never let you see, and that combined with how wickedly funny this show is catapulted it into the echelons of pop culture.

The story of the Simpson family is partly one of class struggle; as mentioned, the Simpsons are just about holding their head above water, but are not blessed with the graces of luxury and finance. Every time such opportunities present themselves, some curse of fate (or, more realistically, the sitcom status quo) will rip it from their clutches and leave them back where they started. This becomes more of a thing in Season 2, with episodes like "Simpson And Delilah", "Dancin' Homer", "Bart Gets Hit By A Car", or "Blood Feud". Special mention should be given to "O Brother Where Art Thou", which sees Homer reconnect with his half-brother Herb Powell. Herb is a rich man in the auto manufacturing business, and by episode's end he has torpedoed his career by letting Homer design a car for the average American which turns out to be an utter monstrosity. The episode has a dark ending that frames Herb's downfall as the Simpsons' faults for being such cursed schlubs that they ruined his life, but let's be real: Herb made plenty of mistakes in letting Homer Simpson's mad whims go unsupervised. In the end, the Simpson curse of mediocrity came for him, just a little late.

The real surprising contrast of average struggling all-American and typical sitcom paragon of virtue comes from a surprising place: between Homer Simpson and Ned Flanders. Now we in the future know how Ned's character will eventually collapse into a singularity of Christianity (in fact, this is so infamous that the term for such character trait exaggeration is fucking named for Ned Flanders), but here in the early years he serves as this source of bitter envy and jealousy for Homer Simpson. This is in there right from the first episode, and also pops up in episodes like "Call Of The Simpsons" where Homer tries to buy an expensive RV to one-up Flanders' purchase of one, but can only afford a piece of shit that gets them lost in the fucking woods. Or, most prevalently, Season 2's "Dead Putting Society" where the rivalry brews over into a ridiculous wager over which one's son can do better in a minigolf tournament. Suffice to say, Ned Flanders is the ideal that the typical sitcom strives for, and Homer Simpson hates his guts for it. Whereas Flanders has a healthy family dynamic, the Simpsons are a dysfunctional goddamn mess.

This is most prevalent in Season 1's "There's No Disgrace Like Home". As befitting most of Season 1, it's an uneven mess both in animation and characterization. Homer Simpson is the one here who realizes that his family is a goddamn mess and pushes to try and make them more of a functioning family unit. This feels off from the modern lens, as it likely would be Marge pushing for this if you made this today. In addition, the perfect family Homer contrasts his own mess of a family with are just some random background extras, when from everything I just said above it would make so much more sense if he was envious of the Flanders again. Either way, we see just how much they all kind of suck. Bart and Lisa constantly bicker and fight, Marge gets sloshed at a work retreat and embarrasses everyone, and poor Homer Simpson is reduced to trying to make their family look like it's a good one when it's a goddamn mess. The climax involves electroshock therapy where the family just shocks the shit out of each other and the therapist, Dr. Marvin Monroe, throws up his hands and says that they're too broken to fix. Somehow this experience brings them all closer together. That's emblematic of early Simpsons: they're totally fucked up and sometimes they hurt each other, but in the end they do all care for one another a great deal.

Holy shit, though, do they fuck up a lot. Homer Simpson buys a bowling ball for his wife's birthday under the pretense of stealing the unwanted gift for himself later. Like, even Al fucking Bundy eventually bought his wife the specialty bras she wanted for her birthday. This, in turn, leads Marge to have an emotional affair with a French bowling instructor, and it damn near becomes physical before the end. Within the 39 episodes that make up the first two seasons, Homer and Marge's marriage is in jeopardy four times (five if you count the turmoil that happens during the flashback episode to how they ended up together in high school). Much of that is Homer Simpson's fault, but he genuinely does step up and try to be better each time (before failing a different way next time). To say nothing of what is arguably the breakout character of the show at this time, Bart Simpson. I have to stress how tightly the pearls were being clutched during this era of history. Bart Simpsons bucked trends by being a bratty little boy who was a troublemaker at school and said hell and damn a lot. Somehow or another, this constituted a mild moral panic back in the day. I wish I were kidding. He cheats on tests, commits multiple acts of vandalism, and generally engages in other delinquent activities. Naturally, he got a fucking rap.

As a brief aside to mention a specific Bart episode, shall we talk about "Bart The General" from Season 1? The plot is standard sitcom fare: Oh no, a bully at school is making this kid's life worse. Any normal sitcom would give lessons about not fighting back, about telling a parent or teacher. Not only is this undercut in the episode by the concept being met with aghast horror over the idea of breaking "the code of the schoolyard" but the resolution to stopping Nelson Muntz's bullying is the power of incredible violence. Namely Bart organizing a mass water balloon attack in an extended parody of the movie Patton, with George C. Scott. This is the kind of punk counterculture shit I live for.

What surprised me most, however, was that among the episodes that most affected me in this batch were the two focusing on Lisa Simpson. Far from the moral crusader I remember that she will become, early Lisa is a very smart girl questioning her place and worth in the world, and struggling to express herself in it. Season 1's "Moaning Lisa" is about her fighting depression and learning how to express her mood via playing jazz on the saxophone. It's shockingly poignant, and it even manages to undercut those good old-fashioned values of the family sitcoms that The Simpsons is subverting: Marge's initial advice is some terrible ingrained "hide your feelings and SMILE" nonsense she got from her mother in the 60's, and she soon enough fights against that and tells her daughter that it's okay to be sad and you don't have to hide it out of some sense of conformity. It's a great episode, as is the other big Lisa episode in Season 2, "Lisa's Substitute". Here she gets a new substitute teacher who she latches on to as an upstanding male authority figure (due to Homer Simpson being a complete and total slob), and then one day he just up and leaves her life.

From here, holy shit this episode. The note her teacher leaves her, simply stating "You are Lisa Simpson", is such a heartfelt sentiment. The climax of the episode is not this, but Lisa Simpson exploding in rage at her father for being an insensitive fucking jackass. And then Homer goes and makes it right. He sits down, he tries to express how sometimes people leave and it's sad, and he's just... He's being a good dad here! He even manages to give Bart some heartfelt advice regarding that episode's B plot, and manages to make both his children feel better. As much of a goddamn idiot as he is, Homer Simpson in this era fucking loves his wife and children more than anything. More than beer and TV and donuts, even. If we're talking poignant tear-jerking episodes about Homer Simpson loving his family, let's discuss "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish", where he eats poison blowfish and thinks he has 24 hours to live. He spends that time with the people and places he loves the most, doing right to try and impart good memories and good deeds on the world in his last day. Again, it's tugging heartfelt drama.

Finally, let me just sort of shotgun blast a bunch of episode discussion. Little things that pop up here and there which feel important or significant. Season 1's "Krusty Gets Busted", for instance, introducing longstanding nemesis Sideshow Bob and is the first of many instances where Bart and Lisa team up to solve a problem that the incompetent adults of Springfield can't (in this case, putting a bunch of obvious clues together that the Springfield police could not to prove Krusty's innocence). Or how the first Halloween special, far from being contemporary horror parodies, does riffs on decades-old horror, Twilight Zone episodes, and then ends with a dramatic goddamn retelling of Poe's Raven poem done by James Earl Jones. It even has an opening disclaimer from Marge Simpson addressing parents warning that it may be too spooky for their kids, which is such a quaint time capsule of the moral panic surrounding The Simpsons being a bad influence that it warms my heart. "Bart The Daredevil", meanwhile, in which Bart risks his life doing stunts, ends with the perfect fucking summation of how The Simpsons is paradoxically both a cartoon and more real than real life. This is the scene in which Homer accidentally tries to jump a gorge on a skateboard, and we see the horrific consequence. It's more real than a Wile E Coyote fall, but also cartoonish in that Homer fucking survives this. Despite this it is peak physical comedy. 

By contrast, let me talk about two of the more absurd episodes of the show, both from Season 1. I have made much about the show being grounded at this time, and one of the more common complaints of the show from the late 90's/early aughts was how wacky and over the top it gets. That DNA is present here, in episodes like "Call Of The Simpsons" which sees Maggie get adopted by bears and an entire subplot of Homer being mistaken for Bigfoot, where the central  joke is ambiguous. Is the joke on Homer for being such a slob that he can be mistaken for Bigfoot, or on society for being too fucking stupid to be able to tell the difference between Bigfoot and an average American slob? Who can tell? "The Crepes Of Wrath", meanwhile, is my least favorite Season 1 episode. It's an extended bit of misery where Bart is abused by French wine bootleggers or some shit, but it's in the absurd category because of its B plot. Said B plot involves an Albanian exchange student named Adil living with the Simpsons who's actually a Communist spy sending back information about American nuclear power plants for... reasons? And this was in 1990? Like, the Wall had already fallen, boys. The writing was on the (destroyed) wall for Communism. This is just weird. But, let's move on.

I want to highlight "Homer Vs. Lisa And The Eighth Commandment" due to how, despite The Simpsons being so transgressive, it still has one foot in the morals of the time. This is an episode where Homer steals cable TV, and since The Simpsons are not allowed any material luxury it is gone by the end. The specific moral objection is not just "stealing is wrong", but that stealing is wrong specifically in the context of Christian faith and the Ten Commandments, and you will go to actual Christian hell if you continue to indulge in ill-gotten cable television. "Itchy And Scratchy And Marge", though allegedly (if the Simpsons Wiki is to be believed) being an allegory for censorship of Tom and Jerry cartoons in the 70's, manages to feel like a reflexive bit of metacommentary on the aforementioned pearl-clutching moral panic that was happening over the Simpsons at the time. It's a dead-on parody of that particular strand of conservatism that, as with so much of The Simpsons, is evergreen and still relevant to the modern day. Though the character of Helen Lovejoy is involved in the moral crusade, her iconic line about thinking of the children has yet to be invented. "War Of The Simpsons" is yet another episode about Homer and Marge's marital troubles, but coming so late into Season 2 it feels like the final burst of all the resentment and shitty behavior Homer Simpson has engaged in all series. Through all that, he still proves that he is a total and unflinching wife guy despite his flaws. This will not be the last time their relationship is on the rocks, but every time he does prove just how goddamn much he is in love with Marge Simpson.

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That should about put a pin in the discussion of the earliest years of The Simpsons. I could gush about just about every episode, but I am not structuring this as an episodic guide. I'm aiming for the general vibe of each season, and though I did dip my toe into discussing specific episodes a little, I'd like to think I proved my point on the strange vibe of early Simpsons. Next time, however long it takes me to watch three more seasons of this shit and formulate my thoughts on it, we enter what I think is considered the true golden age of the show. Or maybe that's the next one. Who knows, but what I do know is things are about to get a lot more gonzo and a lot more ridiculous, but in a pinnacle of comedy way. Be seeing you.

The Golden Age Was Actually A Vibrant Yellow (The Simpsons) [Introduction]

Welcome to 2026 on Frezno's Raving Rants, (a little late I know, but blame snowstorms, flu, and tragedy), where the theme is "big ambitions". So here we are, tackling a really big show in a project that will probably take me at least a quarter of the year. (I was an optimist when I wrote those words in January. Fuck.) Why would I do this to myself? Hubris, or something. Really, the seeds of blossoming nostalgia were planted back in June of 2024 when I went on that throwback trip with Street Cents, the Canadian show that helped teens spend their money wisely. I won't rehash all of that, as it's right there if you want to hear about 90's Canadiana vibes, but I will once again mention the Studio Coquette block that ruled my weekday afternoon TV watching. Because I never get tired of reminding you all that the CBC really did put a CGI French-Canadian bulldog as their after-school mascot. I found another promo for it again, and this one shows the particular oddities of that afternoon block. Street Cents and Jonovision make sense as shows targeted to Canadian tweens and teens. Road To Avonlea, a period drama with ties to Anne Of Green Gables, feels very much like the odd one out. Very weird, but we're here to talk about the reason why I showed up for this particular program block. At long last, it's time to talk about The Simpsons.

Frezno's Games Of The 2025 Thing!

Well, here we are again, gang. 2025's sunset, and as is tradition, we're going to talk about a bunch of computer video games I played during that time. I haven't gone as crazy with the gaming as I have in past years, but this is nevertheless a delight to do as a yearly wrapup. All the apps get to do it, so why can't I on my big blog? The end of the year is always a party, so let's get the party started and celebrate the year that was... in personal computer video gaming for your old pal Frezno Inferno.

Why Jingle All The Way Is My Favorite Christmas Movie

A very happy holiday to all of you at home! This constitutes a little bit of a holiday gift for you all. Usually on this blog, we run radio silent from Halloween to New Year because I do November words and by the end of that I'm wiped out. This year's Non-Specific November Writing Month was actually not that taxing, and the words flowed like wine, so I'm not completely burnt out. That and I've had a few weeks of rest. 2026 is going to be bumpin' with content, hopefully. There were two big things I wanted to write about and then just didn't get to. Maybe if there's time I will revisit them and do it again, they're very heady pieces. For now, here's a gift to you. Something I've threatened for a long time and am now finally doing at long last. It's time to talk about my favorite Christmas movie. Surely you have one as well that you hold near and dear to your heart. A beloved nostalgia classic like It's A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story? A comedy classic like National Lampoon? One of those buckwild ones that merge the holiday with horror and action, like Die Hard or Gremlins? Here, then, is mine.

Jingle All The Way is my favorite Christmas movie, and I'm about to justify that.

Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 16 (Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers)

Boo.

Happy Halloween! I hope the ghosts and/or goblins are good to you and that many a child came to your door searching for the treats, which you will have provided of course. 'Cause you're good like that. I had a good few at the door, and possibly more now that the sun is down. Of course, the kids knocking were a welcome distraction, because it gave me a reprieve from engaging with GODDAMN FUCKING HALLOWEEN SIX THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS. Perhaps I gave the game away a little early in this review, but oh my God. Oh my good God this is dire. It's been a long time coming, after going through this series in a strange order (and detouring for the David Gordon Green trilogy), but here we are. The end of the Jamie Lloyd trilogy. That which Halloween 5 was building up to with its strange glimpses of the man in a coat and hat. And it's shit. It's a complete and muddled clusterfuck fired on screen in 90 minutes, it killed whatever the hell these folks were planning, and only by the good graces of Wes Craven making Scream a year later and causing people to go "hey these slasher things sure are popular" did we get Halloween H20 from that. Let's go wild into this thing and what it does wrong.

Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 15 (28 Years Later)

It's another curious place I'm in here, as the astute among you will note I've not actually talked about anything from this series before. I know it by reputation, mostly by the fact that it bucked the usual zombie trend by having the zombies be able to run really fast at you to get you. Also not traditional undead zombies, but people infected by a plague. Kay. I knew all that going in, and didn't quite know what to expect. The result is a strange film, but one with a lot of artistic merit and thematic weight. I'm not sure if I get all of it, or if my read is correct, but as always I'm going to take a stab at it. Let's talk about some fast and spooky British zambabinos, I guess.

Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 14 (Anatomy)

 As we wind down here, let's branch out a bit from the cinema before the final push and talk about a spooky video game. Previously when I've done this sort of thing, it's been a focus on mainly retro titles like Splatterhouse or Sweet Home. Brief and short little experiences from the olden days of gaming that nonetheless tried to add the spooks and scares of horror cinema to the interactive medium. Anatomy is not one of those, but rather is an indie horror game from one Kitty Horrorshow, which you can purchase here for a couple of bucks. It's about an hour long and has some spooky atmosphere which I'm going to talk all over, so if you're interested then by all means check it out before I go into that. Which I will do, right about now.