The Golden Age Was Actually A Vibrant Yellow (The Simpsons) [Seasons 3-5]

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

(Continued from Part 1)

Hello and welcome back to whatever the hell this thing is! Apologies that this took a little bit of time. There was the actual watching of three seasons of Simpsons, there was a week where I caught up with a Kamen Rider show for podcasting, another week and a half where I was out of town, and oh yeah a good dash of just plain procrastinating. I'm gonna be real peeved if I'm sitting here in mid-September struggling to bang out Simpsons thoughts before I hit my busy fall season. That's a good half year away, and I think I can watch and discuss 7 more seasons of television in that time. It'll be easy, we'll split it into parts like this. With all that preamble out of the way... Here, once again for you all, is The Simpsons.

This is a very strange chunk of the show to try and talk about. It is, of course, where "The Golden Age Of The Simpsons" well and truly begins. By the time you wrap up Season 5, you are in the midst of the most beloved era of the show. Pinpointing how the show transformed from the grounded dysfunctional satirical sitcom it was in the first two seasons, to what it would be by the end of this period of analysis, is a difficult task. I cannot point to one specific episode and go "There. Right there is when Peak Simpsons began.". Instead what we have here is sort of a creative comedic Ship Of Theseus: over time, plot elements are introduced, new staff come on board as the old trio of Matt Groening, James L Brooks, and Sam Simon step back to a "creative consultant" role, and the show starts changing up what it focuses on. It is a gradual process, and eventually the butterfly that is Peak Simpsons will burst forth. There is no "aha" moment. It just sort of happens, nice and slowly.

Nowhere is this more apparent than Season 3, which exists in a limbo state and caught between these two worlds. You still have those stories focused on the Simpson family being a dysfunctional mess, trying not to be, and failing miserably at times. In the background, however, things are changing. One of the big shifts is that of reference humor. Early Simpsons is no stranger to throwing the odd movie parody in here or there: the Patton stuff from "Bart The General", or the end of "Life On The Fast Lane" riffing off of Officer And A Gentleman. Starting in Season 3, though, they become more prominent. Not only is that a factor, but the material drawn from is more consistent. I don't need to see these guys' Letterboxd pages to know that they are big fans of The Godfather, or Citizen Kane, or Stanley Kubrick films like 2001. Another thing that happens is that these jokes happen seemingly for the sake of it. The aforementioned Patton stuff is because Bart is raising an army in that episode. Contrast with late season 3, where an episode opens with an extended Raiders Of The Lost Ark riff because... it's an iconic bit of pop culture and it's really funny to make jokes out of a thing we all recognize. Given my aversion to reference humor in my later years, it surprises me that a show like Golden Age Simpsons which uses such things so freely would become a cornerstone of my identity as a teen watching these reruns. 

Don't let that make you think the heart is gone from The Simpsons in favor of making fun of popular movies. We have a pair of delightfully saccharine Homer/Lisa stories in "Lisa's Pony" and "Lisa The Greek" (the latter of which still has one foot in the moralizing of the early show by having the main objection to Homer betting on football games being that gambling is illegal and wrong.), and episodes like "I Married Marge" or "Colonel Homer" show the loving bond that Homer and Marge have for each other, despite adversity. It's not the last time we'll get heartwarming episodes like this, but it feels like the original era of The Simpsons is winding down and changing. There are many a comedic banger I could list, like "Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk" or "Separate Vocations" (at one point I would claim this as my favorite episode of the show), but we don't need to make lists. Let's go deep into one particular episode that pulls at that saccharine thread one last time. Let's talk about "When Flanders Failed".

This is when the mild class envy Homer has for Ned Flanders in the early seasons finally hits a climax of sorts. Ned opens a left-handed store at the mall, and Homer actively wishes for his downfall in order to feel some catharsis upon his "perfect" neighbor being taken down a peg by life. Homer is especially petty here in taking schadenfreude as The Leftorium struggles, and yet when it finally does shutter Homer has a semblance of a conscience. It's a moment of growth for Homer, a real human bit of drama, and it leads to him drumming up support for the store and getting Flanders back in the black to save him. And, of course, this being the era of Simpsons that it is, all is tied up in references to It's A Wonderful Life. There's a beauty to it, even if Homer will go back to hating Flanders by the next episode. (Put a pin in this for a little later.) 

One last little milestone before we leave Season 3. The episode "Homer Defined" has a brief cameo by Magic Johnson. Unlike Dustin Hoffman or Michael Jackson (whose episode, the Season 3 opener, you can't even get on streaming these days due to his allegations), this is not a celebrity voicing an original character. It is an honest to God celebrity cameo, just because. This will become a mainstay of the Golden Age and beyond, and it starts here with Magic. I mean, Season 3 also has an entire roster of pro baseball players in "Homer At The Bat", but the show will move beyond just getting sports stars to cameo soon enough.

Like I said, I can't pinpoint exactly when the shift between shows happened. What I can tell you is that, by Season 4, it is locked in. Much of that is due to the new blood that has entered the fray: folks like Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, and Conan O'Brien. O'Brien in particular is a real highlight: he only has a brief tenure before moving on to the late night hosting gig that made him really famous, but he adds a comedic grace to the show that helps evolve and enhance it into its next form. The man wrote "Marge Vs. The Monorail", for God's sakes. It's one of the highlights of the show, and I vividly remember reciting the Monorail song from memory in school in the 8th grade. I can still fucking do that today. The show does not lose its heart, but it gains a wit that gets truly emphasized during this era.

If I had to pin it down to a nice phrase for critical analysis, I'd put it like this. The early seasons of The Simpsons straddled the line between real and cartoon: It was more real than the average late 80's sitcom, but also a cartoon. From Season 4 onwards, The Simpsons is an expertly crafted cartoon. It revels in not just its pop culture and movie references, but its absolute sheer absurdity. Homer Simpson goes from an easily-riled father figure just trying his best to the breakout star of the show, a rampaging manchild set loose upon a world that is itself absolutely fucking absurd. Springfield itself expands, and we get to see that it's not just the Simpson family that is this fucked up: it's everyone. This whole world is screwy, a twisted funhouse mirror aimed at reflecting 1990s America back at itself in lurid shades of yellow. One might lament the loss of early Simpsons, but the heart is still there. The emphasis has just shifted.

Where do you even begin to talk about this? Seasons 4 and 5 are filled with absolute turbo bangers, episodes that die-hard Simpsons fans of this era will call the best ever... and I can't say they're wrong. I want to pick one to talk about, and I'll go with a favorite: "Selma's Choice". Admittedly when I was younger, I loved this one entirely for the third act in which Bart and Lisa run amok at Duff Gardens, Lisa going on a psychedelic bad trip after drinking funky beer water. Even before that are absolutely golden bits like Homer getting sick from eating a rapidly-rotting 10 foot hoagie, but once again the heart still remains. The emotional core of this episode is Selma Bouvier wanting to have a child of her own before it's too late, and finding that she can't quite hash it as a mother in trying to take care of the Simpson children. As much of a buffoon as she finds Homer, Homer can manage the parenting job better than she can. There's a magic present here, and I kind of love that.

Jumping to Season 5, things get even wilder. We are rapidly ascending to peaks unheard of, and that means things get left at the wayside. Episodes like "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" sort of break the original spirit of the Simpsons being unremarkable nobodies struggling to make ends meet by having Homer be a successful musician in an elaborate parody of the rise and fall of the Beatles. We forgive it, though, because it's really funny. Immediately after that the show airs "Cape Feare". This is once again a movie parody, the biggest yet as it extensively riffs off of Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear remake from the 90's. On the other hand, it codifies the nemesis relationship between Bart Simpson and Sideshow Bob. Bob showed up in Season 3 in a mystery plot involving him marrying Selma and trying to kill her for insurance money, but this is the first episode where Bob sees Bart as his archnemesis and plots his death. It has that spooky thriller tension of Bart being stalked and hunted by Bob, but also the physical comedy is through the fucking roof. Bob's mishaps under the car. Laying in the street and being crushed by an elephant parade. The fucking rake thing oh my good GOD. It's also worth noting that, according to what appears to be an accurate enough Simpsons wiki, this is the last episode produced by the original production team. The Simpson Ship Of Theseus is complete.

There are so many great episodes here, equal parts comedic and heartfelt. "Rosebud" with its extended Citizen Kane references and giving character to Maggie. "The Last Temptation Of Homer" as a reverse riff on Marge going bowling as Homer gets wandering eyes for a coworker before choosing his wife. "$pringfield" with Marge becoming a gambling addict, and how that tears the family apart before Homer brings her back from that brink. Yet the show gets even more absurd here, somehow. In "Deep Space Homer" we contrive a situation to put Homer in outer fucking space. The situation, funny enough, involves him being an average slob and directly contrasting him with Al Bundy. Even so, we have strayed far from the light of Season 1 when the silliest thing was him being mistaken for Bigfoot. Even more absurd sitcom-esque antics abound, elevated as they are, in episodes like "Bart Gets An Elephant". 

Heated drama between men.

God, I could just gush on and on about these, really! What about "Bart Gets Famous", which directly mirrors Bart getting 15 minutes of fame with the meteoric rise of The Simpsons itself, back when Bart was the breakout star and not Homer? Or the memes! My god, the memes that get born from this era! Homer and the hedge thing! "Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong"! Moe's self-defense funk class! There are so many good episodes! I will close, for now, with one that is not in the status of an all-timer, but is that pin I promised to pull out. Let's discuss, briefly, "Homer Loves Flanders". In this episode, Homer and Ned Flanders become buddies but Ned finds Homer's brutish clinginess overbearing. It has the aforementioned hedge thing (which leads into a Terminator 2 parody because Of Course), but it's also the best example of something that keeps popping up in this era: meta humor and subversiveness. Bart and Lisa are aware that Homer and Ned being friends is an unusual shakeup to the status quo, but Lisa is assured that this oddity will go back to normal by the following Thursday. Indeed it does, as the episode goes from the climax where Homer and Ned make up to just instantly back to the status quo dynamic of Homer hating Flanders.

There are a bevvy of these "screw the audience" jokes at play in this era, and it's important to note them. They are only going to escalate from here, and like Icarus in flight, one day they will soar too close to the sun. When I have to talk about that episode, you know the one, it's going to be very interesting. For now though, to close out... This is the Simpsons of my childhood. The show I grew up obsessively watching. An elevated master class in comedy, a show with irreverant love for both its country and its pop culture, a show about a crazed cartoon world where everyone kind of sucks but everyone also kind of loves each other. It's absolute peak.

And this isn't even its final form.