The Golden Age Was Actually A Vibrant Yellow (The Simpsons) [Seasons 6-7]

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

(Continued from Part 2)

Before we get into the words I wrote about this, I have come to a decision regarding this project. I originally wanted to be honest with my memories of watching old Simpsons in syndication, and not just stop at the end of the so-called golden age. I wanted to make it to Season 12, and to then talk about a handful of other things in the future. Maybe we will go back and do those one day, but I have decided that for now this project will stop at Season 9 instead. I want to be clear that I have not chosen this because of any consensus agreement that the show "stopped being good" at that point (though we'll discuss any inherent quality drop next time). Rather, I'm just kind of burned out committing to one thing on this blog for so dang long. I started watching The Simpsons again in January. It's been half a year, and I have already dragged my feet in trying to get words out about anything past Season 5. The longer I drag my feet in writing, the further ahead I would get in watching the show. I haven't watched any Simpsons in over a month because of that, and the only reward for finishing that is another three weeks of binging four episodes a day, plus the extras I had planned. 

That's entirely too much for me. I need to put The Simpsons down, and I don't want this to feel like an obligation. I have other things I might want to discuss on the blog before we hit the fall and my busy season, and if The Simpsons feels like an albatross around my neck, I won't be able to do that. So, new stopping point. Today you get words on Seasons 6 and 7. At some point I'll discuss the remaining two, and then I'll hopefully come back before the fall to talk about some new and exciting shit. Maybe someday I will revive this and do Seasons 10-12 plus the bonus content, but right now I need a fucking break from Homer Simpson. If you were particularly looking forward to that latter content, my apologies. I just need the breather. With that all sorted... 

Welcome back! We're once again going to talk about vintage Simpsons, and this chunk of vintage Simpsons might just be the most fascinating and dense yet. You know that old saying "the night is darkest before the dawn"? I want to flip it on its head. The window of my living room faces the west, so whenever it becomes close to sunset (especially here in the summer) the entire room gets blasted with the final radiance of the sun for the day. This is what seasons 6 through 8 of The Simpsons are: the greatest and most powerful cosmic rays before that brilliant light dips behind the horizon. The metaphor might have gotten away from me a little here, but when have I ever not gone on a needless tangent to try and make a point? I've been doing that shit since 1998 at the lunch table in high school, and the fact that we've almost caught up with the contemporary Simpsons I would have watched the Sunday before doing that is a little sobering. Fuck, I'm old. Let's go back to talking about The Simpsons. Here, then, is the shift to the Golden Age's final form.

Oddly enough, given that description, Season 6 is not particularly rocking the boat in this regard. Don't get me wrong, it is a season full of complete and absolute bangers, and the comedic chops on display are surgical in their precision. It's still very much the show it was in Season 5, tweaking the dial towards the absurd while also having elaborate set pieces parodying the pop culture of the time. One of my favorite jokes of all time in this era is one of these: it's Milhouse doing the dam jump from the 1993 Fugitive movie. Something about the way you cut to his panicked scream followed by the quiet "my glasses" makes me fucking lose it every time. "Itchy And Scratchy Land" goes full fucking Westworld/Jurassic Park for its third act with killer robots rampaging through the titular theme park and the Simpsons being accosted by them. "Sideshow Bob Roberts" is not only a refreshing change of pace for Bob as he just fixes an election to become mayor instead of trying to kill Bart again, but also is extremely Alan J. Pakula-coded as Bart and Lisa try to expose his scheme. 

Somehow, the writers outdo themselves with this element of the show, and manage to craft the best version of this comedic aspect. This season has Treehouse of Horror V, which contains a full parody of The Shining, and... it's peak. It's just fucking peak, gang. There are few things this era's writers love more than Stanley Kubrick movies, and it fucking shows in the craft and irreverence of twisting his Shining into a Simpsonized parody. Even beyond that, you get that segment with the time-traveling toaster that just lets the writing team absolutely fuck with reality in a frenzy of rapid-fire gags. The cafeteria segment is the weakest, but even so... this is the best fucking Halloween special yet. The movie parody element of the show arguably hits its final form with "A Star Is Burns". There's some infamy with this episode as it's a crossover with The Critic, which pissed off Matt Groening so much that he took his name off the episode. I didn't know what the fuck The Critic was watching in syndication so I just assumed they made him up. This is another turbo banger of an episode that's not only filled with movie parodies, but just absolute all-timer jokes. Boo-urns, JUST HOOK IT TO MY VEINS, fucking FOOTBALL IN THE GROIN! Peak! It's peak!

Lest you think the emotional heart of the show is gone, look out. I want to briefly talk about two Season 6 episodes for this: "Lisa's Wedding" and "Round Springfield". The former is a rare flash forward to the then-distant future of 2010, showing a potential future for all these characters: albeit one that will never come to pass because this is a forever show. (Sobering thought: The gap between the episode airing and its future setting is now shorter than the gap between the future setting and the present.) It's a poignant episode about Lisa's chance for love, and her throwing it aside for the sake of her family and her father's silly little tradition. She loves them, despite the goddamn mess they are. Continuing to talk about Lisa, "Round Springfield" sees the return of Season 1's Bleeding Gums Murphy. Who they kill off, which gives Lisa a whole arc of grief and everyone in her life trying to comfort her in their own way. It has Bart do a sweet gesture for Lisa out of kindness for her empathy for him earlier in the episode, and it's just a very sweet episode. Ah, but there's a storm cloud on the horizon there: we have killed off a character on the show, even if it was a minor one who only got one focal episode back when the show looked like a barely scribbled-together mess. We have introduced full canon to The Simpsons, and this will have consequences.

Closing Season 6 are two more turbo bangers. "Lemon Of Troy" is one I always loved in syndication because of its epic scope and its portrayal of Springfield's rival city Shelbyville as a demented Mirror Universe version of Springfield. It's also hilarious, having incredible subversive jokes like "Wait a minute, there's a lemon behind that rock!". I could go on, but I've got many more seasons to gush about, so I will just direct you to an old Patrick H Willems video essay where he analyzes the comedic chops of the episode. The season closes with something even more grandiose and epic. That's right, gang, it's time to talk about "Who Shot Mr. Burns", which dovetails over to Season 7 thanks to a cliffhanger ending in which (shocker of shocks) Mr. Burns is shot. I know I keep saying it, but this is peak Simpsons. The stakes are high, the first half making sure that Mr. Burns and his supervillain schemes make him the enemy of practically everyone in town, such that all of them are suspect in his shooting. The clues are there along with the red herrings, and there's even some of that threatening to strain the continuity. Homer's motive for potentially shooting Mr. Burns is that the man can't remember his name, which takes all those "Who is that dunderhead, Smithers?" gags from the show proper and stacks them up, canonically. Burns even remembers all his other run-ins with the Simpson family.

This is a significant episode as we hop over to Season 7. It's the first I can remember watching on broadcast, and Part 2 goes wild with the mystery solving. It even has a goddamn Twin Peaks reference! Then there's the solution to the mystery, which is at once a ridiculous joke and also the only goddamn way these writers could have done it: solving the mystery in the most absurd "screw the audience" way possible. Mr. Burns has always been a character balanced between two poles: a maniacal super-villainous arch-capitalist, and an elderly man who's as weak as a kitten. We delve back to the latter for maximum comedy, as it turns out Maggie Simpson technically shot him due to a completely ridiculous sequence of events involving Mr. Burns being too weak to take candy from a baby. I wonder if the people who bet hundreds on one of the other characters doing it were pissed off when this aired, but with the benefit of hindsight I'm like... we should have expected this. Ah well. Welcome to Season 7! I hope you like the heartfelt and the saccharine.

The change is on the horizon for The Simpsons, but before it fully comes there are parts of this season that feel like a look back upon, like, Season 2. Episodes which act as a perfectly pitched mix of tragicomic pathos, crafted with the expert writing care you'd expect of this team. Look at something like "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily" which deals with the gravitas of the Simpson children being taken away by CPS. The circumstances that lead to it are a comedy of circumstance and bad luck coincidences, but it doesn't make it any less heartbreaking when you see Homer and Marge look at the empty bedrooms and lament that their family has been torn apart. Even so, things are played for comedy with the kids' foster family being the Flanders; while they're clearly presented as well-adjusted compared to the Simpsons, we have that element of character drift that we named after them taking place: being hyper-Christian and ultra-puritan ironically makes them just as much a bunch of weirdos as anyone else in Springfield. Speaking of hyper-Christian, the episode right after this one is "Bart Sells His Soul", which does much the same: mixing the expertly-crafted comedic bits with a real heartfelt story about Bart struggling for his lost soul. Also it has a very sweet Lisa gesture at the end, so I love it. You want to talk about heartfelt emotional gut punches, though? "Mother Simpson". I'm not even going to say anything. I'm just going to post it. If you know, you know.

There's a curious thing which happens with some of these episodes, though, and it's a danger that other critics of this era of the show have brought up. We are, after all, dangerously close to the tipping point of golden age Simpsons. That terrible moment when the show becomes Not As Good As It Once Was. I'll argue about the validity of that tipping point later, but for now it should be noted that some of these heartwarming episodes threaten to veer into the territory of actual saccharine sitcom energy, of the type that The Simpsons was created to lampoon. Season 7's closer, "Summer Of 4 Foot 2", sort of has this energy to it with Lisa pretending to be a cool kid on a vacation to Maine to bond with other 90's cool kids, only for Bart to expose her as a nerd out of jealousy, only for the cool kids to then accept her regardless. I still really like this episode though, as I do most Lisa episodes. The bigger one of these, however, comes earlier in the season with "Marge Be Not Proud". I once read an extensive blog post (later turned into a Kindle e-book by author Charlie Sweatpants) about the downfall of golden age Simpsons that cites this episode as one of the breaking points for those exact reasons, because it represents all the sitcom tropes that they made The Simpsons to make fun of. Bart does a shoplifting, disappoints his mom, learns that shoplifting is wrong, and they all hug it out at the end. The Simpsons has taken the first chink in its armor, and it has begun on its path to being Dead Forever.

I want to push against that reading a little. The Simpsons has always balanced its irreverent mockery with a sweet side, and it's always held a moral conviction against stealing (Lisa and illegal cable hookups, anyone?). Besides, the thrust of this episode is more than just "Stealing is bad, Bart": Marge doesn't drift from Bart because he did a criminal act, she drifts from him because she's realizing he's not a little baby boy any more. Bart feels excluded and neglected because of this but wins his mom's love and trust back with a kind gesture. Despite how much of a dysfunctional mess they all are, the Simpsons have always loved each other. Still, Charlie can smell something in the air in their analysis. Change is brewing, and that change smells a lot like grilled meats, which is a terrible segue into discussing "Lisa The Vegetarian". It's another Lisa episode, but it feels like a shift. She has a strong moral stance, this time being vegetarianism, but this time she's far more judgmental and pushing her new belief onto others. It's exactly what critics of post-golden age Simpsons accuse Lisa of becoming, it's right here... and it's not wrong. Lisa's sabotage of Homer's barbecue is a shockingly transgressive act for her: imagine if we did the aforementioned cable episode with Lisa doing a vandalism and cutting the cord herself. It leads to the worst fight Homer and Lisa have had yet, and the resolution comes thanks to... Paul McCartney. What's interesting is that Paul, the real one, only agreed to do this if the writers maintained Lisa's vegetarianism going forward, and they honored that deal. Canon now officially matters in the world of The Simpsons, and that will have consequences in a bit.

Lest you think Season 7 is all heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, let me remind you that this is the fucking Simpsons and it's a writing team at its comedic peak. Rapid-fire round of absolute hilarity bangers that stood out to me: "King Size Homer" for Homer pushing being a lazy oaf to its foregone conclusion with him abusing worker's comp and endangering his health, "Radioactive Man" for its lampooning of Big Hollywood (and the goggles that do nothing), "Two Bad Neighbors" for taking the real-life feud with George HW Bush and escalating Dennis The Menace-style shenanigans with Bart as Dennis and Bush as Mr. Wilson into a prank war between George and Homer until the climax has them engaged in fisticuffs in a sewer, "Bart On The Road" which Youtuber Billiam called the perfect Simpsons episode because the entire family gets at least one moment to shine... Hell, even the fucking clip show this season is genius! I always loved "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" when it came up in syndication, and it's only on this rewatch that I'm realizing it was just another fucking clip show! It just felt special because instead of clips of episodes you could just see in syndication, it was full of shit I'd never seen before: the Tracey Ullman shorts and all sorts of deleted scenes. A lot of that stuff would end up on the DVD bonus features, but in the 90's this really was a treat. Oh, and if we're talking comedic genius in Season 7, we simply must mention "22 Short Films About Springfield", which is just wall-to-wall with comedic short vignettes about the people of Springfield. Every one of them is immaculately pitched, getting in and out within two minutes and yet being expertly crafted. You've got Apu's 5 minutes off, extended Pulp Fiction riffs with Wiggum and Snake, Smithers being stung by a bee and nearly dying, and oh yeah maybe you've heard of this bit:

Like, what the fuck am I supposed to say here? It's Steamed Hams! It's Steamed Fucking Hams! In just under three minutes the writers of this era craft something so absurd, so funny, so pitch perfectly delivered with seriousness (which only makes it funnier) that it has become the Simpsons meme to end all Simpsons memes. It's been disassembled and reassembled in just about every way you can fucking imagine, and people are still somehow imagining new and exciting ways to fuck with it to create their own absurdist comedy takes on it. There's that old adage about how dissecting a joke helps you understand the joke but also kills it, but somehow Steamed Hams has managed to survive its infinite dissection and only becomes funnier each time. This shit turned 30 during the lifespan of this project, and it's still surviving! It takes the premise of Skinner and Chalmers' relationship established in the latter's first appearance (that Skinner is always lying about his incompetence to Chalmers, who gullibly accepts it every time) and just fucking escalates it over and over again, until you have the complete nonsense of an otherwise intelligent school superintendent believing that they call hamburgers steamed hams in Utica and that the NORTHERN FUCKING LIGHTS ARE IN SKINNER'S FUCKING KITCHEN! It's peak! It's fucking peak!

This is The Simpsons at its absolute creative zenith. Even a little skit like this about tricking a guy about fast food burgers is so iconic as to have infinite memetic potential. The Simpsons has not just defined comedy, but culture in this era. The thing created to make fun of Bill fucking Cosby has become a titan of modern entertainment, a trendsetter in its own right with a gravity all its own. The world never was the fucking same after the Simpsons, and things only kept getting better and better. We have evolved from a dysfunctional sitcom to a show that lampooned pop culture, to something that became the pop culture of the time. This is the absolute peak for The Simpsons, and a commercial triumph.

And then, kids, the golden age had to come to an end.