| Simpsonista

"At Long Last Leave"

Sometimes I feel like I love the show more than THEY do, is all.

It was clear from the early promos that this episode wasn't going to be special in any meaningful sense. It was just a regular old Simpsons episode, which happened to drop into the "500th episode" slot in the series' run. This seems like a puzzling waste of opportunity. Only four other shows in the history of television have gone for more than 500 episodes, and two of those shows are WWE wrestling so I'm not sure if they really count.

It seems like it would have been right to mark this milestone with something a little different. I'm thinking of the "Behind the Music" episode, something meta, an episode that is ABOUT the show. It kind of makes me wonder if the show's creators actually care about the show at all, you know? We make an effort to mark the epic milestones of the things we care about. For grandpa's 100th birthday we don't just give him a cursory pat on the back and get on with our day.

Menu To Celebrate the 500th Simpsons Episode

Doughnuts are the obvious choice, but there are so many more options!

Looking to sit down with something a little special, for tonight's landmark 500th Simpsons episode? Here are some ideas, culled from the show's 23-year run:

Butterfingers

Do you know how long it's been since the Simpsons hawked Butterfingers candy? But I can still hear Bart squawking "Better not lay a finger on my Butterfinger!" like it was yesterday. Buy these to eat ironically, please. No one liked this "Poochie-esque" chapter in the Simpsons history.

Six Reminiscences In Honor Of The 500th Episode

Hard to believe how much of my life has been lived alongside Springfield's most famous family.

The first episode of The Simpsons aired on December 17, 1989. I was finishing my last year of high school. It aired on a Sunday night, which was family dinner night over at my stepmother's house. My stepbrother and I begged our parents to let us watch the show, because we had heard so much about it.

Watching The Simpsons became part of our Sunday night ritual - for the next few months, anyway, after which my stepbrother and I left the state to attend college.

My father still tries to get a laugh out of me by saying "D'oh!" even though I know for a fact he hasn't seen a single episode of the show in at least the last ten years. But it's part of our shared family history, and he's a dad, and that's the kind of silly-ass lame thing that dads do, even when you're almost 40.

"The Daughter Also Rises"

Hopefully next week's episode will be so great, we'll forget this one

I had a pretty good inkling that they were going to cram some crappy shows in just before the 500th episode celebration. Knowing that the feel-good feeling goodiness of watching the 500th episode would be able to wash backwards in a wave of sentimental retroactive amnesia, and all would be forgiven.

And yep: this episode.

It had some promise at first. I was heartened to see a sitcom Valentine's Day situation where the guy not only remembered about Valentine's Day, but prepared correctly beforehand. Homer is at the ready with nice clothes, roses, the works.

"Bart Stops to Smell The Roosevelts"

It's hard to see past the central fact of this episode, which is that it's an entire Simpsons episode about Teddy Roosevelt.

Even weirder than the idea of "an entire Simpsons episode about Superintendent Chalmers" is the idea of "an entire Simpsons episode about Teddy Roosevelt." As with last week's episode about Moe's bar rag, I feel like if you're going to make an entire Simpsons episode about Teddy Roosevelt AND Superintendent Chalmers, it had better be a pretty great one. For one thing, why waste that combination (however random) on a mediocre episode?

"Moe Goes From Rags To Riches"

This episode was a real mess.

If you're going to do a whole entire episode about a bar rag, you had better make it a pretty funny episode. And this time, they didn't. That's the episode in a nutshell: it wasn't anywhere close to awesome enough to overcome the fact that it was about a bar rag.

I'm a pretty whimsical gal. But there isn't enough whimsy in the world for me to endure an entire half hour episode about a bar rag. And not a canonical bar rag, either. It's not as if we have seen the bar rag before and wondered, "What's his deal?" In other words, this isn't equivalent to a Moleman or Comic Book Guy episode. If anything, the rag is a quaternary character. Ranking below even the tertiary characters, as far as interestingness goes.

"The D'Oh-cial Network"

The Winkelvoss twins making out with each other at the end? SUPER CREEPY. *Erika likes this.

I came to this episode biased from the start, because I hate Facebook more than anything. Well, not "anything," I guess. But I hate it more than a lot of things. Put it this way: I haven't seen the movie "The Social Network," because I know it wasn't as hard on Zuckerberg as I felt it should have been, and I know it would just make me angry.

At the same time, I have very little patience for people who make the same old litany of complaints: people just text each other! They don't talk anymore! Everyone's looking at their gadgets! Get a grip, elderly people of the world. Things change. We know you hate it. We know you want us kids off your lawn. Just relax, okay? Stop being so curmudgeonly!

"Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson"

"And why is there moisture between the windows?"

The Simpsons has always walked a fine line whenever the topic of politics comes up. Instead of tilting the show either to the left or to the right, they always steer it towards easier topics - like corruption in politics, the stupidity of voters, and so forth.

In this case, the show takes aim square at the right wing, and some of the laughs are mighty uneasy. Part of the problem is that this episode pulls a lot of punches when it comes to Ted Nugent. The episode also suffers from the classic Simpsons problem with regards to current events, which is that the show's long lead time means that contemporary references go stale quickly. (The show mocked itself on this very point, earlier this season.)

Simpsons Jokes That Came True

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for dogs with bees in their mouths, and when they bark they shoot bees at you.

There's a great list on Ranker of 13 Simpsons jokes that actually came true in real life. This is a great comprehensive list, but what really fascinated me was the way that they broke down into three basic categories: random chance, "I heard about it on the Simpsons so I want to try it," and the best category: the Simpsons accurately extrapolating from today's trends to predict the future.

Category 1: Random Chance

The Simpsons has been on the air for over two decades. With somewhere around 450 episodes under their belt, you would expect a few things to hit just based on statistical anomalies.

"The Falcon and the D'Ohman"

What we have here is a portrait of Jack Bauer as a semi-retired, semi-broken man.

I guess reviews of this episode were kinda mixed, mostly because it isn't always as funny as it could be. And the plot rambles in some rather odd and unexpected directions. Which is a fair complaint, really. But when I re-watched this episode last Sunday, I was really struck by the way that the show seemed to understand something about Keifer Sutherland's character that the rest of us have never quite come to terms with: he is a bad man who has done (rather, been asked to do) bad things, and who suffers because of it.

Simpsonista

Simpsons episodes, comics, and all things Homer and the gang

Account