It’s been a while since I watched it, but I recall the action in Avatar takes place over less than a year. The coming of the comet as a deadline is announced early on.
Gradually aging the Simpsons would be every bit as bad an idea as letting Calvin & Hobbes grow up. It’s too late to end the show while it’s still good, but at least let it go out without further tarnishing our memories of it.
I love the “It’s terrible, they should end the show, I haven’t watched it in 10 years” comments.
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Nobody’s opinion matters on this. The Simpsons will die when they stop being profitable, full stop. They clearly have enough of an audience to keep making money, and until that ends they will not.
We have this amazing age of near unlimited content, and we still have people who wish death on something because they don’t like it. I don’t like almost all television, and so I don’t watch it. That still leaves more content that I do like than I can realistically watch while still having a job and family. So what’s with the hate? Who cares?
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Sometimes it seems like one of the reasons the Simpsons is kept around is so that people can pretend they’re clever by writing another analysis of how far it has declined – sort of like they’ve been doing for the last decade.
It is largely impossible for something to remain innovative or ground-breaking after twenty-six years, I daresay, and it hardly seems reasonable to fault something for that reason. I suspect the show has a very, very long way to go before it reaches a true nadir.
I think they need to age them, but they need to spiral off into the temporal oddities that are so strange that even Matt Groening didn’t understand them.
Hop to 2:30, Groening misses the issue that Bart is the wrong age relative to Homer. (Homer got Marge pregnant when he was in high school, and since Homer is 37, since Bart would have been born when Homer was 16, Bart should be 21, not 10). Instead, Groening just talks about how the characters don’t age.
Maybe Homer & Marge are aging more quickly than their children? Does that make Abe about 10 years older than Homer in reality?
Nope, Homer started dating Marge when they were in high school but an early flashback episode clearly established that he got her pregnant at age 22. Still, that would make Bart 15 if Homer is 37.
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In response to your (and many other) comments about people criticizing the Simpsons:
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Obviously, the show doesn’t give a shit what we think. They’re going to keep going until Fox says stop.
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Criticism is important since it (supposedly) improves the quality of our culture. If everyone just accepts everything they’re given, there’s no impetus to churn out better stuff. (Which is pretty much where we’re at right now.) Critics aren’t haters (well, good critics, anyway) they’re simply pointing out something that’s true. You can agree or disagree, but to chide them because they’re actually trying to do society a service is stupid.
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In this specific case, we’re not dealing with something that was always shit. We’re dealing with one of the 80’s best underground cartoonists, Matt Groening, who actually had something to say. It’s especially ironic since he and Gary Panter always dreamed of infiltrating and subverting the media, and Groening somehow managed to do that with the Simpsons. So to actually realize your artistic ambition, and then let it turn to the exact thing you were attempting to subvert, is really sad and disappointing. Groening may not agree. Or Groening may agree deep down but can’t allow himself to actually admit that. Either way, it’s worth pointing out.
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Exactly, the point was that Groening was hung up on the “TV characters don’t have to age” problem, instead of the inherent age discrepancy between Bart & Homer.
How long will it be before Maggie has tits?
They’ve always played a little loose with the age discrepancy thing. For example, Maggie was a year old before Apu got married and now his children appear to be older than she is. But as Lisa once noted, “cartoons don’t have to be 100% realistic.”
Yep, and that would be interesting to mess with. Have characters age past each other. Have Maggie die of old age before Bart. Have Homer age twice the rate as Marge. NOW we’re talking.
Only if one of them starts aging backwards, Benjamin Button-style.
Gasoline Alley, which did do the aging thing, became, as a result, almost incomprehensible in random daily pulpy doses. You had to follow it religiously for years to decrypt some dailies. It also stopped being funny, kinda. Interesting lacework, though!
The shows where the Simpsons are depicted as older aren’t bad at all, btw. And those are the ones about the Simpsons as a family, I think… This discussion suggests that “Peanuts” characters should have gotten old and died as well? (OK, http://www.aboutcomics.com/Schulzteens.html .)
As it is, the show isn’t about a family (family dynamics, maybe yes) but instead a vehicle for the sensibility of Groening & co. They haven’t become mainstream, mainstream had to become them. That this wacky idea even merits discussion suggests the show is still very relevant in current form. Also, I’ve noticed every ten years or so, the writers update the story of Marge & Homer with respect to how their love affair resulted in matrimony in the previous decade, and I’m looking forward to eventually learning how they met during the Great Recession of '09, when I’m settled in front of my holovisor and teething my way through the distant future…of two years from now!
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How about this. Final season, whenever it is: Each episode advances about one year. By the end, everybody’s at the age they would be if the Simpsons had aged properly from the beginning.
Maybe start with a season premiere, where Professor Frink creates a device that “fixes” time, even though nobody else was aware it was broken, and each year is set in the actual year it would be if the characters were the proper age.
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Just today I thought that it would be a pleasant end-of-the-world scenario, if we all just aged back to zero.
Somebody should make it into a movie. “Babypocalypse”, I’d call it, but then people will come expecting a comedy…
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Groening wrote that the most recent “look at the future” episode, which I also recall was a season-closer, is canonical.
I still enjoy the show, but wouldn’t mind if they pulled the plug.
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Well, a lot of people think it has stunk for a while. Many disagree on just when it really started to stink consistently. Season five? Ten? Fifteen? Depends who you ask.
I haven’t watched regularly for about 15 years, which means there’s a huge backlog of new-to-me reruns in syndication.
The occasional new episodes I see are almost always mediocre-to-bad.
But from that 15-year backlog I sometimes catch something really good. I’ll look up those episodes and often find out that they’re from seasons numbered in the teens that many hardcore fans/purists have written off completely. Even though I started watching the Simpsons when they were 2-minute shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show, and remember fretting over whether it would get renewed for a second season (I rarely do that with any TV show), I guess I’m not much of a purist.
I’m agnostic on the question of cancelling it now. If people still enjoy making and watching it, I don’t really mind if it goes on and on.
The Simpsons are still relevant today for two reasons: powerlessness and nostalgia.
Powerless, in that their actions are always reset by the next episode. It doesn’t matter if the power plant almost melts down, or if Bart somehow passes himself off as a genius, or Lisa starts some social activism movement. Whatever momentum builds up is never enough to survive even to the end credits. Just like modern life today: most people are stuck in a circumstantial Groundhog Day they can’t figure out how (or are actively thwarted trying) to escape.
“We are born on the couch and we die on the couch.” - every Simpson character ever
Nostalgic, in that Springfield is not just middle-class, but secure. Think about it: Homer always keeps his job, no matter how badly he bungles it. The family never falls apart. They’re comfortable - a term I suspect many viewers cannot apply to themselves without bitter, cynical laughter.
As such, The Simpsons won’t be dying any time soon, in my jaundiced opinion.
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Wait, does everyone age in reverse at the same time, but at varying speeds, so we all reach babyhood at the same time, or do we start de-aging at the same time, but at normal speed? Who’ll change our nappys and feed us our bottles/boobs? Who will sing us to sleep and hold our hands when we watch scary movies and check the closets?
I like this idea, and I want to know more.
