Because it's the 40th anniversary of the franchise, been watching the original Transformers cartoon. Season 2 is when things got pretty outrageous, like an episode where Megatron keeps a captured Optimus Prime alive, but steals parts of Optimus to use as various weapons and gadgets for the Deceptions across New York City, which Megatron has mechanized into "New Cybertron".

Just saw part of a college football game where one of the teams was Michigan, and a Michigan fan was dressed as a Storm Trooper, likely as a tribute to James Earl Jones. :(

The Simpsons

QUICK NOTE, this post is a monster, and I want to add in videos and edit it a little after I get home, and am not writing on a little mobile screen.

I’ve been watching the Simpsons with the goal to watch every episode - or at least until I get tired of the show since it’s quite a lot of episodes. I started with the shorts from the 80s, there’s about 50 of them.

So, one thing I’ve found is that a lot of the Simpsons people talking about the show’s decline and the “golden age of the Simpsons” are mostly over-exaggerating or completely full of shit. First, Golden Age from season 3 to 8 is immediately easy to spot as bullshit, IMO. Season 2 has multiple episodes that are better than most to all of those in season 3. As far as cultural relevance, that covers many, if not all of the Season 1 episodes such as the Christmas episode where they get Santa’s Little Helper, The War if the Simpsons where Homer (very creepily) sexually harasses Maud Flanders by asking her to get the peanuts at the back so he can ogle her breasts, then going to the marriage rescue camp with QUEEN OF THE HARPIES! So IMO, War of the Simpsons Season 2 was perfect saintly the best episode until sometime in season 4.

Season 2 also features another very close second place, or tied with first place, episode called Lisa’s Substitute, which is a reimagining of The Graduate - it has lots of references from the film such as “Mrs Krabapple, you’re trying to seduce me” - and the leg - and both featuring Dustin Hoffman. The episode also features Bart running for President against Martin, and the “More asbestos!” chant.

So, I mostly think the people who say season 1 and 2 aren’t the “golden age of the Simpsons” are wrong.

Season 3 was better for the average episode, as there were a lot of episodes I liked a lot (The one where the Germans buy the plant, Bart joins the Mafia/Goodfellas parody, saw production improvements, Mr Lisa goes to Washington, Bart’s Friend Falls in Love) the one I liked the best was Colonel Homer. But I liked the two episodes I mentioned above from season 2 more. Also, Colonel Homer isn’t the first marital difficulty episode, or even the best one to this point: and IMO, this story gets done better with the Mindy episode “The Last Temptation of Homer” in season 5 - that episode features an unwitting drug trip by Homer who are a package of what he thought was powdered gravy in the parking lot.

Season 4
An episode that is often upheld as the best of the show, The Monorail episode, while good, isn’t as great as it’s been made out to be. It wasn’t in my top 10 to that point. And I’d say the best episode of season 4 is Last Exit to Springfield - it is the most heavily quoted episode of the show making it or less the Casablanca of the Simpsons - old, well respected, highly quotable, and with a song that is a defiance of power: instead of the Nazi’s, it’s Mr Burns Power Plant. IMO, the best episode of the classic seasons.
My second favourite from this season is Whacking Day.

Season 6, 7, and 8 are IMO the strongest stretch of The Simpsons, as there is a high density of great episodes. But I don’t think season 9 and 10 are crap and not worth watching, as some would have it. There are about 3-4 bland episodes in each season, but also some great ones too. It’s a dip, but mostly it’s just that season 6-8 were exceptional, while 9 and 10 are back to the status quo. The episode “Natural Born Kissers” which features Homer and Marge running naked through Springfield after being caught getting it on within a mini golf castle, is one of my favourites of the whole show, that’s at the end of season 9.

Season 9-13 felt like a show running out of ideas, as they kept repeating stuff from the past episodes. The Simpsons had been repeating episodes since back in season 4, but it felt like they were doing it more in this season. But this dropped back by about season 14 or 15, and the stories felt more original after this point. Also these “dip in quality” seasons still had lots of great episodes in them. There’s a lot of over-exaggeration when it comes to Reddit/Youtube discussions on The Simpsons quality.

Season 17-19 had only a trickle of bland episodes, probably at least equal to the exceptionally good seasons (6-8). I’ve been enjoying these seasons thoroughly - so far (in season 19).

You Kent Always Say What you Want from S18 features a conspiracy theory where Kent Brockman becomes an alternative media figure and talks about the relationship with Fox, Fox News, and the Republican Party. I enjoyed that one a lot.

Crook and Ladder is a Bill Odenkirk (brother of Bob Odenkirk) episode, and I find his episodes are always a laugh riot. This one features Homer, Apu, Moe, and Skinner forming a crooked fire department where they rob the place and then report it as burned. But the best Bill Odenkirk episode of the season is a reimagining of The Godfather, featuring Michael, who is the son of Fat Tony.

In this season, there was a parody of World of Warcraft, where Bart becomes an annoying black Knight who rules over everything, but then Marge starts playing, and he has to start compensating… until he murders her in game.
There is also the 24 parody from this season which I found was average, but was generally considered a favourite of the season and makes “10 best episodes of the The Simpsons after season 8” lists - I’m mentioning it, but it would barely make my top 10 for season 18 alone, let alone of every episode after season 8. I think episodes like this one tend to get more noticed because they have a gimmick, or maybe there is something about them that appeals to American culture that I am not susceptible to.

So anyway, when it comes to people discussing Simpsons after season 8, I think there’s a ton of exaggeration. It’s kind of like weird fandom where someone is a fan of Thing A, and therefore Thing A is all or mostly perfect, but Thing B does nothing right—despite the reality being that Thing B is around 95% as good as Thing A. Most fanboys don’t realize they are fanboys, and will argue that they are objective and that their over-exaggerated pessimism on Thing B is the result of unbiased analysis—but they’re mostly just fooling themselves, and perhaps confirm the bias of others that share their bias. That’s fanboyism; fanboys are a very pessimistic and cynical crowd; and there’s probably something like 10-50 times the number of them today as there were 25 years ago… or they just happen to be 100 times louder than everyone else on the Internet 😁

The other reason why there might be the perception of quality decline is simply that the Simpsons isn’t as culturally relevant as it was in the 1990s, especially the early and mid-90s. In 1987-89 the Simpsons were edgy shorts, then they went mainstream as an edgy animated show in 1990. But Simpsons faded in relevance during the shock TV era which hit in the mid-late 1990s; suddenly, what was edgy, was now seen as being wholesome like Full House - and that’s not a good thing for the fanboy crowd who will look at the old seasons with rose-coloured nostalgia glasses, but not give the same benefit to anything after point X, and they’ll often find one episode and spend like 45 minutes talking about it and act like that one episode now represents the entirety of the show - and why these bad/contrived arguments don’t set off most people’s bullshit detector is because of confirmation bias - for most people they see “oh yeah, that must be why I stopped watching the Simpsons in the late 1990s” instead of the fact that culture shifted to other things.

Anyway!
By season 19, I’m still finding great episodes, and when talking about the standard quality episodes, I find that the average episode is about the same quality. The lower episodes are where I notice the quality differences, mainly: as the bland episodes were more frequent (about 4-5 per season instead of 1-2) during season 9-12 or so than other seasons; but in season 9 if I recall, they were all mostly back to back around the middle, and there are still like 20 episodes that are good or great in that season. Apart from Bill Odenkirk, I’ve found J Stewart Burns, Matt Selman, and Joel H Cohen episodes to be almost always great. Most others are mostly good, Tim Long has a mix of good and great episodes. Others, like Michael Price, can write one of the best episodes of the season, and also one of the worst.

But heading through season 19, this is probably the 4th or 5th season in a row where I felt it improved over the last. Season 18 (IMO) was the most enjoyable since 8, and I don’t expect anything to top season 6-8 as a season, but I’m still thrilled to find lots of episodes I like around as much as those seasons, which is also true for season 1-5.

Finally got to see Transformers One. This may be the best Transformers movie since Bumblebee. :)

The Wild Robot: I was hoping for something a bit closer to Wall-E with good silent storytelling and such, but once I got over my own expectations and the movie got going I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's more about parenting and community than it is about appreciating nature or life itself. Anyway, this is one of the best pictures Dreamworks has ever put out and I hope to see more like it. Don't miss it.

The second to last season of Home Improvement. Shame the tie in game for Super NES was a dumpster fire, and I don't mean one Tim started.

Just started watching "Yellowstone" two days ago. Watched two entire seasons already, it's brilliant! It's like hillbilly Succession!

After this I'll be re-watching "The Expanse", having my annual "Band of Brothers" re-watch, and then I'm finishing some documentaries to really enjoy the eye-candy of my new TV. I've also been sick for nearly a week, so it's the perfect time to rot on the couch.

It's so bleak with so many unsympathetic characters that I call it Yellowsnow.

They really are nasty. But there's a rhyme and reason to it, I don't know why, but I do love me some antiheroes! It's very well written, and the side-stories don't take up too much of the screen time, which is something that tends to happen to modern TV-shows.

Yes, I'm sure Beth had "rhyme and reason" to tell Jamie to kill himself. She's a fucking heartless cunt who makes every scene with her unbearable (other than one scene where she got beaten within an inch of her life).

That's why I like The Punisher so much. Almost every time Punisher finds someone who genuinely deserves to die he takes them out.