Monday, November 06, 2006

Two responses to last night's Orson Welles parody on The Simpsons



If you missed the segment, it's above. BTW, that's the very funny voice performer Maurice LaMarche doing his Welles impression. Which sounds nothing at all like his voice for The Brain (of Pinky & the...).

But it's the end I want to talk about. As you saw, it was a jab at the republican party. I had two responses. The first was as someone who likes to flatter himself he's a pretty astute judge of TV comedy.

In that sense, I thought it was heavyhanded, not well or clearly led up to and, you should pardon the expression, out of left field. It suffered, as so much of The Simpsons has for me in the past five years, from "lets say" syndrome.

That's where you get a sense not of a story being told but a room full of jaded, creatively bankrupt and exhausted writers saying "let's say...", anything to get out of the corners into which they've painted themselves.

In this case "let's say...we take a jab at the republicans!"

However, my other response was as someone who's a Democrat (tho sometimes just barely thanks to their jelly-like consistencies). In that sense, I thought: If these ideas stick in enough people's heads for a few more days...

...it will almost be worth how random and tacked on it seems.

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