Saturday, July 16, 2011

"Hate Month" Margical History Tour

Kriken: Black
RBY: Purple
So yeah, another Brian Kelley episode. I'll admit I didn't remember this one being God-awful and thinking this was his best one. In reality, it could be argued that this is his least horrible work and that's as good of a compliment I'll ever give this guy.


And yet this would fit in just fine with the later episodes of the show, if you catch my drift.

Oh hi RBY, I see you got my message, clearly he was ahead of his time.

That sounds about right. So, let's skip the imprisoning/idle chatter/whatever, just get this over with. What are we starting with?

Well I'd assume the first segment, in my opinion, the framing device isn't worth talking about.

There's not much that can be said about it, I guess - it's too bland to really pick out anything to harp on (except the treatment of that one book, but I speak as a mild bibliophile). So, we're starting off with King Henry VIII, then. 

Well I feel that the King Henry segment more or less helps support my theory about Brian Kelley's sense of humor and how he always feels the need to insert meaningless sex jokes that aren't funny. Case in point, the opening scene where King Henry announces to the royal court that he just screwed his wife.

Keeping in mind the era, where open talk of sex was essentially forbidden, it's a bit jarring. Even more irksome, though, is the scene where Homer makes a sex joke and then has Wiggum explain it. 

Ah yes, the "Modern Simpsons School of Comedy"

  1. Write an unfunny joke
  2. Explain said joke
  3. ???????
  4. PROFIT!
See, it's funny because we referenced South Park in a Simpsons review! .....laugh, damn you!

I see you have taken a few courses there yourself. Anyways, the whole divorce bit and re-marrying scenes weren't funny. The whole "Splitting things in two" has been run into the ground by so many others shows and the "Sex in the church"? Ahahaha, not funny.

That could be said of a lot of jokes in this episode - the 'cannonizing', the pikes, the Agnes/Homer pairing (and Otto/Homer implications), the scene with Lisa (which will be touched on again later)....you get the idea. 

We could honestly go into great detail about how this segment ALONE was bad, but it's time to move on. The Sacajawea segment was there, after all.

This is another thing that'll have to come back up, and a lot of the complaints here are similar to the King Henry VIII issues (i.e. lack of humor and gags that went on for too long). That said, as bad as this may sound, who they chose for Lewis and Clark is also a tad problematic.

You mean the whole "Blacks were slaves back then"? I can understand that, and it probably could've been solved with a different male pairing (Burns/Smithers, Moe/Barney, Skinner/Chalmers (despite what I've been saying recently), you get the idea).

I'll be honest, when I can, I'll give the episode credit when we're reviewing. This, I can't find anything to give credit for.

Well since you didn't bring it up, the whole 'time period jokes' were just bad. Ranging from how Lewis and Clark knew names of landmarks despite minimal exploration of that land to that point, to Moe's Bar, to the exploration somehow getting back to Washington DC in 1806...

Honestly, I felt those fell under the same issues as King Henry VIII; the stories presented are mere scraps of the truth sewed together with inaccurate jokes. As I've made clear, it's outrageous how the writers seem unwilling to do any research on topics central to their plots. Still, there's one last thing that needs to be discussed: when 'Sacajawea' mentions how to scare off a mountain lion, without ANY reason to mention it. Maybe if they had heard a mountain lion's roar, and 'Lewis' or 'Clark' asked about it, then it'd make sense.

Ah yes the 'Painfully obvious foreshadowing'. How lazy can he be to not possibly put that in some form of context where it would make sense?

Don't you know? The jokes padding out each segment kept them from having enough time to create the necessary context! And we all know how good those jokes were! Weren't you rolling on the floor the whole time?

Yes I guess I was, when my brain tried to evacuate my skull, I had to cover my ears with the floor and my face with my hands, so I guess I needed to roll back and forth.

See, there we go! So, shall we move onto the 'Mozart' segment?

You know you can't throw in 'It's historically inaccurate' because Mr. Kelley beat you to the punch at the end of it.

So he KNEW it was bad and didn't feel like fixing it? That's somehow even WORSE!

Yeah ripping off (There's a difference between homage and ripping off) the historical inaccuracies of the movie perfectly justifies your crappy segment. Makes sense to me.

As usual, there are bad jokes abound here, but there's also a rather strange plot hole: when Lisa drugs the emperor, she only drugged ONE glass, with no apparent leftover liquid. How did she manage to also drink a drugged glass?

You expect a Brian Kelley episode to have continuity? Ahahahaha! *rolling on the floor*

Well, a LITTLE would be nice!

That's the best joke I've ever heard involving Brian Kelley. Anyways, yeah that was stupid and two jokes in particular I want to bitch talk about: the Jackson 5 joke and the 'Musical fruits' opera *Cries*

*puts on Literary Analysis glasses* It does bring up one question: just where did the Jackson Five come from? Did they travel through time? Or is it a sign in-story that Marge knows absolutely nothing about the era?

*Breaks glasses* For me, the problem was the joke had NO buildup and made no sense. The opera joke... it's an opera about farting... I'll let that sink in *Sobs in corner*

*picking up shards and the frame* Despite what people claim about opera, it's mostly reserved for epic tales, usually of a romantic nature. Again, given the era, the joke makes no sense given how people felt about bodily functions. 

I'll say one thing about the epilogue and then we'll be just about done. It was very stupid and a piss-poor attempt to re-integrate 'real Homer' (Although the real Homer has been dead for a while) and the jokes at the end were just stupid and not funny. We get it, Homer likes Animal House, you though are not worthy to mention Animal House.

Now, then, Kriken, I just have one final thing to say. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to talk about Lisa's scene in King Henry VIII, her treatment as Sacajawea, and (though I actually didn't mention this) her treatment in Mozart.

Aw, crap, everyone take cover. 

Hardy-har-har. Anyhow, in each segment, Lisa is, at best, brushed off and humiliated. At worst, she's just degraded, with no sense of how her character - or even the characters she represents - works. In the King Henry VIII segment, it's BARELY justified considering the king's desire for a son, and even then, the scene was just clearly meant to be 'comedy' by humiliating Lisa. 

Ugh, please never bring up the 'Grow a penis' joke again.

Then, as Sacajawea, despite the help she did offer and accounts that have portrayed her as the explorers' greatest asset, whether for guiding, negotiating peace with angry tribes, or simply showing that the explorers meant no harm. All of this runs contrary to the portrayal shown by Brian Kelley, who only shows her as a know-it-all bitch, if you'll pardon my language. It's just frustrating. Lastly has to be Lisa in the role of Salieri, who is ignored and pushed aside at every possible turn until they push her into the madhouse. I could see this happening to Lisa in the show as well, given how Brian Kelley has her written every time! I can't tell if Brian Kelley just hates Lisa, or if he has issues with women in general (though, given other episodes he's written, it's easy to believe the latter is the correct theory).

Okay, and that's the end of our discussion about this episode, next week won't be fun at all, will it?

We're finally going to do 'Lisa the Dra

*Points gun* NO.

2 comments:

  1. I laughed at the end of this entry with "Lisa The Drama Queen". I hate that episode.

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  2. I hate the Sacajawea part because Lisa was the stuck up prick she is in the newer seasons, and although she was like that in the other segments, it showed even more in that segment.
    And the grow a penis joke was just another example of Brian Kelley's horrible, pointless sex joke style writing.

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