An Analysis of The Simpsons: Early Years & The Golden Age 

lil bastard clock tampering kit. Can’t believe I remember this decades later, funny shit.

I’m curious though so if anyone knows chime in please. Did Bart also have other “lil bastard” kits or was the gag only used once?

Yeah I know

@@joshuawesteros5345 He has the Li'l Bastard Traveling Kit in Itchy and Scratchy Land and the General Mischief Kit in The Joy of Sect (which he never gets to use before the cult leaders use their Li'l Bastard Brainwashing Kit on him). That's all the instances of Li'l Bastard Kits I can think of off the top of my head. I think that's all of them.

Ty. The whole lil bastard kits is great.

Also I will mention that in real life, many sociopaths recognize there is something wrong and decide to control their urges and be a good person. I'm going to make a movie about this path that they take, with a plot loosely based on the book Ulysses

I saw an episode from about season 30 recently and he was on a cocktail of meds, so I guess they eventually found a balance. Also, that anti med episode actually did end with him on Ritalin.

agree, Bart does feel guilt and feels empathy. Sociopaths dont

Mismedication(?) is rife but the problem is that people take that and get all AnTi!!!. They do nothing for the children who need it and... pppfff🤷🏾‍♀️... well...

Exactly. Someone with ASPD (or conduct disorder, as Bart is a minor) wouldn't give a damn about shooting a mother bird and wouldn't bother incubating her (as far as he knew) eggs in her absence. Edit: I 100% agree about the anti-medication bullshit.

you don't need to like everything about a series to be a fan

Corpos can't own an IP. It belongs to the people.

Pretty much most fandoms in my experience

lol, nice, i like the first 6 but don't count myself as a fan, but i'm always down to watch the OG trilogy and enjoy the first 6 - last 3, only saw 'force awakens' and was honestly bored by it but fan is short for fanatic, never understood the point - take it or miss it, doesn't matter much in life

Nice jab, hardly applicable tho

I always knew he was a good man

@@EdnaK728🤨

@@RebornAudio oh geez, what the hell is that look all about?

@@EdnaK728 Language Timothy. Where's the proof that fact is true?

@@RebornAudio do you accept Wikipedia?

You've summed up the key problem, in the early series homer actually had some basic intelligence and some fatherly authority even it's just if he could cut corners and so something half arsed he'd take the short cut which is where the humour came from, also he had a certain lovable innocence, unfortunately the more they increased his stupidity the more of an outright arsehole he became until as you say he became downright detestable in the end because his concern for anyone other than himself over rode all his better original qualities. What's worse though is that he stopped being funny cos all the original writers like Conan O Brian left and new people who had no real understanding of what made homer likeable in the first place moved in and so the depth of character was gone to be replaced with superficial moronic frat house humour and that's where they ruined their own program.

I'll stick to what I've always said about Homer Simpson he is man's initial thoughts and the way we would like to act before societies programming kicks in

Homer's rampant alcoholism is societal programming. We've seen in flashbacks, examples of what Homer and Barney were like before they first tried beer 🍻

@@AnnoyingNewsletters Homer was directly responsible for Barney's alcoholism though. His friend was going to make something of himself but Homer's possible jealousy at this had him harassing Barney to try beer which sent him on a spiral I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong) they've ever shown Homer making himself accountable for as an adult.

'got more stupud'

It’s because she’s Matt Groening’s POV character

Also the women in her family have historically been very smart and intelligent and sometimes brilliant and the men in the family including overseas relatives have typically been doofuses and ignoramuses. There's an episode that explains that. Can't think of exactly which season. I gotta look it up.

This video made me go back and watch the first season of the programme, yeah it's bloody brilliant. A lot more grounded and dark in tone that the rest of it, but I like that.

I'd include season 1 in the golden age any day

Okay but the *real* early years don't even start until The Tracy Almond show loool

It would be rather silly to dismiss season 1 of any series. It's the foundation for the rest of it, after all.

Golden age refers to the run of top tier episodes. S2 is my personal fav but it's a lot different from the next few seasons that all seem to have found the formula

I watched it when I was younger and was so confused to learn how many people hated it when I thought it was funny

Up Yours Children.

To be honest, I do know some people who in their life ONCE tried to rebel against their overbearing parents - and then never again. I could see that in Skinner too.also explains his allowed healthy libido without any concerning kinks. He must have had at least a short wild time.

What about skinner grandfather Sheldon.

@@BillBlazejowski I give the episode a pass for that line alone

I did a breakdown of life on the fast lane for an essay for my master's and when you look at the structure of the plot and character, it's just a thing if pure beauty.

​@@StubagfulI'd love to read that!

@@Stubagful Please make this a video essay.

Season 1 is fine as it’s more experimental

"Finally someone else recognizes how great the first season was." I completely agree with you.

True. Also in separate vocations the counsellor says he had Bart pegged as a drifter when the aptitude test tells him he's going to be a cop - then he becomes a hall monitor and he's good at it

That same future has Bart dying after pranking skinner (who also dies), so he doesn't get as boring as skinner.

She’s a midwit

"What do we need a psychologist for? We know our kid is nuts"

​@@Stubagful Sheldon skinner.

​@@Stubagful Seymour grandfather.

​@@Stubagful what about Sheldon skinner.

Seriously I think about Maggie a lot. She is probably my favorite character and honestly probably smarter than even Lisa

The absolute FORKING CHOKEHOLD that the mystery of who shot Mr Burns had on the culture, I have lived nearly 4 decades and I will never forget that.

I see

And they pulled it off internationally! @@rockcriedout7679

Her first word was also voiced by Elizabeth Taylor....I remember that episode being such a HUGE event.

Good points! No Troy McClure/Lionel Hutz = no classic Simpsons!

You made a really good point on these.

@@chaddwickfincher5835 gil was the scrappy doo of the simpsons.

Phil Hartman was not the heart of the show at all. he was in 54 out of 206 episodes of the show up until his passing. if he was the heart, how come more episodes were produced without him than with him?

​@@thebasedgodmax1163 maybe you didn't watch the show in the 90s. troy mcclure and lionel hutz were some of the funniest characters on the show. matt groening named fry from futurama after Hartman after his death. They were even talking about making a troy mcclure movie at one point.

I just did the math and if you keep watching at that rate it'll take you until March next year to completely catch up to the current end of the series (and by then Season 35 will be halfway through airing). May God have mercy on your soul.

Good luck! My husband and I attempted that a few years back and only got to around season 12 or 13.

​@@crpalstuck2966I did slow down when I got season 8. If I get going again I'll be finished by the end of the year.... probably

Season 14 was the season I gave up. I liked the treehouse and moe baby blues is great, but the other 20 odd episodes for me ranged from boredom to awful. The humour in my eyes drastically went down when al Jean returned in 2001

​@@Stubagful Google is deleting people account at the end of the year.

Thanks

You are the best GlipGlig ever

Ty

Also didn't help that Grimes was also a judgemental, Randian, "bootstraps" asshole with delusions of grandeur (given his rant at Homer was just veering very close into "welfare queen" dogwhistle territory).

The class after class of ugly, ugly children broke him

Particularly do season 1. I recommend everyone try season 1 again cause it was so far ahead of it's time. It gets modern trends in adult animation so on the money

@@Stubagful I’m very keen to watch it properly. They wouldn’t rerun season 1 as much when I was a kid so the only time I ever properly watched it was when I was staying with my cousin who had the dvd. I was really excited to see how The Simpsons began but was so confused at why it was sad and miserable and didn’t try it again for years. I’m really excited to see it after all these years, where gloomy and miserable TV has almost become the thing I enjoy most.

Huh interesting. Didn't come across that one. It's possible. I never realised back in the day that the antifreeze in the wine was an actual scandal in the mid 80s

Looking it up it seems like you're talking about the murder of Ryan Harris; it seems like that happened in 1998 though, which was after Bart the Murderer. So unfortunately that couldn't have been the inspiration.

​@@TheAlexSchmidtthey said it was a 14 year old girl who was murdered. Was Ryan Harris a girl? If not then that can't be the case they were talking about.

@@MissSeaShell Ryan Harris was a girl, but she was 11.

Yes, that is a great episode.

Yes😊

​@@marcj3682yes😊

For a long time Stu just did Doctor Who reviews with the odd video of something else so it's a pretty niche audience to capture. That plus his videos always use the crude animation instead of the perhaps more popular format of talking to the camera I guess wouldn't attract as many viewers (fwiw I've always loved his little animations and they're a staple of the channel I'd never wanna see gone). Stu does deserve a much larger audience though tbf, I've always appreciated his insight and thought he's one of the best reviewers on the site even when I don't agree with him, so hopefully projects like these get him more noticed.

ADHD is also commonly believed to be either hereditary, or at least likely to run in a family. Bart DEFINITELY has ADHD, and it is extremely possible that Homer also does. When I got diagnosed, I dug DEEEEEEEP into it, and because it all clicked with me, but it also massively applied to my dad, I told my dad to get checked out and guess what? Lol. If the Simpsons wanted to be really relevant now, they would have Bart getting diagnosed with ADHD and either Homer gradually works out that he also has ADHD, or maybe Marge or Lisa works it out for him or something.

@@wolfgangbailey3730 Exactly my thoughts! Same thing happened with me and my mom and sister.

I was thinking Bluey when l heard that as well. "Functional" does not mean "flawless" or "without problems".

@@TheDanishGuyReviews I never said it did but they get along way better than the Simpsons do.

@@icecreamhero2375 I didn't mean to imply you said that. Instead, it was what l thought of when l heard Stu say functional.

I'm gonna put together all the videos I make into a 6 hour compilation and call it that

A lot of the backlash was from the cast themselves, particularly Harry Shearer.

I still feel that Principal and the Pauper could have worked if it was from an earlier season. By season 9 we have had several spotlight episodes for him. So we know who he is and what makes him get up in the morning. I will say having the background of him being much like Bart, a rebellious angst, shines a new light on their relationship. Skinner wants Bart to do better and not to fall into the same traps as he did. It took a war for Skinner to change and clearly he does not want history repeating itself.

Ironically the backlash against change caused one of the main problems of why the simpsons fell in popularity, with now only the odd stories that actually do anything new even being talked about.

though when it comes to experimentation I think this is something the show has gone back to doing more regularly more recently, which is nice to see!

He may be a madman, but Sideshow Bob is handsome and charming and his voice is utterly intoxicating

i'm also thinking the cannibal treehouse episode could be inspired by sweeney todd

yes that line was great! it's classic.

It took me a long time to understand how to get people around me to understand depression too. I honestly tear up watching that clip of Marge. I hope you're okay and getting the help you need. I struggled with depression for so long but therapy has turned my life around, for me and everyone around me. It's made me much more capable of expressing what I need

See I thought that too but then I watched the golden age back and it's full of celebrities as themselves - Krusty gets cancelled is full of them. And they still do "we wrote a character for a guest star" in later years I've run into. I was trying to put my finger on what wasn't working about a random episode and didn't realise an incidental character was played by Reese Witherspoon. I think it's the lack of deprecation too. When George Harrison shows up, homer doesn't go "oh my god it's George Harrison" he goes "oh my god where did you get that brownie?" In the golden age no one's impressed a celebrity has shown up in Springfield. It's the opposite of the Elon musk one

As a kid I could get through Nightmare Cafeteria, but I would always stop the episode before the inside-out fog bit.

I've loved this episode for 15 years, and as an adult now, I *STILL* have to look away at *BOTH* of the scenes you two mentioned. XD

​@@BenColMy parents would turn the show off before the inside out scene played. I wonder if it bothered them?

no, you're just stupid. as a child, i was cognizant of things like unfairness and inequality. i didn't have the language to describe these things, but i would speak out against them anyway. my social studies teacher in middle school would only pass the "talking ball" to the boys in class, and the boys would only pass the ball to each other. this is such a clear sign of inequality that a child understood it, but when i pointed it out, i just got in trouble for arguing with the teacher. i was always arguing with my teachers, especially history teachers, because history is political. i always had something to say about how people were teaching things to me. i remember learning about the civil war and my teacher told me there were other, more important reasons that the north and the south fought. it wasn't just slavery! it was uh, states' rights, and uh, Independence! you can believe me or not, but as a child, i recognized that this argument for what it was, evil. it was trying to lessen the evils of slavery by saying oh that's not really what everyone was fighting over. it's something that was taught to me and millions of other impressionable young children and i felt so alone because i was the only one speaking out against it. do you know how isolating it is to be the one child trying to stand up against a teacher? it's humiliating. you're a child and this adult has all the power over you. you still haven't learned enough words to communicate your own ideas and the teacher is telling you slavery wasn't that bad and you feel like that's wrong. you want to stand up for what's right but the teacher yells at you and all your classmates think you're annoying and loud. i WAS considered an "sjw" in school, even before people knew what that was. no one wanted to be my friend because i was constantly challenging the status quo. just because you conformed doesn't mean there aren't children who recognize inequality and want to change things. i got told, suck it up, life isn't fair. well why isn't it? shouldn't we be working to MAKE it more fair? i couldn't get over being told that life wasn't fair. it was so stupid to me. maybe if you cared more about other people, you would recognize this too.

I was like Lisa at that age too. I get a little annoyed when people respond to characters like her as "little kids don't talk that way". Other than that I loved this video.

I’ve honestly always been the same way. A lot of the time, with characters such as Lisa, the lack of friends and overdeveloped sense of language, reading, writing, and thinking is something that I’ve seen paralleled a lot in my own interactions and life. This is also a bit of an issue with the art that I happen to create, as usually the stylistic, conceptual and artistic choices are, from other people’s perspectives, too different or complex for them, so they don’t like it. I do want to make clear that I am not trying to boast, or boost my considerably atrophied ego. My writing thus far has only been a reflection upon my own life. However, I do wonder whether I would have been better in a gifted program, a la the “Bart the Genius” episode. I was not placed into one when younger, supposedly because I did not meet the requirements. However, considering how my life has went and the challenges I have faced, I do recognize quite a bit of these struggles in descriptions of other gifted kids. Again, please keep in mind that I do not consider myself a genius in any way, nor anything special. However, paradoxically, I do see the differences compared to my peers, much like how you saw that your reading and comprehension levels were higher than average.

@@dumbolddoor9882 tbh, one of the things Bart the Genius gets so right is that gifted programmes are just containment vehicles, only presented as a Special Treat rather than a punishment. Most of the time when people “don’t meet requirements” it is because they are judged to be too socially well-adjusted, and thus are judged to not need the true reason behind the programme. I was in some of the various forms of it, and even skipped a couple years in school, but even then the main reason given behind those decisions was an attempt to reduce bullying from my social ineptitude. A problem with those programmes is the way they separate kids creates a self-reinforcing cycle of always being separate and different from their peers. Not that that’s the only way it can happen, but it’s a pretty common one. IE it can create a lot of the bullying and behavioural problems it exists to try and address (in a very blunt way). By some very limited metrics I kind of thrived in those programmes, I did university-level stuff a few years early, but it didn’t help prepare me for life any better. And the hyper competitive atmosphere makes it very difficult if not impossible to make friends among your new peers. I tried so hard to make friends with the other bookish nerds but they were even more proud and standoffish than I was, so there was always some barrier which came up and we always hit an impasse. As we see in Bart the Genius, it’s quite a mean, two-faced, defensive environment. You have to constantly prove you really “deserve” to be there, which means the kids spend more attention on each other than the way they’re treated by the adults around them. It’s kind of a diversionary tactic, carefully outlining the societally-acceptable ways to utilise one’s smarts and demarcating the ways that are bad and will get you ostracised or kicked out back into the general stream (where you will always be marked as an outsider). The idea is to teach people how to be good at office work, whether that’s with social cohesion in the break room or being sequestered at one’s desk constantly. But it’s also completely understandable you wonder what it would’ve been like if you’d been “allowed in” by the gatekeepers, since it is sold as some amazing special reward, wow honours track, etc etc to the rest of the school populace. That’s another major dimension of how it serves to control the student population. To give just one example the smart kids who want to be let in will focus on that aspect, and will often want to avoid getting-into trouble in the hopes that lets them gain consideration into later entry. But you really honestly didn’t miss much. In a lot of ways it messed up my sense of self which took many years to begin to recover from post-education, where it was all bound-up in my academic performance and precocity. Precocity is a quickly-rotting asset, even moreso than ideas like youthful beauty. So I didn’t know what to do once that began to fade, and school certainly hadn’t prepared me to learn how to struggle in a world of equals. Adjusting to being a fairly unremarkable near-30 year-old was hard. And don’t worry, I don’t think you’re tooting your own horn. It can be hard to discuss these topics precisely because of the envy which the school systems deliberately implanted in its student body when they instituted this kind of separation. The very fact it is a system of separation, intended to be aspired to, creates an artificial hierarchy which can outlast people’s time in school. Attempting to simply discuss it factually does run the risk of someone interpreting it as a humblebrag, and missing the point in so doing, because they will often have old social wounds associated with the topic in one way or another. It’s just another reason I wish time had been allowed to exist in the Simpsons - Lisa could’ve been a vehicle to explore all these difficulties at uni and beyond, but instead she’s stuck perpetually in this kind of school limbo. Imagine how it could influence her parenting style, for good and ill! Or how Bart could come to realise the remedial and gifted wings were just two different ways to cordon off “troublemakers” and bond stronger than ever with Lisa, breaking through some of that envy. (Because let’s face it Bart is also really smart and resourceful in tons of arenas, just not ones which require the ability to quietly sit at a desk all day.) That got a bit longer than I’d intended, but I hope you can find something useful in all this.

I think he meant animated series. Right off the top of my head, I can't think about a single one.

You mean like the Jetsons, Flintstones, Addams Family, Proud Family?

@@glitch84- Bob's Burgers, they have issues due to being poor, but as a family unit they're perfectly functional.

in a random attempt to make this comment seem more genuine and less robotic so the compliments can really sink in: my arm is super itchy right now for no reason, but it's lucky my nails are longer than they've ever been. my sister painted them pink for when we went to the barbie movie, which i LOVED by the way. so i couldn't bite them. they're still pretty short but just that extra white sliver makes all the difference with scratching. and i'm acting like humanizing myself is a noble act to make the compliment hit deeper, but really i'm hypomanic (bipolar) and just like talking about myself. anyway, i'll watch your friends video next - that one looks like a goodie.

not that i've ever watched friends before - but hey, i had never heard of the simpsons before this either! (that's a joke)

I didn't think it was robotic. I hearted because I thought it was lovely. Thank you :) I enjoy going deep on characters. I find trying to express the core of what makes these iconic characters function improves the writing work I do outside youtube

Simpsons video essays get better as they go on. Compare this to supereyepatchwolf’s or entertain the elk’s from years ago & this is much more nuanced & has better analysis

I got to an interesting episode in season 11 where Barney gives an almost BoJack horseman style speech when he realises he's a bumbling stereotype and decides to quit drinking. This was about 2001 and was weirdly ahead of the curve

a channel Anime Academic reviewed each season with summarized mini-reviews of episodes and Reveiwed2Death is currently doing it episode by episode.

Lisa, stop playing that stupid... SAXAPHONE! Yes, that's it!

@@dna6 tramampoline! Trabampoline!

Tubamaba?

I was also very insecure and obsessed with intelligence and right and wrong in a way that was damaging to myself and my relationships with others. also very much seen in Lisa. Man, is this therapy

Not unpopular with me

Lol

grown ass adults watching bluey is creepy as fuck.

Almost like people like different things?