The Simpsons

Well it has only been one week and our friends at the Simpsons have stolen a joke from Seinfeld. In this weeks episode, Reporter Kent Brockman said "This town has finally started to show its real feelings and it is about ******* time." Boy was that quick. By the way someone pointed out that this would happen last week and I have one question for them. What numbers do you see in the Virginia Lottery?

Jason William Borges

In article [email]

Actully Seinfeld isn't the first to do it this season. The premire episode of "The Building" had the swearing/bleeps. And it was done *much* better than Seinfeld. I'm not going to get on it's good/bad to use profanities in sitcoms, but in The Building "f*cking" was funny, on Seinfeld it got to be that it was used derogatorily.

I'm sorry CBS didn't make more than four episodes of The Building. It was very good.

Actually, a while ago, Fox's "Living Color" did a skit (with Sam Kinison I believe) that was filled with censored swearing. It was quite funny but I'm sure many people complained about it. Anybody else see this skit?

Sherm.

Being a die-hard fan of both shows I tend to see it more as a tribute than a theft. I thought it was hysterical when Brockman got beeped out. I mean, the writers aren't stupid. They know everybody watched Seinfeld last week and its not as though they think they can slip one by us or maybe nobody will remember. It was a gesture of friendship from OFF to Jerry and the gang.

..

Could be, but don't they create the Simpsons cartoons months before they air? I personally would think they could've created the cartoon in the span of time since the swearing episode of Seinfeld, but I don't really know.

[email] wrote:

Sure, they create the cartoon months before, but a simple voice-over for Brockman's newscast, which was probably already drawn into the script, would take about 5 minutes. I'm not saying that the swearing was _definitely_ a tribute, I'm saying that if it had _anything_ to do with what happened on Seinfeld the week before, then I prefer to believe it was a tribute rather than a stolen joke. dsw

Oh come on. You're joking, right? The Simpsons is all about parody and mocking other shows (as well as society in general). When you parody and mock, you naturally use parts of other shows in order to point out how ridiculous those parts were in the first place. It is not stealing a joke just to get the same laugh that the original show got. It's to parody the original show in the first place. They didn't steal anything!

[Boy, I'm in a heck of a mood today. Time to get back to work... :-) ]

[email] (Russell Jaslow) writes:

Not to mention that the Simpsons episodes are written at least 6 months in advance. It takes a lot of time to do all that animation!

Actually, Matt Groening says that each Simpsons episode takes about six months to produce, so w/that time frame, I don't think the writers are stealing, borrowing or paying tribute.

Even *if* the six months timeline is a bit much, it's doubtful that they could produce that within two weeks of the Seinfeld episode.

In [email] (Robert M Ettinger) writes:

I've heard that they can change the dialogue within a day or so of airing. All they have to do is dub the voice over -- you can never tell the difference anyway.

Forgive me if this seems like something more suited for the alt/tv.simpsons newsgroup, but here goes. Here in SF we have a Cartoon Art Museum. I was talking to one of the employees who told me that Groening and crew are always changing the dialogue up till the last minute. She says that its often easy to spot changed dialogue because the mouths always don't look like they're saying what one hears. Also, animation is traditionally done by recording all the dialogue first then synching the art to the dialogue. My call is that the Simpsons team has a script that they work with in order to complete the animation. Later they might change dialogue. Remember, much of the animation work is done overseas and is very labor intensive. I can't imagine the Groening and crew making a major change in animation even two months ahead of the air date (despite the throngs of low-paid Koreans doing the actual production work). Let's face it. The Simpsons can often be quite timely in the jokes that appear on the show. Too often to always chalk it up to coincidence. As for Kent Brockman's F*cking comment being related to the previous week's Seinfeld? IMHO too hard to call either way. See! I did relate this to Seinfeld after all.

--M.T. Peck

"Giddyup!"