celebrity obsessed and frivolous

Thanks for posting the article (see below for full article). I was thinking about this paragraph specifically, then I looked at the episode guide on FOX's website:

fixed

and

here are my observations, using the above as a jumping point.

first off, i don't know what the writer means when he said that "people were starting to get sick of the frivolous and phony nature of the 90s . . ." i don't think that's the case at all. up until september 11, and even after it, we were and are as frivolous and celebrity obsessed as ever. society has not changed and left the simpsons behind; the simpsons have fallen into the pop culture vacuum it once satirized. the show itself is frivolous and celebrity obsessed. social satire and witty culture references and humor have been replaced with obscene sight gags and vulgarity. quite frankly, the show used to matter and now it doesn't - it is frivolous. and the simpsons is also celebrity obsessed now. where guest voices were once implimented to further the show - like joe montagna as fat tony or sara gilbert as lara powers or john lovitz as aristotle amadopolis, we now have mel gibson, britney spears, alec baldwin, kim basinger, jack lalane, n'sync, etc, etc, as themselves. sure, it's not an absolute transition, but just look at the list of celebrity guest voices on snpp.com, and you will see my point. even the celebrities who appeared as themselves most often were well integrated into the story - tony bennett singing about capital city or larry king reading the audio book bible. now we just have a celebration of celebrity for its own sake, not for the sake of the show.

any comments?

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Stephen wrote in message news:0cIJ7.21798$[email]...

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     I agree with this whole-heartedly!  I still LOVE the show, and think that
a vast majority of the episodes (Homer the Moe included) have been really good.
 The use of celebrity voices, though, has gotten to me.  There was zero reason
to have REM show up in that episode, and it really took away from what could
have been a great, rather than good, scene.  They need to get back to using
celeb voices more sparingly, and less "as themselves."
     I think that the problem is that in the beginning they had problems
getting a lot of people to do voices.  Now they are lining up to be on the
show.  The writers probably had to write a character before a celebrity agreed
to do the voice, so they were usually put in at the last minute. (wild guess, I
suppose)  Now they know what celebs are doing voices, so they just simply
decide to take the easy road and write the people as themselves to save
brain-power.  When people talk about how the show has just gotten "wierd for
weird's sake" I think that this is one of the main culprits.  Sure, have REM do
some voices if they want...that's really cool that they want to.  But there's
NO real reason that they have to be themselves.  Too often it just makes them
stick out like a sore thumb rather than be an integral part of the show.  My
$.02, anyway.

Till Then=) Jeff Warden "If I wanted smoke blown up my ass, I'd be at home with a pack of cigarettes, and a short length of hose." --The Simpsons

I thnk what is really getting old is that all these celebrities are always appearing in Springfield. They always show up and another characters is always going, "Wow, it's so-and-so!", or the celebrities are like, "Hi, I'm so-and-so." It gets really boring after the first million times.

Remember what I told you... I'm Joe Namath.

- mirilidium It was just vapor lock!

"mirilidium" wrote in message news:[email]...

always

always

OH...MY...GOD!!! WHERE DID YOU GET THAT BROWNIE???

Dr Music P.S. Parking was ample.

=v= Certainly _South_Park_ is going to have better turnaround time, seeing as how so much less work goes into animating it. Yet look how frivolous they are with the type of "cutting edge" celebrities they use.

=v= Last year's _Lisa_the_Tree-Hugger_ was all 21st Century (except for the _Matrix_ homage) and absolutely on-target. <_Jym_>

P.S.:  R.E.M. may have been playing a 20th Century
song last week (double irony in that fact), but they     .--.
were the best part of the episode.                      /   |\
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