Breaking News: Simpsons' Writers Turn To Internet For Ideas

I watched a new Simpsons episode last night for the first time in a long time. The episode was Eternal Moonshine of the Simpson Mind and towards the end Homer experiences a near-death experience that triggers the old life-flashing-before-your-eyes bit. The sequence was pretty well done and the music soft and tragic. All in all, very entertaining.

They even did a fake YouTube "share/watch again" ending (although it should be "replay").


Immediately after seeing that sequence I went online to see if I could find the clip but to no avail. I also couldn't help shake the feeling that the sequence was vaguely familiar. Leave it to the bloggers to figure it out. The sequence was a parody of photographer Noah Kalina's Everyday video that has gained a certain notoriety online:

I wonder what you're supposed to do with rest of your life once you've been parodied by the Simpsons. Awesome.

Note 1: See Noah's note on the Simpsons parody here. Apparently they used the music without permission.

Update: Looks like the part about using the music without permission was an oversight. The Simpsons people are trying to make it right.

Note 2: According to the YouTube spoof at the end of the parody, Homer is 39 years old. Who's gonna update Wikipedia?

Blue Harvest

Blue Harvest, the hour-long Family Guy retelling of Star Wars: A New Hope, was apparently the highest rated episode since the show came back on the air in 2005. And rightfully so. This episode was as good as the show was back in seasons two and three when Family Guy was at the height of its comedic deftness.

For some reason I couldn't find the episode's opening crawl text (which is pretty funny) anywhere online so I felt it was my duty as a blogger to jot it down and post it here:

A long time ago, but somehow in the future...

FAMILY
GUY

Episode IV

A NEW HOPE

It is a time of civil war, and renegade paragraphs floating through space.

There's cool space battles, and the bad guy is the good guy's dad, but you don't find that out 'til the next episode.

And the hot chick is really the sister of the good guy, but they don't know it, and they kiss. Which is kind of messed up. I mean, what if they had done it instead of just kissed?

Angelina Jolie kissed her brother. Yeah, she did. You know it, I know it,and her dad knows it. That's why they hardly ever talk anymore. You can run away to Africa, but you can't run away from the truth.

Oh, by the way, here's a tip for you: when this is over, go out and rent the movie "Gia." She's way naked in it, and makes out with another chick and everything. It's awesome. I stumbled across it late night on HBO after I had just got back from hockey, and I almost fainted. But I digest...

Princess Leia was coming back from buying space groceries when this happened...

Yeah. I just did that.

Justice Jimmy

Anyone else catch Justice "performing" on Jimmy Kimmel last night? I use the term lightly because they really just played an mp3 of the track off their laptop. Really they didn't even need to be there looking all bored and French and stuff.

It would be pretty awesome if the whole world (and by "whole world" I mean "everyone who watched Jimmy Kimmel last night and doesn't really know/care who Justice is") now thinks that Justice is a lame lip syncing band made up of Michael, Rod, Rick, Stevie and Prince look-alikes.

Simpsons At The Movies

Accordion Guy did some pretty nice blog sleuthing by digging up stills from all (or most) of the Simpsons episodes that spoof movies and comparing them to their original cinematic counterparts.

He has also taken it upon himself to explore more in depth Simpsons-to-film comparisons, including: Citizen Kane, How The Grinch Stole Christmas and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Via Boingboing.

My Other Trucker Hat Is Funny

Do you watch 30 Rock? If not, you should stop reading my blog right away, get your hands on season one and watch all 21 episodes back-to-back and then come back to reading my blog. If you do then you may proceed with this blog post. In every episode 30 Rock, Judah Friedlander's character Frank Rossitano wears these awful looking Ashton Kutcher-style trucker hats with random nonsensical statements apparently made up by Friedlander himself. Of course I took it upon myself to compile a list of all of Frank's trucker hat phrases from season one.


Here is that list:

• Ninja Expert
• Done Deal
• Extra Sausage
• Joystick Master
• Double Cheese
• Arcade Champ
• Bigfoot Expert
• Hand Held
• Over Easy
• ESP Tutor
• Kung Fu Beech
• RODS
• Karate Sluts
• Beef 'N Bean
• Smells
• Extra Cheese
• 1,000,000 Points
• UFO Cop
• Squeeze It
• Cool As Ice
• Time Travel Agent
  
• Liz Rocks
• Mash Potatoes
• Beef Ravioli
• Atomic Super Kick
  
• Mystery Solver
• Bahama Trapezoid
• Alabama Legsweep
• Force Field
• Alien Knight Force
  

What would you do without me?

Urkel Matters

Inspired by my last post, here are some things you didn’t know about Steve Urquel or did know but had forgotten and of which you are now happy to be reminded:

• His father was a brain surgeon
• Urkel makes a guest appearance on an episode of Full House to help Stephanie “How rude!” Tanner deal with having to get glasses
• Steve periodically transformed himself into his suave alter ego Stefan Urquelle by using a Transformation Chamber that he created. This chamber runs on “a liquid known as ‘Boss Sauce’ (a combination of the original liquid, ‘Cool Juice’, plus a booster liquid)”
• Steve eventually created a cloning machine to create a permanent clone of Stefan Urquelle
• Lyrics to the accompanying song for “The Urkel Dance”: “If you want to do the Steve Urkel dance, all you have to do is hitch up your pants, bend your knees, and stick out your pelvis; I'm telling you, baby, it's better than Elvis!”
• Somebody somewhere might still have a copy of “The Urkel Dance” cassette single
• Cartman has a sleeping bag with a picture of Steve Urkel on it
• By the last season of Family Matters, Jaleel White, the actor who portrayed Urkel, was getting paid $100,000 per episode
• For a brief time during the run of Family Matters, you could start your morning with a breakfast cereal called "Urkel-Os" featuring Steve on the box

And now let's have a look at Jameel White today:


I've got nothing.

Wackipedia

It seems that Wikipedia has been taking some harsh criticism in the last little while with respect to its accuracy and its editing policies. This bad press has been going on for some time now but lately (ie: today), I've come across a butt load of references (ie: three) to how easy it is for anyone to pass anything they want as fact. The recent criticism seems to have started with this Op-Ed piece by John Seigenthaler that appeared in USA Today where he's says that the entry for his name in Wikipedia mentions that he may have, you know, offed both John and Bobby Kennedy. And apparently he wasn't happy about that. Stephen Colbert also got in on the action in a recent episode of The Colbert Report where he discussed what he calls Wikiality: "the representation of truth on Wikipedia that is determined by consensus rather than fact." Colbert urged viewers to edit the Wikipedia entry on elephants to say that their population had tripled in the last six months - which of course a whole bunch of people did thus causing the article to be locked "because of recent vandalism or other disruption."


And lastly, the people over at Penny Arcade threw in their two cents with this comic. By the power of Greyskull! (click picture for biggerness)

Colbert info via GeekLikeMe and thanks to Adam (via Sasha) for the Penny Arcade comic.

Richard Dean Anderson To The Rescue

From the ever-so-useful annals of Wikipedia comes a fairly comprehensive List of Problems solved by MacGyver. Remember how he would get himself out of the craziest situations with the most common of household items all the while expounding the intricate details of his plan for the benefit of all us laymen watching at home? Well now you can relive those glorious moments with an episodic breakdown of MacGyver's endeavors. Read all about how he "builds an incubator with padding from a chair and vegetable oil" or the time he "breaks a padlock with magnesium alloy fragments, an iron pipe, some cloth, and a match" or even when he "patches up the Jeep's radiator...with nothing but water and egg whites." Maybe he could try using "scissors" to fix up his "mullet."


Via GeekLikeMe.