Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: animation, entertainment, family guy, Family Guy/Simpson's Smashtacular, the simpsons, tv

The Simpsons Guy: The Mash-Up, With A Digression About Giant Leeches

By Devin T. Quin, writing for Bleeding Cool

The Big Red Leech is indeed big, red and gut wrenchingly awful. It resembles a freelance intestine, crawling across the jungle floor with alarming speed looking for food to reverse defecate. It is also an unlikely internet star, as the first ever recorded footage of this gross monster went viral this past week to promote the BBC's nature documentary, Wonders of the Monsoon. The clip features our eponymous new friend slurping up an earthworm almost twice its size like so much bleeding pasta. See for yourself, if you haven't already. For the record, and this cannot be understated, it is disquietingly nasty, like something out of H.R. Geiger's wildest fantasies.

It looks exactly as foul as it sounds.

SEEN ON TV

Another noteworthy snack for the eyes this past week was the long promoted Family Guy/Simpson's Smashtacular, the season premier of Fox's Family Guy. To many, Family Guy is the reigning champ of offensive for offensive sake humor. As ratings figures still peg The Simpsons as America's favorite dysfunctional, animated family, it seems natural that Fox demand their two animated cash cows to produce a calf. To Fox, this will solidify Family Guy's mainstream status and bring new edge to their venerable Simpsons.

This special was controversial before it began due to a scene (glimpsed in the early release trailer and remaining in the episode at broadcast) where Stewie Griffin, Family Guy's power hungry talking baby character, prank phone calls local Springfield bartender Moe and tells him his sister is getting raped. Appropriate negative publicity followed, though who is to say this wasn't the intention all along? Family Guy's style of shock writing, where the joke is supposed to be that the writers of the program would dare to stoop so low to making light of rape, child molesting or worse is one of the many reasons longtime Simpsons fans had trepidation about the pairing. Of course, they were right.

Armed with only cultural referencing and shock, Family Guy is a two trick pony. At twenty-six years running and still counting, The Simpsons is a beloved horse put out to pasture, but still forced to plow till death. What happens when the best show on television eighteen years ago shares the screen with a show full of characters happy to profit off human misery?

SCHADENFREUDE!

The episode opens with the Griffin family watching a cross-over episode of All in the Family meeting Modern Family before diving in to some nudge-nudge, wink wink jokes about the flimsy intent behind cross-over episodes. Soon Peter decides he'd like to try his hand at cartooning, and his local comic strip is a hit with his small town paper. Unfortunately, Peter Griffin is a bad man who doesn't understand the concept of sexism no matter how many times it is painfully explained to him, so the family has to run away to Springfield to hide from angry feminists when his jokes degrade into wacky bits about spousal abuse.

I'm going to interject for a moment with a personal game. Whenever I watch an episode of Family Guy, and I encourage you to do likewise, I start a stopwatch. I like to see how much of the episode can play out before a woman is assaulted, insulted or otherwise disparaged. In this episode I thought we had a winner at the 1:45 mark, when a banana bemoans his wife being "a vegetable." I guess we'll let that one slide…I mean, if Morrissey can sing about it, I guess it's fair game. There's also a woman objectified for her thong (by Spider-Man, no less) at 2:08, but the game ended at 2:57 when Peter draws the comic strip that begins their dramatic departure. It features a battered wife being thrown into an appliance store by her husband with the caption "I'd like to return this dishwasher, it's broken."

Remember, if you are offended by humor that was written with the sole purpose of offending, you didn't get the point. The joke wasn't supposed to be funny because it was, it was supposed to be hilarious because it wasn't! Keep that in mind and you too can convince yourself that anything you want to laugh at is fair game, especially when it shouldn't be.

RECAP REDUX

So the Griffins and the Simpsons meet and hit it off swimmingly. Homer and Peter bond over donuts, Stewie enjoys Bart's rebel flair and Marge and Lois bond over being…Moms? They never get much screen time in this one, it's just assumed they get along fine because, you know, women. In a creepy twist, the Family Guy/Simpson's mashup passes the Bechdel test, with a very sweet scene where Lisa Simpson, Springfield's voice of female empowerment gives Meg Griffin, the butt of most of Family Guy's insults a pep talk on believing in herself. The punchline to the scene is Peter Griffin telling his daughter for the the umpteenth time she's worthless.

As the Simpsons continue to get slowly creeped out by the abrasive insanity of the Griffins, the plot settles into it's third act turning point. The Simpsons discover that the Pawtucket brewery Peter and his friends enjoy has stolen the recipe of Springfield's local beer, Duff. The show then proceeds to ride a meta-textual roller-coaster, detailing every way in which Family Guy is a direct and poor imitation of The Simpsons, before all hell breaks loose amongst the characters. Cameos from both franchises abound, as well as Fred Flintstone, Bob from Bob's Burgers and more. There were tropes. There were meaningless fist fights.

Was it funny? Depends on your math. There were genuine laughs, but almost all of these were from good character moments with the extended Springfield cast of characters. Indeed, the moments in Springfield were more entertaining than the Simpson's season opener earlier that evening. Now subtract from that enjoyment the painful sexism and ad nauseam references. For every good bit with Dr. Nick or Chief Wiggum we had to see Otto hit little girls with his bus, or watch Lisa backstab Meg due to female jealousy.

Further, for a show that wanted to revel in it's bad boy status, most of the jokes were defensive goalie attempts at blocking criticism. The first joke of the episode is a bit about how uncreative and sensational cross-over episodes are, followed by jokes about how offensive and sexist Family Guy is. Jokes about how Family Guy is just a knock off of Simpsons. Jokes about how no one likes Simpsons anymore. This is the writers calling out their faults before you can, therefore making any lack of entertainment your fault, not theirs.

THESE TRUTHS

For those of us who love either show for good of for ill, who love comedy, cartoons, nerd culture and a respect for television history, this was an event to remember. I can't say as I recommend it.

Like a video of a blood red leech going full on "The Strain" on a hapless earthworm, the Simpsons/Family Guy mash up was self evident. The forced premise, the over reaching inappropriateness, the character's acting out of character to force the laughs, you know what you are about to see before you watch it. It was just as strange, weird, kinda' funny and kinda' icky as you expected it to be. It was one bloated, disgusting creature devouring another to sustain its pop culture cred.

It was exactly as foul as it sounded.

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