Season 1-8 Simpsons DVD commentaries

It's the only season with four different showrunners and note that the second half of 9 is all Scully episodes and starts to get much more wacky and stupid.

yeah second half feels pretty lacking.

I get what they're doing, though. They thought that they would be cancelled/ending by season 9/10 or so. And then fox renewed it. again and again and again.

It's not a great episode but it's not the trainwreck people like to pretend it is; it was simply a slightly misguided meta concept that flyed over most the viewership's heads. If anything, it marked the point in which the writers truly stopped trusting their audience and started making the show way dumber and broader

yeah probably. Oakley and Weinstein left to do mission hill midway through. theirs a secret commentary for Lisa the Simpson if you answer the question on the back of the Lunchable with the DVD remote.

the episode with the race horse in season 11, or 12 is the lowest the show has ever gotten in my opinion.

Mike Scully does have a fairly lowbrow sense of humor. It may have to do with his background--unlike many of the writers, he didn't go to Harvard and he had a much more blue collar upbringing. He moved to LA from Massachusetts, worked shitty wagecuck jobs, and wrote jokes for Yakov Smirnoff before working as a writer on several forgettable sitcoms before Dave Mirkin hired him to the Simpsons.

I still reccomend 9

Oh goodness no, it has gotten so much lower than that but the episode was certainly a valley among a series of dips.

Season 12 had some of the worst episodes of all time. Homer vs Dignity, Tennis the Menace, Simpson Safari, Children of a Lesser God. It could never possibly be worse than those.

See here where Al Jean has a candid admission that the show should have ended a while ago.

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You never saw the HD seasons I take it.

Also why is Yeardley Smith so consistently useless on the commentary tracks?

>"Oh gee, it's been like ten years since I've seen this episode."
>"Boy you can really feel Lisa's pain in this scene."

Yes, it's just yhat it's not as good as the previous ones
It becomes unwatchable starting from season 13

I'd say by the HD switch.

They did:
youtube.com/watch?v=5PrNjlz8kps

The 1-8 commentaries are so good though. I love the few with Conan and of course the legendary Schwartzwalder one.

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Season 9 is only slightly worse than Season 8. In that it's a far cry from the quality of 'Classic Simpsons' which ending with Season 7, but it's not the total garbage that 10 to 13 are.

The Simpsons commentaries were so disappointing when listening to them after the Futurama ones.
They had the perfect mix of the voice actors having fun and cracking jokes and the writers delivering genuinely interesting information. Some of them are almost like old comedy albums.

Meanwhile in The Simpsons commentaries:
>"I forgot we did this"
>"how did we get away with that?"
>"how was this animated?" "I forget"
>*long moments of dead silence*
>"it's been so long since we've seen this we're just watching it instead of commenting ha ha"

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Would a Zoomer like me who’s only seen Zombie Simpsons get anything out of this, or has the power creep of shock value (South Park and beyond) made The Simpsons just a nostalgia thing? What is the core appeal?

Yeah, felt the same way. I've listened to the commentaries of the first 8 or 9 Simpsons seasons, but can't really remember much about what was said on them. Meanwhile, Futurama had probably the best audio commentaries I've ever listened to.

>David X. Cohen, Nicolas Cage and the trilobites
>the gay guy and the ghost
>the "nobody cares" song
>those times when the VAs did the voices of their characters
>all the banter between the people on the track

Piss off back to Yea Forums

I think season 9 is when nearly all the writers of the older episodes were gone.

>Welcome to "To Tell The Zoidberg"
>Billy West clearly does the voice wrong on purpose
Those commentaries were a defining part of how I view comedy nowadays.

I love the ones where Jon Lovitz joins in, it's a riot hearing just roast the others in the commentary booth.

People actually listen to DVD commentaries?
Got an upload so I can hear comparisons?

I don't have Simpsons commentary clips, but I've got a couple of random clips from Futurama.
dump.video/i/uw8AOX.mp4
dump.video/i/UMc5s1.mp4
dump.video/i/CKMpXa.mp4

Feed

DVD commentaries in general vary so much in quality. You'll have plenty of people doing great commentaries, informative, funny, interesting, something that actually adds to what you're watching. And then you have others which are total bores and/or they make you realize the people who made this movie/show are assholes.

>"Remember that time Conan did something wacky?"

>What is the core appeal?
excuses for simpsons rule34

have sneed

Smith doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humor, from what I can tell.

I remember hearing that she would regularly refuse to say lines because she doesn't think Lisa would say anything too dumb or mean spirited. But then they have the "Lisa gets jealous of Bart being into jazz drumming" and "Lisa puts a restraining order on Bart" episodes so I don't know what's going on.

>it's a Dave Mirkin commentary

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Even though the cracks are becoming visible, season 9 still has a lot of great episodes.

>"The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson"
>"Treehouse of Horror VIII"
>"The Cartridge Family"
>"Lisa the Skeptic"
>"The Joy of Sect"
>"Lisa the Simpson"
>"Girly Edition"

But it's also a really weird season. One, because Mike Scully's is taking over his show and amping up the kid stories and Jerkass Homer. But also because a lot of the previous showrunners came back to do an episode, in order to give Scully a break. Al Jean's Critic-style writing in "Lisa's Sax" would be considered archaic for The Simpsons back in season five, but now we're at season nine!

Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein (rightly) get a lot of love from The Simpsons community, but I really loved the style of humor Dave Mirkin brought in during his time as showrunner. "The Joy of Sect" was a nice embodiment of the fuck you, anti-sitcom humor of seasons five and six. Jerkass Homer did kinda originate from Mirkin, but it always felt more innocent or, at the very least, too cartoony to take seriously. It also helped that Homer would still have moments that showed he still cared for his family.
I think that was the biggest problem with Scully's Jerkass Homer. Homer's fully aware he's an asshole and doesn't care.

>it's a Ken Keeler goes full REEEEE on Principal and the Pauper because fans didn't understand his masterpiece commentary

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So what's the joke?

youtube.com/watch?v=5PrNjlz8kps

the joke is clickbait articles about dirty jokes you didn't get as a kid but now you do as an adult were mistakes.

To be honest I still don't get adult jokes.

holy shit these are great. Do I gotta buy the DVDs for em? Also, are they still that funny on the comedy central season commentaries or just the original four?

You can always go for yo ho ho.

I know many won't agree but daily I watch an episode or two of The Simpsons, and I recently arrived to Season 12. I gotta say, Season 11 was really dull, but Season 12 has its moments. Not that many mind you, the Treehugger episode was heinous, but I watched the next one this morning (when Mr. Burns pays Homer to entertain him) and it was pretty good.
I do think the best seasons are within 5-8, pushing it to 9 at most, but it's not altogether terrible. Most of the problems I have with the episodes is that it seems like the main premise is abandoned halfway in, so there's like three or four plots instead of two.

That was season 11 and yep, I concur, that one was downright terrible.

For me its sneed

>unlike many of the writers, he didn't go to Harvard and he had a much more blue collar upbringing. He moved to LA from Massachusetts, worked shitty wagecuck jobs, and wrote jokes for Yakov Smirnoff before working as a writer on several forgettable sitcoms before Dave Mirkin hired him to the Simpsons.
so he's literally Herb?

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formerly chuck

Lol i've heard about it but never heard it myself, is there a site where one can download specific commentaries for shows and movies or do i have to get those bulk torrents with them.

Or god forbid, buy them.

I think the biggest difference between them is he amount of time passed. Futurama got there dvds a few years after the show, the simpsons writers were always doing commentaries over a decade after the fact

I tried but they didn't have the commentary tracks on them

Mirkin apparently used a lot of ideas he had for Chris Elliott's ''Get A Life'' that he never got to use after the show ended and applied them to Homer. It sort of worked because, even though Harry SHeaere felt it marked a downturn in quality, it was still funny and there was still an innocence to Homer that made the Chris Peterson qualities tolerable. Then Scully amped up the ''wackiness'' and Homer slowly degraded.

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By default most pirate releases don't bother to include commentaries. But I know there are Futurama videos that include the commentary as the alternate audio track, since I downloaded them years ago from somewhere. Can't remember anymore where exactly, and don't know if the source is still even up.

I haven't listened to all the commentaries after seasons 1-4, so I can't comment on their quality. I stopped watching halfway through partly because I had trouble finding time, and partly because I didn't care for those episodes as much as the earlier ones.

Anyway, if you can't find them online, I think the DVDs are worth buying. They're not that expensive these days, I've seen some pretty good deals for them. I've bought them all, and I've got the downloaded copies just for the sake of convenience (clicking the episodes is easier than switching discs).

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commentaries are done in batches

if they're happening on a bad day or during a particularly stressful time, that affects the entire run of them, because they're unscripted (though they may have a list of talking points)

but as Mickey Rooney pointed out when they asked him to do a Radioactive Man commentary: what? that was 20 years ago, I don't remember any of it!

also the Futurama commentaries are much the same way for the first four seasons, except that they're clearly passing a joint around so the ones toward the end of whatever day are just a mess, and there's this really tense series of them where one guest gets super excited and practically says "oh shit, weed, yes please" every time they pass to him (these are also recorded without editing for the most part, because there's nothing in the budget to pay an editor and nobody wants to do it for free, so shit like that makes people tense)

then there's the ones where guests just plainly didn't want to be there because they had other stuff to do, but it was free money or they were helping out a friend or whatever

The best part is as soon as he starts ranting you can hear the other writers go "oh boy hear we go again..." and then just sit quietly while Keeler whines.

Speaking of Futurama commentaries, I heard one of them mention that David X. Cohen originally walked away from the series for a brief time. Any more info on that?

>Keeler gets mad when it's implied "The Principal and the Pauper" is based on a movie and not a news story only a Harvard student would know
>Bill Oakley continues to troll him by saying it's based on a movie for the Talking Simpsons podcast of the episode

Mirkin always did have a fairly surreal sense of humor which led to his early projects getting cancelled or censored by the networks.

If I'm getting paid $300,000 an episode, you better believe I'm going to say anything they put in front of me.

The commentary for The Last Temptation of Homer was mostly just Groening and Mirkin slobbering over how how Michelle Pfeiffer was.

Off topic - but the Invader Zim DVD commentaries are fucking wonderful.

Wait, didn't Lisa suggest setting fire to the Simpsons' house in Bart Carny?

I can't say Julie Kavner is any better.

>"Oh gee it's been years since I've seen this episode."
>"Wow, the animators did some great angles here."
>"Marge only stays with Homer because he has a huge dick."

This user gets it.

>the family guy commentary track where seth just leaves halfway through

I guess she kind of had alright tits in Ginger Ale Afternoon.

What did they say about episode 11x5 - E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)?

>Lisa the Greek
Mike Reiss: There was one time we were going to have Homer strangle Lisa, but we couldn't do it--she's just too sweet.

Hello from Yea Forums, faggot.

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Autists gonna autist

This is considered funny?

>too sweet
Sure, Mike.

Can we all sign a petition to force the simpsons crew to finally make a naked lisa episode?

Nah it would be better to use Jessica Lovejoy for that. More in character.

Strangling Lisa isn't funny though, doing it to Bart or Homer is. It's their gag, not hers.

I mean they never even did a bath/shower scene where you don't really see anything.

She's also on way too many commentaries including episodes she didn't do much in.

I'd say it has more to do with his personality and writing experience than the fact that he wasn't rich enough.

I love the story about the time lunch was late and Conan pretended to be the delivery guy. Honestly it's not too interesting on its own, but the way Conan tells it is so charming & great.

Bill Oakley said Conan was one of the funniest people he's ever met.

Just plain good comedy was always more important to the show than shock value. There are different opinions about when the show got into a serious groove, but I would say that the comedy became really on point in season 4.
Also the characters are endearing and it has that classic charm of seeing them get into new hijinks each episode.

I'll never forget the part in the "Anthology of Interest" commentary when all the writers just start shouting "ROBIT! ROBIT!!! ROBIT!" in a Zoidberg voice over the fight scene.

Just found out my torrent only has commentary for S3. Anyone know where I can get download the first 10 seasons or so with commentary?

I like listening to commentaries in the background while I work. It's often like a creator podcast.

And some of them are just plain entertaining in their own right:
youtube.com/watch?v=y81-VDiptQA

Wasn't Harry Shearer a douche who wouldn't do any DVD commentaries?

>seth's sheer disbelief that anyone could sit through all the episodes
>"there should be a reward if you can answer a quiz that proves you actually sat through all these"
Considering that this was for the pre-cancellation seasons that people remember so fondly, Seth had an interesting attitude towards his work.

>But then they have the "Lisa gets jealous of Bart being into jazz drumming" and "Lisa puts a restraining order on Bart" episodes so I don't know what's going on.

There is a limit to what the VAs can change. Smith saying "turd" is too crude of a word for Lisa is fine, but she doesn't have executive power to overwrite an episode.

Maurice LaMarche hated that one Pinky & the Brain episode, where Brain wanted to melt the polar ice caps because it meant Brain would be killing people via flooding. After voicing his concern, the staff told him to just read the script.

Oh and Harry Shearer did _not_ want to do The Principal and Pauper.

>There's No Disgrace Like Home
Mike Reiss: I don't think you'd see Homer wearing a shirt like that now.
Al Jean: I think the FCC told us we couldn't do that anymore.

But are they as good as the Venture Brothers commentaries

Nobody on the entire staff wanted to do it except Oakley, Weinstein, and Keeler.

>The commentary for Bart sells his soul actually reveals that one of the writers got the inspiration for the episode from his childhood
>He had pulled a similar shtick growing up where he tricked his bully into selling him his soul for 5 dollars and then convinced his neighbours and friends to start messing with the bully, telling him he felt different and that something was missing
>The bully came back begging on his knees and bought his soul back for 50 dollars

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Hank Azaria didn't like Moe stealing Homer's pants at gunpoint in The Parent Rap--the line "Yeah, I rob now" was ad-libbed.

The Scully seasons also had tons of gore/shock humor that Mirkin's episodes didn't have.

Lesson learned: Actors are just meat puppets there to read a script and shouldn't be allowed any part in the creative process. Just look at what happened to Star Trek: Nemesis when Patrick Stewart got to insert his retarded ideas into the script.

I love Al Jean's soothing parrot voice.

I don't get why he doesn't just give it up and go for sweatpants.
He says the crotch wears out too quickly.
Arr, that's gonna replace the whale in me nightmares.

Also Mike Reiss talks way too much on the commentaries and drowns everyone else out.

Actors used to be considered a step above whores. I never got why that changed

How about when Dan Castallaneta thought making Barney sober was a genius idea?

Shearer thinks the show should have ended with his retarded Spinal Tap crossover. Fuck that shit.

>Al Jean's Critic-style writing in "Lisa's Sax" would be considered archaic for The Simpsons back in season five, but now we're at season nine

Lisa's Sax was one of the 3G episodes. These were actually produced during Season 7 but aired spaced out between 7 and 9.

>Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein (rightly) get a lot of love from The Simpsons community
They're the only showrunners who seem to genuinely enjoy and respect the fanbase.

Why is that a good thing? These retards keep watching a garbage show that should have been put down 20 years ago. They deserve no respect

I'm not the guy who subjects myself to the HD episodes.

>comments like "Wow, how did that scene get in there?"
sauce?

>the "nobody cares" song
I actually use this and yes I am a sad lonely person

Season 9 is mostly good, season 10 50% good 50% bad, and has a stuck in the mud feel to it. In seasons 11-12 they attached hyper-crazy rocket boosters to the show to make it go fast again, but the boosters were so powerful the show derailed.

Season 12 is wretched. Most of those episodes are horrible to sit through.

Well 11 is mostly the same as 12, though some believe 11 has more of a "camp value" that makes its bad episodes better than 12's.

11 had _much_ better jokes even if they were stupid as fuck. 12 isn't funny at all and mostly just painful to watch, plus they really took the gore/shock gags up to a 9.

>the episode with the race horse in season 11, or 12 is the lowest the show has ever gotten in my opinion.

Please tell me you haven't watched anything past Season 12

More like
>Season 1-8 Simpsons DVD commentaries
>So where did this idea come from
>How the hell should I remember, this was so long ago

I watched up to 18 or so.

As a case study in the transition process from a thriving series full of engaged talent to a hollow shell, yes. S9 and 10 will be objects of great value to future studies.

Yeardley is not much of a great creative type like Harry Shearer or as deep a talent as Nancy Cartwright. All the intellectualism pinned onto Lisa seems to have literally gone to her head to a degree.

>Scientology cash machine
>talented
...

Like what has she ever done outside the Simpsons except design shoes and act in shitty B-movies?

>the joke is clickbait ... [is a mistake].
Shortened that for you.

Underrated post.
>I never got why
Hollywood growing into a massive moneyed industry with enormous cross-pollination with the media and even politics (Reagan, the Governator) might have something to do with it.

At least Nancy's DVD commentaries are pretty funny (like talking about how hot shirtless Groundskeeper Willy is in Radio Bart).

Not relevant

A number of things, but it's how well she does them that's actually on the table

>Bart's Girlfriend
Matt Groening: It's pretty hard to design attractive characters in my style, so I was really pleased with how [Jessica Lovejoy] came out.
Julie Kavner: Look at her eyes.

No way, man. I'm actually watching 12x8 and it's really good. I actually think it's more consistent than 11 so far, though this episode sort of feels like it belongs in an earlier season.

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Remember that awkward guest commentator for mountain of madness? That shit made me cringe before cringe was even a thing (as in I didn't know how to describe that feeling lel.)

>Season 12 episode 8
>Skinner's Sense of Snow

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>those Family Guy commentaries where Seth acts really sensitive over FOX, like that Quagmire shoots the Simpsons joke
>those South Park commentaries that are only two minutes long an episode

>those American Dad commentaries where they talk about the american dad porno