THE SIMPSONS HAS been running for 28 seasons at this stage – and oh god how the quality has suffered.
Everyone knows that it’s gone downhill – it’s usually cited by fans as being around season 8/9/10 that the rot set in. Most people who enjoyed it in its early days have stopped watching the newer ones, but small clips you might see confirm that it hasn’t returned to its former glory in your absence.
Now, this is common knowledge – so it’s presumably hard to find a new angle on the decline.
Enter Irishman John Walsh – who is a very popular YouTuber going by the name of Super Eyepatch Wolf, with a quarter of a million subscribers. He mostly produces high-quality videos on anime, but yesterday he turned his analytical eye to The Simpsons’ downturn.
And his half-hour-long opus “The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened” is pushing 200,000 views overnight
If you’re a Simpsons fan, it’s worth sitting back and watching the video in full as Walsh dissects what went wrong and when – mixing in theories with interesting background facts to provide context.
The infamous Season 9 episode The Principal and the Pauper episode is a good start when looking for signs of “Zombie Simpsons” beginning, but the video goes so much further than that simple analysis
He deals with how early Simpsons perfectly parodied pop culture and the media, whereas the latter episodes merely put characters in zany situations… and often changed the very character traits themselves
Case in point: Classic nuanced Homer vs Jerkoff Homer.
Another theory put forward is that, not only did the writing get a lot worse, The Simpsons became such a part of mainstream media that they could no longer satirise it properly – and had to transform itself on that basis. Which led to uninventive celeb guest appearances as themselves, instead of a bespoke character created for a famous voice.
Its insight and research has won so much praise – and it’s only been on YouTube a day
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Beyond Twitter and YouTube, the video has flown up the ranks on Reddit and is racking up the views.
Essential watching for anyone who knows The Simpsons has got shite and want to know why
You can follow Eyepatch Wolf on Twitter here, and he has a Patreon account to help him with his video production too.
Good work.
