Notes for VABF01 ('Paths of Glory)
From
Matt Garvey@1:2320/100 to
alt.tv.simpsons on Tue Dec 8 14:21:00 2015
From Newsgroup: alt.tv.simpsons
This felt fairly strong and I liked it more or less! I liked the classic mischief-maker Bart story and Lisa's was OK (though the loom was bizarrely ornate in its output and, really, weird IO and instructions in general). A few weird gags like Willie in an impossible disguise, for example...
DYN:
...a new Souvenir Jaquito jacket (Transformers: the Ride)?
...Homer and Marge could have just removed the title page from the sociopath test?
Previous episode stuff
AABF09: Solar powered car (and shadow) gag seems to recall Ed Begley, Jr.'s CABF11, 2F01: "Your son is dead" fakeout gag (more like CABF11)
3F23: Bart's relationship with cursive
CABF04: Didn't Bart get a 100% on a test *then*?
Meta
Homer says near the start of act 3 that "we did everything we could for him during the commercials" (though he could also be referring to commercials/downtime in something he was watching, not the time spanned by the act break)
Question
Did anyone watch the 2-hour Paley Center special on Monday about the list of 40
of "TV's Funniest Animated Stars"? I didn't. I wonder if there's a list I can find.
Sam Simon credit
He died much earlier this year, and at the time I wondered where his name would
appear in future episodes. As I suspected, he's still listed in the "developed by" names in the opening, but the air and production season in progress when he
died kept him listed as Executive Producer. Now that we are in a new production
season (VABF), I am not surprised to see that the EPs listed at the end are now
just Al Jean (showrunner) on his own, and Matt Groening/James L. Brooks as a pair. And that's the way it goes.
What about U?
The episode season codes since season 10 have been skipping ambiguous-looking letters, specifically I, O, Q, and now U (I suppose it looks too much like V). So we go from TABF to VABF. I and O make sense, but Q and U still strike me as funny omissions, not just because they don't look like any digits or other letters, but because they have been used multiple times in 20th Century Fox TV's current coding scheme in the *show* codes (ABF, ACX, etc.). Also, with those letters skipped it makes me even more curious to see if we'll run out of letters or seasons first. If V is (production and bulk of air) season 27, then assuming WXYZ all get used, Z will be season 31, 2019-2020. If the coding scheme introduced in the late 90s had or added a way to handle the season character beyond Z (as it clearly had one for numbers higher than 9), I have no
idea what it could be. Any thoughts?
Late start (paging Don)
In the eastern time zone, football ended on time by 8, but 8 to 8:15 was devoted to Obama's address (and a little bit of intro/exit from Shepard Smith);
as Shep promised, the full comedy lineup slated for 8 to 10 ran immediately afterward, so this episode began at 8:15 pretty much on the dot (not 8:20 as currently listed on the episode airdates page). If any affiliates in other cities delayed or preempted it further, I don't know, but Fox 8 Cleveland let the network feed go as it was.
SEEN-BY: 2320/105 154/30 2320/100 0 1 227/0