Treehouse of Bore-er

It's not controversial to say that The Simpsons is nowhere near as good as it used to be. There are a variety of reasons for this: shorter run time, changes in popular types of humor (call it The Family Guy effect), different writers, no more hand-drawn animation (watch something from season 3 and from season 20 and tell me that the crisp image and sharp lines don't hurt the experience. Animation should be fluid), and of course, running out of ideas. Even with all of this, I still watch the show regularly and frequently find it enjoyable though rarely great. Even in the doldrums of the show, the Treehouse of Horror episodes were always highlights. Except for this year.

Like the show the ToH episodes have also been falling in quality. I'd even go so far as to say that they haven't been the same since they moved on from the humorous headstones or at least having any sort of opening credits. The writers also stopped creating any sort of connective tissue like everyone telling scary stories trying to one-up each other, or eating too much candy and having nightmares, or even Bart telling the stories of the paintings. Maybe it's just me, but I like when these stories feel at least a little bit related to the real Simpsons universe as opposed to being an excuse to do movie parodies.

And that's really the biggest problem. When The Simpsons writers used to do ToH episodes, they'd stick with horror or Sci-Fi stories, but now they basically riff on anything they want (which is what The Simpsons used to do very elegantly with their normal episodes). So this year there is a bizarre mashup of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Spider-man and Avatar (there's also a Dexter parody, which kind of works, but it's not that dark and way to rushed). Avatar may be sci-fi, but there's certainly nothing scary about it and the Diving Bell parody shoehorns Halloween into the segment by having Homer putting up Halloween decorations, but it's an afterthought.

There are still so many horror stories to pay homage to. I don't know why they are avoiding them. Christ, as far as I remember, they haven't even done a Halloween parody yet! They've barely scratched the surface of Stephen King and Hitchcock (who, let's be honest, gets enough attention during the rest of the season). There's tons of Poe and Twilight Zone episodes to cull from. It makes me sad that they're wasting their time on Diving Bell and Avatar.

There's also a dip in quality from season 13 to season 14, which happens to coincide with every segment of the ToH episodes being written by different people to having the whole episode being credited to one. Having multiple voices makes it easier to forgive a lacking segment if the others are good. On the commentaries on The Simpsons DVDs, they always talk about how hard the ToH episodes are to make, so I don't know why they are giving it to one person. Especially this year, where not only did writer Carolyn Omine not come up with anything good, but she didn't even know how to end the segments. I almost thought that it was going to be one story instead of the triptych that it normally and we'd rejoin the action coming back from commercial.

The Treehouse of Horror episodes should be fun, scary, and more than a little gory times. At the risk of sounding like an old man talking about how things were better in my day, the writers need to go back to the start and take a good hard look at what makes those episodes so good. But don't take my word for it:

Weekly Film Rec: Clue

The entire concept of movies based on boardgames seems horrible. Battleship. Monopoly. Ouija Board. Magic 8 Ball (which can only be some horrible romantic comedy). Candyland. It all reeks of an idea bankrupt industry looking for a quick buck based on name recognition and nostalgia (so the status quo, then). There are so many people trying to write original material or adapt something from and interesting source struggling to find a place in Hollywood, why do we even need to cull the board game shelf for ideas? If you went into a pitch meeting and said something like, "warring ships" or, "a ball that tells the future," you'd be thrown out immediately. There's no story inherent in these games. It's just vague ideas with a goal to win. Totally ridiculous.

However, aside from the names involved, are these such bad ideas? Pretty great movies could (and have) been made about war at sea. The battle for economic supremacy could be interesting. Ouija boards are already a staple in the horror genre (more specifically, haunted house movies). Even Candyland could be fun for a child (just look what it did for Homer):

The fact that they are blatantly using the name of a successful brand seems to be what sets most people (including myself) off. Incidentally, I can make no excuses for Magic 8 Ball.

Perhaps the reason I'm feeling rather lenient towards the people making these board game adaptations is because I'm already in love with one. Inspired by the recent The New Cult Cannon article at A.V. Club, I've got to recommend a perennial favorite of mine: Clue.


We were well underway into the world of the Blockbuster and massive corporatization/commodification/synergization of the film industry by 1985 (not to suggest it didn't exist before, it just wasn't as whorish-seeming before), but compared to today, it seems like an intellectually vibrant era. I can only imagine what people would have thought about turning a board game into a film (as I was only 3). The poor box office receipts surely put a halt to any other designs of board game adaptations. However, adapting Clue seems like an obvious place to start. There's already a literary and filmic history of murder mysteries, not to mention sketch comedy's contribution to the subject:


Of course, it helps to have any amazing cast of character actors and comedians at your disposal when making said adaptation. Martin Mull. Michael McKean. Madeline Kahn. Tim Curry Lesley Ann Warren. Eileen Brennan. Christopher Lloyd. Plus based on a story buy John Landis. That's a line-up I can get behind.

I'm not really sure why people didn't connect with the film. The dialogue is hilarious (personal favorite, "I was in the hall... I know because I was there) and the way the actors play off of each other is perfect. I first saw Clue as a child. For some reason, my family had taped it off the TV (though I'm pretty sure no one had seen it) and my older sister and I watched it constantly. Only upon viewing it in my adult years did I realize that I didn't get half of the jokes (pretty much anything related to Communism). It's a film that rewards rewatching because of it's lightning fast pace, which becomes absolutely manic in Tim Curry's performance summing up the events of the entire night.

Maybe by that time people were expecting "the Christopher Lloyd show" since he'd just been in Back to the Future. I have no idea. I'm just glad it's been a part of my life for so long and that I've had the chance to share it with others.