Hi friends and welcome to another Simpsons Sunday Poast. Sadly, we have a death in relation to The Simpsons. Chef Anthony Bourdain died this week of a suicide, like Kate Spade did earlier in the week. He guest start on the episode The Food Wife.
On the birthday front, Jackie Mason turned another year older Yesterday. He voices Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky, the now late father of Krrusty The Clown. He was of course, killed off in the episode Clown In The Dumps and made a return in the season 28 episode The Nightmare After Krustmas and the Season 29 episode Flanders’ Ladder, as a ghost. Also, Irish actor Liam Neeson turned another year older on Thursday and he guest starred in the episode The Father, The Son And The Holy Guest Star, as Father Shon, The kindly Priest who has Bart’s back while in Catholic school.
This week it is 5 years since The Simpsons have taken over my life and personality. Of course, they are welcomed in with open arms and always invited. I’m going to talk about myself and why the blog looks the way it does, as well as document how I went from a “Meh” fan to a “Woohoo”. Fan of The Simpsons. I am using a number of old posts from the other blog but these are so good that I don’t want them wasted and not to be seen, by my friends on FB.
If you are new to my blog and you notice there are no photo’s, I don’t have any. Everything you see here is done on my iPhone and I don’t know how to use the camera or insert photos into a post. The only way I know how to use the camera is when redeeming an iTunes card. Otherwise, I’m a complete dolt, when it comes to taking a photo.
I am totally blind and have been since birth. I was born at a rather modest birth weight of 2 pounds and 6 ounces. I was 3 months premature and was put into an incubator. When I came out I was totally blind. You could say I am a miracle baby and well, maybe that’s true. As a result I have been rather skinny all my life and I’m also short at 5 foot 3.5 in. This may explain why I get carded when I go into places where drinking is involved.
How did i go from “Meh” to “Woohoo?” Well, I have this habit of going on the internet and in particular, Wikipedia and Youtube. Also, every few years I would become obsessed with something. Weather it is: a band, a singer or in this case, a television show and I became obsessed with The Simpsons through both of these avenues.
On October 24th 2012, I was looking to hear interviews with some of the old guard of the cartoon voices such as: Mell Blanc, don Messick, Daws Butler and others. I stumbled on an episode of Inside The Actors Studio, which had The Simpsons cast as the guests and I took a listen to most of it.
I have said this in an earlier post but I was shocked and surprised to hear what Dan Castellaneta sounded like in his own speaking voice. Of course, he is the voice of: Homer, Krusty The Clown, Barney, Mayor Joseph Quimby, Groundskeeper Willie and others. When he went into Homer’s voice and his other voices during the segment James Lipton spoke to the Simpsons characters I was amazed.
Another revelation for me was actually hearing: Julie Kavner, Yeardley Smith and Hank Azaria in their own speaking voices for the first time as well. I had heard Harry Shearer and Nancy Cartwright before, as they had done interviews on both radio and TV. One other thing I should mention was actually hearing both the name and the voice of Al Jean for the first time too. Al sounds like he is one of the nicest people you’d ever meet. I certainly hope that my observation is correct.
The other part to this transition from “Meh” too “Woohoo” is Wikipedia. As I said earlier, I like to go on Wikipedia a lot. As 2013 rolled around and my 40th birthday drew nearer, something happened that would make a change in my life.
I began noticing that most of my favourite bands and comedians all had some connection with The Simpsons, whether they were guest stars or had their music played on the show. Before Wikipedia came along I was, as I said, a casual fan and loved hearing the voices and the catchphrases on the radio and other media outlets. I also began to research all the characters and their respective voice actor and my favourite characters have been mentioned in past posts. As for the voice cast, I was and still am impressed with each one of the main cast and how much other work they have done and still do, despite the continuation of the show.
Also around this time, I had some issues with my apartment, which involved pests and The Simpsons kept my spirits high, during this rather weird time in my life. This included YouTube and Wikipedia. More on YouTube in a minute.
With Wikipedia and other Simpsons Wiki sights I was looking at all the episodes and their plots. I realized that I had missed a lot of them since the 90s because I didn’t have a TV and I only heard certain episodes on CBC at 5:00 P.M. Monday to Fridays, when I could hear some TV channels on the radio, below 87.5 MHz. Remember when you could listen to TV on the radio? I miss that!
On the weekend of my 40th birthday, I started going on Youtube and looking for specific episodes to watch and I found a great deal of them that I would watch over the next few weeks. I can’t name them all but there were a lot. However I didn’t watch every episode from Season 1 to Season 24 because I couldn’t find them all. Plus, I don’t have wifi in my apartment.
I also began reading up on all the characters and the voice cast. I even began reading Yeardley Smith’s blog, at the end of the summer. Oh… wait… I’m getting ahead of myself.
I had a copy of The Simpsons Moovy, which I listened to the whole way through, for the first time in early July. I had it for a couple of years, thanks to a friend who is also a Simpsons fan and is also blind. It got me through all the crap I was going through with pests in my apartment and having to deal with all the other issues surrounding it. There were times when I was just miserable and almost in tears.
At some point in July, I began writing my own Simpsons fan fiction stories. I have a few stories which I am still working on. One is where Homer goes blind, thanks to an accident at the nuclear plant. Another is about Krusty retiring again and sinking low enough to go to Canada to become a pan Hendler. He makes a contest winner his permanent replacement and Bart goes to find Krusty and try to bring him back, with the help of his replacement. Another story involves Bart going blind and all of the consequences from that. I had started that story in 2015 and I am still working on it to this day.
Also during July 2013, I had discovered ways to get even more information on the show, through fan websites and I even found the scripts on the internet too. I read the episodes I knew and I wanted to check the spelling of some words and how the groans, moans and screams were written. Sometimes it was just written as :grown” or “scream” when Homer would make one of those sounds.
In August 2013 I began to get more into the inner workings of the show than ever. I looked for interviews with: Matt Groening and with each of the cast members about their characters. One thing I should mention here is that almost some of the main voice cast sound much younger than their actual age. For example: Nancy Cartwright is 60 but she sounds like she is about 20 years old. Yeardley Smith also sounds like she is around the same age, even though she is almost 54. The only one who doesn’t actually sound younger is Julie Kavner. She actually sounds more or less her age, minus the honey gravel in her voice. Even Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer sound younger than their actual ages, even though they are all now over 40, like I am too.
I also began to collect as much Simpsons music as I could find on CD and eventually, on iTunes. It was hard to get all of what I wanted because some of it was discontinued or unavailable on iTunes. I had some nights when I had felt discouraged because I didn’t think there was any hope of finding: Songs In The Key Of Springfield and Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons on CD. However, it happened on September 19th 2013 when the week before, I had ordered it from a record store I would sometimes frequent in downtown Toronto and when I had them in my hands I was understandabley happier than Homer with Duff Beer.
Around the end of summer I joined Twitter and began following The Simpsons and anyone else associated with the show, whom I could find and whose names I recognized. For the record, Yeardley Smith was the first person I followed. On the night of the latest installment of the annual Treehouse Of Horror series, The Simpsons followed me on Twitter. I was of course, ecstatic. I now could get the latest news from the show and some Youtube videos along the way, which did happen.
As I mentioned earlier I started reading Yeardley Smith’s blog and she inspired me to start my own blogs. There have been other such blogs that I could have read that I had more access to, but something made me start reading it at the end of August. I’m not going to get into detail but it did give me more of a peak into her life as a celebrity and who she is as a person. She seems like a very nice lady and clearly is happy with her life now. Some of my early posts in this blog came from her as my own take on them.
As I became more familiar with Twitter, I began to follow more Simpsons fan accounts. This includes: Simpsons Wiki, Simpsons Tweets, SpringfieldX2 and most of the characters. Twitter is how I found out about Marcia Wallace’s death. I was upset by it, despite that I had never met her and had only learned about her a few months before. People had commented that she was very kind and I believe that to be true. She may have played Mrs. Krabappel but she did show a side to the character that isn’t that well known toward Bart. At the end of Bart Gets An F, he cries after she fails him and tells her that he really tried. She comforts him and I heard that kind tone in Marcia’s voice, when she says “there there” as Bart is crying. People were saying how sweet Marcia was and I could agree with that, based on that moment alone.
From 2014 to present day, I took the plunge and went on iTunes. I have downloaded a bunch of Simpsons episodes that I liked that I could find. I also downloaded both of Dan Castellaneta’s solo albums and I like them both. His rock album Two Lips sounds a lot like the Beatles, or rather The Rutles. I like his Ringo Star vocal on the song Feat On The Ground. Everything else isn’t bad either but I couldn’t tell who he was trying to imitate of the other 3 Beatles. It sounds to me like he is more into the: Revolver, Sgt Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour period of the bands active life.
With his other album I Am Not Homer, both him and his wife Deb Lacusta made me laugh, especially with the bits as radio personalities. Check out the tracks: AM Therapy and Drive Time and you will be laughing your ass off after a few listens too.
I also downloaded Nancy Cartwright’s audiobook version of her book My Life As A 10-Year-Old Boy. It gave me a new found respect for what she does and has done in her life. She has brought The Simpsons even closer to all of us who have read this book and has given us a real honest look at how things have changed through the years in how you record both music and diolog. Her descriptions of her fellow cast members sounded exactly like I had pictured each of them. If you want to check it out both the book and the audiobook are available on iTunes.
This brings me to how The Simpsons and dead or long dead actors probably could have, or would have, voiced themselves or characters on The Simpsons if they were asked or were alive today. A prime example of this is the late Jonathan Winters who worked with Nancy Cartwright when she was younger. Also, Daws Butler actually trained her in voice acting. He voiced many many rolls himself in cartoons such as the Jetsons and the Flintstones. He also worked many years with Stan Freeburg on some of his comedy albums. Remember the dragnet parities? Stan Freeburg voiced Joe Friday and his partner was voiced by Dawes Butler. Remember the Christmas dragnet, the Dragon Net Dragnet and the Little Red Ridinghood Dragnet singles?
Another example of famous people who would work with the future cast of The Simpsons is Harry Shearer, who worked with Jack Benny when he was 7. He and many others said that contrary to his on air personality Jack was quite a gentle man. Another man who helped Harry at that time was Mel Blanc. Okay, if you have watched The Flintstones and all the bugs Bunny cartoons you know by now that he was the voice for many of the characters including: Barney rubble, Bugs Bunny himself, porky pig, Yosemite Sam, Tweety Bird and Sylvester the cat, among many other voices. Could you imagine any of those people voicing a character, like June Foray did?
As for my continued love for The Simpsons, it shall continue and since I turned another year older last Saturday I have purchased and downloaded numerous seasons which of been available on iTunes. I don’t have them all yet but at some point I hope to, before iTunes is rumored to be shut down.
Simpsons on Sundays 