Posts Tagged ‘The Simpsons’

Sidelined Henry needs some better parents on Once Upon a Time

- April 15th, 2013

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Maybe part of what’s occurring on Once Upon a Time this season can be explained by the wisdom of Patty and Selma Bouvier on The Simpsons.

In a long-ago episode of The Simpsons where they were flashing back to the story of Lisa’s first words, toddler Bart, feeling threatened by baby Lisa, was preening for attention.

Bart’s aunts Patty and Selma glared at him. One of them coldly observed, “The older they get, the cuter they ain’t.”

Same could be said for most of us, to be fair.

But does that philosophy relate to the conspicuous sidelining of Henry, played by Jared Gilmore, on Once Upon a Time?

It’s the perfect week to consider the state of sophomore fantasy drama Once Upon a Time, which airs Sundays on ABC and CTV. This past Sunday, a new retrospective episode titled “The Price of Magic” looked back at how the residents of Storybrooke have handled themselves and their surroundings since their fairy-tale memories were restored.

Season one had a very cool framework: Fairy-tale characters had been cursed to live in our world, unaware of their true identities.

This season the characters realize who they are – Snow White, Prince Charming, the Evil Queen, Rumpelstiltskin, Pinocchio, Red Riding Hood, Jiminy Cricket, etc. Some of them want to get back to their own world and some of them don’t. But as it stands, if they leave Storybrooke and venture into any other part of our world, their minds go blank and they forget everything.

The thing that’s exasperating about the Henry character this season is that he is experiencing some of the worst parenting in TV history.

With all manner of dangerous and magical mayhem occurring, every time Henry walks into a room, the adults awkwardly change the subject. “Don’t tell Henry” is by far the most repeated phrase on Once Upon a Time.

Don’t tell Henry? Are you serious?

Henry is the reason all of this is happening in the first place!

It was Henry who brought his biological mom Emma (Jennifer Morrison) to Storybrooke, because only he understood that Emma could break the curse.

So now, after Henry spent a year convincing the dim adults in his life that they unwittingly were trapped in something beyond their comprehension, those same adults are patronizing him?

To paraphrase Jack Nicholson‘s Col. Jessep character in the movie A Few Good Men, “You don’t think Henry can handle the truth?”

I’ll bet he can. He probably even can help.

I know Henry isn’t as cute as he was in season one. Perhaps it has affected his camera time. It happens with child actors. In real life, Gilmore turns 13 next month.

But that merely emphasizes Henry is getting older, not younger. He should be able to handle more, not less. They’ve turned the character into an annoying little resentful wimp.

Apparently even fairy-tale heroes can be crappy moms and dads.

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca

@billharris_tv

 

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Sean Cullen of Rocket Monkeys says today’s cartoons can’t simply “ape” the past

- January 8th, 2013

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You can’t have a cartoonish attitude toward cartoons any more.

They still can be funny. For example, that’s the point of Rocket Monkeys, a new Canadian animated series that debuts Thursday, Jan. 10 on Teletoon.

But as was pointed out by well-known Canadian comedian Sean Cullen, who is the voice of Gus on Rocket Monkeys, cartoons have come a long way since he was a kid, both creatively and technologically.

“When they used to make Scooby-Doo in the ’70s, kids would see it once and then they’d never see it again,” Cullen recalled. “Now you get it on DVD and watch it 100 times in a row, so it has to be better quality.

“It can’t just be, ‘Oh, it’ll go by so quickly that no one will know that Scooby’s foot disappeared.’ I used to watch Rocket Robin Hood. Every once in a while, someone’s arm moves. It was very basic.

“I watched a lot of cartoons when I was a kid, but they were quite stilted, and stiff, and the stories were quite predictable. These days some of the best writing for comedy and for speculative fiction is in animation. Some of the people we work with on Rocket Monkeys are some of the most talented writers in Canada.”

Besides Cullen’s Gus, Rocket Monkeys also features voice work from Mark Edwards (Wally) and Mark McKinney (Lord Peel). The series follows the cosmic exploits of primate siblings Gus and Wally, who inexplicably have been charged with carrying out important missions in space.

Cullen’s real-life face can be seen regularly these days on Match Game, which airs on the Comedy Network. On that show, Cullen is one of six panelists. But Cullen’s character on Rocket Monkeys is the one in charge. Just ask him.

“Gus is kind of the boss, if there is a boss of either of them,” Cullen said. “He’s the more bossy, pushy one.

“He’s the hero, or he sees himself as the hero, telling everybody how to behave. I kind of model his voice on Charlton Heston. Everything is so dramatic.”

Of course, Charlton Heston had a love-hate relationship with apes. But that’s a much darker tale (not a much darker tail).

Rocket Monkeys is all about fun, and sometimes the best fun can be had by taking something seriously.

“I think humour has taken leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, and animation has benefited from that,” Cullen said. “You realize how much more sophisticated humour has become. For example, The Flintstones (which first aired in primetime in the early 1960s) was aimed at the same kind of audience that in recent years has watched The Simpsons.

“The fact is, when adults take an interest in animation, it becomes better. It’s not just something for your kids to watch and to take up their time.

“And also, people finally have clued in that there’s a lot of money to be made with programming for kids.”

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca

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Boobs really ARE the answer; a look back at TV trends in 2012

- December 23rd, 2012

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In his opening monologue at the Emmy Awards in September, host Jimmy Kimmel noted that cable networks accounted for all the shows in the outstanding drama category in 2012.

“The Academy is sending a clear message,” Kimmel said. “And that message is, ‘Show us your boobs.’ ”

That’s Lena Dunham of Girls in the above picture, by the way, taking Kimmel’s advice to heart – or is it having her cake and eating it, too? – in the opening bit that kicked off the Emmys.

True enough, boobs are the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems, to paraphrase Homer Simpson (he was talking about alcohol). But it actually is more complicated when it comes to TV.

The calendar year 2012 continued the trend of viewers peeling off to specialty programming and specialty channels, as the big broadcast networks try to figure out where they fit in the future of television.

The past year also saw a significant increase in the amount of internet-first “TV” programming, through services such as Netflix and the like.

Genre-wise, there has been a notable push in the past year toward fantasy, at least when it comes to drama. Shows such as Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Once Upon a Time and American Horror Story remind us that when real life gets boring, we always can make something up.

Isn’t it strange that in some ways we now expect our comedies to be more grounded than our dramas? When an alien-based sitcom like The Neighbors comes along, many people turn up their noses because it’s too “ridiculous.” But some of those same people happily will watch Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead and think, “Wow, great art.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just amusing when you think of it that way.

So looking back at TV in 2012, we’ll remember zombies and dwarves, good wives and mad men, drug dealers and high-class schemers, butlers and bootleggers.

And boobs. Lots and lots of boobs.

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca

@billharris_tv

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Family Guy – or should we say Yug Ylimaf – backs into its 200th episode

- November 8th, 2012

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The 200th episode of Family Guy brings new meaning to the term “born again.”

Airing Sunday, Nov. 11 on Fox and Global, the title of Family Guy’s 200th episode – Yug Ylimaf, which is Family Guy spelled backwards – is a good indication of what the story is about.

The bigger question for Seth MacFarlane’s long-running animated series, of course, is if the comedy on Family Guy still is moving forward.

Family Guy is the series on which MacFarlane has built his entertainment empire. Debuting in 1999, Family Guy unofficially teamed with South Park (which debuted in 1997) to take the irreverent humour of The Simpsons and push it to extremes.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the staying power of Family Guy and South Park through the years. I thought initially that the pressure of continually testing the limits of taste and acceptable content might prove to be a trap for both shows.

But comedy is simple in the sense that, you either laugh or you don’t. And I have to say, I laughed quite a few times while watching Family Guy’s 200th episode, while continuing to marvel at what they can get away with these days on network TV, especially when it’s masked in a cartoon.

In Yug Ylimaf, Brian wants to impress the women he has been picking up in bars, so he secretly starts to use Stewie’s time machine. While Stewie is sleeping late at night, Brian sneaks his dates into the machine to take them on fantastical trips.

Keep your ears open for a couple of eyebrow-raising lines – one about a segregated restaurant, one about a 16th birthday – that had me saying, “I can’t believe I just heard that.”

Brian panics when he realizes the time machine has a “years travelled” odometer, which would expose his chicanery to Stewie. But when Brian fiddles with the odometer, it’s time itself that starts to go backwards.

This allows references to some famous Family Guy scenes of the past, not to mention a heaping helping of the straight-forward gross humour for which the series is known (Stewie is a baby; think of what that might mean).

Can Brian and Stewie get time moving in its normal, forward direction before Stewie is “unborn?”

Speaking of being haunted by the past, it was in the summer of 2009 during a party at the Television Critics Association tour in Los Angeles that MacFarlane and I had a conversation about the future of Family Guy.

“I don’t want to go 20 years like The Simpsons,” MacFarlane insisted at the time. “Ideally we would go another couple of years and then wrap it up.”

Hmmm, well, clearly that hasn’t happened. To mark the 200th-episode milestone, a half-hour behind-the-scenes special titled The End of the World as We Know It will air immediately following the Yug Ylimaf episode, making for a one-hour extravaganza.

“Every show starts to suck after a certain point,” MacFarlane observed back in 2009. “And we could already be there for all I know, I don’t know.”

Nonetheless, 200 episodes is a lot of episodes, with or without an operational time machine.

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca

@billharris_tv

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Camp Shlock: Kevin Jonas, meet Milhouse Van Houten – TCA day 5

- July 26th, 2012

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Day 5 at the Television Critics Association tour. Network: E!, etc.

CAMP SHLOCK: A fellow critic – his name is Will Harris, don’t get me started – whose wife and little girl have joined him at the Beverly Hilton told me this story: “My daughter came up to me today and said, ‘I’m pretty sure I saw one of the guys from Camp Rock in the lobby.’ ”

Indeed she had, as Kevin Jonas – one of the Jonas Brothers – was on hand at the TCA tour to promote his new E! reality series Married to Jonas, which debuts Aug. 19. That’s Kevin and his wife Danielle pictured above.

(Side note: This led to Will and I chuckling about how funny it would have been had his daughter said Camp Rock 2  instead of Camp Rock. It reminded us of the episode of The Simpsons when Milhouse exclaimed, “This is just like Speed 2, except with a bus.”)

Anyway, the latest foray by Kevin Jonas and his family just proves again that the path of fame can be a long and winding road.

Meanwhile, I can just hear Bobby Sherman lamenting, “Where was reality TV when I needed it?”

bill.harris@sunmedia.ca

@billharris_tv

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