I don't wonder ANYTHING! Put my show back on!

[vovat]

Okay, it took us a while, but bethje and I have finished checking out the Simpsons Season 11 box set, and watching all of the episodes with commentary. I'm sure I'm not alone in my opinion that this was a weak season overall, despite some high points. But while the season was kind of lousy, the set was put together as well as ever, and they had deleted scenes from pretty much every episode. In his commentary on these scenes, Mike Scully admitted that there were some they should have left in, like the happier ending for "Beyond Blunderdome" and the scene of the alligator's funeral in "Kill the Alligator and Run." As it was, the gator coming out of the courthouse at the end doesn't make much sense without seeing that it had been lying in state earlier on. Of course, that episode doesn't make a whole lot of sense in general, but that scene would have made the ending seem a little less random.

The commentaries were pretty thorough, but I did miss some of the commentators from earlier seasons who didn't contribute much to this one. It was kind of a special treat when Matt Groening or Al Jean would actually show up for a commentary. And are Beth and I the only ones who find Ian Maxtone-Graham's laugh annoying? The staff did mention when episodes were unpopular or controversial among fans. The excuse they used for the jockey elves in "Saddlesore Galactica" was basically that other shows also had wacky ideas like that, which I'm not sure really holds up. I was kind of surprised that Groening didn't mind the trolls, even though he'd complained about unrealistic moments in other episodes. Oh, well. It was a bad episode, but it was an isolated bad episode that didn't disregard character continuity like "The Principal and the Pauper" or "Viva Ned Flanders." It's not like the jockeys became recurring characters on the show.

It is weird that these episodes are almost ten years old now and the show is still on the air, when back then I was kind of surprised that they were even going to make an eleventh season. I have to wonder what would have happened if they had ended the show back around the tenth season or so. Would it be even more famous for having gone out in a blaze of glory, or would the public have largely forgotten it by now?

Oh, and this is unrelated, but I think this is a good example of the first item I addressed yesterday. People who claim to take the Bible entirely literally (which they really don't, of course, but that's another issue) assume everyone else is just as dogmatic as they are, so evolution MUST be a competing religion. Good thing Dorothy got out of Kansas before this nonsense started. {g}