As it stands now, the couch gag is essentially a short film playing before every episode of The Simpsons. But over the years it became such a fixture of the show that the intro began morphing into it's own separate art form. If an episode was a bit short, they'd create a long gag to pad out the runtime. If an episode ran long, then they'd create a short gag. The couch gag actually began as nothing more than a clever way to fill time. There have been over 550 episodes, more than 600 guest stars, and countless recurring characters, but just one famously consistent element on the show: the couch gag. The Simpsons made the adult cartoon the staple of entertainment it is today. The entire television landscape would be unrecognizable. Without The Simpsons there would be no South Park, no Family Guy, and no Futurama. The Fox animated sitcom is a mainstay that pretty much defined at least two entire generations and became a cultural institution over the decades. Seemingly everything has been referenced by, and in turn referenced, The Simpsons. In that spirit, here’s the masterpiece “ Steamed Hams but There’s a Different Animator Every 13 Seconds.The Simpsons is not only the most iconic show of modern television, but arguably the most important cartoon ever created. The only thing more surreal than Hertzfeldt’s couch gag is the infamous “steamed hams” segment, a vignette about a lunch date gone wrong that captured the minds and hearts of the internet.And here’s Geller on why the myth of the Golem is a Jewish superhero story.Here’s another taste of Geller’s work: a video essay on how the video game Control figures into the anatomy and legacy of the haunted house.And you can check out Geller on Twitter here. You can subscribe to Geller on YouTube here. Today’s video is by Jacob Geller, whose content covers a wide swath of subjects, from video games to architecture to folklore. Who made this video essay on Don Hertzfeldt’s couch gag? Watch “ The Best Simpsons Intro Is About Losing Everything You Love“: The gag asks: Okay, so now what? What does it mean to live forever? To be surrounded by the constant reminders of the ways you’ve changed and the ways you cannot? Scream now, if you must. Sitcoms are a world of endless ends and resets of a family unit that has achieved the long-sought dream of living indefinitely with purpose, forever themselves and forever together. As the essay below describes, Hertzfeldt’s couch gag acts as an affecting thought experiment on the existential nightmare of The Simpsons itself. In the gag, Homer accidentally catapults forward through time, showing us a glimpse of what The Simpsons will look like millennia from now. While the episode itself is pretty forgettable, Hertzfeldt’s couch gag is anything but: an unnerving and sad terror trip of time travel, memory, and tragic stasis. What follows is a strange and melancholic vision of what happens when you can’t change but the world does.Īs the video essay below notes, Hertzfeldt was likely working on World of Tomorrow around the same time he created the couch gag for the 553rd episode of The Simpsons, an animated sitcom that needs no introduction because we’re pretty sure it’s been on the air since the cathode ray was invented (don’t Google that). This is the central question in Hertzfeldt’s critically-acclaimed sci-fi trilogy World of Tomorrow, which tells of a four-year-old girl named Emily (voiced by Hertzfeldt’s niece, Winona Mae) who is visited by an adult clone of herself from a far-flung future where the Earth is on the brink of collapse. Most pointedly, and repeatedly: “what would it mean to live forever if you couldn’t take your memories and experiences with you?” Hertzfeldt’s films are pointedly interested in the kind of existential questions that burrow into the three-pound lump of jelly between our ears. If the work of animator Don Hertzfeldt could scream, we’d like to think it would. Today, we’re watching a video essay on Don Hertzfeldt’s trippy, heartbreaking couch gag on The Simpsons. Welcome to The Queue - your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |