Simpsons Episode 3-6-11

This week’s episode featured an underlying theme of drugs. On a class trip to the desert, Lisa discovers that the town flower had a calming effect on scorpions. She creates a drug that when used, the scorpions calm down. Homer tries the drug on his father, who is notorious for being grumpy. After taking the drug, Abe becomes a much more pleasant person. Lisa thinks that the exploitation of the drug is bad so she flushes what's left of it. A CEO of a pharmaceutical company wants to produce the drug that Lisa discovered. They create a trial, and the CEO advises that Abe is the only one to take the drug until the trial period is over. Bart distributes the drug to the majority of the town’s population of grumpy old people. After some time, the side effect of the drug is that the person’s eyeballs come out of their sockets. The people in the town don't get angry about the side effect because they are all under the effect of the drug. They demand more of the drug, because they like the effect of it.

I thought that this episode was entertaining. I thought it was funny how they spoofed the road runner cartoons at the beginning of the episode. I like how they played on the idea of drug addiction. The episode did a good job on showing how an addiction can affect people, and how people don’t act rationally when they are taking drugs. I thought it was funny at the end of the episode when they said that the lesson behind what happened was to not break off from the group when you go on a field trip.

Simpsons Episode 2-20-11

This week's episode featured a satire on the award show season. Towards the beginning of the episode, a wealthy man, who invented an ergonomic chair, comes to the Simpson's house and tells them that he wants to make Bart's web video, Angry Dad, into a movie. The whole family is excited about the movie. When the movie is presented in front of critics, they do not like it, so Lisa suggested to cut parts, and make it a short film instead. After this is done, the short film is nominated for numerous awards, such as a Grammy, Oscar, etc. At each award show Homer steals the spotlight from Bart. When Bart finally gets his moment, he comes to the realization that he was not the only one who worked on the film, yet he was the one getting credit for it. At the end of the episode, Bart and Homer are cutting up the Oscar, and giving a piece of it to everyone who worked on the film. The episode ends with Bart asking Homer if they could order a replacement Oscar from the academy, with Homer responding "they are like $5 online."

Overall I thought this was an entertaining episode. I especially liked how they played on award shows, using real film studios such as Pixar (which they called Mixar). The clip from Mixar that was up for awards against Angry Dad was called Condiments, which I thought was pretty funny. It was a play on Toy Story, paralleling it because instead of toys coming alive when people are not around, it was condiments.