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The Most Awesome Things We Saw Last Week (Oct 28-Nov 3)

Written by EJ Feddes, Myndi Weinraub & Don Kowalewski

Monday, 03 November 2008 14:37

EJ -You call it Halloween, I call it Treehouse of Horror time. That's right, The Simpsons brought us their 19th annual celebration of horror. What made this season's installment notable, aside from the opener where a rigged voting machine stymies Homer's attemps to vote for Obama, were parodies of two of my favorite things in the whole world.

The second segment, "How To Get Ahead in Dead-vertising" is a funny outing in which Homer is hired to kill celebrities so that their images can be used in commercials for free. And yes, this means that Chief Wiggum and Edward G. Robinson finally get to fight it out. There's a vicious joke about Rip Taylor, and the immortal line "Kate Winslet's murder paid for that chocolate fountain". But best of all is the opening sequence that's a dead-on parody of Mad Men's credit sequence. Same music, same animation, only with Homer standing in for Don Draper. It's perfectly executed and hilarious, and it makes me happy to see that Mad Men is widely known enough to be parodied by The Simpsons.

And the third segment brings us "It's the Grand Pumpkin, Milhouse", which is, of course, a send-up of Peanuts. Once again, they mimic the opening of Great Pumpkin and then use some classic Peanuts motifs throughout. Milhouse and Bart wear Linus and Charlie Brown's traditions outfits, respectively. Santa's Little Helper is redesigned to look like a brown Snoopy. Marge practices playing trombone throughout the episode, so she makes the "wah wah" sound Charles Schulz' adults are known for. There's even a party scene replicating the famous "one move per character" dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas. For a long time Peanuts devotee like myself, this was all sorts of fun. Sure, the Grand Pumpkin comes to life to exact his vengeance upon humanity, and we learn that all pumpkins are racists ("I'm just honest about it!"), but all of that pales next to the sheer joy of seeing Ralph Wiggum as Pig Pen. Awesome.

In second place, and I can't be responsible for the part where this blows your minds, is this video of a theater group recreating a vintage Space Ghost episode with puppets. Once you watch it, you may find yourself asking whether it is, in fact, the best thing you've ever seen. Yes. Yes it is.

The recreation...

The original...

Myndi

The Most Awesome Thing is saw (besides those listed above, which are pretty awesome, and SNL which had an awesome cold open with John McCain) was the finest hour of comedy on television. That, of course, would be NBC's combination of The Office and 30 Rock, which returned to bigger laughs and bigger ratings this past week!

First you have the cast of The Office in unbelievable Halloween costumes: Dwight, Creed and Kevin were all Heath Ledger's Joker, Andy was very committed to Cats, Phyllis was adorable as Raggedy Ann and poor Pam was stuck at corporate in a Charlie Chaplin get-up that could also evoke Hitler! That was just the open! The best story of the episode was the passive-aggressive battle for Angela's love that pits Dwight against Andy. I love that this storyline is a study in character continuity. These characters haven't liked each other since the day they met, and Angela is just one more reason, really. It's a triumph of good writing.

Then, on 30 Rock, there were three great plots: Jack is back, trying to oust Devon from his top job, which he's screwing up anyway. To do this, Jack figures he's going to have to seduce Kathy Geiss, the former CEO's daughter, a mentally challenged adult woman who barely speaks, loves unicorns and Marky Mark and, apparently, wears Dora the Explorer panties (shudder). Secondly, Liz's quest to adopt a child will work as an ongoing plot device and finally, Tracy is enjoying to success of his porn video game without compensating those who helped, espcially Jenna, who did a lot of voice work. Liz urges him to do so, and he gives gaudy gifts to everyone (Pete gets a Chinchilla coat) except Jenna, who gets a coupon book for free hugs. This won't end soon either. Bring on Oprah!

Don

Hard to believe there was so few awesome things last week. I could've easily just dumped a bunch of Daily Show and South Park clips into this article, but this late entry got to my inbox just under the wire. It's longer than it needs to be. It's not entirely original.

South Park was the second part of a two part episode about a pandemic that is unleashed on the world when Peruvian pan flute bands are all encamped at Gitmo. Trey & Matt basically take the stance that locking up suspected terrorists at random, without trial, is the equivalent of your local mall minstrel actually keeping a race of giant gerbils from coming out of their nests and destroying the world. But while they're making a sligh political statement, they also crack us all up with the self-reflexive nature of the episode and with the parody of Cloverfield.

But ...somebody spent some serious time editing this Obama-McCain dance-off and, well ...its awesome.