Trollheart's Classic Simpsons Episodes

[Trollheart]

I was recently challenged, in the wake of my Trollheart’s Treehouse of Horror journal, to review every episode of The Simpsons, a task beyond even my Herculean ambitions. But there’s no doubt that there are many, many episodes that deserve to go down as classics in the series, and in this new journal I’ll be taking a look at some of my favourites. I’ll be running a synopsis, pointing out the best bits, best lines, jokes, musical numbers, PCRs (Pop Culture References) and so on, and as usual, rating them on a sliding scale.

Feel free to join in, or just sit back and relive some of the classic moments from a series that has been going so long now that some of you may not even have been born when it began to be screened, and which has now passed into everyday usage and is a part of human culture, so much so that episodes are even preserved in the Library of Congress, maybe. If there’s one criticism I have of the show, like most people, it’s that it began to slide badly in about its sixteenth or seventeenth season, and though I kind of stopped watching around then, the few episodes I did catch did not make me regret stopping. Hard, of course, to maintain the kind of quality The Simpsons has managed over more than three decades, so I don’t necessarily hold that against them. However it does mean that it’s therefore very unlikely any of the classic episodes will come from the later seasons, and more often than not, we’ll be looking at quite early ones. I think the “golden age” of The Simpsons, if you will, ranges from season one to about season ten, and it’s probably going to be from that period I’ll be pulling most of the episodes.

All right, all right, Homer: we’ll get this show on the road, before you lose it!