Tag Archives: the simpsons

May 20

Wayne Allwine

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I was saddened, even though I knew nothing about him other than his occupation, to read today of the death of Wayne Allwine.

Allwine, for the past quarter-century, has been the voice of Mickey Mouse.

Mark Evanier writes that Allwine was a genuinely nice guy, and I’m happy to hear that; it would have been terrible to think of Mickey being voiced by anything less. I was also interested to hear that Allwine was married to Russi Taylor, the voice of Minnie Mouse. Taylor is also, for fans of “The Simpsons,” the voice of Martin Prince.

Apr 17

Two themes that taste great together

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One of my brothers just sent me this. Alexander Courage, meet Danny Elfman.

By the way, do you know there are lyrics to the theme from “Star Trek”? When Gene Roddenberry signed Alexander Courage to write the “Star Trek” theme, he reserved the right to write lyrics for it — and after the show made it to air, he did just that. He knew the words would never be used, and didn’t really care — the point is that writing lyrics made him the song’s co-writer and entitled him to half the royalties. Although this was perfectly legal, Courage considered it unethical and stopped writing any more music for the series.

I remember seeing the lyrics in a “Making of Star Trek” book published in the 1970s, but that was an authorized book, and didn’t get into the reasons for why the lyrics were written and what happened as a result.

Here’s one place you can find the story, not to mention the actual lyrics.

Jun 20

You may remember me from such blog posts as ….

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Mental_floss magazine’s web site has a great new quiz:

Troy McClure Film, or Actual Terrible Movie?

Troy McClure was a character who appeared occasionally on “The Simpsons” and was voiced by the late Phil Hartman. The character was retired after Hartman’s death. He was supposed to be a has-been movie actor, and he would turn up in some TV commercial, educational film or what have you, always introducing himself by referring to his past projects:

“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such nature films as ‘Earwigs: Eww!’ and ‘Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory.’” (Example from Wikipedia.)

I did poorly on the quiz, answering only 8 of 15 correctly. In a bizarre coincidence, I had seven consecutive questions wrong followed by eight consecutive right.

Feb 13

Cowabunga!

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I’m watching a “Simpsons” rerun on WUXP (MyTV 30) tonight, and as soon as the episode started it looked strange for some reason. I finally noticed that Chief Wiggum’s police uniform was green. A quick flip to neighboring channels reassured me that the problem was not my TV, and the commercial breaks were in perfect color as well.

Here, apparently, is the problem. Some rocket scientist at the TV station has adjusted the color on the playback of the episode so that the residents of Springfield’s skin is flesh-colored, instead of its usual yellow tone.

Dec 17

Hulu loves ya, baby

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Well, I finally got my beta invite to Hulu.com, the video service co-owned by NBC and FOX. It works very well — the clips look great on my system and my 1.5 Mbps DSL connection. I just watched the Simpsons Halloween special. Here is one of my favorite “Saturday Night Live” clips:

That clip is presented whole, but you also have the option of using slider bars to choose just a small portion of an episode or clip before linking to it.

Unfortunately, the hulu.com embed box is just slightly too wide to be friendly with my WordPress theme.

Nov 12

Creative use of Mr. Burns

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I told you Mr. Burns was in charge!

Originally uploaded by tvbarn.

Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star had this very funny photo from the Writers’ Guild of America picket lines at his blog. “AMPTP” is a federation of producers against whom the writers are striking, which is why the writers would want to imply that it’s run by, or at least endorsed by, the greedy, geriatric nuclear power plant owner Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”