Episodes 6 and 7

So, we start today's post with Moaning Lisa, and the morning of the 17th of January 1990. The Simpson house has a lounge, a den and a "rumpus room", and Evergreen Terrace is in such a nice neighbourhood that Homer can leave his keys in the front door overnight without the family being the victims of burglary or car theft. What luxury! Obviously, the comfortable blandness (or maybe the bland comfort) of suburban life is a contributing factor to Lisa's depression, which shows itself for the first time in this episode. There's also a scene in which Homer and Bart play a boxing videogame, on a console that doesn't have any obvious real-life analogue, just being a vague lump of technology on top of the TV, though I think this is probably preferable to a vapid referential anti-joke like the "Funtendo Zii" that appears in Season 21. During the match, Bart also delivers the line "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, they can't prove anything!", which was on a T-shirt I had as a kid.

More important though, is Homer and Marge's inability to deal with Lisa's ennui, something typical of baby boomer parents faced with the emergent problems of a generation growing up in a world without the culturally-enforced emotional repression they had forced upon them. Though Homer also has nightmares about the idea that Bart will one day be a better man than he (if it hasn't happened already), while Marge's dreams see her reliving the days in her childhood when her mother advised to to keep everything bottled up inside, to keep up appearances, advice she passes onto Lisa, though to Marge's credit, she does realise the error in this.

Lisa's interactions with Bleeding Gums Murphy are interesting: like he says, she has "no real problems", compared to his life of poverty and dental neglect. But her pain, whether it's caused by the pointlessness she sees in her lifestyle, or a chemical imbalance is still real, and Bleeding Gums doesn't try to discount or belittle it. Their first meeting takes place on the night of the 17th, by the way. I've written so much on this episode, and a day hasn't even passed yet! On the eighteenth, Homer goes to the arcade to learn how to video-box, which is treated as a dirty shame for an adult. How absurd, we all know that arcade games are probably the highest form of art! Meanwhile, driving Lisa to band practice, Marge passes on her awful hand-me-down advice, and instantly regrets it as she sees Lisa becoming a doormat before her very eyes, smiling to please boys and passively obeying the idiotic music teacher Mr. Largo. The episode ends on the night of the 18th, with the Simpsons going to see Bleeding Gums at a jazz club. Nice.

Taking us into the 19th is Call of the Simpsons, an episode I don't really have fond memories of. Don't worry, there's no related trauma or anything, I just don't think it's very good. Season one is a little rough all-round, but this episode is one of the weakest of the bunch. Though only a minute into it, and we've got the first instance of Homer referring to the Flanders family collectively as "The Flandererses", which is hilarious. There's also Ned's big fancy RV, which, as far as I can remember, isn't mentioned again until season six's Lemon of Troy. Odd how Bob, the RV salesman, who quickly alternates between insincere sycophancy and blunt honesty, never became a recurring character.

The 19th was a pretty eventful day! Homer gets jealous of Ned's RV, goes out and buys (a much worse) one of his own, packs it up and takes the family away in it. It's certainly paced like each scene directly follows from the last, so I'm going to have to go along with it, I guess! The RV quickly gets destroyed, stranding the Simpsons in the woods, Maggie wanders off and befriends some bears, Bart's lucky red hat is referred to for the first time, and my memories of this episode's low quality are all being proven right. I'm twelve minutes in and it feels like it's been hours of unfunny, boring rubbish. I don't like being this negative, but this episode doesn't leave me much else to do. It's simultaneously less funny and less dramatically interesting than Moaning Lisa, by a long long way. On the 20th of January, Homer is mistaken for Bigfoot, with people somehow mistaking the brown mud in which he's covered for brown fur.

We see three different front pages, all of the same paper, covering the Bigfoot story, so I guess we're on the 23rd now? Bart, Homer and Maggie have all been lost in the woods all that time without dying, amazing! And Maggie being an unsupervised baby, too! According to the news on TV, a week passes with the captured Homer being studied in a lab. Dr. Marvin Monroe, who has met Homer before, is unsure of his humanity. Marge and Homer were watching the news on TV in bed, on the night of the 30th of January 1990, and since that stinker of an episode has drained the life out of me, that's also where this post ends. Next time, we'll start on the 31st of January, 1990, with The Telltale Head!