All Hail the Lord of the Twin Moons!

All Hail the Lord of the Twin Moons: A Look at Last Night’s SIMPSONS Couch Gag

All Hail the Lord of the Twin Moons: A Look at Last Night’s SIMPSONS Couch Gag

Last night’s couch gag on The Simpsons might go down as one of the oddest in the history of the series. The 26th season opener propels the “Sampsans” into a grey null space of protoplasmic, shriek-talking figures and might just be mainstream America’s first real introduction to Oscar-nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt.

The deliberately off-putting (and lengthy) clip blends live-action and animation while pitch-shifting the voices of The Simpsons clan beyond recognition (although I kind of think Yeardley Smith is voicing the tentacled Marge). Set in the year 10,535, it’s like Hertzfeldt boiled off all of the joy from the long-running animated series and skimmed the broadest cultural signifiers off the top. Then had aliens animate it.

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Watch This: Pistol Pete

In light of the recent barrage of Simpsons output, it’s nice to know that some things about the long-running show are still a bit of a mystery. In this case, the enigma is John Swartzwelder, one of the show’s longtime writers and a veritable JD Salinger/Hunter S. Thompson of the Simpsons world. With a weird and absurdist view on things, Swartzwelder is perfectly suited for writing animated comedies, where pretty much anything that will make you laugh your ass of goes.

A lesser-known fact is that Swartzwelder wrote a live-action pilot that, until this week, few had seen. Swartzwelder’s 1996 pilot Pistol Pete was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday and is a time capsule of an established talent, in the vein of Lookwell and Heat Vision and Jack. Absurdly anachronistic, chock full of bad acting and rough cuts, there are shades of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. But where Darkplace deliberately lambastes, Pistol Pete falls short in its reverence for the classic western source material and lack of self-awareness. Either way, the pilot is a fun watch, if only to see Simpsons-world comedy in a real world setting.

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