What I’m getting at is that, like a lot of Verhoeven satires, Starship Troopers is not “satire” in the way usual way we think of it in America, where it is fairly spelled out and filled specifically with ironic jokes that give the game away. A modern remake under a typical American director would have to have a bunch…

Relative to other forms of physical media, video games have remained pretty prominent in physical form honestly. Tons of big movies now don’t even get a Blu-Ray or DVD release anymore, and music is mostly online or only sold in physical form as niche items (outside vinyl which is mostly for collectors, speaking as…

This is honestly a big reason I can’t really deal with Nintendo anymore, and haven’t owned a Nintendo console since the Wii (outside the two Classic mini consoles, which were insanely difficult to get and a reminder of why I’d otherwise checked out). I’m not denying that they probably make great games still, but good…

IIRC it was also missing No Sleep ‘til Brooklyn, which was a pretty big omission. 

Verhoeven wasn’t going for an actual satiric/comedic tone though. What makes it work is that it’s played completely straight. 

Kavner and Smith were different situations. Kavner was hired because she was already on The Tracey Ullman show so they were essentially saving money and time by casting her. Smith was cast to play Lisa because it was the Tracey Ullman shorts era and there were like three characters outside of the family. (Initially…

It’s not even really that. Characters like Hibbert were not really important to the show at the beginning. They needed a doctor for one episode because Bart was in the hospital, and they thought it would be funny to make the doctor a Cosby caricature because they were up against The Cosby Show in their time slot at…

This is true too, but I think with a show like The Simpsons it’s important to understand that they were just working with the pool of actors who were readily available, and they were making a show about a white (well, yellow, but you know what I mean) family living in a mostly white suburban town. Characters like Apu…

Since the original show. D.C. Fontana wrote some of the best ones.

I’m sure Roddenberry had his problems, some of them are legendary, but you also have to remember he was doing this show in the 1960s. The pressures being placed on the creators of shows, especially those creating shows aimed partly at younger (not young children, but teens and young adults) audiences, were incredible…

The actor salaries were reduced in part because the show had become too expensive and Fox actually was considering finally (IMO mercifully) cancelling it because the ratings have only gone down over time. The producers also took a pay cut. More recently they also axed Alf Clausen (longtime composer for over 25 years)…

They have it right though. This is discussed a bit, for instance, on the commentaries for The Simpsons and Futurama DVDs. The regular voices are paid per episode, NOT per character, so for instance Harry Shearer does not get paid way more for playing half a dozen characters compared to Yeardley Smith with one. And as…

Yeah. I mean I hate to even slightly sound like one of those MAGA Chuds who thinks taking down Gone with the Wind for 5 days is tyranny or some shit, but there is something to be said for the fact that comedy in general has really moved heavily into “clapter” territory the last few years where it’s just making…

This is the age-old problem with all satire, though. There’s always going to be someone who just actively decides not to understand the point. (And it wasn’t just an early 00s thing: look at All in the Family and the reaction to it from people who unironically thought Archie Bunker was an awesome dude.) And how do you…

To our individual opinions now, informed by decades of syndication, maybe. In the early 90s, absolutely not. In 1990/1991 The Simpsons was absolutely gigantic and that first episode was one of the most popular and iconic. By 1993 it was safely transitioning into just another popular show, maybe even a cult one, which…

Leftists have always hated it. We/they view it as another “West Wing” that broke the brains of a lot of liberals, and in this case whitewashed a lot of horrible people by putting them in a “woke” story and framing. This piece on it goes back a few years.

Hate to be that guy. But this is missing “It’s ‘Potato,’ not ‘Potatoe.’” when Bart had to correct Dan Quayle. (That one’s become a rarity though because it was only used once in a summer repeat in 1992.)

The game had a sequence where you beat up prisoners on Rikers Island. Rikers itself is so controversial that there is no a plan in place to finally close it for good; it’s basically one of the worst human rights violations that exists in the U.S. today. Look, I really enjoyed that game. But try to imagine a superhero…

Thanks for the feedback. It seems like centrist liberals have been doing more harm than good for decades now already, so I’m not really taking suggestions from them at this time. I will continue to listen to the BLM movement leaders and the black activists and scholars who have paved the way for them, all of whom have…

The journalist Alexander Cockburn openly wrote about being privy to similar Biden stories in 2008. (Apparently Biden was making inappropriate sexual advances on staffers within the weeks after his first wife’s death.) There’s no way the Obama team simply had no awareness of that article, which was published in…