The story is okay, seeing this show in HD with the new intro is crazy after watching it as long as I remember, and having started on my quest to watch every episode in 2012. I'll never forget the handdrawn animation from the first seasons!
[6.8/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] This episode is tricky. On the one hand, it’s focused on one story, and a character-based one at that. On the other, it has some reality-breaking insanity like a magic pot of sauce that works like a “What If?” machine. On the third, there’s some tasteless and downright stupid jokes. On the fourth (this a power plant set of hands, by the way), it ends with the family doing something sweet to make Homer feel better. It’s a real mixed bag.
I still think I lean toward liking it, if only because it remembers that Homer is a character. He wishes he had been elected class president in high school, sees the success of someone who beat him, and laments how his own life could have been better if he hadn't been wronged in the race. Some of his reactions and responses are cartoony, but the idea that he suffered this setback and his youth and has never fully gotten over it is a very human one.
Why we have to deal with it by a supernatural saucified crystal ball is beyond me. Worse yet, the episode never really resolves the point. Homer sees that things would have been much better if he had won, at least from his perspective, and the show never really bothers to explain why he should be happy with this life in a way that he’d find satisfying. If you squint, you can see the idea that the family he has helps give him a legacy and a place on the Springfield wall of fame that recognizes his accomplishment and gives him something from his purloined success, even if it’s not the whole enchilada. But there really should have been more connective tissue.
Some of the humor isn’t bad. Homer’s bitterness and Vance’s chipperness make for an amusing mix, and Lenny and Carl being afraid of being sent to Carnegie Mellon rather than getting to become townies is a laugh. But there’s also stupid jokes like Patti not being gay in the alternate reality for some reason, and pretty much everything involving the sauce guy.
On the whole, I understand why people had hope for the HD era (though the show’s use of the four act structure is a little janky in the early going) after this one. There’s one clear story here rather than a ton of inciting incidents and other thin b-plots, and it’s focused on the wants and regrets of a character who’s humanized. But the dodginess of the plotting and hit-or-miss nature of the humor still shows that the series had a long way to go before getting back to any semblance of glory.
Shout by Hollandale12VIP 4BlockedParent2021-08-28T22:05:09Z
The first episode in HD and with the new intro! The beginning of a new era of The Simpsons.