Picture from Instant
The touchy subject of alleged plagiarism has reared its head again, this time with a band from Australia called Australian Crawl and their song 'Unpublished Critics' from 1981 surfacing and appearing in articles accompanied by two embedded YouTube videos, one of their song and one of 'Sweet Child of Mine' by Guns and Roses. Without Slash's classic guitar intro the two songs could have been separated at birth, which makes you wonder why it has taken so long for this to be news. Although the original song is well known in Australia neither it nor the band have made much of an impact over here or in America. Spokespeople for the band say that they aren't bothered and are happy for the two songs to co-exist, and even more strange is the fact that both bands were on the same record label. Popular music is littered with accusations of theft, some acknowledge where they have taken the riff from and some go out of their way to deny it. Nirvana were more than open about the fact that 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' owes a lot to 'More Than A Feeling' by Boston, although oddly enough they never to my knowledge thanked Killing Joke for the bass line to 'Come As You Are'. Killing Joke threatened legal action against Nirvana which was a bit of a liberty considering that three years before 'Eighties' came out the riff featured on 'Life Goes On' by The Damned, and nobody seems to have realised that before all of that it appeared on 'Daddy Cool' by Boney M. I could go on and basically turn this into a list of songs that ripped off songs but I won't.
Today I watched The Simpsons Guy, a cartoon crossover between Family Guy and The Simpsons. A reference is made early on to television shows crossing over to set the scene, a joke that (as tradition dictates) was originally used in The Simpsons in 1995 when Jay Sherman from The Critic turned up to judge the Springfield Film Festival. A lot has already been made of the fact that Family Guy borrows heavily from The Simpsons and the two shows have fired shots at each other for years. We can ignore the fact that Family Guy bears a resemblance to Wait Till Your Father Gets Home (incidentally 'inspired by' the sitcom All In The Family which in turn was the American version of Till Death Us Do Part - see, nothing is original when you scratch the surface) for the simple reason that nobody seems to remember it. A crossover episode between the two was inevitable and it wasn't quite the jumping the shark that I imagined it would be, but it came close. I'm glad about this because I love both series and don't agree with those who say that The Simpsons isn't as good as it used to be, in fact I actually think it has improved with age.
Something that blighted the show in my opinion is that the writing wasn't a collaborative effort with Seth MacFarlane's pen responsible for the script which relied more on Family Guy's darker edge and might have baffled fans of The Simpsons who were unfamiliar with their imitator; rape jokes for example (as unfunny as they are) don't shock when watched on Family Guy but are totally out of place in Springfield. However the jokes about how Family Guy ripped off The Simpsons were best displayed in a court case involving Peter Griffin being sued (as a representative of Pawtucket Patriot beer) by Duff brewery, to which he responded "D'oh!", the very exclamation already stolen from James Finlayson in countless Laurel and Hardy films. In court each Simpsons character ended up sitting next to their Family Guy counterpart, including two incarnations of James Woods. The blue haired lawyer from The Simpsons opens the case by declaring "My client the Duff brewery is the victim of flagrant intellectual copyright and theft, but it's not just the main Duff recipe that's been plagiarised. Several packages and designs have been similarly infringed (as the camera pans to pairs of characters such as Kent Brockman and Tom Tucker, Mayor Quimbey and Mayor West, Bumble Bee Man and the cleaner, and Stewie sitting next to Mr Burns), resulting again and again in cheap copies, pale imitations, clumsy counterfeits and weak substitutions". An unexpected punchline arises when we see that the judge is Fred Flintstone, a character who 'inspired' Homer Simpson and was himself based on Jackie Gleason's Ralph Kramden character in The Honeymooners. Funnier still is the fact that the subject of cartoons being rip offs of other cartoons was a storyline in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons entitled The Day the Violence Died when the true authorship of Itchy and Scratchy was challenged, but not by the makers of Tom and Jerry. The courtroom scene was the funniest and cleverest part of the whole episode, I therefore don't apologise for the spoiler because it has saved you from the rest of the episode.
This is an idea that wants so badly to work but ends up as a self-indulgent string of references and in-jokes. Yes, it is funny but it never quite becomes the television event it was hyped up to be, instead serving as a box being ticked for fans of both cartoons but offering nothing to the casual viewer. How many United Kingdom based readers of this blog remember the Coronation Street/Eastenders sketch for Children In Need? The writers took a reasonably good idea and turned it into a contrived mess that even seemed to embarrass the actors taking part. That is what The Simpsons Guy was in places, pairing up Marge and Louis but not really giving them enough to do apart from moan at their husbands was a bit lazy, and more could have been done with the Stewie Griffin/Bart Simpson teaming besides soiling it slightly with the aforementioned rape joke which served only to generate complaints and at the same time demonstrate the difference between Bart's relatively innocent life as a catapult toting practical joker and descendant of the American version of Dennis the Menace and Stewie's psychotic tendency to kidnap and torture. Lisa Simpson's friendship with Meg Griffin could also have been fleshed out slightly although it is probably for the best that they didn't, after all Lisa has never self-harmed or attempted suicide. Most pointless of all was the not knowing what to do with Chris and Brian Griffin besides making them take Santa's Little Helper for a walk and losing him - this was very much an episode that could have been called The Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin Show, dedicating too much screen time to a car washing sequence that would have served better as a Family Guy cutaway and a ridiculous pastiche of the epic fights Griffin has with the giant chicken. Once back in Quahog and in their own house everything is back to normal, Homer and Peter having agreed to stay apart and Louis making one final reference to the fact that this is a one-off occurrence, it is left to Stewie to pay a final homage by writing out I will not think about Bart anymore on a blackboard a'la the opening credits to The Simpsons before the credits roll.
This would have possibly worked better if they had stuck to the standard half hour episode (Peter Griffin actually commented that he was tired because they have gone over that time) or even if they had edited all the funny bits into a slightly longer cutaway for Family Guy. It is an entertaining episode but while it isn't the worst episode eveeeeer, it isn't one of the best either and that goes for either show.
The Sunday Alternative will return soon.
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June Housekeeping
The audio book of Bowie Day (a short story inspired by A Christmas Carol) will be released on August 31st. In the meantime, the book can be downloaded to your Kindle from here.
All donations made using the PayPal button will go towards making podcasts, comedy sketches, live video sessions, documentaries, short films and more that will be made available online for free.
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steveEoliver@gmail.com
