From: baldwin@csservera.scs.usna.navy.mil (J.D. Baldwin)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.simpsons
Subject: Review of Kamp Krusty and Streetcar Named Marge
Date: 29 Sep 92 15:36:55 GMT
Organization: Comp. Sci. Dep't., U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD

The following is a review I lifted from a recent Washington Post.  It
contains a few entertaining details about what we can expect this
week.  Sorry it took me so long to get around to this.

"A Streetcar Named Marge" sounds like it's headed for the pantheon of
the greats, along with I&S&M and Flaming Moe's.  I expect to laugh
particularly hard at Maggie's day care arrangements.

A few editorial comments by me are in brackets.  Enjoy.

*** MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD ***
The Washington Post, Thursday, September 24, 1992, pp. C1, C9.

TV Previews

AMERICA'S MOST ANIMATED FAMILY

by Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer

Amazing, isn't it?  Those darn Simpsons don't look one minute older
than they did a year ago.  That's one of the great things about "The
Simpsons."  The cast never ages.  [Clearly he has forgotten the TU
shorts. --jd]

The show also has escaped the kind of budget-cutting and
belt-tightening that has made so many of the new season's series and
TV movies look cheap and chintzy.  On "The Simpsons," they don't have
to stint on special effects or extras or car crashes.  They just draw
them.

Tune in early enough for tonight's season premiere, at 8 on Channel 5,
and you'll see some big, big stars make cameo appearances during the
opening credits.  [??? --jd] The show gets off to a good start and
about 30 minutes later comes to a good stop.

It's the best series on Fox and still one of the best family sitcoms
on television.

To judge from the first two episodes of the new season, the folks
behind this brilliant cartoon haven't run out of ideas or
inspirations.  In the season premiere, written by David M. Stern, Bart
Simpson and sister Lisa overthrow the tyrannical rulers of a summer
camp so bleak even Franz Kafka would find it depressing.

The second episode (Oct. 1), written by Jeff Martin, is even better
and more resonant.  Marge Simpson lands the role of Blanche DuBois in
a musical version of "A Streetcar Named Desire" staged by a local
theater group.  Guest voice Jon Lovitz plays flamboyant director
Llewellyn Sinclair, who brags he's directed three plays and has had
three heart attacks, a sure sign of genius.

"I just don't see what's so bad about Stanley," Marge tells Sinclair
as she tries to get into the role.  Years of marriage to the loutish
Homer have somewhat warped her view.  Good neighbor Ned Flanders,
playing Stanley, gets to sing, "Stella, Stella, can't you hear me
yella?"  And the entire cast joins in on the finale, a rousing
hand-clapper called "You Can Always Depend on the Kindness of
Strangers."

No, Tennessee Williams will not be spinning in his grave.  He will be
laughing along with everyone else.

What's especially admirable about "The Simpsons" is the way satiric
asides are tucked into every corner.  In the season premiere, Krusty
the Klown, Bart's favorite idiotic TV personality, beckons children to
his Kamp Krusty with a TV commercial promising fat kids that they'll
get to take part in "an exclusive program of diet and ridicule."

Krusty figures in the second episode as well.  Baby Maggie pulls the
string of a talking Krusty doll and hears it say, "If I break, buy a
new one!"  She's been salted away in the Ayn Rand School for Tots 
[!!--jd], and its Nietzschean matron has done the unthinkable: taken 
away Maggie's precious pacifier.

Maggie liberates the pacifier and those of her fellow babies while the
theme music to "The Great Escape" plays on the soundtrack.  A short
time later, Alfred Hitchcock makes a cameo appearance, following a
reference to "The Birds."  Homer, at the play, does what Joseph Cotten
did at the opera in "Citizen Kane."

The only complaint that might be leveled at the first two shows of the
new season is that there's no sign of Montgomery Burns, the
hilariously evil overlord of the nuclear power plant where Homer
works.  We can only hope he'll return soon.

With "The Cosby Show" gone, there's no longer much problem deciding
what to watch at 8 p.m. Thursdays [I never had a problem, myself--jd].
In fact, when it comes to fiendishly funny and fast-moving domestic
sitcoms, "The Simpsons" has little competition on any night of the
week.  As they begin their fourth season, Matt Groening's lovable,
durable characters still seem capable of delights and surprises.
They're a family to be valued, any way you look at them.

			30

[Any typos are mine, not the Post's. --jd]
--
 From the catapult of:              |+| "If anyone disagrees with anything I
   _, J. D. Baldwin, Comp Sci Dept  |+| say, I am quite prepared not only to
 __||____:::)=}-  U.S. Naval Academy|+| retract it, but also to deny under
 \      / baldwin@cad.usna.navy.mil |+| oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer
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