Last Exit From Springfield
It took me a while to watch through and listen to the commentaries on the ninth season set of The Simpsons, but during that time the thought seemed clear in my mind that this would be the last set I got of the show whether bought myself or asked for as a Christmas or birthday present, in a sense a second, perhaps more definite farewell to it after sort of drifting away from the broadcasts a few years back to take part in an online chat on Sunday evenings. (For that matter, in the time since then most of the other people in that chat have since stopped taking part in it...) There's certainly something melancholy about this. Still, for some reason I find myself thinking further back than the original broadcast of the ninth season and my odd, strong feeling at the time that I was so impressed by the episode "Lisa the Simpson" that it might make a stopping point...
When I first got online, in an age of Usenet newsgroups, it seemed to me that a Simpsons newsgroup would be interesting to follow. However, I soon got a sense from it that the general consensus of the group was that by the sixth season of the show, the glory days were long past, the show's immediate future was very much in question, and the only thing left to do was to complain about every joke built around an unusual shift in somebody's character and every animation error... it was there, perhaps, that I formed my suspicion that "fandom" is much less about actually enjoying something than about complaining how your interpretation of the first few instalments has diverged from how the actual creative staff developed things. Of course, if the point is complaining, then maybe I try to keep up my attachment to original works by looking askance at certain other fans.
A few years after finding it and even making the occasional post to it, I stopped reading the newsgroup altogther, and perhaps that helped stretch out my enjoyment of the show by half a decade more. Perhaps, too, getting around to listening to the DVD commentaries was oddly pleasant in hearing the creators enjoy their own work. In any case, after trying to wrap things up on a definite and positive note, I can now think about starting to watch some other work of North American animation, perhaps picking up again on "Batman: The Animated Series" (I ordered the second DVD set of it to join the first some years ago, but never saw the package on my doorstep), "Samurai Jack," or "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (which I admit I've never seen any of, but I have noticed other people impressed with it...)
When I first got online, in an age of Usenet newsgroups, it seemed to me that a Simpsons newsgroup would be interesting to follow. However, I soon got a sense from it that the general consensus of the group was that by the sixth season of the show, the glory days were long past, the show's immediate future was very much in question, and the only thing left to do was to complain about every joke built around an unusual shift in somebody's character and every animation error... it was there, perhaps, that I formed my suspicion that "fandom" is much less about actually enjoying something than about complaining how your interpretation of the first few instalments has diverged from how the actual creative staff developed things. Of course, if the point is complaining, then maybe I try to keep up my attachment to original works by looking askance at certain other fans.
A few years after finding it and even making the occasional post to it, I stopped reading the newsgroup altogther, and perhaps that helped stretch out my enjoyment of the show by half a decade more. Perhaps, too, getting around to listening to the DVD commentaries was oddly pleasant in hearing the creators enjoy their own work. In any case, after trying to wrap things up on a definite and positive note, I can now think about starting to watch some other work of North American animation, perhaps picking up again on "Batman: The Animated Series" (I ordered the second DVD set of it to join the first some years ago, but never saw the package on my doorstep), "Samurai Jack," or "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (which I admit I've never seen any of, but I have noticed other people impressed with it...)