A smart, accessible and funny cultural analysis of The Simpsons, its inside stories and the world it reflects.
From Bart Simpson to Monty Burns, the Internet boom to the slow drowning of Tuvalu, Planet Simpson explores how one of the most popular shows in television history has changed the way we look at our bewildering times. Award-winning journalist Chris Turner delves into the most esoteric of Simpsons fan sites and on-line subcultures, the show's inside jokes, its sharpest parodies and its ongoing love-hate relationship with celebrity to reveal a rarity of literary accomplishment and pop-cultural import, something never before achieved by a cartoon.
Complementing its satirical brilliance, The Simpsons boasts a beloved cast of characters, examined here in playful and scrupulous detail: Homer, selfish, tyrannical and not too bright, but always contentedly beholden to his family; Bart, pre-teen nihilist and punk icon; Lisa, junior feminist crusader; and Marge, archetypical middle-American mother, perpetually dragging her family kicking and screaming to higher moral ground. And, while the voice actors behind the regular cast have eschewed celebrity, Turner considers why a stunning host of guests, Hollywood icons and has-beens, politicians, professional athletes, poets and pop stars, have submitted themselves to the parodic whims of the Simpsons' writers.
Intelligent and rambunctious, absorbing and comic, Planet Simpson mines this modern cultural institution for its imaginative, hilarious, but always dead-on, reflections on our world.
