July 23, 2006

The Simpsons as Explained to Me by a French-Japanese Four-Year Old in Japanese

"Bart is a bad kid. He is always pulling pranks on his dad."
"Who is his dad?"
"Ome."
"Ome?"
("She is using the French pronounciation.")
"Liza's the sister. She's nice."
"What about the mom?"
"Marge."

Posted by marxy at July 23, 2006 11:09 PM
Comments

And Momus complains that you never interview the Japanese man on the street for your blog!

Posted by: Carl at July 24, 2006 12:46 AM

It's a start, but it needs to be Sazae-San and not the Simpsons.

Posted by: Momus at July 24, 2006 1:55 AM

Sazae-san? BORING!

For some real fun watch The Simpsons with the Japanese voices. The voice talent are spot on and some of the joke rewrites are screamingly funny.

Posted by: Chris_B at July 24, 2006 3:34 AM

It's a start, but it needs to be Sazae-San and not the Simpsons.

Sazae-san is like if they had an animated version of The Donna Reed Show and it was still on television. And opposed to the Simpsons, if you described the show as only a cast of family characters, you would not be leaving out very much content. I am always surprised that little kids could like the Simspons, when 75-80% of the jokes require a pretty solid base of knowledge about politics, society, and pop culture. Kids are easy, I guess. The color palette does it for them.

Posted by: marxy at July 24, 2006 12:27 PM

Except that Sazae-San's colours are much more gorgeous than anything seen on The Simpsons, whose aesthetic values are (objectively, mind) revolting.

Posted by: Momus at July 24, 2006 4:14 PM

The original Simpsons episodes were far less about political/contemporary humor. A lot of episodes from the first few seasons could almost take place at any time in the past few decades. Of course the show has utterly gone to crap, and although I haven't actually seen any new episodes in at least 2-3 years, the last time I did try a few they barely elicited a giggle.

And Momus, I know you're kidding around, but The Simpsons ARE supposed to be utterly tasteless and tacky middle America.

Posted by: Mutantfrog at July 24, 2006 5:02 PM

Except that Sazae-San's colours are much more gorgeous than anything seen on The Simpsons, whose aesthetic values are (objectively, mind) revolting.

I keep forgetting that you don't pay attention to narrative content.

Posted by: marxy at July 24, 2006 5:20 PM

No, wait, you started this colour talk, I was simply following through on your cue!

Posted by: Momus at July 24, 2006 8:05 PM