Homer Simpson is a Millennial (Now)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ส.ค. 2024
- Or, how 30+ years of Simpsons continuity put Homer and Marge in their kids' original generation.
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#TheSimpsons - บันเทิง
This video is a sequel to my Simpsons Past and Present Timeline videos. Except with more existential dread. 😉
I had always wanted to do a follow-up and figured 2023 was a good time to do it, since it lines up weirdly now with Lisa's First Word. There is something deep inside me that cringes a little when Homer and Marge are doing contemporary stuff like having TH-cam channels and stuff like that. Where I kinda miss them just being out-of-touch boomers. So I figured this topic would be a good way to explore how weird things have become after 30+ years of a floating timeline.
The ending perfectly encapsulate my feelings about this re-writing and re-recording the entire ending was the way to go ! :)
It's weird to see homer being out of touch with 90s rock music in homerpalooza and then inventing grunge in that '90s show
Just wait until you're 50 years old, still making videos about 39 year old Homer.
FINALLY A SEQUEL
And like most millenials, he has a giant house which he got from his job that required no college degree. And his wife doesn't work. Truly Homer is one of us millenials. He also sucks at technology and watches TV news
In a few years Homer is going to be younger than The Simpsons.
god, that's disturbing to think about...
I hate this. Thanks.
@@oz_jones In about 13 years Homer Will Be part of gen z..... 😨😨😨
And like most millenials, he has a giant house which he got from his job that required no college degree. And his wife doesn't work. Truly Homer is one of us millenials. He also sucks at technology and watches TV news
🙃🫠🥲
It’s so bizarre that at one point Bart was characterized as a rebel by listening to music that Homer now gets nostalgic for
Bart was putting out rap songs at the time homer was a listener. DEEP DEEP TROOOOUBLE
IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOUUUU!!!!
It's actually stranger according to the 90s episode Homer invented the kind of music he gets made fun of for liking at lollapalooza
@@TheBfutgreg reminds of the episode when grandpa Simpson says "I used to be with it and then one day I wasn't and it'll happen to you!" Well it cant happen if Homer just keeps getting younger.
Does that mean Abe was into Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple?
The fact that Bart was originally born in the 70s but the show is old enough that now he was born after Gangnam Style is existential crisis inducing
Maggie being born after COVID Lockdowns had been over for a year is what gets me. When The Simpsons were in lockdown, they didn't have the exact family dynamic that they do now.
The only logical explanation to all of this is... the multiverse. Every few years the show jumps to a different reality in a different universe with the exact same family and town but their lives just started a few years later.
"Bonus Ducks" (part of the Scream Fortress 2014 update) is now nearly a decade old btw. There are some kids playing TF2 younger than your avatar reference.
Wait... Gonna go think about the unstoppable march of time.
@@seronymusI started playing that update as well, so I've probably been playing longer than at least a couple of players I've fought have been alive lol
As a member of Gen Z I can’t wait to see Homer flashback episodes where he plays Club Penguin as a child
As a gen alpha I can't wait to see baby Homer Simpson watch sibidi toilet on his tablet /jk
Oh GOD don't do this to me. It was odd having to get used to Lisa being a MySpace user.
It was freaky having the show extoll iPods and Myspace. I'd gotten used to the show being in this early-late '90s zone/early web like Hoops and Yoyo - eCards were the extent of the Simpson knowledge. But apparently not.
>You will experience Homer fondly remembering Cocomelon and Skibidi toilet in your lifetime
IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOU.
We will also have to see homer evolve from playing on a ds and wii as a child, to playing on an ipad and watching skibidi toilet as a child
Homer Simpson is married, has three kids, owns a two story house with like five bedrooms, owns two cars, has no student debt, and can pay for all of this with a job that requires no qualifications... How can he be a millenial?
At least sometimes there are only four bedrooms.
the job requires calification, its just that the plant is so inept that they contract him because he was the first one there, remember lenny and carl actually have a master's degree.
His father won the house in a gameshow and he got his middle class job after being promoted from his entry level technician role.
The broad strokes make sense and are universal. If the real world economy is booming, then Marge is a bored housewife and homer overpaid and bad with money. If the economy is bad then Marge struggles to maintain a budget, Homer is a fire-able employee, and is desperate to make ends meet.
I really don’t think the dates matter for the simpsons.
He never paid for avocado toast, not once. That's how he was able to afford a house.
@@joseaguilar3323 Of course, he shoplifted all the groceries!
Homer can't be a Millennial, he has a job and owns a house.
Hahahaha, that is hilarious 😂😂😂
He works in a nuclear power plant despite being severely incompetent... So I guess that's still accurate.
Yeah, owning a house like that and supporting an entire family on a single "middle-class" income is a privilege only previous generations enjoyed. And yet they call us the spoiled ones.
@@artvandelay7182Now that Homer is a millennial, baby boomers (and the boomer minded, don’t know which is more pathetic) are getting ready to put all of the blame on him for The Simpsons’ decline.
@@artvandelay7182 he's a nuclear engineer, albeit an incompetent one.
Many of my old friends and classmates have houses and families, they both work though, but I'm in Sweden.
Becoming Homer is a self-fulfilling prophecy, you'll only become him if you think you'll become him.
Definitely not where i expected my favourite horror history channel
Gives me existential dread of the ever persistent march of time.
*me, krumping in the corner, being a homebody and putting up with all my toxic relationships*
Guess I'm a Marge.
I used to be more like Lisa, but now I am becoming more like Marge. This show is literally as old as I am.
The Simpsons predicted life
The problem is the show still isn't built like a modern millennial life. He's still got the trappings of a boomer, meaning the 4 bedroom two-story house and a wife and kids in a nice suburb on a single income without a college degree. He works at a nuclear plant and spends his evenings in a bar. All the rhythms of the story remain locked in the late 1980s but they keep trying to staple the modern era on top of it, and it ends up just being REALLY incongruous. You can't take a guy like Homer and just say he listened to Smashing Pumpkins in high school and likes video games and boom he's a millennial. This is why the show feels so unnatural. It has the entire structure of its origins as a sendup of old-fashioned sitcoms but they keep trying to awkwardly force modernity into it. Ugh and ugh again.
Bob’s Burgers has the experience right, though it’s been on the air for over ten years so who knows. But I think that show gets away with it more because they don’t really do flashbacks.
@@Jurgan6sure but that's ten years, not 35. The Simpsons started in the 80s, a show that started in the 2010s will be a lot more accurate to modern life.
Thing is, it's ALWAYS been a weird incongruity of the show that Homer has a nuclear technician job (and the lifestyle it affords) despite being portrayed as a blue collar worker with limited education. And they'd draw attention to this incongruity in episodes like "The Front", "Homer Goes to College", and (of course) "Homer's Enemy".
@@ravenwilder4099 And even his lifestyle, like we do forget how often The Simpsons are portrayed just scraping by in the early seasons
@@ZachGatesHere well, that's my point. A show that started more recently feels more relevant to today's world. I've basically come to terms with modern Simpsons and gotten over my "it needs to be canceled" phase, but it'll never feel as relevant as it did in the 90's.
the idea of Homer someday being a Zoomer is the scariest thing in the world to me.
Or worse a gen alpha
Homer flashback to him watching skibidi toilet before Abe caught him and shut down the internet
@@XxXNOSCOPEURASSXxXthis’ll be the simpsons in 2060
Psssst there are older zoomers with kids and jobs who have moved out already
Why ? it doesn't matter.
If he aged continuously since the Tracey Ullman shorts, Homer would now be 75.
This show needed to end so long ago
I'd honestly prefer to see what Homer would be like at 75 than this.
@@StevenOBrienit's why i actually don't mind the episodes set in the future. Sure they aren't golden age quality but it's nice seeing where the characters end up
They feel more like a continuation or a nice ending point instead of the stagnant crap the show became
(Except the episode where homer keeps dying, that one just went too far)
And let’s be real, a man with a diet of frosty chocolate milkshakes isn’t making it to 75.
@@ichimaru96 The future episodes always felt like the writers trying to vent out what they would do if they didn't have to stict to the rules of the show.
Mr Burns is the only character you can keep in a floating timeline as he being born in the 19th century was already pretty far fetched for someone alive in 1989. It's supposed to be silly.
There was a flashback in a more recent episode, where he was a small child in the 30s.
"AND IT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU!!!"
-Abraham Simpson
When the Simpsons launched I was younger than Bart
I am now older than Homer
Dear god
The show needs to go.
I am 3 months older than the show and it's weird to see Homer is now only 5 years older than me now
I kind of felt the same way when Proud Family: Louder and Prouder came out. During that shows original run I was a young single digit little girl in grade school and Penny was this teenager. Now I'm in my 20s and older then Penny and her friends. My God is that weird.
Same, dude. Same.
I know how you feel! I started watching from the very first episode and I was slightly younger than Lisa... Now I'm slightly older than Homer (even with him being aged up a few years). Eventually Abe will come for us!
As a later millennial, I've got less than a decade until Homer catches up to me. Can't wait for an episode about a young Homer going to see The Phantom Menace in theatres with Abe.
“Who knew Anakin Skywalker was going to be Darth Vader?”
(Moviegoers still in line complain angrily)
As a 38 year old Millenial myself.... oh god STAAAAAHP!!!!
As a later millenial here (who saw Phantom Menace in theatres), that is very shocking. I would have thought Homer would be a grandpa by now.
Watching Cosmic Wars with a Jim Jam hat on
OH MY GOD, NO...
The Simpsons should do an episode where the original characters had aged realistically through the years. An elderly Homer and Marge with their middle-aged kids. Kind of like a peek into an alternate timeline where, in addition to being revolutionary in its own right, the show had also pioneered this Bojack-esque continuity for the characters. No whacky future jokes, no scfi nonsense, just what it would look like if these characters were allowed to grow up and grow old.
No. God, please no alternate timelines. I'd rather watch 30 more years of whatever they're doing now.
When the show finally runs its course I'd love a reboot where they truly make it episodic. Move through the years, start with marge and homer over the year together until they have bart, watch everyone age through the years. Have people come and go in Springfield, and in their lives. that'd be neat
I'm actually surprised they haven't done a "future" episode set in the present year yet. It could have been a good 30th anniversary show. (Though it could still be a good 35th or 40th or 45th or...)
I think it would work better as a Tree House Horror story where there is a portrait of the family that aged. After finding it the family goes mad remembering they have been this age for decades and have multiple contradictory pasts. It ends with them deciding to destroy the painting so they can escape their never ending loop.
I've always thought that before they end the show they should start aging the characters up in real time for at least a few seasons. It would mostly be significant for being able to see the kids grow up unless it was so popular that it kept going on long enough to have a noticeable affect on the adults.
I remember thinking it was cool when I reached Bart's age as a kid. I had a very different reaction to reaching Homer's.
Homer Simpson being a millennial like me but also the show not existing when I was born is all stages of grief at once.
The fact that it will still be there when you die and the fact that this says nothing about how long you will continue living is creepy.
Glad to see an Oldboy reference in a Simpsons comment section
@@camelopardalis84 Has Marge become a robot yet? Aside from a fantasy sequence of course.
@@ashkitt7719 No. Unless she's turned into one in that one single episode I haven't watched.
Homer can't be a millenial, he has a two story house, two cars, a wife, 3 kids and a stable job that can actually pay the bills on a single income. I have yet to meet anyone my age living that dream.
It's sort of implied that the Simpsons are living way beyond their means even if they are just "Lower middle class" Homer takes on a lot of odd jobs, Springfield is not a very well off place and out of the way from most metro areas and Marge might as well have a missing career in order to take care of Maggie as a baby.
Not all Millennials are broke hipsters living in Brooklyn or Austin. I think the majority of millennials are now home owners.
Don't you know, we have it super easy and just complain. We just don't work hard enough...
We should ask previous gens why they fucked it up this bad for us instead.
The simpsons should start doing funny jokes about paying rent and college debt all the time like everyone's favourite video game Saints Row 2022
@@milliondollarmistake lol
Ya know, if they changed The Simpsons living conditions to a duplex townhome with The Flanders, I'd be all for it as a 'modern update'.
When the "Homer Creates Grunge" episode came out I joked about how a future episode will re-reboot the timeline so Homer starts My Chemical Romance, look at where we are now
As someone on the oldest end of gen z, I can safely say I have a few years until Homer catches up to me, but I've always found it odd looking at myself compared to Lisa with this floating timeline. I first got into The Simpsons when I was around 7-8 years old, relating to Lisa, and the peak of my childhood fandom was in the year 2010. This also happened to be the far-off future year Lisa's Wedding is set in. Around middle school I gradually lost interest in modern Simpsons, before returning to the show around 2019, and I suddenly realized Lisa would not have been born yet in 2010. In terms of continuity, I oddly enough think one of the characters most impacted by this timeline shift is Todd Flanders. Todd has gradually been made younger throughout the show (one being described as Bart's age, welcoming the Simpsons to the neighborhood before Lisa is born, then in a recent flashback being born after Lisa with the help of Homer and a TH-cam tutorial). This would make Todd one of the youngest characters with defined memories, and the one who is by definition retconned most often by the natural progression of time. I never noticed this until the recent episode where he has a dream and forgets what Maude looked like, leading him to question his faith. We never spend any time hearing Todd's inner world, but this detail made me immediately empathize with him. Maude was killed over two decades ago, but Todd is only seven years old. He's never able to grow past this grief, and that quietly makes him one of the most tragic Simpsons characters, or at least one of the ones most screwed over by the selective continuity.
I'm around the same age as you as the oldest of Gen Z (always wild to see people comment about us being kids when I'm closer to 30 than I am 20 at this point). It's really strange to see that I'm now closer to Homer and Marge's age than Bart and Lisa and that if the show keeps going, they'll start showing nostalgia for media I grew up on.
Also your analysis of Todd is really interesting and something I've never really considered. Maude has been dead for over two decades yet Todd has never aged. He's forever a young child who hasn't been able to move on from the grief of losing his mother at such a young age, let alone not being able to remember what she looks like. A tragic and very interesting analysis.
With how long Simpsons will clearly be dragged on for, Homer becoming a Zoomer is inevitable. At least seeing him playing Minecraft will be pretty funny
Maybe there'll be an episode about him trying to be a lets player.
I actually think its fascinating to see a show go on for so long that it begins to cannibalize itself in order to stay relevant and on the air. This couldnt have happened on purpose and that makes it interesting in my opinion
The same thought occurs when you read modern Archie digests that include stories from anytime between now and the 1940s. This teenage boy and his teenage friends have been up to their wacky hijinks for almost 100 years now. And I can even recall stories where Archie talks to his grandfather who tells stories that are *basically the same stories as Young Archie was involved in*. It's nuts.
Lol, can't wait till I get to that. I'm going systematically, and I'm still reading stories from the 60s.
It is surreal seeing Archie as the 40s and 50s dork and then seeing him as a gen z teen in the reboot
Only 10-20 more years and Homer and Marge will be old enough, to have fond memories of watching the same cartoons, I enjoyed watching in the 2000s and 2010s
the idea of homer being a millenial sends chills down my spine. also, seeing this video made me realise that homer's birth year used to be the same as my dad's. huh.
I'm older than homer. That sends a chill down my spine 😆
He said “huh”
@@SpaceAce1993sure did
Homers birth year was the same as everyone’s dads, considering it stretches over 30 years of the most prime dad ages
Captain America has pretty much the ideal approach to a floating timeline - with his backstory staying in the same historical moment forever, so that the only thing that needs to be retconned is how long he was frozen. Actually, even the Simpsons itself sorta follows that approach with Grandpa Simpson, I guess because they don't mind making him extremely old but do mind it for Marge and Homer.
Compare that to Magneto, who’s backstory is also inextricably linked to that era of history (being a Holocaust survivor defines so much of his character). Magneto has been unfrozen the entire time that Cap was frozen, so he’s aged through all of it.
The problem arises from the fact that people eventually die of old age, but Magneto isn’t allowed to die (not permanently, anyway)
The freezing was actually itself a retcon, originally Captain America was active into the 50s and 60s
Then they added the frozen thing and also retconned those as a Cap stand-in who went kinda crazy (since 50s Cap got pretty...not Cap-like)
@@GloomdrakeSame with Sgt. Fury and the Howling Commandos to a degree, though that's less fundamental to their status as characters, more just a continuity note. But until they retcon their WW2 service (if they haven't already), they've got the same issue.
It's kinda funny that the one major Marvel character who was canonically active in WW2 and who would have no issues whatsoever with being active today, the original Human Torch, is the one who's definitively canonically dead.
@@Idran I think Magneto is now said to just age slower because he's a mutant. Nick Fury took some kind of formula that makes him age slower.
There's no floating timeline with cap, he's just unfrozen whenever the writers decide he is and that's the era he's in
It's extremely wierd to think how much of a missed opportunity the Simpsons were in hindsight to create the first generation long serialized media. Imagine what could have been if everyone would have aged up with time, the character development would have accumulated over the years, we would have seen Bart, Lisa and Maggie age through the years to become parents themselves to new characters that would fill the same space as them do now.
Sure it's unlikely that show would have maintained itself in the air for so long without pause but if it was it would have been an amazingly unique media impossible to reproduce because every new season and every advancement was a product of it's time in the context of it's story.
Spain has a similar show to that. "Cuentame como pasó" (Lit. "Tell me How it happened") is a STILL ONGOING show from 2001 that (storywise) began in the latter years of Francoist dictatorship and the transition to our current democracy. The storyline of the main characters is still going! they have grown into adults and all!
It sadly seems that this is its last season. To be fair, very few people i know have followed it since 2001, so its maybe better to end it. it *has* been going for 22 zoggin' years.
That's is basically King of the Hill, a lot of characters go through age in that series, most prominent is Luanne who goes through college, work, then marriage throughout the series, they even killed off ww2 vet with old age, as it started to not make sense for him to be alive unless they start depicting him as cripplingly old.
Also I heard they were going to revive the show and they were going to age characters appropriately, which makes sense considering generational gap is the main theme of the show and Hank Hill would definitely not be Hank Hill if they re-wrote him as a millennial.
@@Spootprime omg, I went to Spain once! But I was only there for a while, shortly before Covid hit the country. I’ll go to Spain again in 2025. Hey, I haven’t seen this show before, but it surely slaps!
Ew
Or what if they just had the Simpsons take place in the 90s so that they wouldn't need to float the timeline. Even in 2024, the Simpsons could be episodes that take place in the 1990s. That would fix the timeline issues.
At this point, I think Krusty might be the only actual boomer on the show. He is consistently portrayed, even now in the 2020's, as having been been an adult in the 1960's/70's (his show celebrating it's 50'th anniversay in an episode a few years back, marking Krusty as being in at least his 70's). I kinda love that about him; he is this super old hack from a bygone era that was fresh and with it half a lifetime ago, but has since just been doing the exact same thing for decades upon decades without any ambition or creativity. Reminds me of some 60's/70's rock bands to be honest.
Mr Burns is another character that is kind of allowed to remain in his original generation, since he STILL seem to recall things from either the late 1800's or the earliest 1900's. Of course most of his known history dates back to around WWII, which actually makes sense even if we consider him to be one of the characters with a "Fixed" age who changes generation as time moves forward; this being since his canonical age was set all the way back in the 1990's to be as high as 104, meaning that unlike Grampa and other elderly coots, he even from this fixed age point of view belongs to the generation that were adults during WWII. Burns may or may not belong to the lost generation anymore, but he at even his very youngest still belongs to the greatest generation.
Flanders is another interesting case, perhapes the most convoluted one of all. In the early seasons we asumed him to be around 35-40 year of age, and he was shown as a boomer having been a child in the 60's. Then in season 10 he was revealed to be 60 years old, which didnt make sense with his fralhbacks at the time sine him being 60 in 1999 would mean he was born all the way back in the 1930's. But then as the show kept going, him being 60 actually ended up SAVING his backstory as having grown up in the 1960's; by virtue of being stated to be 60 he could remain a boomer while Homer became a gen X-er. However, now in 2023, Flanders being 60 has finally pushed him out of the boomer generation and into being a gen X-er, born in 1963. He can still keep part of his childhood in the 1960's however... for now. It's amazing how before Flander was revelaed to be 60 his 1960's childhood made sense, then when he was first revealed to be 60 this made him too old for his established backstory, then it made him just old enough for that backstory once AGAIN, and now it will soon make him too young for that backstory. Holy shit.
I do think Mr Burns kinda escapes a lot of the timeline shenanigans on account of both being one of the most cartoony characters to begin with and the mad science being employed to keep him alive.
gen x is 1965-1980 not 1963, so still a boomer
Thank you!!! This is exactly what I appreciated about these characters. I didn’t realize how much it cemented their stories until now.
Krusty himself is a reference to The Bozo Show from WGN-TV, which I barely remember being a thing in my early childhood. It felt like an anachronism even in the 90s that a 10 year old was watching a show for little kids that had peaked in 1984.
They also had an episode where Flanders was said to be in his 60s or 70s even though they _also_ have shown him to have gone to school with Homer in elementary school. It's also funny how they've kind of dropped the idea of Skinner being a Vietnam Vet since that would make him likely over 70 judging by the fact he was portrayed as joining early in the war and spending years in a POW camp.
Born late enough to be Bart's age and born early enough to be Homer's age. I'm excited for Grandpa to start talking about Elon Musk like it was the old days.
As I’ve grown closer in age to Home my existential dread has also grown. He’s done so much more than I have in my 32 years.
Are you comparing yourself to a cartoon character?
The characters of Scooby Doo gained life in 1969. They were based on school-kid archetypes from the 50s, that the writers would likely have been familiar with. As the years and decades passed, that part of their context inevitably ceased to be, and the characters became their own context. Similarly, I think it's worth looking at the Simpsons in that light, as characters that have existed for so long that they become their own context.
Things happen when characters endure. Weird things, sometimes. Not necessarily bad things, though.
"I used to be with it. Then they changed what 'it' was, and what I was with wasn't it, and what is it seems weird and scary. It'll happen to you." - Grandpa Simpson
It always blows my mind that I'm now closer to Homer's age than Bart's and seeing the shift in the show to reflect that is alienating yet amazing. I fell out from watching the show years ago (I still catch the occasional Tree House of Horror eps) but seeing this show go on shows how much staying power and relatability these characters have. Imagine Homer explaining punk emo to the kids in the back seat would be amazing.
That whole 'Homer is coming for all of us' monologue towards the end was 10/10.
I guarantee if we had a Grandpa Homer at this point people would be so much more in love with the show. Imagine if the Simpsons actually aged with us it would be a true cultural reflection
I've always wanted an extreme long-runner show where time actually passes. Any episode of the Simpsons where they explored the future of the family always appealed to me.
Plus I think more people would give Marge's voice a pass if her character was in her 70s
No way, man. We're gonna be younger than Homer forever! Forever! Forever.... forever... forever...
I love that The Simpsons and The Punisher share the exact same plot contrievance - though for a while, The Punisher had two running comics, one where he's his original Vietnam War veteran and actually ages, and one where the floating timeline made him an implied veteran of one of the US' many middle-eastern wars.
Marvel in general is like that. Captain america technically saw richard nixon kill himself (yeah, that happened) but the floating timeline keeps pushing the year he woke up
Recently Marvel made up a war that floats on the same timeline. It's not a bad way to go about things but it probably wouldn't work for the simpsons
@@AlessandroAltosoleChannelI think rn the canon is that Vietnam War Captain America was a different guy entirely
Yeah a lot of the Marvel Comics hero backstories relied on the Vietnam War like the Punisher, so recently they retconned in a fictional war so there wouldn't be timeline inconsistencies and not be time pieces. Despite that, the X-Men continuity is such a mess in self anyway.
In a video recently they showed a page from a Marvel comic where they have someone being told that they're in a floating timeline.
I think the floating timeline has its issues, but when you remember that it's a shifting and changing writer's room, it makes more sense to do it that way. Writers who grew up in the 90s are going to find it more difficult to joke about stuff from the past like Vietnam because it's a distant event to them. Sure, some of them probably have some idea of what the Vietnam war was about from other media, or the internet, but they have less of a connection to it so it's more difficult to make a good joke out of that.
I gotta disagree on Vietnam in particular because Simpsons always based its Vietnam stories off pop-culture Vietnam anyways.
This also probably explains why Burns and Grampa are less affected by it. Pre-WWII was probably just as unfamiliar to the Classic writers as the Modern writers, so any joke about them is based on the same general picture.
@@tinkerer3399 A fair point, I suppose, but I'd argue that Vietnam has kinda faded from even pop culture over time.
Making sense of the Simpsons’ changing past is like trying to make sense of Doctor Who’s U.N.I.T dating after the airing of ‘Mawdryn Undead’ in 1983. It becomes a real mess.
And maybe they dont do this jokes (vietnam , 70´ .....) because it would be out of touch for most people watching the show as they are mostly born around 2000 and later
Oh, god. When this show started I was Maggie's age, now I'm almost Homer's age.
And when I'm Grampa's age, it will still be here.
At this point, i wouldn't mind the show just outright throwing continuity out of the window and instead just doing "what if" scenarios from now on. Those examples have been most of the strongest episodes of the past decade imo.
They should just commit to a reboot and shake the status quo. Drop the audience in while marge is pregnant with Maggie. Discard all the previous story details but keep the characters. Homer is still working in the plant but is finding it Hard to move up the corporate ladder due to little experience . Marge is a stay at home but in the context of today so there can be narrative on Springfield questioning why she won’t get a job to support her husband. Bart and Lisa get up to gen z (alpha?) problems. Flanders is morally conflicted over his belief and isn’t a straight up devout. The show is a streaming one now so I feel they can take way more liberties to make it more structured and interconnected
@@hued2542that's not gonna make the show better its still written by the same people. And like Homer doesn't care moving up the corporate ladder that's so oppositional to his character
@@leonconnelly5303 Incorrect. Matt Groening is a pretty writer, it's just that he's stuck against a wall with the Simpsons - they've been going on for so long he's long since run out of ideas and (dare I say) passion. His other projects, namely Futurama and even Disenchantment if you want a newer example, are great, so I think he could do it if he got to reboot his way out of being painted in a corner.
@@trianglemoebius He hasn't written an episode of the Simpsons since season 3.
Homer Simpson being my age kinda makes me wanna die. Like holy shit, Frank Grimes had it made with his apartment between two bowling alleys.
Frank thought he had it bad back in the 90's. He'd need two room mates, two jobs, and at least one side hustle now...
Though I'm pretty sure the joke was that living there was a nightmare for him cause he could never get any sleep.
bro, in 26 years, homer will be gen alpha. 💀💀💀
My personal explanation for the Age Mystery is that both Homer and Marge are actually in their late 60s (67 if they were born in 1956 and were seniors in high school together since taking Marge to prom was part of The Way We Was) but since they're well into their Middle Age Crisis, they claim that they're "almost 40" or flat out 40 if asked. All the other adults their age know that's not true, but we know Homer can be really stubborn as well as imaginative, so if pressed by his kids, he concocts wild stories of his youth in the 1980s and 1990s that totally happened, no really stop laughing. My maternal grandmother did this all the time so it's not a new concept to me. (She never went so far as to make up stories about her childhood, but she did have a habit of claiming to be 40 for ten years before bumping up the age when she no longer felt she could convincingly pull off 40-- hell, the day she passed, no one knew for sure how old she really was or what year she was born because she hid it so well!)
This of course doesn't explain why we never see Bart, Lisa, and Maggie age... unless they decide that when they finally end the show, they'll reveal in the last episode that the entire series was just a bunch of stories Adult Bart made up to entertain his kids, and everything exciting just so happened to occur while he was "10" except for flashback episodes about Grandpa Homer, Grandma Marge and Great-Grandpa Abe and Great-Grandma Mona or "flash-forward" episodes which would just be things happening at the current time-- unless they do a slightly different twist and have "flash-forward" episodes be flashbacks that Grandpa Bart is recounting to his grandkids.
They're both way overdue for a growth spurt.
@@smorrow Hell I still remember from back in the late 90s/early 2000s in interviews where Yeardley Smith would joke about every time Lisa had a birthday on the show, she was always turning eight and joked about how "She's [Lisa] eight going on eight." I even remember realizing once years ago that it would be difficult for Homer to attend high school prom in 1974 (or 1976) if Mona took him to Woodstock at the age of four - so the joke about The Simpsons never aging has been a thing for quite some time now, and it was going on long before the "Modern"/"HD" era. I was going to suggest for the Kearney's Age video that maybe Kearney actually *is* an adult, he just has an autoimmune disease similar to Gary Coleman that has stunted his growth so he always looks like a teen.
My go-to answer in these situations is usually "Who cares? It's just a cartoon," but I know that that's not exactly the "fun" answer for many fans.
Imagine the Simpsons goes long enough and he becomes a gen z
don't scare us like that
Please don't.
From Boomer to Zoomer in no time flat! From Boomer to Zoomer, Just like that!
at this point it's a when not an if
@@prageruwu69 It's only about 13 years away....😨😨
Honestly, I wish the Simpsons writers would take the opportunity and make an episode that is centered around the entire timeline. Maybe showing there's different universes in which the Simpsons always appear during each era of human history, including caveman times and the middle ages and whatnot. That'd be genuinely fascinating to see, and it wouldn't devalue any of these stories either.
Yeah that’s actually a great idea
It would be awesome if they did this. Acknowledge the paradox.
I’ve said if I was ever given the oppitunity, I’ll do an episode where The Simpsons go to a Town where they find their prior actors, who are all aging etc, but each come from a different era of the Show
It's kind of surprising they haven't done that in one of their Treehouse of Horrors.
They did, Barthood
_"How did we get to this point?"_
Well, this is what happens when characters become product.
I think there was a *bit* of a change of strategy. As you pointed out Homer did very slowly age initially but froze about season 10/11. I really think there was a conscious choice to do the shifting timeline in a more absurd way once it became a problem that only became glaringly apparent around that time. While I can't exactly blame them for that choice I do love to envision them using another element of the early logic of the show which also seemed to toy with super slowly aging up the characters. If around season 10 they made the choice to age them up a year every 3 or 4 years let's say, the differences would be less extreme and glaring. It would minimize how often they had to consider redesigning the characters while still allowing to fuzz over the time shift more easily. It allows to keep their episodic, not super canon worrying attitude while not outright shocking their original fanbase.
If this had been followed Bart would be 16-18 now with hundreds of jr high and high school stories having been or being lived by him and Lisa and they'd have a new Bart/Lisa previous age character in Maggie who they could've slowly developed a personality for, as well as creating some new characters her own age to breathe some fresh air into the show. Homer would be in his mid-late 40's and it would've barely changed his or Marge's characters at all. This allows some dynamism while preserving some status quo. This would've greatly increased also the detachment a lot of older viewers feel with the show IMO as they'd more easily process that they're watching a different show. Just overall I really think this would've given them a lot to work with but hindsight is 20/20 and also I doubt they wanted to rock the cash cows boat.
Of course that's not what they did. But can they recover from it? If I was put in charge of the Simpsons now but also not allowed to bring it to a graceful end over the course of a season, I'd advocate a time skip and suggest we keep time skipping every few years until we get current or the show ends. Basically a more shocking version of the previous strategy.
If I was in charge of the whole franchise I'd gracefully end The Simpsons but try to simultaneously develop a sequel show. I personally would like an "alternate timeline" one that pretends they started aging after season 11 so a modern whole series written by younger people with Bart being a millennial stuck in a dead end job etc, and probably Lisa and her kids being the family its centered around, though making it a more ensemble cast that also focuses on the aging Homer/Marge and the struggling Uncle Bart. I know probably some people hate that but we gotta be honest with The Simpsons having already gone well past its useful cultural statement which was made to gen x and millennials. It can still continue making a modern statement to them and more recent generations but it'd have to be adjusted IMO to acknowledge the shows history and stop just rehashing the same exact things. I have long felt that a portion of the "Simpsons is terrible now" is that people see this uncanny lack of change in the characters juxtaposed with the difference in style and pop culture reference.
This is one of your best videos so far. Genuinely took me a minute to comprehend that, with enough time, Homer could be reminiscing on stuff during my childhood... Insane.
Homer reminiscing about Pokemon 😂😂😂😂
Crazy 🙄🙄🙄
You can't get away from the dreaded Simpsons Timeline eh? 😂
It’s much of a nightmare to make sense of as the dating of Doctor Who’s U.N.IT stories after Season 20’s ‘Mawdryn Undead’ where it had a key character Gordon Lethbridge Stewart Brigadier states he retires from U.N.I.T in 1976... Before he even became a Brigadier when taking account of Season 5’s Web of Fear (Debut), Season 6 Invasion (The first appearance of U.N.I.T and when he actually became Brigadier) and the U.N.I.T stories of Season 7-13.
Sounds pretty apt to describe the situation of the Simpsons having their birthdates shift from before the series started airing to occurring close to when those earlier seasons would have aired.
It is strange to see a show slowly morphing into a different timeline. It's like you said, normally a show airs, gets canceled, and then rebooted in 10 years. It feels more natural for that reboot to reference present things. You can separate the two shows. But in this case, it's like the ship paradox. Replacing pieces of a ship for years until you've replaced every single part of the ship. Is it the same ship? Or is it a new ship? If it's a new ship, when did it become a different ship? It still looks the same, but with new pieces.
For a show that's been on so long (and is still going), and is status quo style, there really is no other option than this floating timeline.
The Year is 2024, the Simpsons releases an episode where Homer remembers when he was 8years old watching his favorite adult animated sitcom in the mid 1990s & lements on how long it's been going on & it's decline in quality
Just wait till a decade or so from now when they portray Homer as a zoomer.
This got me curious.. so I posted a poll asking if people prefer when cartoon sitcom characters age or not 😄 So far, it's actually pretty close to 50/50 results.
I like your choice of the "Bart by the barrelful" shot to indicate how you've been shifting focus to the kids.
That was my favorite editing reference in this video 🤣
@@TheRealJims "[name] by the barrelful" when someone is getting all the attention is one of those phrases from The Simpsons that has entered my standard vocabulary.
In 20 years, fans who related to bart in the 90s will relate to grandpa simpson
... Maybe some of us do already 😅
@@MurasakiOp Honestly working a job makes you relate to old people being Grumpy about the Lazy Young people, if you ever had a younger and lazy co worker you will know
Good Lord, this makes me feel old. Superb job on the video though, this was absolutely fascinating especially for someone who doesn't watch modern-day Simpsons - I had no idea the timeline had floated this far forward.
I just watched the first episode of Season 33 with my husband and was deeply disturbed when a flashback had Marge and Homer be High School teens during Y2K - needed this video to process hahaha. Do not recommend- leave them in the past if you can
Homer went from a boomer, to a Gen X and now to a millennial
I am sort of excited to see Homer becoming a Zoomer and probably becoming hopeless or hate almost every single modern media lol
As a 38 year old, this video really hits hard, because it's spot on. When I was a kid, growing up during the classic era, I related to all of the kids and their likes, dislikes, etc, and my parents were in the same timeline as Boomer Homer and Marge, graduating high school in the 70s, so they related to them so well... Now in the present day, I find myself relating more to Homer and Marge's view on the world, since I'm just about Homer's age now, and can't relate at all to Bart and Lisa's view on the world. It's such a wild, wacky feeling that only this show can make you feel!
If we respect the original timelines, the animated dads' generations are:
Baby boomer - Homer Simpson
Gen X - Bob Belcher
Bandit - Millennial
When were Bandits born?
Sorry.
Who's Bandit?
You mean Bandit Heeler, from Bluey? Did a Google search, and was surprised I got the dog and a movie called Bandit, but not an actual literal "bandit" (burglar). I don't watch Simpsons anymore, I fizzled out on Bob's Burgers, and I don't watch Bluey. I thought the blue dog was named Bluey.
Also Hank Hill and Peter Griffin for Boomer, though Peter is more of a last of the Boomers/First of Gen X, given he and Lois had Meg when they were a lot younger than when Homer and Marge had Bart
Also Hank was originally a G.I. Gen if you look up the original drafts for King of the Hill, Fox made Mike Judge changed that for him to fit the average age of their views, Mike then just said Hank was in his mid 30s and did not change anything about his design
Bandit is actually gen x
You know what's even weirder if bart and lisa were born in the 80's, they would be in their 40's💀💀💀
Feeling old yet
TH-cam video in 2037: "Homer Simpson is a Zoomer now"
Bart: "If I had a TV show I'd run that sucker right into the ground"
Homer: "Amen boy, Amen"
One day Homer will be Generation Alpha
And that will be a scary day where Homer will worship skibidi toilet(it’s the next religion).
WELP.
Pack it in folks, we had a good run. I felt my bones turning to dust as I watched this video.
Hey at least we aren't Grampa yet! 😛
@@TheRealJimsIs that an onion on your belt?
@@woahblackbettybamalam It was the style at the time!
I guess 40 is the new 100.
You are never gone as long as your children and their descendants live on
Watching The Simpsons nowadays really fills you with existential dread. Ironically, by them ignoring (or playing fast and loose) with the passage of time it's inevitably hits you like a ton of bricks.
I might be wrong, but I feel like The Simpsons is the only TV show to achieve comic book levels of reconning.
The point about Not It bringing it back to Gen X is interesting. Makes me think about the divide between the old guard Al Jean helmed episodes and the more "current" Matt Selman helmed ones, almost as if they're two different floating timelines.
I think eventually Grandpa and Moanas timeline has to break if the Simpsons keeps floating. Abe served in the western front in the 40s, got married in the 50s and fathered Homer/lost Moana in the 60s. It’s cool that the Simpsons has maintained a continuity for 30 years, but This is fundamentally incompatible with the modern 90s flashbacks with Homer as a teen. Homers childhood under abe is clearly floating through the 90s getting close to the 2000s whilst Abe raising homer stays static in the 60s. Something has to give
Honestly by now Grandpa would be too young to even be in Vietnam
It is my head-canon that every season is an alternate universe and that certain events happened in all of them, just at different times.
Homer Simpson is LITERALLY 1984 🤯😱
If this pattern of time skips continues, then we'll probably get a Gen Alpha Homer in like 10 years.
“Bart, when I was your age, I enjoyed this wonderful show called Cocomelon.”
@@Scott..."I really dislike these modern "horror games" non of them compare to what I grown up with like ChuggaChugga Charlie and garden of Dandan"
Somehow, this is because of the toaster.
The Y2K one is weird considering that Homer failed to protect the plant's cpu system, leading to the end of the world in a Tree house of Horror episode.
15:27 you should be extremely proud of this moment, this is a really really good video. I wish they would let you write an episode you really comprehend shit in a way the new writers don’t.
You are the GOAT youtuber Jims, youre laid back but thorough style is so easy yet engaging to watch. Keep on killing it G.
I love how this went in a more positive direction. I USED to be negative on the floating timeline thing, but now i’m much better with it, and completely agree with what you said.
I think you got me into the Simpsons, I've been binging your videos and I think I've spent more time with them than the actual show
Its also nuts if you think about his financial situation. Simpsons went from Homer's famously quoted "upper lower middle class" status to being somewhat financially successful.
2 cars, 3 kids, latest appliances and devices for all of his family members, 5 bedroom house in the suburbs complete with a full basement and garage, capable of sustaining a crippling alcohol addiction, all despite being a sole breadwinner with no discernable skills or qualifications whatsoever. I assume unless it has been retconned he only has a high school diploma.
Heck, its doubly amazing when you think about all of the holidays that Homer seems to be able to take with his family.
We aren't even talking about other miscellaneous fees that he is able to afford. Quality healthcare and insurance for him and his family, pills for Grandpa, heck even the old folks home costs a pretty penny. Ritalin(or Focasyn) for Bart, and other long term medications (and yes, if you think adhd meds are cheap you are dead wrong. This shit is expensive.) are seemingly paid off without trouble.
I don't know of any blue collar worker that can do that.
The moving time line makes him one. I still wont get over the episode when homer was in the 90s and invented grudge
Why do you care
@@debater452because it makes no sense and clashes with previously established stuff.
@@prageruwu69 they made a comment that they don't care about continuity
@@prageruwu69Literally every flashback episode does that. Contanuity never matered stop acting like it did
@@thecunninlynguist Same as the actuall show
Honestly, I'd love an entire season where each episode takes place in sequential years starting from 1989 and having the characters age and change during that time. Thinking about it though, there wouldn't be enough episodes in a season to bring it up to the current day. And I doubt they'd want to rock the boat to that degree either.
That would be amazing. They just can kill Homer in that special season's finale.
@@Nkrlz he'd only be in his 60s, so I doubt you'd need to kill him off lmao
I mean it's obvious why they have to keep updating the timeline. If they continued just treading the 90s and ignoring anything current, who would that appeal to? The cynical Simpsons "fans" who only cared about Seasons 1-8 are not coming back, even though current Simpsons has been on a roll since Season 31, they still ignore it and say today's Simpsons is trash. No matter what, those people are gone, no matter how good Simpsons gets even if they stayed with Homer and Marge being 60s kids.
So what's left? The current generation. The kids that will grow up with modern Simpsons. If you stick with 90s trends, how will that be relatable to them? They're going to not give the show the chance or they'll get bored right away because it's not relatable. But when you do modern trends like social media, viral videos, and TH-cam, now you've got that audience. They're going to watch because they can relate it to their experiences.
There's just no point to appeal to older audiences cause they've become so jaded that no matter how much Simpsons has improved in the last 5 seasons, they won't care to come back. They'll continue to be cynical. So of course modern Simpsons will be appeal to the current generation at the time and a floating timeline is necessary for that.
Superheroes and comic characters go through that all that time. Floating along their stories to make more sense for the current generation of readers at the time.
Sos L
Homer becoming a newgrounds meme in the Angry Dad episode is my personal timeline anchor to when the show takes place, not before or after, so I think these instances exist to resonate with the ever changing audience
The prom being a nexus point can easily be explained as a 70's themed prom instead of the prom taking place in the 70's.
What high school is theming a prom around a past decade?
@@Moonlight_Soyuz you make it sound like it's an alien concept that's never been done. Sorry if you got stuck with under the sea or whatever.
Or that Springfield is a backwater with outdated fashion.
@@Moonlight_Soyuz If only you knew...
I have always viewed the Simpsons as a multiverse. Where each season (ish) or even episode represents a seperate universe. The Simpsons characters are just parallel versions of each other with slightly different back stories etc.
The floating timeline is really just a representation of which universe (s) we are peering into.
It explains how Homer can keep learning life changing lessons about being a better person that they don't remember once the next episode starts.
This is probably the most sensible thing to imagine the timeline as. It means there still IS continuity, it just gets rebooted after a few seasons, and particularly with every new generational shift.
That's kinda how I view it as well. Even more thanks to this video.
The flashbacks from each era aren't just about the characters' past experiences, but in a way, they're also kind of a mirror/parallel to the things, topics, and aesthetics we've experienced back then as well. Regardless of the era, there's something from one of Homer's backstories we can all relate to. Even if canon-wise they tend to contradict things that came before in a previous backstory.
That's actually a really fresh and nice outlook on the whole series
Oh man, seeing the Bojack mention has me wanting to hear some of TheRealJims's opinions on that show.
What an horrific thought. And just before Halloween too
I suppose, but The Simpsons was imagined as a parody of family sitcoms from the mid 80s, the concept of a stay at home mom and a dad that works in a nuclear power plant that mostly has the job because of the union is so much based in Carter/Reagan’s America that shifting the world to modern day has stripped the show of its original hook…that and the end of the monoculture and just generally weaker writing quotas. The show will always work best as a commentary on 80s and 90s America, and that’s why Family Guy in the late 90s overtook The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers did the same to Family Guy. The farther you get away from the premise of the show, the weaker the connection to the audience it will because.
Im scared for when homer starts having plotlines about getting his old ps2 back or being nostalgic for late 00s internet
This video is the positive opposite of Grandpa pointing his finger and saying “IT’LL HAPPEN TO YOUUU.”
This is like when Fry became his own grandfather
It's also weird since the show does not have a floating timeline as Fry still get's cryogenically frozen in 2000 but is still the same age as he was unfrozen 23+ years later. It's weird if you think about it.
I'm going to be honest with you.I willingly ignore everything that happened after the first cancelation@@Marylandbrony
@@Marylandbrony
As of the second revival, they did imply that something happened to the chronology of the universe, thus hand waving away any issues with the characters’ ages.
Simpsons question/mystery- Who has done the most crimes in the show?
Snake, Homer, Bart, Mr. Burns, Moe, Side Show Bob, Krusty the Clown, one of the bullies,The Mafia, or someone else I didn't think of.
Who is Springfield's most wanted character?
I think it's Johnny Tightlips, but unfortunately, I haven't been able to confirm it through primary sources.
Unironically Homer for being the main character, sure Bart has done more, but his are more petty, Homer would get the longer jail time for his crimes
Jims, this was a very good, thought-provoking video. I'm honestly surprised by that. Thanks for posting it. Gave me something to think about for a while.
Thanks!
Also, Homer being 39 also brings up weird continuity that has nothing to do with the current year. Homer and Marge supposedly had Bart shortly after graduating high school. If Bart is 10, that would've made him 29 when he had Bart. Unless Homer repeated grades a lot...
them having Bart at 18 or 19 makes no sense that would make Homer in Marge in there late 20s when Bart is 10 years old when Marge is clearly supposed to be in her mid 30s at least and Homer always looked late 30s to early 40s.
This seems to be retconned in the episode "The 90s Show", when Marge go to college.
it's always funny how you seem to bring up points the moment I start to think of them.
At any rate, the way I would describe the general age/generation of Homer and marge is that they are the age to be the parents of their children.
Mutant Mayhem was really good and I liked it too! It was a fun new Ninja Turtles story and I liked how it combined old ideas with some new ideas. It also had a few 80s throwbacks! Great movie! Some reboots are better than others. Simpsons is an amazing show and I really like your videos too and I appreciate how you addressed this topic in a friendly way and gave some examples of how you think that the show is doing something that is good for the modern fans. Great work on this video. I watched the 80s chipmunks and the 2010s version on Nickelodeon and both were fun for me. I’m probably one of the rare people who can say that. I have seen both versions of Ducktales too and more than a few different Versions of Ninja Turtles in my lifetime. I like that these franchises still continue on today. Good job once again and I highly enjoy your videos!
always nice to watch a new video from you, its calming! keep it going
God, i always love how even keeled and wholesome ur vids are. Awesome stuff :)