(And you can tell I'm speaking to The Kids now, because of how I say "yr" where people my age would say "thine." And when I say "The Kids," I of course mean anyone at least 18 months younger than me.)
A: Dear The Kids,
On Monday, I posted a video possibly made by Wesleyan students, or possibly just blogged about by Wesleyan students, hard to know. The backing song to the video was very catchy, but I'd never heard it before. I did a bit of Internet detectiving, and I discovered it to be "Kids" by a Brooklyn band, MGMT, the pride of Cantora Records.
The clown shoe-lookin' muhfuckers of MGMT.
Apparently this song's pretty popular with you, the future of America, perhaps because it's about you; says a commenter on its (totally inaccurate but whatever) SongMeanings lyrics page, "Why wasn't this an enormous hit? This was one of everyone's favorite 3 AM dance party songs freshman year in college." Curious, since I've never heard of it or them, and I'm the coolest cat in all the land.
Anyway, here's the song. If I were dancing high on peyote at 3AM, this would totally do the trick.
Oddly enough, MGMT is touring with Of Montrealand Grand Buffet, two of the only bands I've blogged in recent months. So perhaps MGMT + T.A.M.S.Y. is a match made in heaven 4RL.
(P.S.: If you're a member of MGMT, please say hello. I like the cut of your jib. Also please tell me what your song means, so I can tell The Kids who were asking about it. Unless you're like David Lynch or the Young Michael Stipe and you're disgusted by the very question, which is fine also. Also please don't sue me. In return I promise never to call you synth-pop.)
(P.P.S.: If you're the Josh or Sabrina who made that Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Isvideo, I'd love to know you are. I like the cut of your jib also.)
A: The second part of today's trilogy of mind-expandistic YouTubography takes us to Wesleyan University [UPDATE: or possibly elsewhere], for a short film named for and based loosely on a McSweeneys book, Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is.
I'm happy to report Kenyon was quickly disqualified, although I should note it's not so much "preppy" as it is "too lazy / intoxicated / ironically detached / self-obsessed to be bothered with your filthy hippie ramblings, thank you very much." (I submitted Macalester's protest-based curriculum as a write-in, but it doesn't seem to be gaining much traction. Roger, back me up here.)
Anyway, I haven't seen so many comments on a Gawker Media blog since the time Deadspin said something about anything.
Producer James L. Brooks discovered Matt Groening when the production designer on Terms of Endearment bought Brooks one of Groening's Life in Hell cartoons she thought he'd appreciate. That cartoon was called "Success and Failure in Hollywood" (not available on the Interwebs, sadly), and the gist of it was that in Hollywood, success and failure both end badly. It's funny to think that if Groening hadn't drawn that cartoon — or if the designer hadn't come across it in an L.A. alt-weekly, or if Groening had already sold the original to someone else, or etc etc etc — one of the greatest works in TV history wouldn't even exist.
Groening and original show-runner Sam Simon hated one another. Simon comes off as a kind of unbearably mad genius, but is credited with "taking Groening's crude characters from The Tracey Ullman Show and making them into the Simpsons that the world knows and loves," including literally redrawing them (he's a cartoonist himself, which I didn't know).
Animator Gabor Csupo says Brooks originally conceived the Simpsons' segments on The Tracy Ullman Show to be black-and-white, as Groening had drawn them. So the characters' yellow skin and Marge's blue hair were added by the animators, not by Groening himself.
Art Spiegelman, Maus author and current New Yorker toon editor, originally "pleaded" with Groening not to work with FOX. "'They're gangsters! They're gonna take your rights away!"' Spiegelman recalls telling him. "He's never let me forget it."
Spiegelman's advice is particularly funny given the creative freedom the show has famously enjoyed — but it seems like the network wasn't always completely hands off. According to production supervisor Colin Lewis, "David Mirkin was the first [show-runner] who said, 'Why do we have to change it? We're The Simpsons. We're in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won't deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them.'"
But elsewhere in the article, Mirkin and the show-runners who followed him are indirectly cited as partly responsible for the show's post-season-eight decline (before Al Jean returned in '01). So maybe the occasional network input wasn't as harmful as one might assume. [CORRECTION / CLARIFICATION: Mirkin ran the show's fifth and sixth seasons. The show may have been in decline by then, considering how strong the third and fourth seasons were, but it wasn't a huge dropoff.] Incidentally, Rupert Murdoch comes off as an okay dude (I don't really blame Murdoch for Fox News' existence, but that's fodder for a different post).
As to who provided the real brains behind the show, you could go a lot of different directions — Simon or the voice talent would both be solid picks there — but I was particularly struck by the degree to which former Harvard University nerds shaped the show.
I knew a lot of the more prominent early writers, like Conan O'Brien, were Harvard Lampoon vets, but I didn't realize the degree to which they dominated the writing room. Says writer/exec. producer Bill Oakley, "From Season 2 to Season 8, there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff."
Given that Seasons 2 through 8 is the show's golden age, maybe Hahhhvahd deserves more of the credit that I ever realized.
BONUS: From Season 9's "All Singing, All Dancing," here's the "We Put the Spring in Springfield" sequence.
Even the "down" years have their share of great bits.
DISCUSS: Is Harvard still pumping out funny people these days? I suspect it's a different type crowd there than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
(Oh, and Dear Lampoon staff: Maybe you should give a call to your peers over at MIT and ask them to build you a Web site that doesn't blow. Just a thought. Love, t.a.m.s.y.)
The clown shoe-lookin' muhfuckers of MGMT.
, 
