Yoann Hervo's Weird Simpsons VHS

September 25, 2015 6:00 PM

The Simpsons title credits sequence is one of the most delightfully surreal animations in recent history. But when Yoann Hervo recorded it to VHS back in the 90's he must have turned the surreality setting up to 11.
posted by carsonb (21 comments total)

Hee, youtube poop is becoming legit! Degenerate art of the early aughts gains traction.
posted by frecklefaerie at 6:08 PM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

This is just a clip from the original shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show.
posted by prize bull octorok at 6:24 PM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

A cheap silly ripoff. No flow. Doesn't look ike the Tracy Ullman show stuff AT ALL. :-( In fact, it says it was done in celebration of the 25th year.
posted by Seekerofsplendor at 6:33 PM on September 25, 2015

It's very Cyriak.
posted by kafziel at 6:48 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love how some of the parts of the opening got mixed up, like its very structure was melting.
posted by BiggerJ at 6:58 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

I see something new every time. The eggplant. The baby. Bart sitting in the front row. The Super Nintendo.
posted by carsonb at 7:27 PM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Reminds me of something from Liquid TV.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:39 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Why make this when The Samsonadzes exists and is a real thing.
posted by dilaudid at 9:04 PM on September 25, 2015 [13 favorites]

I like how we've all collectively decided the Simpons is the cross generational cultural touchstone we can make upsetting and strange and new. It's a long storied artistic tradition going back to the early years of the show, from "Black Bart" to knock offs to weirdly realistic pencil drawings on early websites to this stuff to memes to strange Simpsons porn done to be deliberately awful to Dark Homer to the actual sacationing of it via the visiting artist couch sequences. It's a viable artistic tradition at this point.
posted by The Whelk at 9:29 PM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

Previously in the simpsons+surreal category: JK Keller's "glitched out work of art". I just rewatched it and it's pretty much as great as I remembered.
posted by Lirp at 10:00 PM on September 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

ALL ANIMALS CAN SCREAM
posted by mmoncur at 11:54 PM on September 25, 2015 [4 favorites]

I will say the music sounds an awful lot like Face Like A Frog which was contemporaneous with the original Tracey Ullman show shorts
posted by The Whelk at 12:01 AM on September 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

And that's Danny Elfman on the music on the face like a frog video there, who also did the Simpsons Theme so ..yeah
posted by The Whelk at 12:07 AM on September 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Man this gives me the same feeling I had when I was a kid in the early '90s flipping through channels late at night and coming across weird-ass animation (mostly weird adult anime and something what I found out years later to be Aeon Flux).

We need more weird animation.
posted by littlesq at 12:40 AM on September 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

'Surreal' seems to increasingly incorrectly used to mean 'sort of weird'. And The Simpsons isn't even that.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 1:59 AM on September 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's not increasing, it just is used to mean that, and has been for decades. You can do the descriptivist maths yourself.
posted by howfar at 3:16 AM on September 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

The VHS tape equivalent of C cassettes spontaneously turning into Best of Queen collections, I guess?
posted by wwwwolf at 5:18 AM on September 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I don't do drugs.

Now I never need to, I guess?
posted by andreaazure at 6:50 AM on September 26, 2015

Yeah, I felt the exact same way about this; I remember that sense of feeling totally unmoored when I first saw Liquid Television as a tween, like I was watching something that would get me in trouble. In trouble with whom? Unclear. I mean, it wasn't porn or anything, and my parents were pretty permissive anyway. Maybe in trouble with reality itself somehow? So much of the show was about refusing traditional narrative structures or attractive aesthetics - a deep weird ugliness running throughout everything. It was totally hypnotic to me, and it resonated through all of my teen years. I wonder if glitch-focused art on tumblr and such is doing that for today's kids.

Same here. That was probably my first memory of seeing something on TV and having the immediate understanding that this was not intended for kids my age, and that there was something very subversive about it.

I'm enjoying the way that the "found VHS" aesthetic is influencing pop culture now. It reminds me a bit of how some of the post-Boomer, early-Gen-X stuff was suffused with an irreverent nostalgia for postwar culture. Like, today, if anyone makes a faux-50's educational propaganda film, they're second-order parodies of a parody that's been thoroughly exhausted. At this point it's just a cliche. But when I see things that make fun of 1980s and 90s material, contextualized from the standpoint of, "I was too young to understand this when I saw it on television or found it on a VHS tape at my grandparents' house," it rings true for me.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 7:28 AM on September 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

The Surrealists were once a concrete organization existing in a specific place and time with a human leader and a list of members that people could be added to or removed from as the group played its political and artistic games.

I guess it is a fitting irony that the prior is no longer meaningful, and they have turned from a membership group with a political agenda into an overused adjective, like an ant becoming a clock over night.
posted by idiopath at 11:25 AM on September 26, 2015 [3 favorites]

Cool. The Liquid Television comments reminded me of Black Hula.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:27 PM on September 26, 2015