We’re at Estrus FEST 2024 and I’m sixteen hours into estrus sampling when my guy Pickle Horse-man COMPLAINS about low blood sugar and I turn my red, sore eyes to him and say BUDDY, WE’RE SIXTEEN HOURS INTO THE SEASON. YOU CAN’T BE QUITTING ALREADY. And this guy has the audacity to bring up the respective downfall of the Simpsons AND Star Wars respectively and it’s just such obvious bait and a clear attempt to sabotage Estrus FEST 2024 but I get to thinking about the good feelings old Simpsons used to give me and the clear deterioration in the quality of nearly everything but specifically writing and animation. Now, one reason for the change is that the script-writing profession itself has drastically declined, and this applies to both movies and television, and, in fact, the Star Wars prequels and sequels suffered similar declines in quality whereby the director is also expected to write the script as a sort of visionary total-package auteur instead of two dedicated specialists, and this results in the sort of tragicomic Rise of Skywalker which was completely unwatchable but possibly the best example of WHY a division of those labors is important (the prior example being Lucas’s dreadful prequels which hardly qualify as a story and are more sensible as a TTRPG lore-dump.) A mare kicks me right in the face and I’m shook. I can’t believe it. I almost died thinking about the Simpsons and Star Wars. I’ve had friends die, getting kicked in the face during mating, but usually there was some extenuating circumstance, always in some ways their action was in some ways impeded, otherwise they would naturally evade the kick. My God. But I still want to get to my initial point I was trying to make because so far I’ve just been surveying trends. And this is more specifically about the Simpsons (Disney Star Wars suffers from this even more, but the terrain on that is far more tricky,) and returning to the “good feeling” of old Simpsons, and the reason for it is 1. Propaganda and 2. the Market. Now, if you grew up in America watching Simpsons it’s really difficult to think of it as propaganda because it was simply our lived experience. It’s just a family-oriented show, right? And its lessons and coterie are all respective of America’s family-oriented middle class. And that’s my point. Old Simpsons specifically targeted our demographic and it was a market shift that changed to international audiences, and it is in appealing to international audiences that we lost that specific, targeted quality of writing. There’s a big difference between a scene from the old Simpsons broadcasting “this is us,” to us, and a scene from the new Simpsons broadcasting “this is us,” to them. It simply rings hollow. Its silliness and irreverence is attractive instead of descriptive. People abroad don’t tune into American media for insight, they do it for entertainment, so the Simpsons now is merely entertaining. Subsequently it has taken on the pacing of Family Guy, which perfected the timing on marginally entertaining dialogue. Now, excuse me a second. I have to taste this pee-pee. I nudge the mare’s leg and she lifts her tail and her pussy gushes out some of that good-good juice and I have myself a thirst-quencher and get my flehmen going real good. “That’s BRISK, Bay-bee!” I shout. Now, I’m not bemoaning having to share my toys with foreign markets, after all, America’s propaganda machine has been churning tirelessly to attract them and the American media has all the money, all the power, all the influence and they’ll do as they please and if it means less entertainment for me, well, I could probably do with an entertainment diet anyhow. It’s just difficult to let go of things that are cultural touchstones. I know in my heart the discomfort is merely a growing pain. I’m not averse to globalization, but I don’t particularly like living in this moment in the process. I want to skip ahead. WHAT THE FUCK. I’m alone in a patch of scrub. All the mares took off toward the lake and I’ve just been standing here talking to myself about American media. Good lord, what has become of this horse. Oh, but the animation! The change of the animation to what it is today! A totally soulless, animatronic product. A true cultural product shows the fingerprints of the people who created it, whether it’s set-design, puppeteering, the sculpting on Yoda’s face, sure, there’s a rawness to it and computer-generation creates more refined outcomes with less cost, but where are the damn fingerprints? You could tell American animators once animated the Simpsons, you could tell Korean animators put their blood and sweat into the series, and now? Now the work is mostly done at inception, wherein some team coded a faster, more generic process, and the artist is more of a technician overseeing the predetermined outcome. There’s a trend that pisses me off surrounding the yoda puppet. There’s a point in The Phantom Menace where they “used the yoda puppet,” and a lot of people in internet discussion point to that moment to show how awful it looked and how the CGI yoda was so much better. Let me tell you now: if Frank Oz and Jim Henson were alive overseeing the presentation of that puppet, there is NO goddamn way it would have been presented in that manner. That case was an egregious example of the people in charge not showing any insight or knowledge in puppetry and slapping that thing to a sprawling CGI counterstrike map with any sort of dramatic lighting or any specific, meaningful motion for the puppet to make other than looking around approvingly at some godawful CGI parade - it makes me fucking sick. And it’s not just all the urine I’ve been sampling fresh from the spout. I’m lost. And I don’t just mean in my narrative over the Simpsons and Star Wars. I’m lost in the foothills and ravines of the Sierra Nevadas of Greater Sacramento. The smell of estrus abounding, but not a drop to drink. But there is the horse-man. There is the bus. I get on board and I begin bonking his backseat urgently encouraging him to drive me to Estrus FEST 2024 because there's eight or nine more crazy days and nights ahead for sampling estrus and thinking about the Simpsons and Star Wars.