The dubbing is Quebecois.
Then I realized I must have the Simpsons on dvd as my son left his stash here before he went to Europe.
Sure enough, I found the boxed sets, under the book shelf, and I grabbed the one on top.
I started watching the first disc of the set, which includes my favorite episode, the one where Homer grows hair. (I just love the executive bathroom.)
The second season from, yikes, 1990! and that season has many of my favorite episodes. Hmm. Produced twenty one years ago. Now, how can that be?
So this Language exercise has turned into an anthropological study of ‘ American cultural history.’
Funny, right now I am watching the episode where Marge takes on Itchy and Scratchy violence.
Ironically, back then in the early nineties there were many Moms in my area who banned the Simpsons for the violence in it – or for the irreverence. Or for both.
I was not such a parent.
I recall one family in the era belonged to a fundamentalist Christian sect and they banned the TV entirely. My sons told me that the kids in that family had radio so they listened to the Simpsons’ dialogue via radio.
That’s what happens when you ban stuff.
All to say, Time Flies.
I have no problem understanding anything in the Simpsons, French, which means I probably am not improving anything by listening.
But I am having fun. Because it’s a good show, even 20 years later.
Although the Simpsons are green here. Must be my ancient Blue Ray machine. And I can’t keep the subtitles from showing up. So I have the translation, even though I don’t need it.
The other day a friend was telling me how her daughter was having problems with her teenage kids. I told her I did not feel qualified to pass on words of wisdom, despite having endured such difficult times myself. Why? Because SO MUCH HAS CHANGED with respect to family life in ten years.
Well, with respect to the new technologies which control us all. The Nintendo machine drove me batty, back then, but I didn’t have kids texting all day in front of me.
And I used to write essays about the impact of new technologies on family life. No kidding. But I’m a virtual dinosaur now. I should have suggested the frazzled Mom in question watch some past episodes of the Simpsons on DVD for advice on how to raise a family.
Some wisdom is eternal. Even some cartoon wisdom.
Funny, in this same episode Michelangelo’s David comes to Springfield and some mothers complain that it is an abomination. Marge, who wants the Itchy and Scratch cartoon censored, feels that everybody should see the statue as it is ‘art’.
Outrageous satire? Exaggerating to prove a point? Not really.
In 1966 in Pointe Claire Quebec, the new shopping center there, Fairview, contained a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Mothers complained. The statue was moved to the new library at Loyola (now Concordia) where, in 1972, if I wanted, I could grab a front row seat and study right in groin view, except that some pranksters had painted the David’s genitalia green.
In my follow up to Threshold Girl (www.tighsolas.ca/page10.pdf.pdf
that I am calling Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, Militant Suffragette Sympathizer and Inadvertent Opium Addict, I have Edith Nicholson visit an art exhibit in Phillip’s Square while in a drug stupour (on the day after King Edward VII’s death, and a week after her fiance’s death in Cornwall fire.
She comes face to face with the painting Maternity, by Helen Riter Hamilton. And faints.
