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Television

‘The Simpsons” Most Memorable Interactions With the Real World

By Tom Hawking on

Sigur Rós and Björk were on The Simpsons last night because, hey, Iceland is the place to be, right? We’ve written in the past about memorable guest stars and movie references on the show, but it’s also interesting to look at its interactions with… the real world, for want of a better term. So here’s a brief selection of life imitating art, and vice versa. … Read More

Pop Culture

Awesome Maps of Iconic Pop Culture Locations

By Tom Hawking on

If you hadn’t noticed, we’re pop culture geeks here at Flavorwire, and we’re also really rather partial to cartography. As such, we emitted collective “OMG” when we saw these awesome prints of maps from prominent locations in films, video games, TV shows, and comic books. They’re available as prints from a company called City Prints, which we spotted via Laughing Squid. It’s amazing how iconic and easily recognizable some of these maps are — go on, see how many you recognize without having to refer to the captions! … Read More

Books

The Favorite Poets of Pop Culture Characters

By Alison Nastasi on

We’re suckers for a great cameo — as our review of last night’s celeb-heavy episode of Saturday Night Live proves — but our favorite surprise appearance belongs to literature. You may have noticed that we’re on a bit of a poetry kick lately, exploring beautiful verses about books, the favorite love poems of great poets, and more. To those who say poetry is dead, we offer ten pop culture characters and the poets they turned to for inspiration — which revealed the internal dialogue running rampant through their minds. … Read More

Art

Cheeky Paintings of Pop Culture Icons on Junk Food Packaging

By Alison Nastasi on

Who knew the Les Misérables Broadway banner image of Cosette could look so satanic with a McDonald’s logo in the middle of her forehead? Ben Frost, apparently. Website Who Killed Bambi? introduced us to the artist who paints pop culture characters on different kinds of packaging. Junk food, cereal boxes, tiny pharmaceutical containers, and more are covered in Frost’s cheeky redesigns. The artist imagined Linda Blair from The Exorcist as the “hostess with the mostess” on a cheery Twinkies package and painted a depressed Mickey Mouse pondering his failures on a box of Xanax. See more icons Frost painted for pop culture posterity in our gallery. … Read More

Pop Culture

10 of the Most Disturbing Pop Culture Parodies We've Ever Seen (NSFW)

By Emily Temple on

This week, we heard about a terrifying-sounding SpongeBob SquarePants porn parody entitled SpongeKnob SquareNuts, and we thought to ourselves: but why? Turns out, there are tons of incredibly disturbing pop culture parodies floating around the Internet, just waiting to ruin all of your childhood memories. In case that’s something you want, we’ve collected ten of the most upsetting here for you after the jump. But you’ve been warned. Not disturbing enough? Did we miss your favorite video? Let us know in the comments. … Read More

Television

10 of the Greatest Pop Culture Homage TV Episodes

By Emily Temple on

Yesterday, we read a great article over at NPR entitled “In A Fragmented Cultureverse, Can Pop References Still Pop?,” which ruminates on the way insider references work in our wide-sprawling cultural consciousness. Here at Flavorpill, we’re (obviously) big fans of the pop culture reference, and the article got us thinking about all our favorite cultural inside jokes — in particular, a few of our favorite TV episodes that pay homage to other great cultural artifacts. After the jump, our picks for the greatest pop culture homage TV episodes — but since taste is everything, and we haven’t watched all the television we probably should have, be sure to add to our list in the comments! … Read More

Television

The All-Time Weirdest Guest Appearances on ‘The Simpsons’

By Tom Hawking on

So if you haven’t heard, Tom Waits was on The Simpsons last night, voicing “a gravelly voiced paranoiac” prepper and joining the long list of illustrious and not-so-illustrious guest stars who’ve graced the show since it started screening way back in 1989. His appearance got us thinking about some of the more unlikely guest stars and/or performances the show has seen over the years — and so we’ve amused ourselves after the jump selecting some of our favorites, from Johnny Cash playing a psychedelic coyote to Thomas Pynchon breaking a 40-year TV silence. Did we miss any of your favorites? Go ahead and let us know. (And advance apologies for the quality of a couple of the clips — Simpsons videos are like hen’s teeth on YouTube.) … Read More

Web

What’s On at Flavorpill: The Links That Made the Rounds In Our Office

By Alison Nastasi on

Today at Flavorpill, we appreciated Anne Hathaway’s response to her own wardrobe malfunction. We watched a tipsy Amanda Seyfried find liquid courage on Letterman. We wanted to buy the Mystery Machine from the Scooby-Doo film. We prepared for the end of the world with an apocalyptic gift guide. We listened to the new They Might Be Giants track. We checked in with Carly Rae Jepsen about the highlights of her 2012. We took a music break with Korean indie music duo and YouTube stars, J Rabbit. … Read More

Television

‘The Simpsons’ Hipster Episode Was Everything That’s Wrong With ‘The Simpsons’ Now

By Judy Berman on

Like many other former fans, I stopped watching The Simpsons sometime in the mid-2000s. It’s not that I think it’s uniformly terrible now — it’s still better than a whole lot of other shows on TV — or I’m boycotting it on principle. Hell, I even end up tuning in a few times per season, for a “Treehouse of Horror” or if someone I like is guest starring. But unlike its newish neighbor in Fox’s Sunday-night animation block, Bob’s Burgers, The Simpsons just can’t hold my attention anymore.

Sure, part of it is just that, a quarter-century into its run, the show rarely comes up with the kind of brilliantly loopy storylines that sustained it through the ’90s. What bothers me even more, though, is that a show that once had so many smart and original things to say about American culture has long seemed behind the times, its criticism mild and stale. In perhaps the most glaring example of this unfortunate trend, The Simpsons welcomed Portlandia stars Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (as well as Patton Oswalt and, briefly, The Decemberists) to Springfield for an episode about hipsters. … Read More

Television

Judd Apatow’s Early Spec Script for ‘The Simpsons’ Will Air

By Alison Nastasi on

A young, up-and-coming Judd Apatow wrote a spec script for The Simpsons, and now the This is 40 director will be seeing his rejected work make its way to the small screen on the long-running, animated comedy next year. The Anchorman filmmaker spoke to Conan O’Brien on the talk show host’s web series Serious Jibber-Jabber… Read More