While The Simpsons season 34 is changing many of the show’s familiar routines, one trippy couch gag held on to a well-loved tradition. The Simpsons season 34 is changing everything from existing backstories to the way that the show’s Halloween episodes work. However, while season 34 will feature two Treehouse of Horror specials and a new origin story for Carl, The Simpsons isn’t abandoning everything that worked in earlier outings.
While The Simpsons season 34’s first couch gag was a clever visual gag, the pencil-drawn couch gag for The Simpsons’ “One Angry Lisa” (Season 34, Episode 2) brought a more colorful and vivid style to the opening of the outing. The immersive short followed a carpet on the Simpsons' living room floor into a trippy realm of colorful shapes and patterns before the surreal odyssey circled back to the living room as the gag ended. In keeping with the rest of the cartoonist’s work, it ended with an oversized signature appearing in the corner of the screen.
“One Angry Lisa”'s couch gag was animated by none other than Bill Plympton. As well as collaborating with everyone from Kanye West to Weird Al Yankovich, Plympton has an extensive career as an animator. A legendary underground figure, Plympton has provided The Simpsons with no less than six earlier couch gags. Plympton first worked on The Simpsons in season 23, and has drawn a couch gag for almost every season since. His return and continual involvement in the show is welcome news and continues a trippy trend seen in many of The Simpsons' later seasons thanks to his signature animation and artistic style.
Why The Simpsons Keeps Using Bill Plympton Couch Gags
The cartoonist’s signature style is similar enough to the animation of The Simpsons for the characters to fit, but psychedelic and weird enough to always be memorably different from a normal episode. While The Simpsons has jumped into the future in some outings and depicted some fairly bizarre occurrences in others, the show isn’t usually as free-flowing as Plympton’s work. That said, Plympton’s work does share the Tex Avery/Chuck Jones influence that is often evident in The Simpsons, making him a perfect fit for standalone couch gags. Since the couch gag is a longstanding Simpsons tradition, artists as diverse as Guillermo del Toro and Banksy can be brought in to offer a unique spin on it.
To this end, Plympton’s style works particularly well for The Simpsons because it is markedly different from the show’s usual appearance, but close enough in of humor to not feel too jarring. Banksy’s dark couch gag felt more akin to The Simpsons and ended up overwhelming the episode that the sequence appeared in, with few viewers ing much beyond the opening credits (the same occurred with Don Hertzfeldt’s surprisingly poignant couch gag). In contrast, Plympton’s style is surreal but still fits The Simpsons thanks to their shared classic cartoon inspiration. As a result, Plympton’s regular couch gags remains a high point of many episodes of The Simpsons and seem like they will continue to going forward.