Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

When, a while ago now, I reached what I'd decided would be an adequate stopping point for watching DVD sets of The Simpsons, I pondered a few other options for watching North American animation and wound up returning to Batman: The Animated Series. Some years before that, I had bought the first DVD collection of that show, part of a general mix of "finally being able to really afford anime" and "keeping up with assorted cartoons," if one that did leave me thinking I really ought to at least try and watch some live-action stuff. (That urge added a bit of impetus to starting the new Battlestar Galactica, although when Doctor Who returned not that long after I thought more "this ought to be interesting" than "this will be somehow 'good' for me.") When I never saw the package the second collection was supposed to be in on my doorstep, though, I went to slight lengths to get the anime I'd missed out on but just sort of left Batman.
( Once equipped with this new motivation... )

In the summer of 1985, my family bought a VCR. It wasn't long before we were recording programs from the handful of channels our antenna picked up out where we lived, and that came in handy as autumn arrived. One of the local stations had long shown cartoons at noon, but now, instead of waiting for rainy lunch hours and obliging teachers providing a rare treat for a classroom of students stuck inside, I just had to hope my parents had remembered to set the timer. In keeping with the times, the cartoons the channel showed were shifting from two decade-old reruns to the phantasmagoria of mid-1980s syndication, and that season they showed a different program every day of the week. Right in the middle on Wednesdays, after Transformers and The Lone Ranger (I looked forward to the former a bit more than the latter) and before The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show and the "He-Man-like" Blackstar (again, I liked the first more than the second), there was a show called Thunder Sub. It started off in a peaceful future rudely interrupted by the "Death Force," arriving on board "Terror Star" from "the dead planet Gotham," and Earth's last hope was the enormous and eponymous submarine. Something about the show caught my attention, and part of that might have been the actual continuing plot, even if that was tricky to follow when we didn't happen to have recorded the episode that week. However, there was a larger snag...
( The snag... )
( ...and how I got past it, two and a half decades later )

It took me a while to watch through and listen to the commentaries on the ninth season set of The Simpsons, but during that time the thought seemed clear in my mind that this would be the last set I got of the show whether bought myself or asked for as a Christmas or birthday present, in a sense a second, perhaps more definite farewell to it after sort of drifting away from the broadcasts a few years back to take part in an online chat on Sunday evenings. (For that matter, in the time since then most of the other people in that chat have since stopped taking part in it...) There's certainly something melancholy about this. Still, for some reason I find myself thinking further back than the original broadcast of the ninth season and my odd, strong feeling at the time that I was so impressed by the episode "Lisa the Simpson" that it might make a stopping point...

When I first got online, in an age of Usenet newsgroups, it seemed to me that a Simpsons newsgroup would be interesting to follow. However, I soon got a sense from it that the general consensus of the group was that by the sixth season of the show, the glory days were long past, the show's immediate future was very much in question, and the only thing left to do was to complain about every joke built around an unusual shift in somebody's character and every animation error... it was there, perhaps, that I formed my suspicion that "fandom" is much less about actually enjoying something than about complaining how your interpretation of the first few instalments has diverged from how the actual creative staff developed things. Of course, if the point is complaining, then maybe I try to keep up my attachment to original works by looking askance at certain other fans.

A few years after finding it and even making the occasional post to it, I stopped reading the newsgroup altogther, and perhaps that helped stretch out my enjoyment of the show by half a decade more. Perhaps, too, getting around to listening to the DVD commentaries was oddly pleasant in hearing the creators enjoy their own work. In any case, after trying to wrap things up on a definite and positive note, I can now think about starting to watch some other work of North American animation, perhaps picking up again on "Batman: The Animated Series" (I ordered the second DVD set of it to join the first some years ago, but never saw the package on my doorstep), "Samurai Jack," or "Avatar: The Last Airbender" (which I admit I've never seen any of, but I have noticed other people impressed with it...)