Here, it's a lame wink at the end of a crass, gratuitous gag. When The Simpsons first visited Springfield Gorge in season two's "Bart the Daredevil," it was for a genuinely heartwarming story about the complicated relationship between Bart and Homer. Much of "The Simpsons Guy" was boring, but the echo of the much earlier, much more poignant Simpsons episode was a little disheartening - if only as a reminder of how far The Simpsons has fallen. Homer stands in for the chicken, in a long, bloody fight that turns the characters into superheroes and takes them into outer space, before returning back to Earth to riff on Homer's failed jump and repeated tumbles down the canyon wall. "The Simpsons Guy" ends with a remix that blends one iconic moment from each show: Peter's seemingly endless series of fights with a giant chicken, and Homer's ill-fated jump across Springfield Gorge. (Whatever truth there is to those complaints, "The Simpsons Guy" is Exhibit A.) Family Guy is a dumber, crasser rip-off of The Simpsons The Simpsons is a soulless, long-in-the-tooth version of the innovative show it used to be. It all builds to a scene in which Homer and Peter turn on each other, parroting the most common complaints about each other's shows. This is where a cynical writer might suggest that the scene in question was revealed early because Fox knew it would drum up additional controversy, driving more attention to their big crossover episode. To be fair, that seemingly pointless lack of taste may have been the point a clip of the scene was revealed months ago, leading to an inevitable condemnation from the Parents Television Council. As expected, the gag wasn't nearly funny enough to justify how glib or gross it was. The edgiest moment comes when Stewie, attempting to emulate one of Bart's prank phone calls to Moe's Tavern, says, "Your sister's being raped!" and hangs up. (Well, almost everybody Family Guy doesn't have much use for Lois, so she and Marge are basically pushed aside for the episode.) From there, everybody splits up to repeat the same antics and catch phrases you've seen before. The Griffins stumble into Springfield, where each character is paired off with their rough analogue: Peter and Homer, Lois and Marge, Stewie and Bart, Meg and Lisa, Chris and Maggie, Brian and Santa's Little Helper. It also anticipates a blogger backlash that never really happened, as a bunch of straw-man feminists run the Griffins out of Quahog for drawing a sexist comic that also makes light of spousal abuse. "The Simpsons Guy" opens, inevitably, by mocking the idea of crossover as a pathetic, headline-grabbing stunt by a couple of sell-outs. Though the majority of the episode took place in Springfield, this isn't quite a crossover it's an extra-long Family Guy episode in which the Simpsons appear as versions of themselves, warped through a Family Guy lens. The dominant flavor of "The Simpsons Guy" is Family Guy. More than anything, "The Simpsons Guy" was lazy - a fundamentally misguided attempt to make two totally different tastes cohere, like a tuna-and-peanut-butter sandwich. The truth is a lot less exciting than any of those things. "One of the most fascinatingly weird things to ever happen on television," said Entertainment Weekly. "The Simpsons and Family Guy crossover was The Best. The Simpsons and Family Guy each inspire constant, breathless hyperbole, both positive and negative. But the main event came an hour later, when Family Guy premiered "The Simpsons Guy," which brought the Griffin family to Springfield for an extended encounter with the Simpsons.
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