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Tag: The Simpsons

  • Disney+ in Hong Kong drops ‘Simpsons’ episode with ‘forced labour’ mention

    By AFP

    HONG KONG: An episode of “The Simpsons” that refers to “forced labour camps” in China is nowhere to be found on the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong amid growing censorship concerns in the city.

    Hong Kong once boasted significant artistic and cultural freedoms compared to mainland China, but authorities have clamped down on dissent following democracy protests in 2019, including stepping up film censorship.

    Episode 2 of the US animated hits’ 34th season included the line: “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labour camps where children make smartphones, and romance.”

    “One Angry Lisa”, which first aired last October, could not be accessed on Disney+ using a Hong Kong connection but is available elsewhere, AFP confirmed.

    It is the second time in three years that the streaming service’s Hong Kong version has dropped a Simpsons episode that satirised China.

    The previously affected episode showed the Simpsons visiting Beijing’s Tiananmen Square — the site of a deadly 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters — finding a sign there that read: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

    The Hong Kong government and Disney did not immediately provide comment.

    In 2021, Hong Kong passed censorship laws forbidding broadcasts that might breach a broad national security law that China imposed on the city.

    Censors have since ordered directors to make cuts to their films and refused permission for others to be shown.

    ALSO READ | Million Tibetan children separated from families in China, forced to assimilate: UN experts

    While those rules do not cover streaming services, authorities have warned that online platforms are still subject to the national security law, which criminalises the broadly defined crimes of subversion, succession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.

    In recent years, Hollywood has been accused of bending to China’s censorship regime to tap into its vast consumer base and billion-dollar box office.

    Beijing has long denied accusations of torture and forced labour in the far-western Xinjiang region, even as a recent United Nations report found the allegations credible.

    Rights groups say more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are detained in what the US State Department and others have said amounts to genocide.

    In 2020, Disney came under fire for filming the live-action Mulan remake in Xinjiang, with local government agencies thanked in the credits.

    HONG KONG: An episode of “The Simpsons” that refers to “forced labour camps” in China is nowhere to be found on the Disney+ streaming service in Hong Kong amid growing censorship concerns in the city.

    Hong Kong once boasted significant artistic and cultural freedoms compared to mainland China, but authorities have clamped down on dissent following democracy protests in 2019, including stepping up film censorship.

    Episode 2 of the US animated hits’ 34th season included the line: “Behold the wonders of China. Bitcoin mines, forced labour camps where children make smartphones, and romance.”

    “One Angry Lisa”, which first aired last October, could not be accessed on Disney+ using a Hong Kong connection but is available elsewhere, AFP confirmed.

    It is the second time in three years that the streaming service’s Hong Kong version has dropped a Simpsons episode that satirised China.

    The previously affected episode showed the Simpsons visiting Beijing’s Tiananmen Square — the site of a deadly 1989 crackdown on democracy protesters — finding a sign there that read: “On this site, in 1989, nothing happened.”

    The Hong Kong government and Disney did not immediately provide comment.

    In 2021, Hong Kong passed censorship laws forbidding broadcasts that might breach a broad national security law that China imposed on the city.

    Censors have since ordered directors to make cuts to their films and refused permission for others to be shown.

    ALSO READ | Million Tibetan children separated from families in China, forced to assimilate: UN experts

    While those rules do not cover streaming services, authorities have warned that online platforms are still subject to the national security law, which criminalises the broadly defined crimes of subversion, succession, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.

    In recent years, Hollywood has been accused of bending to China’s censorship regime to tap into its vast consumer base and billion-dollar box office.

    Beijing has long denied accusations of torture and forced labour in the far-western Xinjiang region, even as a recent United Nations report found the allegations credible.

    Rights groups say more than a million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities are detained in what the US State Department and others have said amounts to genocide.

    In 2020, Disney came under fire for filming the live-action Mulan remake in Xinjiang, with local government agencies thanked in the credits.

  • ‘The Masked Singer’, Beyonce’s ‘Black Is King’ among juried Emmy Award winners

    By ANI

    WASHINGTON: While the 2021 Primetime Emmy Awards are still a few weeks away, the trophies have already begun rolling out for some of the past year’s biggest shows.

    Beyonce’s ‘Black is King’, ‘The Masked Singer’, ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Love, Death and Robots’ are among early winners for this year’s Emmy Awards, as the Television Academy announced juried category honourees in the fields of animation, costume, interactive programming and motion design, reported The Hollywood Reporter.

    Juried categories are decided by a panel of professionals in the appropriate peer groups with the possibility of one, more than one or no entry being awarded an Emmy. There are no nominees but a one-step evaluation and voting procedure with open discussions of each piece of work.

    Outstanding individual achievement in animation was awarded to ‘Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal’ (David Krentz, storyboard artist); ‘The Simpsons’ (Nik Ranieri, lead character layout artist); and four recognitions for Netflix’s ‘Love, Death + Robots’ (Robert Valley, production designer; Patricio Betteo, background artist; Dan Gill, stop motion animator; Laurent Nicolas, character designer).

    Costumes for a variety, nonfiction or reality program went to ‘Black is King’ (Zerina Akers, costume designer; Timothy White, costume supervisor); ‘The Masked Singer’ (Marina Toybina, costume designer; Grainne O’Sullivan, costume supervisor; Gabrielle Letamendi, assistant costume designer; Lucia Maldonado, assistant costume designer); and ‘Sherman’s Showcase Black History Month Spectacular’ (Ariyela Wald-Cohain, costume designer; Patty Malkin, costume supervisor; Erica Schwartz, assistant costume supervisor).

    Innovation in interactive programming was given to Apple’s ‘For All Mankind’, and motion design went to ‘Calls’, also from the tech giant.

    The juried awards will be presented at the 2021 Creative Arts Emmy Awards, which take place in Los Angeles on September 11 and 12. An edited presentation of the ceremonies will be broadcast on FXX on September 18.

    The Primetime Emmy Awards will follow on September 19, hosted by Cedric the Entertainer with a limited in-person audience in downtown Los Angeles. 

  • Season 33 of ‘The Simpsons’ to premiere with first all musical episode

    By ANI
    WASHINGTON: The producers of ‘The Simpsons’ on Saturday revealed that the upcoming season 22 of the long-time running show will kick off in a musical fashion with a little help from ‘Frozen’ star Kristen Bell.

    According to Variety, during the comic-con panel of ‘The Simpsons Season 33 and Beyond’ executive producer Matt Selman teased what fans can expect from the Season 33 premiere, which will air on September 26.

    The musical episode, titled ‘The Star of the Backstage’, will feature all original songs with Bell as Marge’s singing voice.

    “The premiere this year is the most musical episode we’ve ever done – almost wall-to-wall music. It’s like a Broadway musical of an episode, with all original songs, and we’ve got Kristen Bell playing the role of Marge’s singing voice. We all love Marge’s voice, but this is the singing voice that’s different, let’s just say,” Selman said.

    The panel also shared a sketch of one of the scenes from the episode, depicting Homer singing to an annoyed-looking Marge in the bathroom in his underwear.

    ‘The Simpsons’ team revealed a few more tidbits about the upcoming season, including that there will be five segments in the show’s annual ‘Treehouse of Horror’ event.

    “[We’ll have] five segments on this year’s Halloween show for the first time. We have a romance that may come to stick in Moe’s life, and we explore the greatest tragedy Homer ever faced with guest star Rachel Bloom,” executive producer Al Jean said.

    As per Variety, Selman said this season will also have a “two-part epic love letter to the show ‘Fargo’ and prestige crime shows in the world of streaming television,” featuring Timothy Olyphant, Christopher Melonia and Brian Cox.

  • Hard to keep ‘The Simpsons’ fresh, says showrunner Al Jean

    By PTI
    NEW DELHI: “The Simpsons” is one of the most-loved animated sitcoms of all time, but it is always a challenge for the makers to keep the show topical, says showrunner Al Jean.

    The animated sitcom, created by Matt Groening, is the longest-running show of the American television history and an inalienable part of modern-day pop culture.

    The affable story of the titular family, which consists of middle class couple Homer and Marge as well as their three children, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, continues to touch lives of many people across the globe that brought it a dedicated following over the course of the last 30 years.

    But Jean, who has been associated with “The Simpsons” since its inception back in 1989, believes there is also a downside to a show going on for over three decades.

    “We made a decision early on that we wouldn’t advance the storyline.

    It wouldn’t be a continuing narrative where people got older, which I think was good because now Bart would be about 45 and he’d still be living at home, which would be very pathetic.

    “So the negative of that is that when you always go back to square one, there’s never going to be. Bart isn’t going to die. We’re not going to do anything terrifying to the characters. So the lack of suspense and the number of episodes that we’ve done, the hard thing is to keep it fresh,” Jean told PTI in a group interview over Zoom.

    The showrunner added that the world of animation is “evergreen” and with the core cast still attached with the series he is confident that “The Simpsons” will continue to find stories and experiences worth telling on the screen “The animation is evergreen. We still have the original cast, which is fantastic. We just try to look at the world.

    What’s happened to us, our families and our friends’ families, anything you could possibly see and turn it into something that is part of ‘The Simpsons’ which is great.”

    While there have been bouquets aplenty for “The Simpsons” makers, they have also faced brickbats for the controversies the show courted along the way.

    From Bart being a bad role model for school children to the row over the stereotypical depiction of Indian-origin character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, the show has often rubbed the audiences the wrong way.

    Jean, 60, said it is true that the world has changed a lot since “The Simpsons” started and the things, which were “funny and and inoffensive” back then, could offend people today.

    “One has to go with the times. But it’s really true that we stereotype every nationality, especially Americans, especially fat American men. I think they come off worse on our show than just about anybody.

    “So our hearts are in the right place. And if we’ve made a mistake here or there, it probably comes with going on the air for 30 years.”

    “The Simpsons” was among the major intellectual properties that Disney was able to get its hands on after the Hollywood studio acquired 20th Century Fox and its key assets in 2019.

    That enabled Jean to plot crossover episodes of “The Simpsons” with Disney’s marquee properties — ‘Stars Wars’ and Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) franchises.

    The first crossover was with the “Star Wars” which resulted in the animated short “The Force Awakens from Its Nap” involving the character of Maggie Simpson.

    The short debuted on streamer Disney Plus on Star Wars Day in May.

    Jean now got the chance to work with key MCU character Loki, voiced by original star Tom Hiddleston, for another short “The Good, The Bart, and The Loki”.

    Hiddleston can currently be seen in his solo MCU show “Loki”.

    “People have different knowledge of Loki and some of the people I worked with knew quite a bit. Other people had less knowledge. So we sort of did it just basically like he’s the God of Mischief going in and you don’t have to know anything more.

    “I think he’s gotten a good deal of publicity in the last four weeks. So people who were less familiar are now more familiar with him. One thing to know is that he’s a shape-shifter and he can pretend to be other people, which is a key to the short,” Jean said.

    “The Good, The Bart, and The Loki” follows Loki after he is banished from Asgard and must face his toughest opponents yet: the Simpsons and Springfield’s mightiest heroes.

    Jean was particularly in awe of Hiddleston as they had absolute fun while working on the short.

    “Tom Hiddleston could not have been nicer and funnier. That really made the experience over the top for me. With him, you just don’t want the session to stop. You just want it to keep going because it was so fun.”

    The positive of being at Disney and working on its key intellectual property is that one can also make fun of the studio, Jean said.

    “Now it’s actually freer reign because they’re not going to sue themselves, which is us. The funny thing is that we’ve made a lot of jokes about Disney over the years and these are all available on Disney Plus.

    In terms of the future, they just wanted us to be ourselves.

    “They said, ‘you know, we bought ‘The Simpsons’ to be ‘The Simpsons’.’ And we’ve had no blowback.

    The two shorts that we did, the ‘Star Wars’ people were very gracious and Marvel people couldn’t have been better.

    And so yeah, it’s been a huge advantage,” Jean added.

    “The Good, The Bart, and The Loki” currently streams on Disney+ Hotstar Premium.