Is it me, or has Lisa become an unlikable character as of later seasons?

It's natural for some of the characters to change since this isn't the 90's anymore.

For me Lisa has always been preachy... specially on the early Simpsons.. Remember the episode where she made Marge pay for the small fruit and homer had to cut off the illegal cable line?

Or in S1 and S2 where Lisa was all emotional for anything.

About the Bart character, he was modeled after Dennis the Menace who was the bad kid on TV previous the Simpsons, only that Bart was made 20 times badder.

If we really take off the default hate for the current seasons.. You can track Bart not being the future delinquent/Jerk since Season 3 at the latest. Most of his jokes afterwards were really meh except for one or another.

For me the truly bad boy Bart Simpson was on Season 1 and 2.

Lisa has been always preachy, she's the brain and the best thing of the Simpson family.
 
She may have been preachy at times back than too, but she also had those sweet little girl qualitys to make up for it. Now she's just preachy, mean/snobby and trys to act way more mature these days than she should. To me, that does not make a fun character. I do agree, Bart was more of a devil in the begining. Now he's this prankster/fun kid we've seen from seasons 3-9 and now the side to Bart has returned a bit more these newer seasons.
 
Lisa, at least in the first 8 seasons was the little girl who was misunderstood by the family of idiots. She was the intellectual who was held back by her family, yet beneath it all, she was still a little girl with, little girl tendencies (she likes ponies, "Cory," Itchy and Scratchy). However, where she went wrong was when the writers decided to make her 20yr old liberal activist trapped in an 8yr old girl's body.



Then the writers and producers shouldn't give us reasons to hate the show.
 
You really sum it up brilliantly there. That's exactly the problem with the character now.

Regarding Marge, I think part of the reason people find her annoying now is because the writers are actually trying to give her funny lines. In the classic seasons, she didn't say much that was supposed to be funny, but recently they've tried to give her all kinds of puns and one-liners. I think part of the problem is that they might be written as intentionally lame jokes, which would be okay for her character, but the way Julie Kavner reads them (she may be directed to do it this way) is as if they're supposed to be normal, good jokes. So the audience just hears them and thinks "wow, that's a really lame joke."

On the other hand, they do write some genuinely horrible jokes as well, that don't seem to be intentional. I remember one in particular from "Bart Gets a Z" that went something like this:

Bart: Did you write your dream down on the (wiggles fingers dramatically) index card of fate?
Krabappel: Yes, but it still seems (wiggles fingers) stupid.

I couldn't believe it when I heard that joke. It sounds like something you'd hear on a show aimed at 8-year-olds.
 
Yeah, Marge has suffered more than Lisa.

I rewatched "Homerazzi" last night and a perfect example of how forced her dialog is now is when the family photo album is destroyed and she laments about it, saying that a photo album for her is like what a resume is to a man. Such a forced joke. I thought back to "Bart's Dog Gets an F" when the family quilt is destroyed; did she work in a one-liner while crying? No, and the scene was better for it.
 
Bart actually has kind of the same problem these days. Because whereas it's true that Bart stopped being a complete jerkass as early as season 3, he nevertheless remained a very witty character throughout the golden age (which i count as lasting up till about season 8). This season 3-8 version of Bart is what i like to call his "comedian" or "showman" version: most of his jokes were genuenly witty (often sarcastic) insults directed towards other characters. He was something of a yellow-skinned Yakko Warner.

But sadly,since about season 10-11, Bart has become a character whose jokes we are more often supposed to laugh at than laugh with (much like what is also the case with Marge). This is because most of Bart's jokes these days aren't written to even come of as smart, sarcastic remarks, but rather as childish and crude, and we are supposed to laugh at this childishness. As an exmaple, one can point to the recent Sidehow Bob episode were this exchange occurs:

Bart: It was a clever plan Bob, but you forgot one thing.

Bob: And what was that?

Bart: You stink like my butt!

We we hear this, we are supposed to go "that's such a dumb, childish thing to say!" and laugh at it because of it. And while in this case, the intended nature of the joke is pretty obvious, there are other times when Bart's "so childish they're funny"-jokes might come of as lines that are actually supposed to be clever, and in these cases they instead just seem extremely unfunny. In other words, it's the same thing that happens with a lot of Marge's "so lame they're funny"-jokes.
 
Witty Bart? Most of the stuff Bart did during the suppose "Golden Nostalgia age" is childish now. Bart may have broken a few taboos like talking back to adults, but most of the stuff is not even "Shock" "ZOMG"
 
Eh she's always been a liberal activist. "Lisa the Vegetarian" comes to mind specifically and the Stacy malibu episode.





They aren't forcing you to watch it, or hate it. and of course the ratings say otherwise.
 
Lisa the Vegitarian was the first episode where Lisa had the "PC Thug" tendencies, and Lisa being "preachy" was Oakley and Wienstien's biggest flaw of their two years as showrunners during Seasons 7 & 8.

However, Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy episode was just fluke at the time. The first six seasons she was still very much a little girl who was too smart for her age.



The ratings could be a "0" and the show would still make a billion dollars a hawking Simpsons junk.
 
Okay, whether Barts (or any other characters, for that matter) lines were ever witty or not depends on your own idea of what constitutes "wit", but even so the fact remains that Bart's jokes during the golden age usually wasn't supposed to be funny merely on account of being crude and childish, like so many of them are these days.

And would you please stop insinuating that the reason why people prefer the early-mid 90's episodes over the newer ones is due to nostalgia? Yes, i grew up with those episodes and therefore probably have a bit of "nostalgic bias" towards them, but you have to keep in mind that even most fans who were ADULTS even back when the show first came on agrees that the show was better then than it is now. And you will also find that contemporary reviews of episodes by proffesional TV/animation critics from that time tended to be a lot more positive than reviews by critics these days of new episodes.

Naturally, one cant go as far as to say that the show was objectively better during the 90's than it is now, since nothing is ever objectively better than anything. But the show sure has changed from how it used to be, and nobody who cares to study the show more in-depth can deny that.
 
Some people have just gotten cynical. I would say that is what you're going through judging by what you wrote here.

But there has definitely been a distinct change in the way they have crafted their stories and the construction of their gags over the past decade. This is definitely not 1995's Simpsons anymore.
 
I'm not cynical so much as just tired of the Simpsons at the moment. I used to love the Simpsons so much, but maybe it's just something I need to revisit again a few years from now because all this talk about how the Simpsons have degenerated into a piece of crap has affected my judgment.
 
You're beating a dead horse. To some, okay MANY, the 'nostalgia' defense is like saying: "La la la, I'm not listening to YOU!" because the nostalgia excuse-givers want to believe all cartoons are the same: A bunch of wack junk where nothing really has any meaning, so if you like something from a long time ago, it's due to mixing your 'happy days' with a cartoon and not because the cartoon was objectively better.

Frankly, all the "it must be nostalgia!" whiners are probably the most ignorant people to come across on a message board.
 
I think the question is who hasn't become an unlikeable husk on The Simpsons in this day and age?

Homer has mutated into a completely moronic manchild, Marge does nothing but nag and make inappropriate jokes, Lisa has become the equivalent of Brian Griffin, and Bart does nothing of interest anymore unless Homer needs some counter fodder in an episode (the episode with his friend Bashir comes to mind).
 
Of course it's not 1995 simpsons anymore, it's also not the Simpsons of 1989 or 2000's anymore. Everything changes, everything evolves. Diferent ages, diferent tastes. the same as The Flinstones is not the same in comedy terms now in the current decade.
 
Marvin Tikvah said:
I think the question is who hasn't become an unlikeable husk on The Simpsons in this day and age?

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Which he's always been. Under The sea.. Under The sea... or when Bart wrote "Insert Brain here" on the back of his head and he was like: "What you wrote?" and then threw himself into the floor. or the Land of the chocolate during the negotiations, etc.


,

Always been a nag, don't remember the episode(clip show) where they remember all the complaints and growling of marge. or the time where she flipped and growled at the police officers that led her to abandon her family for awhile?




In what? This argument sounds like grasping at straws (No offense)




The character Bart itself is outdated since he's model after Dennis the Menace. characters like Bart hardly exist in modern television since most of the "Bad" stuff he did, most children have done worse by now. In the 90's he's behavior was like ZOMG he modified the songs, ZOMG he talked back to Homer and Marge.

And remember Homer is the favorite character of the audience in the past 10 years according the documental about the Simpsons. Hence why Bart faded into a sidekick of his dad instead of being the star of the show he was on the 90's. He's just not that popular anymore because as I said: The character itself is outdated.
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As I've said before in a similar thread, Lisa has become a brat and yes she has become somewhat like Brian but in recent episode she hasn't been as pushy with it. She hasn't hounded anyone about her being a buddhist, she hasn't tried to get anybody to share her beliefs, and she hasn't done something for reasons only she would understand. Recently Lisa has been putting a spin on most things Little girls normally do. I don't know how this came to a Simpson family season bash but I can probably see it becoming closed because as Barbossa said it will become a hate thread.
 
True, most everything evolves, but not always for the better. Some would argue that the show was better in the earlier seasons, and there's nothing wrong with that, and isn't always based on nostalgia.

...We've had this discussion before, haven't we? ;)
 
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