Barney Gumble

Years on the Tree: 6

Acquired:  Gift from my family for Christmas (Which is kind of like saying, “Here’s something for you to look at next year.”

Fun Fact: My favorite episode of The Simpsons is Mr. Plow. 

   Of all the shows I have opted to watch as an excuse to get out of performing productive tasks and enlightening social engagements, I would have to say my all time favorite will always be The Simpsons. The Simpsons have been on literally as long as I have been alive. At 26 years old it is difficult for me to remember any part of my life where there wasn’t the occasional appearance by Homer or Bart on the television. One of the earliest pictures of me I have actually involves The Simpsons. I was really chunky, had two front teeth with a large space in between, and had short but curly hair. (That’s right. I looked like a little Louie Anderson being pushed around in a stroller. Wherever our separate locations on the planet, I am sure we were both eating a Ziploc full of Teddy Grahams). Next to me is my older brother, and he is wearing a baseball cap that has Bart Simpson’s head and the pic is saying “Don’t have a cow man.”  This, of course, was back when companies would find out whatever the new ‘it’ thing was and merchandise every character and catch phrase for every greedy dollar they could. I’m glad those days are over.

     I remember when watching The Simpsons was a treat because it meant that my mom would let me stay up until the shocking time of 7:30pm. (Rachel has been trying to put my son, Luke, down for over an hour and it is just now 9pm. I could have watched 3 full episodes while she has been in the nursery with him. I wonder if I should go tell her this information at this very moment in loudest Duff Man Voice that I can):

Rachel [Rocking Luke] (whispering): Hush little baby don’t you cry, Momma’s gonna sing you a lull-

Me: ARE YOU READY TO GET DUFFED?! OH YEAH!!

Luke [First word]: Duff

Rachel: GETTHEHELLOUTOFTHEBABIESBEDROOMORIWILLKILLYOU!!!

 

     In all seriousness though (this blog can’t justify this as a passable transition statement), the show has taken a lot of heat over the last 10 to 12 seasons for not being….well….any good.  Now, you have to remember that after over 500 episodes of a show airing over 24 seasons you might to run out of the A-List Material now and again. I will admit watching an older episode back-to-back with a new episode really conveys just how much the show has fallen from its once high pedestal of animated glory. FOX’s Animation Domination leads off with The Simpsons but it is one of those things where I know it is not going to be worth watching the whole episode. I still have my DVR set to record the show; however, it has been so many years since I have sat and watched a “new” episode of The Simpsons all the way through and laughed. I really hate to confess this, but I have started watching a new episode and something more entertaining happens to make me Stop and Delete the show:

Examples include:

-The Ice Cream man drives by. I don’t necessarily want Ice Cream. But the jingle of the Ice Cream man’s truck can actually be better than the last episode I watched.

-My dog Bentley goes outside to bark at squirrels, other dogs, or the wind.

 -My dad calls to talk about what he threw away while my mom went to the store.

-Bentley takes a dump. 

     So, needless to say, the lows have been pretty low as of late; but my fondest memory of The Simpsons will always be watching VHS tapes with my younger brother on Saturday mornings or days we had off of school. The Simpsons had about a decade where they were the most reliable funny program on televison. The Simpsons were on for a solid hour on network TV in the Chicagoland area when I was growing up. What I used to do is record the entire hour onto VHS tapes until the tape was full and then we bought another tape and started recording those, too. I believe we had a total of nine or ten tapes that were pure Simpsons episodes. This was before DVRs, DVDs, the Internet, and Netflix where we could just instantaneously watch an episode at a whim. No, there used to be a time when you had to be lucky enough to catch an episode by happenstance in order to watch it. My brother and I would watch these tapes all the way through and it would seem like even though we memorized the episodes and their order it never got old. 

So behold Barney Gumble, in all his glory:

I love this ornament because it doesn’t deserve to be an ornament. 

WHY BARNEY IS NOT A CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT:

-From top to bottom, there is nothing inherently Christmassy about him whatsoever. He isn’t hanging lights or sneaking Christmas cookies…nothing.

-Complete absence of Christmas colors. He is orange and blue

-Not Merry or Bright

-Characters on a Christmas tree that are not typically winter characters usually dress in winter attire. Barney is still rocking his traditional garb. 

-When we get down to it, there is an alcoholic with a frosty beer mug on my tree.

WHY BARNEY IS A CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT:

 

-He has a string on his back which allows him to hang.

     To be perfectly honest, I am kind of a liar. I LOVE this Barney ornament because he has nothing to do with Christmas. He is quite the oddity on the tree because every other ornament is innately Christmas and has a story OR is an oddity so rich in its mystery that it belongs on the tree as sort of an ‘eye catcher.’ As for Barney, he falls into the neither category. I could literally take a toilet paper tube and write “Christmas 2012” and no one would deny that it definitively belongs on the tree more so than Barney Gumble getting tanked on the tree.

See what I mean!