The clip, easily one of the darkest, most despairing piece of animation to come down the pike since “Grave of the Fireflies,” kicks off with a bird carrying a dead rodent through the Springfield skies – and then it turns grim. Sure, the theme music and the sequence of events stays true to the show’s familiar themes – Bart cheekily writes “I must not write all over the walls” on the chalkboard, a Krusty billboard gets a little Banksied – but as the family takes its place on the couch, the action pulls away to an Asian animation sweatshop. How hellish is Banksy’s vision of how “The Simpsons” gets made? It makes a real sweatshop look like Club Med. Children dip animation cels in toxic waste while rats carry off human bones. Kittens are wood-chippered into Bart Simpson dolls, hauled off by tragic pandas. And do you even want to know how they put the holes in your DVDs? Chained up unicorns.

It’s a stunning indictment of harsh international working conditions and animal cruelty, a provocative statement on the  show’s reputed practice of outsourcing its animation to South Korea, and the most effective ad for Klonopin ever created. That the sequence would go viral faster than a case of mono on a Flava Flav-themed reality show was never in doubt. And sure enough, by Monday, if you didn’t have a friend who had forwarded you the clip, you likely just didn’t have a friend.

What’s truly extraordinary about the sequence — aside from its unyielding horror — is the level of public relations panic Fox must surely have to swallow to permit its own image to be depicted quite literally surrounded by barbed wire. Speaking to Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times Monday, Simpsons executive producer Al Jean said that they made a few changes to Banksy’s “even a little sadder” original vision, but that the network, which must by now be at least a little dead inside from the show’s ongoing jibes, gave its blessing to the stunt. 

It’s a bold move to the let one’s own troops fire upon oneself. But what would entertainment be without the master taking on a bit of public whipping from the servant? Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” came to vicious life when the host’s “toxic” relationship with NBC became grist for his late-night barbs – just as David Letterman’s show did likewise in its waning Peacock network era. Anybody can make a talk show. Saying you’re putting that talk show up for sale on Craigslist takes a special kind of awesome. Similarly, is “30 Rock” ever better than when it’s taking potshots from within the belly of the beast, imagining a network strategy of “reality content made exclusively for your mobile phone” that doesn’t sound all that different from GE’s own “diversification strategy that includes aggressive cable acquisition, global expansion, investment in film, and the development of innovative digital distribution.” And if Geffen hadn’t told Weezer to give them something a little more commercial, we’d be living now in a world without the bird-flipping delight of their reply, “Pork and Beans.”

Despite the numerous compromises artists make along the road to commercial appeal, the strange wonder of Banksy’s collaboration with “The Simpsons” – and by extension, Fox – is a reminder that envelopes are made to be pushed. And sometimes, somewhere in the highly charged space between the outpouring of creativity and the opening of purse strings, something tense and strange and fascinating emerges. And it looks like a chained up unicorn.

Thursday marks the show’s two-decade anniversary – an event that serves as a reminder not only of the show’s extraordinary staying power, but also the extent to which it’s disappeared from the cultural conversation. While “The Family Guy” and “South Park” have kicked up controversy – tackling subjects like Scientology and abortion – “The Simpsons” seems to have aged from envelope-pushing misfit to grandfatherly institution. But as John Ortved argues in “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History,” an oral history of the show’s tumultuous rise and creative demise, the “Simpsons’” legacy continues to be felt everywhere from “Wall-E” to Barack Obama’s speechwriting.

Salon spoke to Ortved over the phone about the show’s effect on television comedy, Marge’s recent Playboy cover, and whether it’s finally time to pull the plug.

I guess the obvious first question is: Why has the show lasted so long?

I think “The Simpsons” has lasted so long because its initial seasons – the first five – laid strong and solid groundwork. It was an amazing combination of creative forces and timing. Fox was a brand-new network. There was relatively nothing else on TV. Then you had the creative force of Matt Groening’s original drawing style, the brilliant humor of Sam Simon and the writing room he put together, and James L. Brooks’ ability to create fine dramedy.

But clearly you think it’s gone downhill.

I think that the show’s drop in quality has been both a gradual one and a relative one. I think to be fair to the writers and to be fair to Matt Groening, there’s only so much you can do with a set of characters in a situation. I mean, no one has written a show for 20 years. It’s amazing that they’re still funny at all. As the show sort of moved away from its roots, starting around the sixth season, and the show kind of got a little zanier, the show became sort of unmoored from those emotional character-driven plots that initiated the series. You really start to get 21 minutes of throwaway jokes and then one minute of emotional reconciliation thrown in at the end.

After it hit that 10-year mark, the show had a serious drop-off in quality, and it’s just never, ever come back. They started relying on guest stars and more topical humor, which they can’t really do because the lead time is so long. So I think this actually speaks to how outdated their writing room is. They’ll do an “American Idol” episode, but they’ll do it four years after “American Idol” became this big thing. Or they’ll do an iPod episode, but they do an iPod episode in like 2006.

When I recently spoke with Mike Judge, he said the reason why “King of the Hill” had lasted so long was because they withstood the pressure to change the characters as they went. Otherwise, you keep making small deviations, and as you put people in increasingly outrageous situations, you lose what the show is even about.

I think that’s absolutely apt, and I think that is one of the things that happened with “The Simpsons.” Once that unmooring took place, there was no going back. When they tried to, they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the same chemistry in the room, and once you throw a bag of feathers off a roof, you can never collect them.

I used to watch the show all the time when I was a teenager, but now, as a man in his 20s in New York, I don’t think I know a single person who watches. Who do you think is still tuning in?

That’s a really good question. I still watch it. Not religiously, even though I don’t think it’s funny anymore. I think we’re creatures of comfort – people like you and me who grew up watching it every day when we came home from school. We really speak “Simpsons.” I think it’s actually interesting and important to note that President Obama’s chief speech writer is a 28-year-old guy. I mean there’s no way that “The Simpsons” hasn’t influenced the way that guy tells stories.

In what sense?

I think that audiences’ sense of irony, and audiences’ willingness to accept a certain level of irreverence, have been really influenced by “The Simpsons.” For example, I love that when the New York Post covered the Iraq Study Group’s report, the title was “Surrender Monkeys!” which is a “Simpsons” line.

That’s funny. I use that term all the time too, actually, and I totally forgot where I knew it from.

I would add that “The Simpsons” made audiences a lot smarter. They really raised the bar for what you could put out there and what audiences were ready for. I can’t say with any authority that we wouldn’t have “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” without “The Simpsons.” But I doubt it.

Given how extreme television has become, it seems so strange to me that the show was actually considered offensive when it first appeared.

It’s completely ridiculous if you look at TV now. Almost nothing is controversial now. I think part of the Simpsons’ early controversy was a bad publicity thing drummed up by the Bush White House when he was campaigning for his second term. With the Bushes going out and the Clintons coming in, there was this move from the right to make culture the focus. I don’t think there’s this switch overnight of “Full House” and Bush, then “The Simpsons” and Clinton, but I think that the controversy was part of a program to get people up in arms about family values.

What do you make of Marge’s recent Playboy cover? To me it seemed like a bizarre collaboration between two outdated brands.

I think it actually speaks to the Simpsons’ continued influence and their power that you could put a cartoon character on a magazine cover like Playboy and still sell it. The relevance of what “The Simpsons” had to say ended a long time ago, but it’s still relevant as a brand. They’ve opened a “Simpsons” ride in Universal Studios, and I would look for more of that stuff in the future, like a Simpsons Land.

Would you choose to pull the plug on the show if you could?

I think “The Simpsons” has always been a product of News Corp., and the decision to pull the plug will be when the show becomes unprofitable. They could do things to revamp it. There’s really two rooms working on the show: One room is [executive producer] Al Jean and his yes men, and the other room has the younger, hipper comedians. [The second room] sends jokes to the first room, and all their good stuff gets written out of it. I think if they were to save the show, they would need to get rid of the show runner and really shake up the writing room. I don’t know if they’ll ever get it back to the level they had, but they could start making great episodes again.

Who do you think is the direct heir to “The Simpsons”?

Without sounding too cheesy, I think contemporary television is itself the heir. I think “The Simpsons” in one way or another gave us most of what’s smart and progressive in television. But I consider the most direct heir to be Zach Galifianakis’ “Between Two Ferns.” For something that awkward and meta-theatrical to be accepted by a wide audience, we have to thank “The Simpsons.”

To me, the most direct descendants are the Pixar films – with their mix of child-friendly comedy and adult satire.

I think that’s astute not just because Brad Bird left “The Simpsons” to make “Iron Giant,” then Pixar movies. When I talk about redefining our humor, the way that “The Simpsons” constructs stories, in which they go from having an A and a B story in a classic sitcom to having four to five storylines, you can see that in the Pixar movies.

Given the proliferation of cable channels and the Internet, do you think there will ever be another TV show that has as big an impact on our culture as “The Simpsons”?

There will never be another show or entertainment program as wide-reaching as “The Simpsons.” It’s largely a question of timing. Fox was the fourth network. They hit all these timing buttons right on the head. It was the last time that a network TV show could be that omnipresent – because of the choices, because of the cable networks, because of satellite, because of Zach Galifianakis.

But, if there’s ever a Zach Galifianakis ride at Universal Studios, I’ll definitely be paying money for it.

An iconoclast in the guise of a traditional housewife, Simpson has always steadfastly defied conventional expectations. As the wife of nuclear plant worker Homer J. Simpson and mother to three high-maintenance children, she fulfills the traditional domestic role of chief cook and bottle washer. But she has also been a cop and a pretzel entrepreneur, is active at her children’s school and local government, and, like Jack White and Anna Wintour, retains a fiercely independent personal style, resisting trends and favoring her trademark green wardrobe and blue bouffant.

She’s also abundantly comfortable in her sexuality. Despite the demands of her hectic schedule and the challenges of being in a long-term relationship with a man who has a crayon in his brain, she retains a healthy attitude toward her erotic life and makes sex a priority. The fact that she’d decide to flaunt some of that yellow flesh in the pages of Playboy is an unsurprising move from a woman who’s traveled the world, gone on the lam from the law, and been a competitive bodybuilder.

So while dlisted.com was quick today to put down Marge for her pictorial, dismissing it as “ho shit,” she herself is probably laughing it off. A churchgoer and member of her town’s Citizens’ Committee on Moral Hygiene, Mrs. Simpson has never conflated being a good person with being a prude. And in a year that’s featured Kim Kardashian, Lisa Rinna and Heidi Montag on the cover of Playboy, the smart, adventurous and very funny Marge is the most appealing — and downright real — woman to grace the magazine in a hell of a long time.

Some pilots will raise the temperature slightly in the belief that it helps people sleep, but this is pretty rare. Adjusting the temp controllers is very common while on the ground or during climb and descent, but once at cruise, we set the dials to a recommended position (a known and stable comfort zone) and basically leave them alone until somebody complains.

On the jets I fly, there are three temperature zones adjustable from the cockpit (forward, mid and aft, plus a separate controller for the cockpit). The equipment does a very good job, though the temperature values we see on the gauges aren’t always reflective of the exact comfort level. Over the course of a long flight, we’ll typically get three or four calls from the cabin attendants asking us to raise or lower the temperature slightly.

Many times I have been on a plane when, just after pushing from the gate, the interior begins to fill with the strong smell of jet fuel. This odor usually hangs around for a while and then dissipates.

This is a semi-common occurrence during engine starts. What you’re smelling is backflow of exhaust fumes drawn into the air conditioning units. It’s not an ideal situation, obviously, but usually it lasts only a minute or two, until the engine reaches idle speed. To some extent it depends on the wind. As you would being stuck in traffic next to a truck or a bus, you get a quick taste of the vehicle’s exhaust if the breeze is blowing a certain way.

Our regional jet had started its takeoff roll when suddenly the pilots slammed on the brakes. We pulled off the runway and stopped for several minutes. When the captain finally made an announcement, he told us that such-and-such a system “didn’t come on” during takeoff and that he would “give it another try.” We then departed without incident, but I kept thinking: What system wouldn’t activate until takeoff? Shouldn’t everything be up and running by then?

Not necessarily. Some systems are designed to engage at certain speeds or certain engine power values. The auto-throttles, auto-brakes and auto-spoilers, for instance. A failure to arm wouldn’t by itself be unsafe, but it might entail a discontinued takeoff.

However, takeoffs are aborted for such failures only at low speeds. Any systems designed to engage during takeoff will (or will not) do so quickly, within a few seconds of commencing the roll. Pilots will not abort in the high-speed realm unless it’s something very serious. Only a small handful of things will bring on an abort if a jet is anywhere close to liftoff speed.

As for that 10-minute delay before the second attempt, aborted takeoffs are taken seriously regardless of the speed or reason, and usually a crew needs to get clearance from its dispatchers or maintenance staff before, as your captain so inelegantly put it, “trying again.” This can take a little while, especially if a system also needs to be reset (or deferred as inoperative). There are also brake-cooling issues to consider. A subsequent attempt can take place only if the brake temperatures are below a certain value for a certain amount of time.

I recently flew on Lufthansa from Frankfurt, Germany, to London. After takeoff the plane banked abruptly and repeatedly — beyond 30 degrees, I’d estimate — with a significant pushed-into-the-seat G-force feeling. Is the training different for European pilots? I’m just curious if certain airlines have a reputation for training pilots to fly “harder”?

There are no significant differences in the way European pilots are trained. In any case, airline training does not teach basic flying technique. It teaches procedures, aircraft systems and crew coordination. What you experienced was probably just a product of the departure profile. In Europe, because of noise abatement rules, departure paths are often tightly packed with turns and climbs.

I doubt your pilot would have gone past 20 or 25 degrees of bank while turning. When hand-flying, you are following a guidance device known as a flight director, and it will not command anything higher than that. If he’d gone a nudge past the commanded angle, it would have been a momentary thing.

Passengers have a tendency to grossly overestimate the angles of bank, descent and climb. For turns, figure 20 degrees maximum. You’ll never be more than 15 or 18 degrees nose-high, and even a steep descent is under 10 degrees nose-low.

Two weeks ago, a Fokker 100 jet landed in Stuttgart, Germany, without its main landing gear. Is that kind of emergency taught and practiced in flight training, or did we see a mixture of talent and good luck?

This was fairly serious since it involved failure of the main gear, beneath the wings and fuel tanks, rather than the nose gear. But there was no fire or major structural damage, thus little chance of death or injury.

This is not something you can train for in a simulator. If you know the gear has a problem, you touch down as slowly and gently as feasible — basically you make a normal landing.

In an incident like this, the crew shows its mettle in the way it prepares for and carries out the emergency evacuation. The hands-on aspects of “flying” have fairly little to do with it.

Landing gear (and engines too) are great sources of passenger worry, but to an extent they’re an airframe’s most expendable zones. Gear problems sit pretty close to the bottom on a list of a pilot’s worst nightmares. If the public has become hard-wired to panic over gear mishaps, much of that is due to the televised landing of a JetBlue Airbus back in 2005 — perhaps the most grotesquely overhyped airplane incident of all time. The plane’s nose tires were cocked, and the forward strut collapsed on landing, sending a rooster-tail of sparks down the runway. It was made-to-order fare for the news channels, but a minor event from the crew’s point of view.

More on gear and tire dangers here, in one of my favorite-ever columns.

One of the things that bothered me most about last winter’s Air France crash was the lack of a Mayday call prior to the plane going down — something you didn’t address in your coverage of the accident. Does the absence of a distress call strike you as unusual? Does it mean anything?

No. At the point over the ocean where the crash occurred, the pilots would have been communicating with air traffic control by voice over high-frequency radio and/or by means of an on-board datalink unit. Sending even simple messages by these methods is relatively time-consuming and is not something the pilots would have been concerned with in the heat of a serious emergency. Maybe you have this Hollywood-inspired image of a pilot with a microphone in his hand, saying, “Mayday, Mayday, this is Air France…” It doesn’t happen that way. The first order of business in an emergency is to keep control of the aircraft and deal with the problem. Once in a while — diverting off the organized “track” system over the North Atlantic, for instance — communicating takes a higher priority, but as a rule you do not make radio calls until time and circumstance afford.

GO-AROUNDS

Re: Music and pop culture

The theme I want to explore this week is the phenomenon of great artists tailspinning unexpectedly into mediocrity.

Creative decline is to some degree inevitable and happens to everybody. It happened to my idols Kurt Vonnegut and Spalding Gray. It happened to Patrick Smi … Well, not to everybody. But the fall is often strikingly sudden and unattributable to the usual suspects — to old age, say, or substance abuse.

We see this a lot in music, which we’ll get to in a minute, but first, can we talk for a minute about “The Simpsons”? I lamented this popular show’s remarkable downfall in a column a few weeks ago, but I need to elaborate.

How tragic it has been for something once so brilliant to become so crass and embarrassing. Poor Matt Groening — only those six-figure royalty checks, I imagine, keep him from drowning himself in the California surf. From 1990 through 1995, “The Simpsons” presented what was arguably the most cunning satire in the history of television. What made it so was its style — its masterfully hewn characters, rapid-fire comic timing, and a welcome lack of the sort of self-congratulatory comic vanity the networks normally give us. The scripts were wry and irreverent but never obnoxious. “The Simpsons” was art.

And then something — I don’t know what, precisely — began to go terribly wrong. There is no single moment — a switch of writers or producers, for instance — that commenced the demise, but within a season or two the scripts began falling apart. By 1998 the show was unwatchable, and it has remained that way: tediously self-conscious, bloated with slapstick and annoying plots hitched cheaply to various events and celebrities (and products) drawn from popular culture.

Am I the only one who feels this way? In October 1990, the openly gay actor Harvey Fierstein appeared in a fondly remembered episode playing Homer’s personal assistant, Karl. Watching this episode today, you see how deftly the writing and directing were able to incorporate the theme of implicit homosexuality. Not once is the word “gay” uttered; there are no political overtones or kitschy ironic references to Karl’s sexuality. By comparison, one need only to endure the 1997 guest appearance of filmmaker John Waters to see how weak and witless the scripts would become. When Fierstein was asked to appear in a sequel to his 1990 appearance, he found the script so void of subtlety and overflowing with kitsch that he refused not only the initial offer but a rewrite as well.

What ever made the show sick, it so unraveled its DNA that today, in reruns, the eras are plainly distinct: A veteran fan can usually differentiate “Simpsons” old from “Simpsons” new within the first 10 seconds or so.

Sadly, the longer “The Simpsons” plays on, the weaker and more diluted it becomes in our cultural memory. Somebody kill it, please.

Switching now to music:

In a column this past summer I made reference to the Jesus and Mary Chain, and how that band was never able to replicate the mastery of its debut album, “Psychocandy.” Not everybody agreed, and similarly I caught some grief for my dissing of the Replacements in this space a week ago. I expected that to happen, though frankly it wasn’t much of a dis. I described the Replacements’ debut LP, 1981′s “Sorry Ma Forgot to Take Out the Trash,” as nothing less than “the greatest garage rock album of all time.” It might be more than that, actually, and at the very least it is a must-have for any connoisseur of American underground rock. But then I went on to submit that the Replacements’ late-career material was by comparison a big disappointment. That’s what got your letters coming in, calling me an idiot and “old” and such.

But I believe that I’m right. There’s a tendency, I think, for once-marginalized musicians to grow overconfident. And when they do, their albums become overextended, self-conscious and self-indulgent. “Tim,” released in ’85, was the last memorable effort from the Replacements. Next came the gutless “Pleased to Meet Me,” marking the unfortunate point where the ‘Mats jumped the shark. (If you need additional proof, Wikipedia reports that Green Day vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong said of seeing the Replacements perform live after the release of “Pleased to Meet Me”: “It changed my whole life.”)

This was around the same time that Hüsker Dü, that other indie sensation from the Twin Cities, also jumped the shark. They signed with Warner Brothers and promptly treated us to an album named “Candy Apple Grey.” There are two outstanding cuts on that record: the bookends “Crystal” and “All This I’ve Done for You,” both written by Bob Mould. But they are poor compensation for the horror of Mould’s “Too Far Down” or the piano-laced abomination that is Grant Hart’s “No Promise Have I Made,” one of the most pretentious rock songs in history. Every copy of “Candy Apple” ought to be tracked down, baled up and scuttled at sea, the owners given even-exchange copies of “Metal Circus,” “New Day Rising” or “Zen Arcade.”

These sorts of collapses can happen surprisingly early in a band’s career. Consider REM, whose first two full-length albums, “Murmur” and “Reckoning,” are masterworks. But the latter was released in 1984, more than a quarter-century and dozens of watery, throw-away albums ago.

I think REM lost it around the time Michael Stipe decided to sing in actual lyrics rather than in tongues. If you’ve got a copy of “Murmur” around, throw on the song “Shaking Through.” It’s beautiful. And it’s also hilarious, because although Stipe sings in a slow and meticulous voice, with every syllable perfectly audible, you still can’t understand a single word he’s saying! As a sign on a bin in a Boston record shop once put it: “REM: The only band that mutters.”

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Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling isn’t a bad metaphor for “The Simpsons Movie,” if only for the way Groening and Brooks (two of the 11 screenwriters who worked on the picture) and director David Silverman (“Monsters, Inc.”) find so many smart ways to use the movie screen’s larger canvas. The story — and I promise to give you only the barest rundown — is an environmental epic laid out in a series of elbow-noodle turns: Lisa (Yeardley Smith), at 10 the conscientious elder daughter of the family, launches a campaign to clean up the ultra-polluted lake in the town of Springfield, where the Simpsons live. The presentation she gives to the town assembly is called “An Irritating Truth.” Simultaneously, Homer (Dan Castellaneta), in between the eating of doughnuts, instigates an environmental disaster, involving a silo marked with the nearly poetic legend “Pig Crap.” Meanwhile, id-kid Bart (Nancy Cartwright) skateboards nude through the town, on a dare from his father. And Marge (Julie Kavner), she of the blue beehive and quavery vowels, busies herself trying to talk sense into her husband (a practically futile task if ever there was one), tending to baby Maggie (who wanders, Swee’Pea-like, into various blithe misadventures, including an encounter with a backyard sinkhole) and doing her best to keep the house tidy. In one of the movie’s sweetest touches, she pauses during a life-and-death moment to grab, wash and wipe a single plate sitting in the sink, as perfect a summation of her dedication to her role as you could wish for.

The bigger idea wrapped around the higgledy-piggledy plot details of “The Simpsons Movie” — the waffle around the butter, if you will — involves not just the necessity of taking care of our planet but the importance of flexibility and forgiveness in family life. The latter, especially, is a favorite “Simpsons” theme, but what keeps it from ever being cloying, in the show and in the movie, is the way Groening and his writers so persistently revel in bad parenting — a bold, gleeful exaggeration of the style of parenting many of us grew up with, in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, when parents raised kids even as they were also busy smoking and drinking in the backyard, instead of organizing every minute around the children’s activities and imagined needs.

Despite the fact that Homer allows — no, encourages — Bart to hang from the edge of their house’s roof, you can never quite call him a bad parent: He always comes through in the clutch, more or less, making him a vital and concrete metaphor for the imperfection of human beings, and of parents — either the parents we are or the parents we had, or both. That, and he eats all the things we wish we could eat (and some we don’t) without guilt or reservation.

Cartoons that work beautifully on TV often get swallowed up by the big screen, as anyone who sat through the static and dopey “Beavis and Butt-head Do America” will recall. But with “The Simpsons,” the filmmakers find inventive ways to use the extra acreage available to them, expanding on the show’s various mythologies without sacrificing its loose-limbed, easygoing intimacy. One of the recurring gags of the show is that no one knows exactly where Springfield is. When the Simpsons’ deeply religious and even more deeply annoying neighbor Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) takes Bart on a hiking trip, he waves at the vista spread before them, like a map of the territories of L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and tells Bart that from this single spot, they can see the four states bordering Springfield: Ohio, Nevada, Maine and Kentucky. But the movie’s most brilliant moment is a gag involving a (cartoon) penis and a very long hedge. Even if you could get away with the subject matter on TV (which you couldn’t), it would be a stretch to make the gag work visually. Here, it’s an example of the filmmakers’ exalting in the wide-open territory of the big screen instead of fearing it.

I went into “The Simpsons Movie” in a lousy mood and came out on the other side of the conveyor belt, reconditioned and rejuvenated. The picture works because, despite the fact that it took nearly six years for the filmmakers to bring it to the screen, it doesn’t strive for greatness. It’s fleet, concise and clever in a nut-ball way. On the seventh day, God looked at all he created and saw that it was good. Then he let one rip.