I'd like to highlight both of these for a moment, because it's fascinating to me how people can be this wrong, Bob most of all.
First off, since when has China pandering stopped? Gay scenes continue to be cut out of movies (though this is also done for other foreign markets that don't like the gays), Chinese actors or locations are shoehorned into blockbusters, and studios are constantly groveling at Winnie the Pooh's feet to be allowed to release in China. Hell, do we even need to bring up the Mulan remake, which was basically one giant Chinese dicksuck, down to thanking the government of the region where the Uyghur concentration camps are located?
Second, it's wholly justified to point out the double standards at play with Disney and other woke corporations. They talk up a big game with "diversity is our strength" and "love is love" and whatever other platitudes, but as soon as they need to make a buck in "backwards" parts of the world, they'll throw those beliefs out the window. They're not sincere, they never have been, and continuing to support them because you've been tricked into thinking they actually are progressive makes you an absolute idiot.
Finally, no, it was not a given that the Japanese and Taiwanese flags would have been put back onto the Top Gun jacket. The reason they were taken off in the first place is because Tencent was initially going to be a major investor in the movie's production, but eventually they backed out because it was too pro-USA for them (and
Lord is it ever). Once that happened, and with the movie probably never opening in China (there's no box office receipts there to my knowledge), there was no need to worry about China pandering, so the flags were put back on. Bob's pretending like this was some great marketing ploy when the reality is that, once you don't have to please a particular country, you're free to make the movie how you want to.
And with results like the single biggest Memorial Day opening weekend in history, I think that was the smart move.
There are countless examples to point to to show how The Simpsons has degraded in quality over the years. For starters, one could simply look at
the average viewers per season. The first few years, about 20 million people were tuning in every week, and viewership remained strong for many of the early seasons. But then, the average viewers started to decline, to the point where the latest season had a paltry 2.32 million average viewers, with many episodes barely cracking a million. There simply aren't a lot of people still watching nu-Simpsons.
This could be anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but I'd also heard that when FXX did their marathon of every Simpsons episode, there was a definite correlation between the good and bad seasons and how many people were tweeting about it. When the first few seasons were on, people were chatting about them constantly, but once it moved into Zombie Simpsons territory, reactions dropped off considerably.
I also wouldn't be surprised to find that most local stations that have syndication rights overwhelmingly air the early seasons as opposed to the later ones. Why show episodes that nobody will watch when the classics are right there waiting for you? The only cable networks that have syndication rights are FXX and Freeform, both of which are owned by Disney, so they're not really making money off of syndication there. And while I'm sure DVD sales provide some revenue, I'm guessing it's not that much.
The Simpsons keeps going because the showrunners don't want to admit it's long past its prime. Even if nobody's watching anymore, even if the quality is completely downhill, even if it's nowhere near the cultural institution it used to be, they'll keep cranking out season after season just to say they're still relevant. I'd almost say that the death of one of the core voice actors might be enough to kill the show for good, but it feels like they might happily recast them to keep going, or worse, deepfake them.
