Simpsonania

After two decades on TV, "The Simpsons" has been made into a movie. Here Matt Groening is surrounded by costumed representatives of the cartoon family he thought up: Left to right, Lisa, Homer, Marge, Bart and Maggie (all but Bart named after Groening's own family members), at the movie's premiere in Springfield, Vt., which beat out 13 other Springfields to host the premiere.

"The Simpsons" was created two decades ago as 20-second cartoon shorts inserted before the commercials in the comedy series "The Tracy Ullman Show." As Homer historians will tell you, the cartoon family debuted in April 1987, looking a little different in appearance from when the segments were spun off into a half-hour series in 1989.

"The Simpsons" has evolved. Eighteen seasons, 400 episodes, and 23 Emmy Awards later (as well as $2.5 billion in revenue; much of that money coming from Bart bikes and pinball machines and greeting cards and T-shirts), the show is billed as the longest-running prime-time animated series in history and the longest-running comedy on prime-time television.

The creators of "The Simpsons" establish early in "The Simpsons Movie" the challenge they face in turning their TV series into a film. The family is shown in a movie theater watching a scene from an "Itchy and Scratchy" animated film. "I can't believe we're paying for something we get free on TV," Homer exclaims.

Perhaps the nude scene -- what Variety calls "Bart's sure-to-be-talked-about skateboarding sequence" -- was one way to distinguish the movie from the TV show. It's not, however, why the movie received a PG-13 rating. That was for "irreverent humor throughout" -- which sounds like a description that 20th Century Fox would gladly have paid the Motion Picture Association of America to receive.

Eleven writers, current and former producers of the TV series are credited with putting together a movie nearly four times the length of a single episode. A wider screen is filled with more details, the characters are given shadows denied them on the home screen, and there are some 100 speaking characters -- all of them mad at Homer.

The reason why they are all angry has to do with ...

... Homer's new pet pig, and ...

... pollution ...

... and President Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to quarantine the entire city of Springfield under a huge dome.

But the plot, as Matt Groening told the LA weekly, "doesn't matter. I mean, I can't imagine somebody going 'Well, I think I won't see the film because of what the story is...'" Viewers like the gags ...

... and the loopy adventures ...

... and the satire of American society (this still is from the 17th season of the TV series, not from the movie.) Homer Simpson beat out Abraham Lincoln as "The Greatest American" in a BBC poll taken in 2003.

To say the show is about family would be too easy to mock; after all, two of the most common words used to describe "The Simpsons" are "irreverent" and "unsentimental."

But surely, a sense of family has developed among the six actors who have voiced most of the characters for the past two decades and do so again in the movie, including (right to left) Dan Castellaneta, who does the voice of Homer, and at least a dozen other characters; Groening; Yeardley Smith, who does Lisa; Hank Azaria, who voices Moe, Apu and others; Nancy Cartright, who does the voice of Bart and other kids.

One could even regard the show sentimentally when discovering that Philippe Peythieu and Valerie Augereau spent a dozen years dubbing "The Simpsons" into French -- he played Homer, she Marge -- before they fell in love, and got married ... real-life Simpsons, without the yellow skin and purple hair.