I'm Not Doing This Post Until I get My Cheese Danish

So, the Simpsons movie. Like most people of my age, I think, I was an avid fan when the Simpsons first came on. It was the middle school/high school equivalent of a water cooler show, if you couldn't quote from last night's episode on Monday, you were just weird and suspicious. But, I think like a lot of others, my interest has faded over the years. It's obviously one of the greatest shows to make it on the air. Not just because it's a comedy and I think the best comedy's are harder to write well than the best drama – you have to do everything a drama does, have to move your audience the same, and still be funny doing it – but because it's also a cartoon. It's easy to overlook now when there's Family Guy and South Park but at the time there hadn't been an animated show on prime time since the Flintstones. We can thank The Simpsons for all those shows that have followed and, probably, in no small part the anime boom as well because they paved the way for treating cartoons as a somewhat serious medium. For that alone they get up there with All In the Family and Cheers and Seinfeld and all the other greats.

But, still, I just can't watch the show anymore. I'm not quite sure what it is because of the show has been remarkably consistent and high quality but any time I try to watch one of the more recent episodes, it just doesn't have the same magic it did during the first half or so of its 18 year run. It might be just familiarity, I've seen so many episodes and such that it's lost the ability to surprise me, just as much as it might be a decline in overall category. But the plots aren't as tight, the jokes don't have the same edge, the heartwarming bits are maudlin instead of, you know, heartwarming. One little pet theory I have is that shows have a finite life span. There's only so long that the creative energies that make them good can be kept in sync. The writers change, the actors grow, the zeitgeist shifts and what's left is a pale echo of what made the show a success in the first place. And I think the Simpsons is well past that point by now.

Which is not to say it's a bad show, really. It's a great show especially compared with some of the other crap that gets broadcast. But it's just not at the same creative highs as the early seasons and, I'd argue, it can't ever be again. Doesn't matter I suppose because like Sesame Street or SNL, it's become an institution. It's not going away any time soon.

Stepping off my soap-box for a moment, then, to review the actual movie, well, it's good. It's like a really good two-part episode from the past few years. If you've liked the Simpsons lately you'll love it. If you've loved the Simpsons in the past, well, there are fleeting glimpse of what the show used to be making the whole enterprise rather bittersweet. Probably my biggest complaint would be that the film succumbs to a fatal flaw in transitioning to the big screen and that's the urge to make everything bigger, grander, in order to fit the larger canvas. And, I'd imagine, to justify putting it on the silver screen in the first place. That's why the plot has the town in danger (Which, of course, has been done on the show before, as in Who Shot Mr. Burns which, really, compare the two and I think you get why I'm disappointed. Also, no Tito Puente in the movie.) and an astounding percentage of the shows hundreds of recurring characters show up. It's been made grander, the stakes have been upped along with the animation budget when, really, the show's always been at its best when taking a small slice of life and extrapolating from it and, I think, the movie would have been better of not to go over the top but to stay true to what made it successful in the first place, just translated into movie format – I'm not saying I want to see a 90 minute episode but that I wanted to see Simpsons as movie, if that makes sense. It's a perfectly good film, got some great laughs, and makes some great satirical points from the same inoffensive bi-partisan centrist place I find contemptible when people like David Broder start talking about it but at the same time you can't help but wonder what it would have been like if the movie had been made in 1991 or 1994 when the show was at its creative and cultural peak.

One of the interesting facts I learned researching the movie for this post wasn't that the producers had wanted to do a movie for a long, long time but that, originally, they'd intended what became the season 4 premier to be a movie script. That script became the classic episode “Kamp Krusty” (Aired, in, I believe, fall of 1992) the one where Bart and Lisa are sent to the poorly run Krusty brand summer camp (Led by your bestest buddy in the whole wide world...... Now here's... ...) which they take over in a Lord of the Flies moment? That was a damned good episode and, I think, it's easy to see how that framework could have been extended into a full length feature. Spend a little more time on the B-plots, on life at the camp before and after the kids take over, and tack on more of a coda with the kids on their trip to Tijuana and beyond with Krusty and throw in the budget for first rate animation and, yeah, that's a film I'd much rather watch than the one we actually have. Not just because I happen to like the plot a little more, happen to think it would be a much better use of the medium, but because I think the writing would have been sharper. The barbs, like the subtle criticism of the wave of Simpsons merchandising that was going on at the time, a little more biting. The jokes faster and funnier. Because whatever energy the show's lost over the years would still have been there.

Of course, you can say the same about a lot of the early episodes. They're so dense and packed with good stuff that you can imagine a lot of them spun into a feature film. Imagine if they'd done episodes like “Homer at the Bat” or, yes, even “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” as films. I'd personally have loved to have seen the Gabbo episode, with the dancing old people with their pants around their ankles, “Krusty Gets Cancelled” writ large. If only for the chance of more “Worker and Parasite”. But, hey, the movie in my head is usually better than the one that actually makes it to the screen. Because, the movie was never going to live up to the hype. It was always going to disappoint. In my head, though, it can be truly perfect.