THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

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Language Level: advanced
Standard:American accent

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE

The Great American Family

The Simpson Movie is the much –awaited film version of the hilarious TV show film version of the same name. That the movie came out this year is fitting, given that the Simpson, a dysfunctional family of cartoon characters, made their debut on American television 20 years ago. They were originally a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, but were given their own 30-minute program on prime time in 1989.

SIMPLY THE BEST

Since then over 400 episodes of The Simpsons have been made. It is America’s longest-running animated program and it is currently the country’ longest-running sit com. In December 1999 Time magazine called it “the 20^th century’s best television series.”

The Simpsons were created by Matt Groening. He talked about the challenge of placing Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie on the big screen:

Matt Groening

(Standard American accent):

The Simpsons is a group effort. It’s a collaborative vision, a shared vision of a lot of people, hundreds of animators, 20 writers, a lot of producers, actors – actually, not that many actors; just a few actors doing a lot of voices –but, for the rest of us, for the rest of the production team, it’s a huge number of people and right now we have about 20 writers working on the show, and over the course of the last two decades, we took sort of “The Simpsons All Stars,” the best writers – well, not necessarily the best; the good…the ones who are writing now are really good, too but people who basically ran the show, and working with Jim Brooks, who developed the show with Gracie Films and guided The Simpsons to its success and fruition, we sat in a room, just up the stairs here, and threw out a whole bunch of different ideas and one hit and that’s what we ran with.

YOU’LL LOVE IT!

Groening was confident that the formula would work on the big screen:

Matt Groening:

At the very beginning of the process, we thought, “OK, we’re on the big screen, so we’ve got to take advantage of that,” so we’re using the widest possible screen format and the animation is more sophisticated and ambitious and there’s a lot more going on, and the story is big. It’s an epic story, and we tried some different kinds of jokes and we’ve changed a lot of stuff around. U would say the movie is still a family movie, but you know, if you’re bugged by the Simpsons on TV, you probably will be bugged by it in…the movie theaters, but if you’re not, you won’t be, you’ll love it. I think you’ll love it. The rating is PG 13, “for irreverent humor throughout,” which is…What? That’s the greatest review ever!

LOSERS!

Not surprisingly, Groening was asked to explain the enduring success of The Simpsons:

Matt Groening

You know, I don’t know exactly why the show is so successful all over the world. It’s not successful everywhere, but in a lot of places, it’s really, really successful, and I think in England, for instance, it seems to be more successful even than in the US, Australia it’s also very, very successful, Spain, France.

I mean it’s…it’s amazing. I’m thinking that maybe it’s because there’s a universal joy in seeing people that you can feel superior to! I think people love the idea that no matter how bad their lives are, at least they’re not as bad as the Simpsons!

Voice Artists (no audio available)

Remarkably few actors were required for making The Simpsons Movie. Dan Costellaneta, for example, does the voice of Homer Simpson, but also that of Itchy, Barney, Grampa, Krusty the Clown and Mayor Quimby. Harry Shearer (who was in the coast of Rob Reiner’s splendid 1984 film This is Spinal Tap) does the voices of Scratchy, the Reverend Lovejoy, “President Arnold Schwarzenegger” and the Simpsons’ irritating neighbor, Ned Flanders. The voice of Homer’s 10-year-old son Bart is provided by Nancy Cartwirght, a 49-year-old woman.