Thursday, January 07, 2010

A supersized 'Simpsons' marks show's 20th anniversary


By Bill Keveney, USA TODAY

Overachiever — and proud of it.

TV's longest-running comedy celebrates two decades of irreverence Sunday with the hour-long Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special: In 3-D! On Ice! (Fox, 8:30 ET/PT).

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me, 30 Days) traveled from Scotland, which loves Groundskeeper Willie, to Brazil, which hates its depiction in an episode, to document the show's widespread cultural influence. (Don't worry. It has clips and other funny stuff, such as a guy whose back is completely covered by Simpsons tattoos, another who has turned his home into a memorabilia warehouse and Moby playing one of his seven interpretations of Homer's Mr. Plow song.)

"Our goal was to bring the (special) in through the viewpoint of how the world sees the show and how the show sees the world. We spoke to a ton of fans, the people who kept the show on the air for 20 years," Spurlock says.

One of those fans is Spurlock. He first saw the yellow family in a series of animated vignettes on The Tracey Ullman Show in the late 1980s.

"It was really smart, and it treated viewers with a tremendous amount of intelligence," says Spurlock, who appears in the film as he does in his documentaries. "The show comes in with such a fantastic attitude about the world; it distrusts everything."

Read the rest here

1 comment:

Johnny Sweatpants said...

I don't get it. Is it in 3D or not?

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