[WillG]

Looks like it has officially started

From the NY Post

Quote:

June 8, 2005 -- 'THE Simpsons" movie is finally under way, says one of its stars.
"You know what? We've just done the table read for the 'Simpsons' [movie]," Nancy Cartwright, better known as the voice of Bart Simpson, told the BBC.

"So although we've been promoting that we're going to do it, now we're actually doing it and are in production. I'm sure it won't take any less than a couple of years," she said.

"I don't know the name of it, and I can't go into details about it," Cartwright said. "We'll just have to see how it goes, but I think it's going to be great and the fans are going to dig it."

The rest can be read here: http://www.nypost.com/entertainment/47895.htm

[Lynda-Marie]

The mind boggles... just what will the Simpson family be up to on the big screen? Can't wait!

[Adam Lenhardt]

Hope they bring James L. Brooks in to work his magic on this one. If it's the current writing staff, might as well throw in the towel now.

[Adam Portrais]

Sorry, but I think that The Simpsons are just about as funny as they've ever been. Sure there are some hit and miss jokes here and there, but you try coming up with new material after 17 years. As for The Simpsons on the big screen, I don't know. The show itself has commented on how movies made from TV shows suck (it's in the episode The Ziff Who Came To Dinner, the one with The Re-deading (Baby Button Eyes), and the kids are talking about the movie "The Wild Dingleberries", can't remember the exact quote).

[Adam Lenhardt]

It's cheap humor though. I thought maybe I'd just overrated the show until I went back to the early seasons on DVD and realized just how genuine emotion there was at times back then. Modern Simpsons mocks such sentiment and character development. If I'm going to pay ten bucks to sit through and hour and a half to two hours of something, I better get more out of it than the ocassional laugh I get from modern Simpsons.

[Jonathan T.]

I can see wher you are coming from Adam. TO a certain extent, ALL sitcoms chnage in a similar way over their lives. So many shows started out very "small" and character driven, like Friends, Seinfeld, Frasier, King of Queens, Family Matters, The Jeffersons, and begin to rely on gimicks and zany plot devices as they age. Sometimes the shows survive this shift and continue to be funny, but in different way, like Seinfeld, and Frasier, and other times they evolve into something awful and you wish they would just die, like Family Matters and Friends, and worst of all Rosanne (WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THAT ONE????)

Thankfully the Simpsons is in the former group, and I look forward to the movie. I imagine Groening will become directly invloved on what could end up being a send off for the yellow family.

[MatthewA]

I disagree. The other shows you mentioned were never held on such a high pedestal. I detested Friends, and the only show you mentioned that I ever cared for was The Jeffersons, but that's not the point. They never made any big-budget films out of those series and probably never will. There is not now, nor do I think there ever will be, a college course on Movin' on Up 101.

But lately on the Simpsons, a cheap laugh would be better than none at all. Hopefully it's because they are saving their better material for this film. But the writers they have now are just phoning it in, and using any excuse to justify the often dreadful scripts, increasing the ratio of overall bad-to-good episodes. They have publicly claimed that the 22-minute length is not enough time to resolve plots, and then said the new episodes are competing against "memories" of the old ones. And then bashing other shows while trying to ape their style (Family Guy) wreaks of hypocrisy.

Is this an elaborate commentary on shows that start out good but degenerate into schlock? I doubt it.

Gimmicks are not any good unless they actually work.

I was in England a few months ago, where the show is still popular, and the entertainment press and airport inserts act like the show is still friggin' Shakespeare.

Bottom line: A show that should have ended no later than 2000 is using its current writing staff for a motion picture. I'm praying for a miracle.

You may think I hate this show but that's simply not the case. It pains me to see this show degenerate into a mess. It's like watching an elderly relative you love very much die from dementia.

[Jonathan T.]

Quote:

The other shows you mentioned were never held on such a high pedestal.

Are you crazy? No offense, but are you crazy? sure Family Matters and Frasier may not have ever reached the stratosphere like The Simpsons has, but Friends and Seinfeld certainly did, and the only reason we won't see movies based on these shows is because the formats of each would be completely untranslatable into the movie format.

Quote:

I detested Friends

Do you claim to speak for the entire tv viewing population? Because I'd think you'd find that Friends was far more popular than the average sitcom... Just asking....

Quote:

A show that should have ended no later than 2000 is using its current writing staff for a motion picture. I'm praying for a miracle

How do you know that? What's your source?

[Fred Bang]

I personally think that the idea sucks.

We're gonna have another Flintstones movie on our hands.

[Fred Bang]

Forget my previous post. I somehow conclude that a Simpson movie would automatically be a 'live action' movie (like the dreaded Flintstones movies), but I guess its animated, right?

[WillG]

Quote:

but I guess its animated, right?

I would assume since apparently it was the voice actors who did the table read.