‘Simpsons’ Fans Lament What We Lost With the New Intro Sequence

Ever since its introduction in just the second Simpsons episode “Bart the Genius” on January 14, 1990, the opening sequence of The Simpsons has been the single most iconic intro scene in American TV history. But like America itself, it’s been in decline since the 1990s.

Every Simpsons fan knows the sequence by heart — the shot opens as the camera soars through the clouds to a patch of blue sky where the title card awaits, announced by the angelic chorus. The camera goes through the show title to pan down on the town of Springfield, stylishly cutting between each member of the Simpsons family as they finish up their day’s activities and rush home to watch TV and engage in the week’s couch gag. Bart skateboards out of detention. Lisa boogies her way out of band practice. Homer tosses a nuclear rod onto the street. And Marge, distracted in the checkout line of the grocery store, recoils in shock that gives way to relief as Maggie gets scanned and placed in a bag.

Though the bones of the intro have remained mostly the same through 35 seasons, the individual scenes themselves have changed significantly along with The Simpsons' animation style — both for the worse, as many superfans recently bemoaned. The popular Simpsons fan account @CriminalSimpsons recently posted a side-by-side comparison of Marge’s grocery store mishap in its original style and in today’s cold, inexpressive animation, and it’s like seeing the Mona Lisa get repainted in Corporate Memphis:

The Simpsons opening sequence has actually undergone two major overhauls since its introduction almost 35 years ago. The first change occurred at the beginning of Season Two, when Simpsons artists reanimated and recolored the sequence to give the series a cleaner, freshly renewed feel. The animators also changed around the background characters to better reflect the supporting cast — like how Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief Wiggum and other favorites replaced the unnamed, sloppily drawn, rule-breaking crowd of bus-riding nobodies in the Bart-to-Maggie-and-Marge transition.

Then, in Season 20, even more noticeable alterations came to the opening sequence. The 2008 Simpsons artists drastically changed Springfield as it’s seen in the intro to better reflect the two decades of “progress” made in the Simpsons universe, adding nods to classic episodes with bits such as Jimbo and Kearney sawing off the head of the statue of Jebediah Springfield in a reference to “The Telltale Head.” At the grocery store, Marge’s checkout belt includes Tomacco juice, Mr. Sparkle detergent and Krusty-O’s cereal — along with Maggie, of course.

However, starting in Season 22, The Simpsons began to cut scenes from the intro, sometimes skipping directly from the title card into a semi-cold open. Since Season 30, if the intro is even included at all, it’s a dramatically abbreviated version that barely has time for the chalkboard and couch gags. In fact, Season 33 didn’t feature a single episode with a chalkboard gag at the beginning, possibly because modern Simpsons writers found it to be too much work to write a single funny line each week, or maybe because they couldn’t find a way to shoehorn their Twitter-level political commentary into the even-more-restrictive character limit.

In the replies of @CriminalSimpsons thread, animation fans with technical knowledge broke down exactly why the current intro — on the rare occasion that it actually plays before an episode — is an uninteresting, lazier and less lively alternative to the work of the 1990s animators. “The obvious shape-tweening parts too... God forbid you animate a head moving as a whole or a fist shaking without a shape tween nowadays,” one fan wrote of the new fist-shake bit between Maggie and Baby Gerald.

“The Simpsons used to have top quality animation smears,” another fan pointed out. “I get that computer graphics and 3D models have really smoothed out the creator’s work flow, but they’ve also taken out so much of the heart and soul of hand-drawn animation. The difficulty and the messiness defines the art.”

While the majority reaction to the comparison was a demand that The Simpsons return the intro to its roots, some fans think that a simple throwback intro isn’t enough to fix the many years of animation mistakes and missteps. In their opinions, the artists need to go even further. Said one such extremist, “Bring back Marge’s rabbit ears.”