|
| courtesy of matt groening |
 Road trip: The Simpsons enjoy a family outing far from their Springfield home in "The Simpsons" movie. |
|
The Simpsons are going Hollywood.
Not to Hollywood, mind you. That's been done before, in one of the 400 episodes of the TV series featuring America's favorite cartoon family. In fact, there aren't many places - or plots - that haven't already been visited by Homer Simpson, the disturbingly inept employee of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and his nuclear family over the last 18 seasons.
So what fresh ideas did the show's creators come up with for Fox's "The Simpsons Movie," opening Friday, the franchise's long-awaited foray onto the big screen?
"Well, the original concept ... was Homer falls in love with a pig, and then it just wrote itself," creator Matt Groening said, laughing.
Other details have been harder to come by. To keep the plot a surprise, the studio did not screen the movie for the press. Fans attending test screenings were entreated not to leak details.
Movie and celebrity news blog
This Week's Question
Which Springfield would you have picked for the real Springfield? Check out the entired and make your pick or view others by visiting juneaublogger.com/movies.
|
"I'll be happy to tell you anything about the plot of the movie - in about two weeks," the movie's director, David Silverman, told the New York Daily News.
Instead, the focus has been on a guerrilla marketing campaign almost as animated as the movie itself. For the month of July, 11 7-Elevens in the United States - and one in Canada - were recast as "Kwik-E-Marts," after the show's fictional convenience store, home of the "Buy Three for the Price of Three" promotion.
Certain tidbits, however, have reached the Internet, such as the revelation that Bart Simpson, the mischievous, serrated-haired 10-year-old, briefly appears nude.
"It's not that big a deal," Groening said. "If you look at the Simpsons and note how simply they're designed, you can imagine if you see Bart's doodle, it really is literally a doodle."
There was nothing simple, however, about making "The Simpsons Movie" while continuing to churn out episodes for the series' upcoming 19th season.
Silverman says close to 100 animators worked more than 18 months on the movie. In the end, there were 100 speaking parts.
And all this after it took four years just to come up with a script that everyone could agree on.
"We were writing up until a week and a half ago," says producer James L. Brooks, who knows a thing or two about movies as the Academy Award-winning writer-director of "Terms of Endearment" and "Broadcast News."
Impressed by Groening's "Life in Hell" comic strips, Brooks commissioned the artist to come up with material for animated shorts that would play on the "The Tracey Ullman Show." The first aired in April 1987. Dan Castellaneta (Homer) and Julie Kavner (his loyal wife, Marge) were "Tracey Ullman Show" veterans who are still voicing the same parts almost two decades after that show went off the air.
Twenty-three Emmys later, the series is still going strong - though maybe not the craze it was back when everyone was doing "The Bartman" dance.
"It may not fit the times as well as it used to," said Elayne Rapping, a pop-culture expert and professor of American Studies at the University of Buffalo. "(But) it must be doing something right. There is obviously still an audience."
