BIZZFAD

Lisa surrounded by Simpsons episode guides.

Although the Simpsons franchise has been spread across every conceivable medium in 2024, it was the episode guides that first truly captured the hearts and minds of Simpsons nerds. Many of us older fans have fond memories of waiting in line at Border’s for the midnight release of the next guide in the series.

After reading this IGN article, it occurred to me that for someone who’s completely new to Simpsons fandom, things can be a little daunting. For those of us who grew up reading the episode guides and watching the TV show, the reading order likely seems fairly obvious. But if you just happened to have a used copy of one or two of the episode guides, you may have no idea where to begin. To help you figure out where to start, I’ve put together this quick primer on reading the Simpsons episode guides in order below.

1. The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family

Published in 1997, this episode guide kicked off the series. It covers seasons 1 through 8, and even includes a small guide to the Ullman shorts written by creator Matt Groening himself. Some fans argue this is the only episode guide you need, but the choice is up to you.

2. The Simpsons Forever!: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family …Continued

This was the follow-up to the first episode guide. It’s much smaller, as it only covers two seasons, 9 and 10. Think of it as an addendum to the first guide. This would set the standard for the next four years.

3. The Simpsons Beyond Forever!: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family …Still Continued

The third episode guide in the series, this one covers seasons 11 & 12.

4. The Simpsons One Step Beyond Forever!: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family …Continued Yet Again

Covering seasons 13 & 14, this is the last of the traditional episode guides. I kinda wish they had continued this pattern of titles, just to see how convoluted they’d become (Twelve Steps Beyond Infinity…?) but maybe it’s for the best that they went in a different direction for the next one.

5. Simpsons World: The Ultimate Episode Guide: Seasons 1–20

This hefty tome covers every episode from season 1 through 20, so you basically don’t even need the previous episode guides. It reprints material from the previous episode guides, but it expands on that material by dedicating at least 2 pages for every episode, and adds new artwork. The book is pretty bulky and not very portable, so you might want to just stick with the previous episode guides. But seasons 15-20 is completely all-new material, so it’s worth buying if you’re a completionist.

As of this writing, seasons 21 through 36 have yet to be collected in the form of a physical episode guide, so it seems that – for now – the series has come to an end.

JOCK CENTER

CGI Simpsons football field with the logo for ESPN The Simpsons Funday Football. Ullman-era Homer is about to throw a football while Hans Moleman stands nearby.

For years, football has postponed The Simpsons, but soon you’ll be able to watch both at the same time! In what will surely be a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists, Monday Night Football is heading to Springfield where a live NFL game will be animated and brought into the Simpsons world using advanced VTuber technology.

An ESPN press release has all the details on this grotesque display of corporate synergy:

ESPN, Disney, the Simpsons and the National Football League will premiere The Simpsons Funday Football on Monday, Dec. 9, an animated Monday Night Football game transformed in real-time into the iconic Simpsons world using Sony’s Beyond Sports Technology. Atoms Stadium in Springfield will host the fully immersive fan viewing experience featuring the Cincinnati Bengals at the Dallas Cowboys, ESPN’s Monday Night Football game that evening.

The Simpsons Funday Football alternate viewing presentation will stream on Disney+ and ESPN+, and, on mobile, with NFL+. The traditional Monday Night Football telecast will be available on ESPN, ABC and ESPN Deportes with Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli on ESPN2. Both the traditional telecast and Peyton and Eli will also be on ESPN+, making each distinct presentation available in the ESPN App. All telecasts will begin at 8 p.m. ET.

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NOISELAND ARCADE

Homer and Bart are anguished to see a condemned sign on a chain-link fence. Behind the fence is a screenshot of Springfield from the Tapped Out game.

Electronic Arts has announced the mobile game The Simpsons: Tapped Out will be shut down on January 24, 2025. In-app purchases have already been disabled and the game will be delisted from app stores on October 31, 2024.

In a Facebook post, EA thanked fans for their “remarkable journey” together:

The decision to end our twelve-year journey is an emotional one. Together with our partners at The Simpsons™ and The Walt Disney company, we have delighted in bringing this game to you, the fans, and seeing how you’ve each built your own beloved versions of Springfield. It has been a remarkable journey, and we are grateful that we’ve been able to deliver 308 updates, 831 characters and including today’s final farewell 1,463 questlines.

Launched in 2012, Tapped Out is a “freemium” game that allows players to build their own version of Springfield, with storylines written by actual Simpsons writers. By playing through questlines and acquiring currency, players could obtain buildings and characters to populate their town, and/or purchase them with actual money. That last part is key: just two years after its launch, Tapped Out had generated over $130 million. While its popularity had decreased over the years, it was still making money: according to Statista, the game generated $4.38 million in the first five months of 2024. Critics have opined that such “freemium” games are more akin to video gambling than traditional video games.

While this has not been confirmed, the imminent shutdown of Tapped Out next year could be an indication that EA’s exclusive Simpsons license is expiring after 20 years. The publisher had signed a “long-term, exclusive deal” for the rights back in 2005. It released The Simpsons Game for multiple platforms in 2007, and… that’s been it for The Simpsons on consoles, outside of collaborations with Minecraft and LEGO. A writer for Screen Rant theorized that “considering the success of Tapped Out and the relatively mixed reviews previous Simpsons games received, EA may believe that it doesn’t need to make a new AAA video game based on the license.”

Earlier this year, it was announced that Disney and Epic Games will collaborate on an “all-new games and entertainment universe” featuring “content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more.” Whether The Simpsons will be a part of that universe remains to be seen.

RIP

A promotional image for Lisa's First Word featuring the Simpson family gathered around Maggie, who appears to be about to speak. There is an inset of James Earl Jones.

James Earl Jones, the voice of Maggie Simpson, died yesterday at the age of 93.

Jones was a titan of the stage and screen whose prolific acting career spanned decades, including such films as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The Hunt for Red October, Coming to America, and Field of Dreams, television work including Sesame Street, Gabriel’s Fire, the miniseries Roots: The Next Generations, and the television movie The Man, as well as the plays Fences and The Great White Hope. His trademark commanding baritone made him a natural for voiceover work, including his best-known roles as Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, Mufasa in The Lion King, and the guy who says “This… is CNN.” Jones received many awards and accolades over the years, including three Tony Awards, two Emmys, a Grammy, a lifetime achievement Oscar, and a Disney Legends award.

Jones voiced the iconic role of Maggie Simpson in the “Time and Punishment” segment of “Treehouse of Horror V.” [CNN]

PANEL PIECES

Homer chokes Bart during a Disney Legends animated segment.

The Walt Disney Company recently held its biennial D23 convention celebrating Disney and its various properties, which thanks to corporate consolidation and a lack of antitrust enforcement also includes The Simpsons! Here’s a roundup of all the Simpsons-related stuff.

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BIZZFAD

A blurry silhouette stands in front of the real-life Simpsons house. Lisa and Bart look apprehensive at the figure.

For as long as there have been Simpsons, mankind has pondered what they’d look like if they walked amongst us. Not as simplistic, googly-eyed, yellow-skinned cartoon characters, but as living, breathing human beings.

People have tried to fancast a live-action Simpsons movie for decades. Notable names like John Goodman, Ben Affleck, Danny McBride, Kevin James, Hardy Rawls, and even Dan Castellaneta have been bandied about as potential candidates to take on the lead role of Homer Simpson. As talented as those thespians may be, however, they would always be imperfect impostors. No, we want to know what Homer would look like in real life, not a real-life man wearing a Homer costume.

There are a number of factors to consider when contemplating a realistic version of Homer Simpson. What is the real-world analogue to the two croquet hoops of hair that crown his cranium? What would his five o’clock shadow look like without cartoonish abstraction? What is the texture of his white polo shirt? And what about his eyes, those windows to the soul? Would his glimmering blue irises still feel as recognizable to us as the simple black dots that grace our televisions? These are the questions that pervade our thoughts as we go about our ho-hum, mundane existence.

Some remarkable artists working in multiple mediums have attempted to take on this task. Their depictions of what Homer Simpson would look like in real life are wonderful, intriguing, and sometimes scary. As incredible as they may be, these works will nevertheless always be constrained by the skill level of the artist, their subjectivity, and their breadth of influences. We can – nay, we must – go further.

With the advent of artificial intelligence, we can now harness the combined power and computational knowledge of thousands of supercomputers trawling through trillions of terabytes of images to generate a realistic Homer. Yes, with just a few lines of text and a click of the computer mouse, we can glimpse upon the true visage of Homer Jay Simpson, the hero of Evergreen Terrace, the paterfamilias of Animation Domination.

Unfortunately, the AI system said we didn’t have enough tokens to generate the image. It seems that Realistic Homer Simpson is, for now, reserved for God’s eyes only.

UNRELATED SIMPSONS IN THE NEWS

Homer and OJ Simpson looking morose in a heavenly sports bar. They are in angelic garb with halos, eating onion rings. Behind them are a lot of TVs showing various football games.

Pro Football Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson, who was quite a character, has been permanently ejected from the game of life by cosmic forces, and also cancer. He was 76.

Born in 1947, Orenthal James Simpson, also known as “The Juice,” is widely regarded as one of the greatest football players of all time. During his time in the NFL, he was the first player to rush more than 2,000 yards in a season, and recorded an average of 143.1 yards rushing per game, a record that still holds today. The former Buffalo Bills running back also had a storied acting career as an ad spokesman for the Hertz rental car company and a recurring role in the Naked Gun franchise, before running into some legal problems in the mid-1990s.

Simpson claimed to be a fan of The Simpsons in a 1991 issue of Simpsons Illustrated, “especially the part at the beginning where Bart has to write on the blackboard.” Despite this, he turned down a role as a celebrity panelist in the classic episode “Last Exit to Springfield,” which then went to Dr. Joyce Brothers. Thanks to a draft of the script uploaded to the Internet Archive by JamesHellBrooks, we now know how the original scene would’ve gone:
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BONGO BEAT

The Simpsons waving at the viewer. Behind them are various Simpsons comic books. Text at the top: It's a Simpsons send-off!

Bongo Comics announced in an e-mail that its Simpsons Store app, which enabled consumers to purchase Simpsons comic books digitally, will be shut down on April 30:

To our dedicated fans:

We regret to announce that, after more than a decade, the Simpsons Store app has come to an end across all platforms and devices.

We are no longer accepting any new purchases or downloads, but the app will still be available for use in its current state (which may include technical difficulties) until April 30, 2024, at which point the app, all in-app comics, and all other app-related content will no longer be available for use. Please enjoy the app until the servers shut down on April 30, 2024.

Thank you for supporting the Simpsons Store.

Its companion app, Futuramaland, will be shutting down on April 12.

Bongo previously sold its titles digitally on ComiXology before announcing it would be moving to its own proprietary service in 2015. Amazon killed off ComiXology’s standalone app late last year.

The news is the latest blow for Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s publishing ventures. Groening, who owns the show’s publishing rights, launched Bongo Comics Group in 1993 with four Simpsons titles. Its flagship series, Simpsons Comics, ran for 25 years and 245 issues before being discontinued in 2018, when the company ceased publishing monthly titles (it remains unclear if this had anything to do with Disney’s aquisition of 21st Century Fox). The following year, Groening debuted a new company, Bapper Books, which was to publish comics based on his Netflix series Disenchantment as a digital-first series. That ended up not happening, and the comics were not released until late 2023 by Titan Comics, shortly after the show had ended. Currently, old Bongo material continues to be republished in book form, with the third volume collecting the Treehouse of Horror series set to be released by Abrams Books in August.

The news is also an unwelcome reminder that you do not own the digital content you purchase.

NEWS ROUNDUP

Professor Frink looks at a woman in a bikini and Bart's twin Hugo. Behind them is a word cloud, and the word simpon is the only non-Japanese word.

It seems like everything’s in a death spiral these days: linear television, Twitter, the internet in general, America. Oh, and a little show called The Simpsons.

  • Last Sunday’s episode, “Frinkenstein’s Monster,” suffered a huge drop in the ratings from the previous episode (which aired on Christmas Eve), netting only 0.72 million viewers, making it the least-watched episode of the series… so far. For comparison, the highest rated show in that timeslot was the season premiere of The Equalizer, with 6.32 million viewers. [TV Series Finale]
  • Conservative writer Nick Clairmont has watched every episode up to Season 35, but now he’s dropping the show due to a decline in quality, which is a very funny concept. After a couple years of “THE SIMPSONS IS GOOD AGAIN!!!” articles it feels refreshing to get a dissenting view, even if it’s mostly complaining about Wokeness. [The Critic Magazine]
  • There’s been a noticeable increase in spam bots on Twitter as of late, perfectly crystallized in this moment where a Simpsons meme referencing the phrase “░M░Y░P░ U░S░S░ Y░I░ N░B░I░O ░” used by spammers is replied to by another spammer with “the simpon:”A tweet by ErnieLies consisting of a Simpsons meme. There's a reply by user @Chloe019283244, who has a stock image of a woman in a black bikini as their avatar, that just says 'the simpon.''

    Over on Bluesky, “simpon” was briefly the only English word trending, which users then catapulted to #1. [@ErnieLies]

  • Here’s a nostalgic look at the official Simpsons website over the years. It used to be charming and chock full of information, and now I guess it… doesn’t even exist anymore? There’s a page for the show on FOX.com with some information on the cast, but otherwise it looks like it’s just social media for the franchise now. Grim. [Web Design Museum]