Wow, has it really been 20 years since The Simpsons has been on the air? I can still remember when the Simpsons appeared as a regular short feature on the old Tracy Ullman show before the folks at Fox decided to make it into a 30 minute show. Now into their 21st season (and still going strong), The Simpsons 20th season has now made its way to Blu-ray and is the subject of today’s review.
Show 
I am sure that all of you are very familiar with The Simpsons TV show so my description here will be brief. The show is a parody of a typical working class American family consisting of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson, in your typical small town Springfield which could have easily been dubbed Anytown USA. The show parodies American culture, the media and society in general.
The fact that it has been on TV now for 21 years is amazing. The fact that it is still fresh and funny is even more amazing. Given some of the crazy things that happen in real life anymore, I guess the show can go on forever. I am sure that the news will continue to provide material and fodder for the writers of the show for a long, long time.
The complete 20th season contains a total of 21 half hour episodes. The 20th season of the show was the first to go HD but did so only near mid season. Accordingly, 9 of the episodes included here are in standard definition with the remaining 12 being in HD.
Disc one contains the following 9 episodes, all in SD: Sex, Pies and Idiot Scrapes, Lost Verizon, Double, Double, Boy in Trouble, Treehouse of Horror XIX, Dangerous Curves, Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words, Mypods and Broomsticks, The Burns and the Bees and Lisa the Drama Queen.
Disc 2 contains the following episodes, all in HD: Take My Life Please, How the Test Was Won, No Loan Again, Naturally, Gone Maggie Gone, In the Name of the Grandfather, Wedding for Disaster, Eeny Teeny Maya, Moe, The Good, the Sad and the Drugly, Father Knows Worst, Waverly Hills 9-0-2-1-D’oh, Four Great Women and a Manicure and Coming to Homerica.
The show features the usual voices of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer. If you are a fan of the show, this is a great collection as it features the same great writing that made the show a hit as well as the first episodes of the show in HD. Recommended.
Video
The video quality here is a mixed bag, but only because the first 9 episodes of the series are presented here in 4×3 SD. Even though the SD material is upconverted, there is really little that could be done to make it look good. It looks just like you would expect SD to look, fuzzy, soft, noisy and unappealing, rating a 3 on the 5 star scale. However, the HD material looks great and so much better than the SD material that it is hard to believe it is the same show, the difference is that dramatic.
The HD material features bright bold colors, deep and stable blacks as well as exceptional clarity and depth. The HD video quality on this release even exceeds the quality of the Fox broadcasts. I averaged the 9 SD shows with the 12 HD shows and came out to an overall rating of 4, with the SD content rating a 3 and the HD content a solid 4.5. I have no doubt that fans of the show will be thrilled with the quality of the episodes presented in HD.
Audio 
Unlike the video side, the audio for all of the episodes is encoded using DTS HD Master Audio so that the audio quality does not vary at all between the SD and HD content. The audio design here is pretty good for a cartoon TV series. The sound design is not all that sophisticated and is mainly front heavy with some occasional and mostly subtle use of the surrounds. Do not expect an immersive sound field as you will be disappointed.
I will comment that the sound here is appreciably better than the rather tinny sound on the broadcast version of the show but still falls a good deal short of what one would expect for a film. My main complaint with the audio, other than the lack of immersion, is the overall fidelity of the audio which sounds a but bright for my tastes. If simply lacks the smoothness, fullness and openness of some of the better sounding Blu-ray discs I have heard to date and is better off not being experienced at reference sound levels. While not totally devoid of any meaningful dynamics, the dynamics also fall short of what you would expect with a motion picture release. However, for a cartoon series, the audio is more than acceptable.
Special Features 
To say that the extras on this release are threadbare would be a bit of an understatement. There is only one very brief extra contained in disc one, a 20th Anniversary Special Sneak Peek hosted by Morgan Spurlock that may clock in at a whole 2 minutes or so. That is it folks. At least it is in HD. Were it not, the extras would have to rate a zero. There is no digital copy provided and the release is not BD-Live enabled.
Final Thoughts
The Simpsons – The Complete 20th Season is a great release for fans of the show and contains the first HD episodes of the show and the same clever writing that has made the show such a long running hit. Recommended.
