Homer's Night Out: This episode starts with a bathroom scene very
much reminiscent of the camerawork used in Scorsese's 1991 remake of Cape
Fear.
Homer makes an arse of himself at a party where a belly dancer provides the
entertainment, unaware that the rest of his family are eating out next door.
With his spy camera, Bart takes a photo, copies it and sends it around his
school, but before long is gets around the whole town.
The Crepes of Wrath: I love the start of this episode as it's another
Homer classic. Here, he skids on Bart's skateboard, crashes down the stairs and
has to listen to Bart's Krusty doll winding down, watch as the dog licks him
and Maggie crawls over his face, all because of a bad back.
Like many episodes, there are two concurrent themes. Bart is sent to France on
an exchange student program where he's not exactly made to feel at home and
his temporary replacement attracts a lot of attention from the local
constabulary.
Krusty Gets Busted: Krusty The Klown has a show on kids TV in the
afternoon so he's the last person who you'd expect to rob the Kwik-E-Mart armed
with a gun, but who else looks so weird?
Bart and Lisa smell a rat and aim to prove his innocence. Being such devotees
of his show, they spot the evidence that evaded the police and sets the real
Krusty free. So, who's the real culprit? Any chance it might be his slapstick
partner Sideshow Bob? (voiced by Frasier's Kelsey Grammer)
Some Enchanted Evening: Marge becomes so fed up with her family she
phones Dr. Marvin Monroe's advice line for help, aiming to restore things with
a lobster dinner out for her and Homer and a babysitter for the kids.
Alas, the latter turns out to be a nightmare when she turns up on "America's
Most Wanted" as the Babysitter Bandit, ties them up and then they struggle
to get the message across to a non-listening world.
One highlight of the show is that Bart's known for making prank calls to
Moe the Bartender and fake names in this series include: "I.P. Freely",
"Jock Strap" and "Al Coholic".
Suck on this.
The programme has always been made and presented in 4:3 fullscreen and once
you get past the occasionally-crude animation, it mostly looks damn good, save
for some backgrounds that come out in patches because it appears that the
encoding isn't quite up to scratch.
Originally filmed in stereo, there aren't quite as many special effects applied
here than there are in later series, but what is has been enhanced with a
Dolby Digital 5.1 remix throughout the entire series. This was quite unexpected
but most welcome. Even in the scenes where not much action happens, the clarity
is the dialogue greatly benefits from this treatment.
The Simpsons Season 1 boxset.
All of the extras are on disc 3, apart from some of the scripts.
Never Before Seen Outtakes (5 mins): from an unaired version of
Some Enchanted Evening, which has a very dodgy-looking quality to it
but you easily overcome that to appreciate the rarity.
Animatic from Bart The General (2 mins): Narrated by
Matt Groening and the episode's director David Silverman, this brief footage
shows the basic outlines for Bart being chased and beaten up by Nelson.
The Making of The Simpsons: "America's First Family": Just a
five-minute collection of interviews and show clips that showed on BBC in a
much-longer show - and in 16:9 widescreen, which is cropped to 4:3 here. Hence,
the clips of the series which were zoomed in to fill the 16:9 frame have been
cropped at the sides, thus windowboxing them. Why couldn't we have the whole
programme?
Foreign Language Clips: Clips of the show dubbed into French, Italian,
Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese.
Tracey Ullman Short (2 mins): "Goodnight Simpsons" was one of the
many 4-parters that bridged the advert gaps in her programme to make people
return afterwards.
Albert Brooks Audio Outtakes (4 mins): As he takes on the role of
Jacques in Life on the Fast Lane.
Art of the Simpsons: A one-shot look at Matt Groening's Life in
Hell and some early sketches and drawings.
Scripts: For four episodes: Bart the Genius, Bart the General,
Moaning Lisa and Some Enchanted Evening, each of which show the
original typed pages and annotations - a warts and all look and it's what
I like to see. Let's have a full book of all of these please!
Audio Commentaries: One for each episode, usually featuring creator
Matt Groening along with various directors and writers.
Each episode has six chapters which is a good figure and subtitles
come in 5 flavours: English for the hearing-impaired, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian
and Swedish.
Despite it losing slight points for picture and sound quality, it's easily
worth a purchase because it's high time the Simpsons were on DVD. Now let's
have all the other series made available!
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
