Biggify here: kidicarus222 [Flickr]
Drew Mackie of Back of the Cereal Box blog did something so amazingly genius that I was surprised that it was never done before. He took the intro of The Simpsons and stitched the scenes into one continuous panorama:
Technically, in every episode of The Simpsons that begins with the un-abbreviated intro, Milhouse appears. So too does Nelson, Dr. Hibbert, and even Maude Flanders, who overcomes the considerable handicap of being dead.
I speak of a brief section of the intro that occurs directly between Marge and Maggie’s simultaneous horn-honking and the arrival at Casa de Simpson that segues into the weekly couch gag. The camera pans away from Marge’s car and, if only for a few seconds, over a Springfield panorama, featuring various characters. It’s pretty hard to see the whole of it with the naked eye, and it wasn’t until the arrival of the Simpsons DVDs a few years back that I could actually see who was there by scanning frame-by-frame. For whatever reason, I was suddenly motivated last week by the urge to reproduce this scene in full in a way other people could see by Photoshopping the frames together.