... But why I fell out of love with Homer and Company

The Simpsons Movie opened in Bahrain last week after getting its world premiere in Springfield, Vermont, US which was named official home of The Simpsons.

The venue beat 13 other identically named US towns in a competition to host the event, having had to prove how similar it was to the fictional Springfield inhabited by America’s number one animated family.
The Simpsons of today revels in big, stupid antics, one-note gags and obvious plot twists. The Simpsons of yesteryear, however, was a different beast, one that would have found no room for over-sized pastries pursuing characters along sidewalks.
That’s why it’s hard to greet the arrival of the movie with whoops of excitement. If it’s anything like the current TV show, this will be one of the greatest misfires in spin-off history. You can almost hear the panic in the voice of The Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening. The film will be “deliberately imperfect”. It contains “everything we couldn’t show on television”.
His co-producer Al Jean has even boasted that “if you’ve never heard of The Simpsons, you can enjoy the film”.
They know expectation is sky-high, even for something that’s been 17 years in the pipeline.
So why the need to qualify the film with so many caveats and premature apologies? Could it be that they know, deep down, The Simpsons is but a shade of what it used to be?
Once, it was the greatest show on TV. Every episode was brimming with imagination, excitement and some of the sharpest one-liners to come out of America for decades. But above all it was smart: The Simpsons knew how to parry crudity with intelligence blow for blow.
Bart’s big-haired nemesis Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake nine times would be followed up with a surreal two-minute performance of HMS Pinafore.
Homer lobbing a lookalike of himself over a waterfall would be followed by a reference to Walt Whitman’s collection of poems, Leaves and Grass. This was dizzyingly intelligent, daring, exhilarating stuff. For every burp gag came an arch pop-culture reference. For every time Homer fell down the stairs or Bart got strangled, we had a nifty TV parody or sly political dig.
And it kept on coming, week after week. An entire generation didn’t understand it. George Bush Sr, then US president, even wished aloud that American families could be more like the Waltons than the Simpsons.
A massive rift opened up between those who “got” The Simpsons and those who hated it. You chose your side carefully. To be a Simpsons fan was truly one of the most privileged things in the world.
 Then it all changed. A new guard took over and ripped up the rules. Veterans of the show with pedigrees on venerated US comedy institutions like Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show – Jon Vitti, George Meyer, John Schwartzwelder – either departed or went part-time.
In came writers who had cut their teeth on sappy teen comedies like Blossom and unsophisticated knockabouts like Beavis and Butt-Head. A looser, lazier sensibility took hold, given free rein by new executive producer Mike Scully. And the show became stupid.
You can even put a date on it: 1997, in the early episodes of the ninth series, where the head of Bart’s school, Principal Skinner, was suddenly, arbitrarily revealed to be an impostor, and his entire life to date had been a lie. Come again?
The residents of Springfield, Vermont, may soon be ruing that giant pink doughnut.