As I’m sure everyone is aware of, The Simpsons Movie is opening in wide release today. The marketing machine has been hard at work, turning 7-11s into Kwik-E-Marts, commercials since around the Super Bowl and running a contest to determine which of the 14 Springfields in the US would stand in for the fictional TV town for its movie premiere. Even the Booze Mail application on Facebook allows you to send Squishees and Duff Beer to your friends. They definitely did a great job of creating awareness for the launch of the movie.

Though something strange happened during this whole process. In seeing all this stuff going on I realized something about their promotional efforts. It was making me feel nostalgic about The Simpsons. Now if I were to guess on this, I’m doubting that was the reaction they were wanting to elicit with their marketing campaign. The Simpsons is still on and is going into season 19 in the fall, but in reality, who’s still watching this show? I know its probably been 5 seasons since I made a concerted effort to be home on a Sunday night at 8pm to catch a new episode. I know many of my friends are the same way. Almost everyone I know used to make The Simpsons a can’t miss during their weeks. You wouldn’t want to be caught out on some great line from the show the next time you see your friends. The days of quoting The Simpsons are pretty much over. It has come to the point that it is now uncouth to be caught uttering re-hashed Simpsons lines. And the reason for this is because the only stuff worth quoting is pretty much from the first 8 seasons of the show, when it was actually funny.

So to get nostalgic about the show seems only fitting when it pretty much jumped the shark a decade ago. I would say probably around seasons 12-13 the laughs were so few and far between that it was hardly worth watching anymore. I think everyone yearns for the days when an episode had more of a sub-text then the writers scripting a way for the Simpson family to encounter a random celebrity and for Homer to have a crazy new day job. We can only hope the movie will rise above the recent standard the show has managed.