UPDATE: Thanks to Quint over at AICN who got ahold of the following excerpt from Contactmusic.com

The show’s principal voice actors have all signed on for the project and creator Matt Groening is delighted with the script for the film. The Simpsons‘ spokeswoman Antonia Kaughman says, "Now we’re going to get the best of both worlds, evidently… They finally worked out a movie team, a team of the writers, because we could never hire outside writers – they had to be Simpsons writers, and most of them were working on the show. They finally put this team together that has time on the side, and they’ve been working on the script. So the movie won’t be at the end of the series – they’ll be working simultaneously."

Well, I guess all we can really do now is cross our fingers and watch reruns of Futurama and The Critic for the time being.


*sigh*

The word of a Simpsons movie isn’t quite breaking news. It’s supposedly been in "serious" talks now for about a year. My dismay comes from the idea that I feel this will turn out to be nothing more than a feature length rehash of what we’re being given today on TV. The Simpsons has gone from being one of the seminal and absolutely genius comedy shows of the last 15 years to, and I’m going to be perfectly frank here, SHIT. The problem (and this is a subject for debate) is that the show began to really lose its luster around the 10th or 11th season (it’s on number 16 now) as they began moving away from jokes that stemmed from character and instead opted for cheap, lazy, and absurdly obvious satire at whatever moments the writers felt it appropriate. I’ve been rewatching Seasons 3, 4, and 5 (Pre-order Season 6 through CHUD right here!) for the last few months and I’m just floored at how far south the show has gone. Really sad.

My own personal bickering aside, BBC’s Radio 1 spoke to Nancy "Bart Simpson" Cartwright as she was in London performing her one-woman show My Life As a Ten Year Old Boy and had this to say about the feature length cartoon:

"You know what? We’ve just done the table read for the Simpsons movie so although we’ve been promoting that we’re going to do it, now we’re actually doing it and are in production. I’m sure it won’t take any less than a couple of years. I don’t know the name of it and I can’t go into details about it and we’ll just have to see how it goes, but I think it’s going to be great and the fans are going to dig it."

Sounds like this is getting closer and closer to fruition. Let’s pray to God that Brad Bird and Conan O’Brien are in on this thing.

Reminisce back to the good ol’ days like a friggin’ coot on our message boards!