Toon Zone Talkback - "The Simpsons" Season 20 Coming to DVD/Blu-ray

It's understandable that they'd make an exception with The Simpsons since there's a huge 9-season gap between the latest season on DVD and the latest season broadcast.

As a matter of fact, what Fox could do is release two DVD's a year; one in order and the latest (for example 12th and 20th this year, 13th and 21st next year, and so on)
 
I wouldn't be surprised if they do that, actually. And after a while, they'd be caught up and we wouldn't have this big gap between seasons and DVDs anymore.

I just hope they don't skimp on the special features. The whole reason I stuck with the DVDs past the end of the Golden Age was because of the commentaries.
 
Same here. If this DVD doesn't have any commentaries, I'm skipping it when it comes out and wait for a price drop to get it. And that's with the above average episode we got in that season.
 
Well uh, this makes sense. With me being the Simpsons fan that I am, I'll get it eventually, but not right away, mainly due to lack of enthusiasm. I was actually kind of hoping for Season 13 to come out before the end of the year, but it looks like that won't happen.
 
Season 13 and 21 - 2010
Season 14 and 22 - 2011
Season 15 and 23 - 2012
Season 16 and 24 - 2013
Season 17 and 25 - 2014
Season 18 and 26 - 2015
Season 19 and 27 - 2016

that's only if they keep the show going for that long. another 7 years. =/
 
It was about as good as you'd expect it to be, especially since you've seemed to forget it already. Actually the last season, along with the last season of Family Guy, really had no episodes that were great all the way through, instead they only had great moments in some of the episodes.
 
KABF17 "Sex, Pies, and Idiot Scrapes" (Homer and Flanders become bounty hunters)
KABF15 "Lost Verizon" (Bart steals Denis Leary's cell phone)
KABF14 "Double, Double, Boy in Trouble" (Bart meets his exact double and trades places with him)
KABF16 "Treehouse of Horror XIX" (Homer kills people for the sake of advertising; plus, parodies of Transformers and "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown")
KABF18 "Dangerous Curves" (Canon-skewing flashback episode to when Homer and Marge met the Flanderses)
KABF19 "Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words" (Lisa becomes a crossword puzzle champion)
KABF20 "MyPods and Boomsticks" (Bart befriends a Muslim boy and Homer disapproves)
KABF21 "The Burns and the Bees" (Lisa tries to save the town's bees from Mr. Burns' new sports arena)
KABF22 "Lisa the Drama Queen" (A Bridge to Terrabithia parody featuring Lisa)
LABF01 "Take My Life, Please" (Homer sees what his life would have been like if he'd been senior class president in high school)
LABF02 "How the Test Was Won" (Bart participates in Springfield Elementary's national achievement test)
LABF03 "No Loan Again, Naturally" (Homer loses the house to the Flanderses and gets evicted)
LABF04 "Gone Maggie Gone" (A Da Vinci Code parody featuring Lisa)
LABF11 "In the Name of the Grandfather" (Homer and Grampa inherit a pub in Ireland)
LABF05 "Wedding for Disaster" (Homer and Marge have to get remarried again because Reverend Lovejoy didn't have a valid marriage license)
LABF06 "Eeny Teeny Maya Moe" (Moe falls in love with a little person)
LABF07 "The Good, The Sad, and the Drugly" (Bart volunteers at the Retirement Castle and ticks off Milhouse)
LABF08 "Father Knows Worst" (Homer becomes a "helicopter parent")
LABF10 "Waverly Hills 9021-D'oh" (Bart and Lisa get transferred to a new school)
LABF09 "Four Great Women and a Manicure" (Multi-story episode parodying Elizabeth I, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Macbeth, and The Fountainhead)
LABF12 "Coming to Homerica" (Ogdenville's economy collapses, so everyone in town moves to Springfield)

As to whether or not they're good, that's up to you. I only saw three episodes from this season, and I liked 'em, but from what I understand, they were better than average.
 
I saw all those episodes when they originally aired....but I only remember like 5 of them.

Goodness. If the season is that forgettable only a year later, I don't know what to think. My memory is also a total blur on Seasons 13-19 as well.

I've only seen each of those episodes once too, as opposed to Seasons 1-10 that I've rewatched a billion times and own in my cherished collection.
 
I think I know why they're doing this.
Season 20, as you all know, started to broadcast in High Definition. And, as you also know, this is the first season to be released in Blu-Ray. I imagine they want to take advantage of this while people still care about HD. If they'd gotten to season 20 while running in natural order, people might've moved on to the next big thing. Like, say, 3-D television. I pray to god real 3DTV is coming shortly.
 
Are Seasons 13-19 the least popular seasons, for any reason? Its weird they stopped right after Season 12, as opposed to the end of the Golden age (which was Season 9).
 
I've been playing catch-up with this season due to it debuting in syndication, and I haven't been too impressed. There have been a few good jokes here and there, but nothing that made me kick myself for skipping the season when it first aired.
 
I believe there was a discussion several months ago about whether the show would be put on blu-ray, and some said that it'd be good for the recent seasons, but not the earlier ones, due to them being mastered on video. I wonder if I'll pick them up. All tv shows I have season sets for don't have gaps between the seasons. I don't have any "season two" sets without owning "season one", and don't own any "season six" without a "season four".
 
I don't think that's true. For instance, Fox released/is releasing specials for Prison Break and It's Always Sunny... on Blu-ray despite the fact that Fox hasn't released a season of Prison Break in high-def since S1 and there haven't been any It's Always Sunny... HD releases at all.

I think they're releasing it because:

1) TV-on-Blu-ray hasn't been selling that well, and catalog TV-on-Blu-ray is abysmal; holding off means they're just leaving money on the table
2) Either they think people will buy it :) and/or they were pressured into it by the show's producers

Oh, it'll be a long, long, long time before that's marketable. It took a really long time for high-def to get the traction it has today, and Blu-ray's still barely a blip on the map. There isn't a single 3DTV that meets the definitive specs, and even if you get a 3DTV, you'll need a new receiver (something with HDMI 1.4) and a new Blu-ray player (since most/all existing ones aren't forward-compatible with that). Blu-ray's not breaking sales records, and it has a foundation. 3DTV is starting completely from scratch.
 
People seem to forget how old DVD really is. It's been going strong for over 10 years now; Blu-ray has quite a bit of time to carve out a niche for itself. The next format will most likely be... digital distribution, not a format at all. That's already offering quite a bit of competition to the notion of Blu-ray. Plus, there is no practical need for any higher resolution. I know people always say this stuff, but it's, like, really true this time, dude.


Anyway, I'm glad to hear this news, because it means we're that much closer to answering the question of whether or not they're going to put the rest of the series out on Blu-ray, and I can put my purchasing anxiety to rest. The first 10 seasons wouldn't really gain much from HD (unless they have original film prints lying around, which seems unlikely), but I wouldn't mind having them on Blu-ray just for consistency in the collection, and they could fit them on much fewer discs. And for the later computer-assisted episodes, I would imagine there's a way they can output them at a higher resolution.
 
The original 19 1/2 seasons were shot on 480i video and the native resolution can't be increased unless they went back and reshot the show, which I doubt fox would do. They could cheat and artificially sharpen the video the same way you'd sharpen a picture in photoshop with the filter, but it would leave the glowy 'halo' around the black lines. So, trying to get HD from a purely SD source would basically be an upscale, which most blu ray players do a decent job with. (The Oppo Blu Ray player and PS3 do the upscaling the best from what I've heard.) Unfortunetly, only the native S20, HD episodes will benefit from Blu Ray.

Too bad the first 19 1/2 seasons weren't shot on film because you can do a high-res scan of the film negaitves and the results are perceptually indistinguishable from the original prints. Just look at the Wizard of Oz on blu ray.
 
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