February 17, 2009

Simpsons in HD

It's a sign of how desperate things are with The Simpsons when there's a big song and dance about a single episode (this Sunday's) being not just the first in widescreen but also in high definition. Be still my beating heart...
On Sky HD only of course. Here's the reworked opening sequence to save you tuning in to the standard definition version of the (former) funniest cartoon on TV and wondering where all the jokes have gone...

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Will the SD version on Sky1 be 16:9 too? (downscaled from the HD version)

Nialli said...

I believe so.

Anonymous said...

I watched the new opening yesterday. Can't say I'm fussed with it one way or the other. The show lost my interest about 11 series ago and from what I've heard it's nowhere near as good as it was.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Nialli.

We haven't watched Simpsons in ages (I prefer Family Guy these days).

We do love Homer though so have set it to record just for curiosity.

Anonymous said...

I hope Sky HD can get the picture quality a bit better than Fox's 720p broadcast of this ep from last week. Too sharp and too low a bitrate are not a good combination unless you like aliasing and artefacts everywhere. Upscaled picture from Sky SD might actually be more watchable, and at least it's 16:9 now! I know this style of animation can look really great in HD from The Simpsons Movie and the feature length Futuramas that have been on Sky HD and Blu-ray.

And The Simpsons writing will probably never be as good as everyone remembers their favourite old episodes being, but some of the more recent ones have been much better than the worst ones that happened somewhere between season 10 and 20, so could be worth a look if you haven't seen much of it for a while.