Hi there,

I bought season 1 and season 2 of the simpsons here in UK, and they are good but very old episodes, these episodes are probably about 10years old and from the early 90's.

The episodes did get alot better and funnier as time went on, why does it take so long to get the season out on the shelf, I will buy them all and i'm sure loads of other collectors will too.

One gripe is quality, I can see that the image looks very compressed - these disc are dvd-9 but they don't use the full capacity of the dual layer disc which is a shame hopefully the later seasons will be an improvement and use a higher bitrate when compressing to use the full 8 to 9 GB of disc space per dvd,

Also I would have expected at least some extra's I was hoping to see Dan Castellanata in the flesh - that would have been great.

I think in the States you can get lots more seasons than available here in the UK which sucks.

-r

[Phil Hinton]

Your last comment is not true, America are at the same season as us in the uk, thats is they are waiting for season three.
The compression is fine on the discs released, it is the animation that is pretty lame by todays standards.
We actually have more episodes of the simpsons available on DVD than the states as Fox uk tend to release themed discs every so often with at least four episodes from accross all 11 seasons.

For the simpsons DVD boxsets, the producers have chosen not to feature cast members on the DVD's, so you won't expect to see dan castella.

I've heard the R2 boxsets have inferior picture quality to the R1 boxsets- has anyone compared the two?

Possibly the same for Futurama and Family Guy

I think it's good they are releasing the original seasons first, there would be alot of complaints if they just skipped them and started them at season 6 or whatever. Alot of people think the older episodes are funnier. Like in that recent top25 simpsons episodes of all time list they were all 6 years or older. I'll probably pick up the R1 boxsets sometime since they are cheaper and have better features.

[Jake LaMotta]

Um......

There are extra features. There are commentaries (ON EVERY EPISODE), interviews, music videos and quite a fewothers. That's quite a bit if you ask me.

The Region 1 discs don't have more special features. Where are you getting that info from? The only difference is a cut on the COMMENTARY track in order to get a PG rating. Big deal.

I've got the season 1 (R1) and Season 2 (R2) sets and as far as I'm aware the picture quality isn't better one one region (obviously the season 2 animation is a bit better)

Considering the age of season 1 (1989/1990) and season 2, the picture quality isn't bad and the transfer has been pretty good. Try comparing the DVD picture to BBC2.

[alextgreen]

If you want extra features go dig out 'The Simpsons sing the blues' CD - a dire anthology of cheap cash in covers that I am just sad enough to own.

[Quinnsey]

The animation for season two is almost identical to what is shown in the present episodes and the compression is terrible on those discs.