The Most Awesome Thing I Saw Last Week: Bow Before McBride! (Feb 11-17)

Now, some of us are poor and can’t afford HD.  But even so, the change is noticeable.  It looks like they upgraded the animation to the standards of 2007’s Simpsons Movie, with a wider color palette, sharper lines, and some really impressive shading.  And just to show off, this episode marked a real milestone:  For the first time since 1990, they’ve updated the opening sequence!  The classic opening has been unchanged since the Season Two premiere, and it showed.  Only the earliest characters make appearances in the rolling tour of Springfield, and the family looked really off-model since oh, Season Four or so.  This new sequence, while keeping the same basic action, is completely re-drawn with new animation, and it is gorgeous.  It’s absolutely stuffed with Easter Eggs and references to classic episodes (Is that Mr. Sparkle I see?), and they put new life into a sequence that some of us have seen probably thousands of times.