Simpsons creator Matt Groening and executive producer Al Jean at the presentation of the film in Madrid. Photograph: Paco Campos/EPA
Last night the world got the first glimpse of what host Danny Baker described - not completely ridiculously - as an event on the scale of a Beatles reunion. The press were given a sickeningly brief first look at ten minutes of the first ever Simpsons movie, along with a backslapping audience of Baker, show creator Matt Groening and executive producer Al Jean.
It's been 18 years and 400 episodes since The Simpsons first appeared on Fox, and although the idea of a film has been mooted since round about season three, it's taken until now to materialise. Yet with the TV show generally agreed to be a teensy bit past its best and a weensy bit surpassed in recent years by Family Guy, Baker wasn't all that far off the mark - this has as much potential to go wrong as a ballsed-up Beatles reunion.
Don't worry, though: unless these were literally the only 10 fun minutes out of 90, The Simpsons Movie seems as brilliant as it should be. Where the sublime South Park movie Bigger, Longer and Uncut depicted a gay affair between Saddam Hussein and Satan, Al Jean claimed last night that the theme of their movie was basically "that a man should listen to his wife".
Yet even 10 minutes were enough to tell that The Simpsons Movie riffs on global society's two biggest moral panics: religion and the environment.
Look away now, spoilerphobes - this is what we know. The movie sees Green Day poisoned and drowning in the fetid Lake Springfield after interrupting a Duff Beer-sponsored show "to say one thing about the environment". At the memorial service, Grandpa Abe experiences a moment of religious possession, which prompts Marge to go off on a hare-brained journey of spiritual discovery. (As Groening said with an evil glint in his eye when asked about the movie's potential to offend, "we do posit the existence of a very active God".)
Elsewhere, while researching her school presentation on climate change (called, brilliantly, An Irritating Truth), Lisa falls in love with a conscientious Irish charmer named Colin ("although there's obviously a tragedy to the romance because they're Irish"). And oh yes, the naked-Bart skateboarding scene does exist, but it's far too genius to spoil with any more information than that.
In short, it looks like The Simpsons Movie is going to be worth the wait. Still sceptical? Consider that this joke, revealed by Groening, didn't make the movie, as Bart inadvertently gets stuck in an Egyptian sarcophagus:
Marge: "Homer, get him out of there!" Homer: "Honey, he has to get over his fear of coffins one day."
Excited?
