Not content with crossing over with Futurama and Family Guy, The Simpsons are set to cross over with themselves in their next Halloween special.
If you're a big fan of The Simpsons or - sorry - simply old enough to remember, then you may know that Springfield's favourite family were once not as good looking as they are today. When the the Simpson family first appeared in a series of sketches on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987 (two years before The Simpsons first aired), they were crudely drawn ghosts of their future selves.
Well, for their annual Treehouse of Horror episode, the template for TV's biggest animated sitcom are set to parody The Others and rise from the dead to haunt Homer and co.
Hinting of the episode's plot, Simpsons executive producer Al Jean told Entertainment Weekly: "We’ve implied that they were murdered and buried under the house, so this is expanding that thought… If people want a real Halloween bloodbath, they get it."
The crossover will apparently be challenging for voice actors Dan Castellaneta (Homer), Nancy Cartwright (Bart), Yeardley Smith (Lisa), and Julie Kavner (Marge), who will have to replicate wildly different voices their characters had back in the '80s.
"People remember Dan’s, but Nancy’s is different too," Al Jean added. "It was lower-register, and you can see in the difference in this segment. It was really funny to get the interplay [between the two versions of the Simpsons] and for the actors to see the voice evolution. The great thing is we didn’t have to ask—we already had the cast hired for the Tracey Ullman Simpsons."
The episode will air on Fox on 19th October. Meanwhile The Simpsons' crossover with rival show Family Guy airs in the US on 28th September, with the Futurama one to follow in November.
