The sofa's gone – and so have the old credits

Bart and Lisa never grow up. Homer always wears the same white shirt. Marge begins each episode by scanning Maggie at the supermarket checkout. But after 20 years, the makers of The Simpsons have decided to break one of their oldest traditions – by dramatically revamping the show's opening credit sequence.

• The whistlestop tour through Springfield, which begins at the fictional town’s elementary school and ends on the Simpson family sofa, has undergone a major facelift for the first time in the programme’s 429 episodes. The new incarnation was unveiled to the American public on Sunday night.
• Many of the key scenes, and the basic plot, remain untouched. Bart skateboards recklessly; Homer displays a fine disregard for nuclear safety; Lisa waltzes out of school band practice playing the saxophone.
• But Matt Groening, the show’s creator, has crammed dozens of new characters and in-jokes into the updated sequence, which runs to two minutes and makes a range of topical changes to life in Springfield.
• In a nod to the economic climate, the price of Marge’s supermarket shop has doubled from $243.26 to $486.52, while her sisters, Patti and Selma push a trolley full of cigarettes behind her in the checkout queue. Lisa’s classmates are shown playing on Nintendo DS machines. Bart’s journey home is interrupted by Apu, the Indian shopkeeper, who forces him to take evasive action by stepping on to the pavement with his eight newborn children.
• Some elements have always changed with each new episode. The phrase that Bart scrawls on the blackboard is always tinkered with, for example. The new sequence marks the show’s debut in high-definition television: Bart is pictured writing the phrase “HDTV is worth every cent”.

  The revamped credits were initially timed to coincide with American broadcasting’s switch from analogue to digital. But that was delayed after it emerged that millions of people had yet to buy expansive converters that would allow them to receive a signal.