When I was a kid, just about the two coolest things in the world were cartoons and secret messages (see how I blatantly lied there?). Hell, come Saturday morning K-TV, between Candice Hillebrand signing “I love you” in our special code and Garfield and Friends sending me subliminal messages to burn down my school, the weekend couldn’t start much better.
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| This is how she’d say, “Ninja Turtles, on in five”. |
I’m sure it’s up for little debate that the greatest “Did you see that?” cartoon of all time is the Simpsons. It’s not quite the same these days, what with everything being released in high-def online and with a standard frame rate that could turn any washing powder commercial into a scene from the Matrix, but fifteen years ago, every (Saturday?) evening on M-Net Open-time – may it rest in peace – tens of thousands of eyes were glued to the screen as that wobbly, hand-rendered title sequence flicked to life. Lids stretched, tear-ducts shriveled and red-veined eyeballs grew cracked and dry, screaming for tears, as a presumably even number of gooey orbs strained to catch Bart’s weekly blackboard scribblings.
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| Totally worth it. |
These days, it’s a matter of scrolling forward until you find the correct frame, but back then, the best hardware we had at our disposal was VHS, so unless you had the ability to read at 25 frames per second you were bound to miss it. And so began the tedious method of play, pause, play, pause, play, pause, until a jittering, blurred image of whatever cocky slogan Bart’s creators had contrived hovered before us. And it was worth it.
But no longer! Thanks to Bart’s Blackboard.com and few guys with more time on their hands than Elton John at a Hustler casting, we are now able to view all twenty-two season’s worth of blackboard slogans.
Thanks guys, I thoroughly appreciate it, even if my boss doesn’t.
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