It’s in its 28th year, but they’re still going strong and this year for their 600th episode, they’re going Virtual Reality…at least for the couch gag.
In the upcoming Treehouse of Horror XXVII episode of The Simpsons, which airs on October 16th in the US, the 45-second couch gag which has been titled ‘Planet of the Couches’ will screen on TV with a URL available to viewers to experience a a full 3-minute VR event, which will also be available in Google’s Spotlight Stories app.
Karen Dufilho, Google Spotlight Stories’ executive producer said
We love animation. We love VR. Working with such a renowned team to bring this iconic family and their fans into immersive storytelling was a blast
While Spotlight Stories works in any Google Cardboard viewer, in the US, viewers will be able to logon to simpsonscardboard.com to snag a free Simposons themed Cardboard. There’s only 25,000 Simpsons themed Cardboard units available, each of which come with a Treehouse of Horror slipcover, but unfortunately they don’t offer shipping to Australia.
According to Homer himself, the team was quite excited to work with Google…once they worked out who they were, saying
At first we had concerns about working with Google because we didn’t know who they were but then we googled the company and were very impressed.
The additional footage will contain a significant amount of extras according to The Simpsons producer Al Jean, who said
You can see different characters and different jokes and different music, different effects. The fun of it as a fan is looking at it and trying to figure out everything we’ve hidden in it. There’s a scene where the Simpsons are in a prison cell. In VR, you can look above them to the ceiling of the cave that they’re in. Below to the floor, over the left and over to right and behind you. You have six different views. Let’s say you see Moe and he does something. You turn again, and you look at him again, and he does something else.
He went on to say ‘There’s one character from Futurama and the clue is: It’s ‘Planet of the Couches. There’s a reference to an upcoming Fox movie. Kang and Kodos are in it’.
The Treehouse of Horror XXVII episode of The Simpsons will air locally here on Foxtel channel Fox 8 on Wednesday the 19th of October at 7:00pm.
