The Simpsons Movie, due out in July, brings the family's adventures to the big screen. Producing the series and the movie simultaneously required a huge increase in production personnel. © 2003 FOX.

We had a long-standing running joke that we hope they never do Jay Leno, because our characters don't really have big chins. And then they went ahead and did him, so they pulled it off somehow. It's a challenge -- sometimes we nail it right away, and sometimes we pass it from artist to artist, each taking a crack at it. Then we'll take a little from here, a little from there and ultimately it becomes that character.

Roger Meyers Jr. (producer of the 'Itchy and Scratchy' cartoons): That screwball Marge Simpson, we've got to stop her... but how?

Animator: Drop an anvil on her?

2nd Animator: Hit her on the head with a piano?

3rd Animator: Stuff her full of TNT and then throw a match down her?

The Simpsons Movie, due out in July, brings the family's adventures to the big screen. Producing the series and the movie simultaneously required a huge increase in production personnel:

It's been a challenge to do both at same time, that's why they gave me this position. We had to train a lot of new people. I went back to some of the same classrooms I studied in at Cal Arts and did some recruiting there. People have come in and we feel most people have risen to the challenge and done a good job.

We did a lot of recruiting last year. One of the cool things about The Simpsons is we're still doing drawings and flipping paper, we key pose the way the classic animation was done. We find that the young people who have studied animation, that's exactly what they want to do. There isn't a plethora of jobs out there doing that. We've become one of the old school places [Film Roman] that people want to come to. It's like you owned an electric guitar, and suddenly Unplugged became really popular; I think we're the Unplugged of animation.

I think the feature will do phenomenally well. What I love about it is it's a cartoon with characters the public loves. Everything else around it is CG. It's a big screen story and the artwork is fantastic. It's still The Simpsons but the artwork is magnified and the detail they put it in is just beautiful.

Marge: What on earth possessed you to get an earring?

Bart: Milhouse has one.

Marge: If Milhouse jumped off a cliff...

Bart: Milhouse jumped off a cliff?! I'm there!

The Simpsons is doing drawings, flipping paper and using key pose the way the classic animation was done. It's become the Unplugged of animation. ™ & © 1999 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. Cr: Fox.

I think if there weren't The Simpsons, there wouldn't be the whole bunch of primetime animation shows that are on now. How do we feel about it? It just means we're successful and we've been emulated. A lot of these shows are really original and we're fans of some of those shows -- or all of them. Sometimes I've thought wow, they really cross a line here, or gee, they're really making us look more G-rated all the time.

Bart: Hey dad, how come they're taking The Cosby Show off the air?

Homer: Because Mr. Cosby wanted to stop before the quality suffered.

Bart: Quality, schmality! If I had a TV show, I'd run that sucker into the ground!

Homer: Amen, boy. Amen.

We're still on TV for at least season 19, and I think all the artists want it to go on forever. Personally, I'd like to see us break the Gunsmoke record -- 20 seasons. We've already broken by far the longest-running animated series, then the longest running comedy series records. In animation, no surprise it was The Flintstones, which ran six seasons; we've gone triple that. The real surprise is the longest running comedy was Ozzie and Harriet. [The series ran from 1952-1966, but began on the radio in 1944.] A few years ago we bypassed that.