The Simpsons are the most influential work of film/TV series in terms of shaping my outlook of life while growing up, only rivaled by the Bugs Bunny/Merry Melodies & Tom & Jerry cartoons, and perhaps the amalgamation of Hanna-Barbera cartoons (basically, anything the Cartoon Network put in front of me).

For at least the last 2 years I have been re-watching the whole series before handing out my judgment.

But this is kind of sad and perhaps a fortunate story too. See, I come from a home in which Spanish was the only language spoken. While growing up I had the great fortune of going to a private school (from kindergarten to the 6^th grade) in which English was thought as a 2^nd language. At home, when watching cartoons, I would inevitably gravitate toward The Cartoon Network (never Disney or Nickelodeon) which would have some of their programming in Spanish and other in English. The Flintstones? Spanish. The Jetsons? Spanish. Scooby Doo? Both, but mainly Spanish. Bugs Bunny? Both. You get the idea, some in Spanish, some in English, sometimes 1 or the other.

With the Simpsons it was a different story. As you may know The Simpsons have never been part of or shown on The Cartoon Network. Locally they were shown on Channel 11 (much later acquired by Univision) and always in Spanish. So they grew up with me (we are somewhere around the same age) and I with them, the always dutiful and hardworking Marge (modeled after my mom, of course), that devilish Bart (I saw something of him in me), the bookwormy and sensitive Lisa, the dumb but well meaning Homer, Maggie and the rest of the lot. Needless to say that I saw and learned about the everyday vicissitudes that they endured and try to apply them to my own unique context and circumstances.

While I outgrew other of the old cartoons (Scooby and the gang can only catch the bad guy so many times before it gets old) the Simpsons remained a fixture in my life. Then around 2005/2006 something horrible occurred (Season 16). Due to a dispute between the voice actor’s union and the company in charge of the Spanish dubbing many of the original voice actors quit and were replace by new, lesser talent. This affected the voices of Homer, Marge, Lisa and several of the supporting characters. I remember to this day the first time I heard the new Homer voice; I was stunned and didn’t understood what was happening. At first, I thought it was some sort of temporary mistake since in previous seasons some minor characters were voiced by different actors if their screen time on a particular episode was limited (they wouldn’t pay the regular actor their regular fee for 1 line I suppose). I stuck with it at first, decide I would make the best out of a bad situation, I tried to focus on the characters which voices remained the same, like Bart, but I couldn’t. Eventually I realized they weren’t coming back, and I decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

So, you know when people complain about the current quality of the series and how they aren’t as good as “the earlier seasons”? well, I didn’t get to experience that, at least not fully. It is certainly true that there is a quality drop in say, Seasons 14-15 to the earlier seasons and differences in animation can be staggering when looked at closely. But even in Seasons 14 and 15, of which I will say surprisingly I had not seen at least 80% of the episodes in Season 15, there still are some good quality episodes while never being bad. I would characterize the worst episodes in Season 14 and 15as merely existing, not bad or good but just “there”. Some in an ironic way, the change of the voices prevented me from fully experiencing whatever ostensibly dramatic drop in quality and whatever once in while great episode the series delivered from Seasons 17 onward. So, when I rate the Simpsons 10/10, know that I do so rating only Seasons 1 to 15.

In way, for me, the Simpsons remain frozen in time for ever beautiful (just like Maggie is forever a baby). They aged gracefully because in a way they never did.