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Trailer for "The Simpsons Movie"

Well, you can’t say they don’t warn you.

The Simpsons Movie opens with an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon. As it draws to its predictably grisly conclusion, we see that it is being shown in a movie theater to an audience that includes everyone’s favorite yellow family. Homer rises and complains, “I can’t believe we’re paying to see something we can see on TV for free! If you ask me, everyone in this theater is a sucker,” at which point he directs his finger at us and says, “Especially you!”

Did I take that seriously? Of course not. I assumed that it was the ever-dependable writing staff of The Simpsons poking fun at expectations about the movie version of the popular animated TV series that has been running for nearly 20 years. In fact, I was encouraged by it: I figured they must be awfully confident about the movie to risk such a joke.

Turns out they weren’t kidding. I’m sad to report that there is nothing in The Simpsons Movie that you wouldn’t get on the TV show. Its 77 minutes (not counting 10 minutes of credits) play like a padded single episode, with a few mild profanities to ensure a PG-13 rating.

I haven’t been so disappointed since John Kerry’s concession speech.

I bow to no one in my affection for The Simpsons, which over the years has made me laugh more times than pretty much anything. In my life I may have laughed harder and deeper at Monty Python and the Holy Grail, say, or The Daily Show, or the books of Donald E. Westlake and P. G. Wodehouse, or some of the Three Stooges shorts. But The Simpsons surpasses all of them in terms of quantity (except Wodehouse), and I can’t recall a single episode that didn’t have at least a few laugh-out-loud moments.

Like Python, also the product of overeducated writers, The Simpsons’ success comes from its ability to blend “highbrow” and “lowbrow” humor. Python wasn’t funny because John Cleese, Eric Idle and company could make jokes about both Kierkegaard and tits jokes, but because they didn’t see any separation in the material.

An episode of The Simpsons that ran last weekend, in which overachiever Lisa was assigned to tutor the children of a hillbilly family, blithely dropped references to Dario Fo, Edward Gorey, “outsider art,” the Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali surrealist film “Un Chien Andalou,” The Sound of Music and The Honeymooners, along with guest appearances by Steven Sondheim, James Patterson and Peter Bogdonovich.

Granted, to some extent this becomes showing off. But 95 times out of a hundred, given the opportunity to write a part for a celebrity guest, the writers on The Simpsons rise to the occasion. Merely getting the infamously reclusive Thomas Pynchon in front of a microphone would have been more than enough for most shows, but The Simpsons made him funny in a way that wouldn’t have worked with anyone else.

The scuttlebutt for years has been that while 20th Century Fox wanted a Simpsons movie, creators Matt Groening, James Brooks and Sam Simon didn’t want to do it until they could come up with an idea worthy of taking the show to the big screen. And Fox’s reticence to publicize the completed film, on the grounds that they preferred to build audience anticipation, sounded plausible enough (even if the strategy was swamped by the secrecy surrounding the release of the final Harry Potter novel).

In retrospect, it looks like Fox knew that they had a dog on their hands and were trying to keep it quiet. (Isn’t it interesting that, despite the secrecy, nearly 2,300 people have voted to rank the film on the top movie Web site imdb.com, giving it a rating of nine out of 10? I suspect that some Fox employees have been stuffing the ballots. Believe me, that number is going to go way down by next week.)

For the record, even the little information Fox has given about the movie is inaccurate. The plot does not involve Homer saving the world, only Springfield, from a catastrophe caused by his own laziness and stupidity—a description that applies to any number of the TV episodes.

It’s not that I didn’t laugh at The Simpsons Movie. I did, maybe as much as at an average episode of the TV show. There are 11 writers credited, all veterans of the series, and they know how to do gags.

But there’s absolutely nothing here that justifies the move to the big screen. One would expect that, at the very least, the creators would have been squirreling away some of the staff’s better gags over the last few years. The secrecy over the movie’s content would lead you to expect a clever plot, certainly one that would take advantage of the longer running time and more intricate animation capabilities. One might even have hoped for some surprising celebrity guest stars, used in clever ways.

Nope. Nope. And nope.

Sure, the animation is of a higher quality. But it’s not so high as to be interesting in and of itself. And besides, the quality of the animation has never been a factor in The Simpsons’ success. If you wait to see this on DVD or television, you won’t miss anything. If you’re expecting the number of sight gags to have increased to take advantage of the larger visual field, you can leave your glasses at home. This isn’t the kind of animated movie you need to see a few times to get everything. Once is more than enough.

The Simpsons Movie clearly exists only to squeeze money out of a large fan base. But those fans have reason to expect much more than they will get here.