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How long are they going to be kids? Is it normal that Matt Groening seems to have no plans for advancing their ages?
If The Simpsons were in real time then Bart would be 32, Lisa would be 29 and Maggie would be 22 D: weird.
If they do, it will change everything. I mean imagine them being 18 or something. They won't be in elementary school, they wont be able to pull the little pranks they do and the list goes on. I honestly think the Simpsons are dead though, it's not what it used to be.
It's because the episodes are supposed to happen close together, not over a period of 20 years or more when the episodes are made. If you see what I mean.
I was going to post something about "narrative convenience", but then I scrolled past the dappled/gems thing.
WHAT THE FRAKK IS UP WIT DAT
It's normal because they're not real. If they were humans, then there would be a problem
Aha, dappled. Someone should paint that; the Modern Lisa.
And yeah, the Simpsons are decades old now, but as someone said the show would lose it's charm with older characters. The older episodes were best.
Aren't they just drawings? Why do you want drawings to grow up? By that rationale, the Mona Lisa should be a corpse by now.
While Mona Lisa is a static illustration, the Simpson's cartoon syndication is not. With movement, adventures, and other sentient, anthropomorphous qualities and motifs added, there is an expectation of an adherence to the human aging process.
That's true but how do you pin a timeline to something that exists only discontinuously. The Simpsons may have existed for a quarter of a century but only for 23 minutes of every week. And they show old ones, plus people in different countries see them in differently spaced intervals. You could artificially pin it to the present day on the day each episode is made, except it takes longer to make an episode than to show it. Another paradigm shift in terms of chronology.
The only way to avoid tying yourself up in knots is to assume a very compressed timeline, which is what The Simpsons do. The characters actually do grow older (I remember Bart having a birthday) but they grow older at a vastly retarded rate. This allows the makers to deal with issues such as birthdays and rites of passage without getting bogged down in all the problems of "real-time".
I think most of us are familiar enough with the medium to not expect the characters to age, in the same way Wile E. Coyote always recovers from an accident in next to no time. It's a device that is a requirement of the medium. It's fine to ask why characters don't age, but there's a good reason why it's easier if they don't.
Personally, I do fall on your side of the argument sometimes as I like it when cartoon makers subvert the usual rules of the medium. I distinctly remember a Tom and Jerry where Jerry shot the fur off the top of Tom's head and in the next scene Tom wore an awful ginger wig. The clever part is that he wore it right through to the end of the show, even though it had already served its purpose as a comedic device.
Right. Well, even for a "retarded rate of aging", it is extremely slow. How long has Maggie been a baby and been carried around while sucking on a pacifier? About 15 years? Insufferable.
Haha, I love that show. But yeah I've noticed that too. They've been the same age since 1989
Haha, I knw bart's voice is done by an adult. Meaning the voice tone is nt gna change much. So they can't get older. Coz the voices are not done by kids :).