Dude, I love the Simpsons.

I know this might not be the most revealing confession or even an uncommon one, but I just feel like saying it. This show has been around for so many years that waves of wild popularity followed by natural backlash have surged over and over, but I simply don’t care what the popular opinion is about this show. The Simpsons remain one of my favorite comfort shows, as I usually watch a TiVo-caught episode before beddy-bye, and aside from the rare exception, this isn’t a series that irritates or depresses me.

It’s fascinating to watch the show as it developed, especially in its first half-dozen years. Drawing techniques went from crude to less-than-refined yet more-than-crude. Characters’ voices changed (such as Homer, Skinner, Wiggum, and even Ralph), while the cast of hundreds of animated characters fleshed out their personalities to become more real. Running gags were introduced, played out, retired. Stories ranged from the common and believable to the farfetched and fantastical, while the pacing went from the plodding end of the spectrum to the hyperkinetic cutting end.

For me, I could take or leave the first couple seasons. Sure, there are some quality shows mixed in with the bunch, but the developing nature of the show means that the Simpsons back then weren’t exactly the Simpsons I grew to love.

Happily, as the glacier-paced production of the DVD sets rolled out, eventually we were destined to get to the third season. Season 3 is when the Simpsons started to leave their childhood of wild popularity based on shallow catch phrases and fresh newness, and graduated into a startlingly deep and funny show that not only reflected our society (and serves as a sort of museum for the past decade and a half of America), but also managed to find humor in places no one had ever looked on TV before.

As most of my Simpsons experiences are in reruns, it really shocked me to see how many of my favorite episodes came from this early season. Let’s revisit a few, shall we? The 3rd season kicks off with the first major MAJOR guest star of the series, Michael Jackson, as (ironically) a psyche ward inmate, in “Stark Raving Dad”. “Treehouse of Horror II” carried on a legacy that would become one of the show’s most famous annual events, hosting three mini-Halloween stories (including this year’s Monkey Paw one). “Radio Bart” has the gullible townspeople rallying around a trapped boy in a well, plus, y’know, Sting! And if you’re any sort of fan of the show, the words “Flaming Moe’s” will most likely conjure up an appropriate song and a classic episode in your noggin.

The third season has one of the best Simpsons sequences, in “Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk”. This is where Homer fantasizes about The Land of Chocolate, in which a drawn-out sequence is shown, full of a deliriously happy Homer eating everything in sight to the trippy little happy tune. “THAT WAS TEN MINUTES AGO!”

Here we have probably one of my most favorite episodes ever, if only for the first half of “The Otto Show”, where the series welcomes the cult movie band Spinal Tap to the stage. It’s bizarre, but so appropriate to the film the group is based on, and you would just never think something like this would’ve been welcome on any other show. “We salute you, a HALF-INFLATED Dark Lord! Oy!”

As this season progressed, we witness Chief Wiggum’s hair turning from black to blue, repeated guest star characters (such as Sideshow Bob and Homer’s brother) return for a second outing, and Homer begins to take on more and more alternate vocations (a clerk at the Kwik-e-Mart, a fast food employee, a putt-putt windmill operator, softball player, and a country music manager).

Why should you go out and sell everything you have to own this DVD collection? Two excellent reasons, my friend. First of all, whether you’re very aware of this or not, when a TV show goes into syndication the networks tend to trim seconds or even minutes from each episode to allow more time for commercials. This results in a loss of quotes, entire scenes, and choppy editing. However, once you purchase and hold the DVD collection in your hot little grubby hands, you have the full episode to view — no cuts, no commercials, nada. Plus, they even took some time to add back a few scenes in various episodes that never made the air.

The second reason why this (and the other Simpsons and Futurama sets) are worth their weight in yellow, yellow gold is the cast and crew commentaries. Each one of the 24 episodes has a full commentary, and these aren’t just your typical droning on-and-on about various technical details you couldn’t care less about. I personally loved listening to Matt Groening and Al Jean and the writers and various cast members talk about what they loved from the episode, some behind the scenes stories, some problems with guest stars (grappling with some grumpy baseball star egos in the softball episode was a chore for one guy), and just flinging around jokes like nobody’s business. When done right, the commentaries can even make you see the episode anew (or in a different light), which is miraculous considering how many times I’ve seen each one.

There’s a lot of other extras and details in this set; they don’t skimp on the buffet. One extra I’d really like to see repeated was one they did just for “Colonel Homer”, where they had a “pop-up trivia” option (a la VH1’s “Pop-Up Video”) that just had fun pointing out a lot of little trivia bits for us, the viewing audience.