The Simpsons opening sequence couch gag is shown, before the credits are displayed on a new widescreen flat panel television. Sometimes, the flat panel television falls to the floor and breaks, but unlike "Bart Gets a Z", the episode will begin then anyway. In the 500th episode, the opening sequence was a montage of all previous couch gags. Creator Matt Groening developed a lengthy opening sequence for the first season of "The Simpsons", in order to cut down on the animation necessary for each episode, but devised the two gags as compensation for the repeated material each week. In the first of the original
The Simpsons opening sequence where the billboard says "Krusty: Now Doing Funerals". The chalkboard gag is a running visual joke that occurs during the opening credits of many episodes. In this gag, Bart Simpson is writing lines on the chalkboard as a punishment; when the school bell rings, he immediately stops writing and runs out of the classroom. The phrase he writes on the chalkboard changes from episode to episode. Chalkboard messages may involve political humor such as "The First Amendment does not cover burping", pop culture references such as "I can't see dead people" ("The Sixth Sense") and "I was not the sixth