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
Optimum HDTV viewing distance degree viewing angle). Viewing an HDTV from a position where the display occupies a 30-degree field of view is widely quoted as the SMPTE (or SMPTE 30) recommendation (equivalent to about 1.6264 times the screen size in a 16:9 TV). This recommendation is very popular with the home theater enthusiast community, appears in books on home theater design, and is also supported by a white paper produced by Fujitsu. Although an article on research into setting the specification for the next evolution of HDTV, Ultra HDTV (or UHDTV), does support the premise that HDTV was optimized for a view angle