Fans of The Simpsons will certainly recall a moment from the fourth season episode “Selma’s Choice” in which Lisa unwisely drinks the foul-looking liquid from an It’s A Small World-type attraction at Duff Gardens and then imagines that chattering animatronic dolls are surrounding her on all sides. Additionally, they may recall a scene in the ninth season episode “The Joy Of Sect” in which poor Hans Moleman attempts to escape from the Movementarians cult and is enveloped by the floating white orb from The Prisoner. If those two incidents were somehow synthesized into one hellish sensory deprivation experiment, the result might be something like “The Simpsons Sphere – 360° 500 Episodes At The Same Time,” a diabolical, cacophonous, 10-minute YouTube creation posted by one John Hatfield. Here, the first 23 seasons play simultaneously in some kind of nightmare globe with no doors and no windows, only Simpsons reruns. Using YouTube’s relatively new 360-degree feature, the viewer may scroll up, down, left, or right, but will find the adventures of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, and the other Springfieldians in all directions.
This may sound like some ill-advised experiment from the FXX underground testing labs, but as Chris Plante explains at The Verge, there is a history here. A YouTube account called OmniVerse already posted a collage of couch gags and a similar 10-minute video with 500 simultaneous episodes. What Hatfield did was to take the latter OmniVerse video and transform it into a 360-degree sphere, giving viewers the impression that the madness surrounds them on all sides with no hope of escape. In Plante’s estimate, Hatfield has effectively “chosen to weaponize” The Simpsons by doing this. Brave fans of the series are invited to attempt the challenge themselves and draw their own conclusions.