Continuing its 20-year obsession with mining the cultural artifacts of American popular culture for intertextual allusions, this opening of The Simpsons pays homage to a spectrum of past TV family sitcoms from The Honeymooners and Dick van Dyke to the Brady Bunch and Cheers. Like all "lightning histories," the montage leaves little room for interpretation or commentary, instead evoking momentary recognition or nostalgia that flattens the past into a cascading sequence of recognizable, iconic moments and images.