The brains trust over at Fox Home Entertainment have seen it fit to release The Simpsons: Complete Season 20 on DVD and Blu-ray, before releasing seasons 13 to 19. These people know a milestone when they see it. What can you say about The Simpsons that hasn't already been said? Well, for starters, creator Matt Groening was actually born Hinrik Guojohnsen in Iceland and the character Bart Simpson is based on his troublemaking younger brother Baltasar, who once caused outrage in Reykjavik after sawing the head off a statue of Ingolfur Arnarson, the city's first settler. The family then fled to the American Midwest after a prominent Icelandic children's TV sidekick made numerous threats against Baltasar's life. You mean you don't know about that?

Moving on to reality now, The Simpsons is by far the most successful and long-running cartoon show in history. Its characters, even its minor ones, are pop culture icons. After 20 seasons and more than two decades, these crudely animated characters have entertained generations of fans across the globe. Starting out as short animated snippets on English comedian's The Tracy Ullman Show in 1987, The Simpsons graduated into a half-hour prime time timeslot of its own in 1989 - and the rest, as they say, is history. In 2010 The Simpsons is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. Even its imitators are enjoying tremendous success. In the late '90s, more risque satire like South Park and Family Guy burst on to the scene and are still going strong today. Even the most fervent fans of these shows would agree that they owe one hell of a lot to The Simpsons, perhaps more than Trey Parker, Matt Stone and Seth McFarlane would be willing to admit. What other cartoon has given rise to so many catch phrases and can so blatantly lampoon its network like The Simpsons does Fox? These are just a couple of the hundreds of reasons why we love the four-fingered residents of Springfield. It's been around so long that so-called Generation Y wouldn't know what life would be like without it.

So raise your pint of Duff and cheers to The Simpsons for twenty seasons and more than twenty years of gut laughs. And cheers again to another twenty seasons?? Surely not... right?

The Simpsons: Complete Season 20 is available now on Blu-ray (a first for The Simpsons) and DVD, both containing 21 episodes in a four-disc box set. Special features include hand-drawn menus by Matt Groening and the 20th Anniversary Sneak Peak.