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The success of The Simpsons Movie (#1 this weekend, with nearly $72 million box office in the U.S. alone!) has lead to renewed interest in Simpsons merchandise. The excellent Kwik-E-Mart promotion-- which sadly ends tomorrow-- has helped this. There have been news reports on Simpsons collecting from the following: The Onion, Time Out New York, FOX in Philadelphia, and CNN! Everything appears to be coming up Milhouse for Simpsons geeks this month.

Jon from CMH Records has emailed us about an album they have released called “Four Finger Music: The Bluegrass Tribute to the Music Made Famous by The Simpsons”. It is available now on their website or digitally via the iTunes store. The CD will available in retail stores this September. It features 14 tracks, recreating famous Simpsons music in a bluegrass style. Cletus would approve, and so do we.

This week begins the official Simpsons Movie promotion at Burger King restaurants. Burger Kings will have a number of promotional items, the coolest of which are the toys. There 15 toys in the set (see above image), plus the chase Golden Homer figure. The toys for this week are Lisa, Krusty, and Chief Wiggum. Golden Homers will be available every week, in limited numbers. The promotion runs through August.

Finally, the all-gold set that we'd seen pictures of is the international set only.

The SCS will be at this year's Comic Con International in San Diego (July 25-29) and we have again made plans to interact with our fellow collectors. On Friday, July 27, we will have a Simpsons Collectors Meeting from 6:00-7:30pm in Room 24A (in the new portion of the Convention Center, on the top floor, on the city-side hallway near the South end of the building). This will be a friendly get-together, so come and show your faces! We are also inviting any attending SCS members to join us for a BBBQ on Saturday night. We will also be seeing a little something called The Simpsons Movie on Thursday night. There also will be many panels of interest to Simpsons collectors and other planned activities throughout the weekend. We all had a great time meeting everyone last year and we hope to see many more Simpsageeks this year!

Note: A full schedule of planned SCS activities is up in our Magazine. Full, official Con programming schedules also available.

Do you live in Vermont? Then, good news everybody! As previously announced, the city of Springfield in Vermont has been voted as site of The Simpsons Movie premiere tomorrow. But, even cooler, everyone's favorite ice cream hippies-- Ben & Jerry's-- have announced a special Simpsons flavor to be available only in that city and only that one day. The flavor, "Duff and D'oh-Nuts", is a combination of chocolate and cream stout with chunks of glazed chocolate donuts. We are extremely jealous geeks over here.

In addition to his review of the Movie Mayhem figures, Michael Crawford also has written a review of another McFarlane Toys movie set... the Bart/Flanders "What You Lookin' At?" box set. Keep an eye out for paint slop if purchasing this set in stores. Michael Crawford intends to review the rest of the movie figures in the coming week.

Two CDs full of original music from 'The Simpsons' episodes-- 1997's "Songs In The Key Of Springfield" and 1999's "Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons" -- have already been released. Now, the new newsletter from Shout Factory makes mention of a third CD coming soon. From the release-

As Homer J. Simpson would say, "Woo-hoo!" Shout! Factory is uber-excited to bring a fantastic Simpsons TV soundtrack to your CD players this September. The Simpsons Testify is a 41-track disc featuring all your faves from Seasons 10 through 18, like "My Fair Laddy" (based on My Fair Lady), "Everybody Hates Ned Flanders," "Glove Slap" (to the tune of "Love Shack"), "Homer & Marge" (a Springfieldized version of "Jack & Diane"), as well as four previously unaired songs. Plus, it's packed with special guests, including Ricky Gervais, Jackson Browne, The B-52s and David Byrne. What with the film coming and all current Simpsons hubbub, the only thing left for you to fan it with is this CD.

And don't forget, the official Simpsons movie soundtrack is coming later this month.

UPDATE: The Simpsons Channel apparently has the cover art... scroll down to July 16th for the news item.

We're still not 100% sure, but here is what we believe to be the official details of the Simpsons promotion at Burger King, starting in one week. There will be 15 talking toys in the set, with an additional Golden Homer variation as a chase. The other gold toys seen earlier were just prototypes, we believe (we may be wrong, but we hope we're right). eBay seller supply312 has preorders up for the full set... minus Golden Homer. This seller also provided us with the image seen above (click thumbnail for larger view). There will also be Simpsons-themed bags, sandwich wrappers, and the like. Not as cool as real life Kwik-E-Marts, but still pretty darn awesome.

UPDATE (7/16): Okay, the confusion continues... it appears there may be a full set of gold figures after all, just not in the United States. eBay seller mmms_family has an auction up showing the gold toys, labeling them as an international set. Hopefully when the actual promotion starts next week, we will have reports from collectors to verify what the deal is.

UPDATE #2 (7/19): We now have confirmation that the gold set is an international/European BK promotion.

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