VIDEO : NOBODY BEATS `SIMPSONS' FOR COMEDY.

Byline: Robert Bianco Special to the Daily News

Those who call ``The Simpsons'' a great cartoon give it too little credit. It's a great comic creation, one of the best TV has ever done in any format.

On Sunday night, this sitcom stalwart enters its ninth season, and to celebrate the occasion, Fox is finally releasing the show on video. This first video installment of ``The Simpsons,'' the longest-running prime-time cartoon in TV history, consists of six episodes from the first season on three tapes ($9.98 each, $24.98 as a three-pack).

Volume 1 of ``The Best of the Simpsons'' includes ``Life on the Fastlane'' and ``There's No Disgrace Like Home'' (the infamous episode where the therapy-impaired Simpsons zap each other with electric shocks). Volume 2 has ``Bart the General'' and ``Moaning Lisa''; Volume 3 has ``The Crepes of Wrath'' and ``Krusty Gets Busted.'' In addition, each tape includes one of creator Matt Groening's original ``Simpsons'' shorts from ``The Tracey Ullman Show.''

What these tapes offer is a chance to see ``The Simpsons'' develop. The animation in this early version is not as smooth and fluid as it is now; the family members are less life-like and more grotesque - both in the way they're drawn and the way they're written. The show had yet to pick up its full array of subsidiary characters and catch phrases. (Bart says ``Aye Carumba!'' but Homer can't be counted on to say ``D'oh!'')

From its birth as a sort of human counterpart to Groening's buck-toothed ``Life in Hell'' bunnies, ``The Simpsons'' has grown into one of the smartest, most complex and most subversive shows on television. In the end, virtue is almost always triumphant, but along the way, you're expected to laugh at your virtuous assumptions.

Though there have been other popular prime-time cartoons, ``The Simpsons'' was the first to use animation to its full effect: to rush its cast of thousands through time and space in ways no live-action series could duplicate. Its scripts and its drawings are incredibly dense, demanding and rewarding attention. In its first five minutes, ``The Simpsons'' can use up more jokes and plot lines than most sitcoms use in a full episode.

Because it's a cartoon, we give the show's characters leeway no human would be allowed. They can go to ludicrous and hilarious extremes to make a point, without being dragged back by reality or politically correct pressure. Only ``The Simpsons'' could skewer targets as diverse as nuclear power, cartoon violence, Disneyland excess, union feather-bedding and ``Kwiki-Mart'' hot dogs. Nor is it likely that any other show could do an episode implying that the entire steel industry was gay, and then end it with a final dedication telling the steelworkers to ``Keep reaching for that rainbow!''

As a pop icon itself, ``The Simpsons'' is well-placed to target other king-pins of pop culture, as witness its spoofs of ``The Wonder Years,'' ``Cape Fear,'' ``Thelma & Louise,'' ``The Shining,'' ``Dracula'' and ``King Kong.'' The show has also given us more than a few memorable musical moments, including a song-and-dance version of ``A Streetcar Named Desire'' and a combined spoof of ``101 Dalmatians'' and ``Beauty and the Beast'' that featured Mr. Burns' show-stopping production number ``Be My Vest.''

Yet for all its countercultural appeal, when it wants to, ``The Simpsons'' can swing back for a sweet and surprisingly touching family moment without ever becoming maudlin. The people who attack The Simpsons' family values have missed the point. At the show's core is a dysfunctional but loving family, united together against an outside world that's even more dysfunctional.

Doing most of the show's hundred-some voices is a vastly underappreciated cast: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Yeardley Smith, Nancy Cartwright, Hank Azaria, Harry Shearer and frequent guest Phil Hartman. The show also revels in stunt casting with the likes of Johnny Carson, Glenn Close, Kirk Douglas, Harvey Fierstein, Dennis Franz, Kelsey Grammer (the homicidal Sideshow Bob), Bette Midler, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, Sting, Meryl Streep, John Waters and Elizabeth Taylor - who spoke little Maggie's only word.

What was that word? Come on: That's why the show's on tape.

Elsewhere on video

The other big cartoon news is the video return of Walt Disney's 1959 classic ``Sleeping Beauty'' for the first time since 1986. The tape includes bonus programming and is available in pan-and-scan for $26.99.

The film, which was the first Disney animated feature to be shot in 70mm widescreen (a format that made it the most expensive animated feature of the time), is also the first Disney cartoon to be available in letterbox. You'll pay more, however, for those black bands: That tape sells for $29.99.

``Sleeping Beauty'' has long been considered the weakest of the classic Disney fairy tales, mostly because of the intrusion of those three blathering fairies, Flora, Fauna and Merryweather. Even so, it is gloriously animated and likely to enchant children now just as it did in 1959.

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Photo

Photo: In the early episodes, ``The Simpsons'' lacked fluid animation and all those offbeat characters.