So now that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been compared across the Internet to Kenneth the Page, the earnest country boy come to New York in NBC’s comedy “30 Rock,” the question almost asks itself: How long before Jack McBrayer, the Second City-trained comic who plays Kenneth, will be enlisted by “Saturday Night Live” to do Jindal?

We’ll answer that, as best we can, in a minute. First, though, it’s fair to say that the comparison, however cruel or partisan it may strike people as, isn't crazy. Jindal was looser and more natural in his “Today” show interview Wednesday morning, but on Tuesday night, delivering the Republican response to Pres. Obama’s State of the Union address, he brought the Kenneth: The earnestness. The slow, almost overly mannered delivery. The gee-whiz affect.

Kenneth has even been known to question science. Jindal invoked money for volcano monitoring as an example of imprudent, Democratic-approved spending. Here, following in the footsteps of many today, is a side-by-side video comparison. Here is a typical post.

What this means is that, with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin finding her pop-culture doppelganger in Tina Fey, the two Republican frontrunners for the 2012 nomination (an important status to have almost four years out, to be sure) have comic analogues in the “30 Rock” cast.

It’s also a pretty safe bet the Republican field will include somebody who looks and acts a lot like Jack Donaghy, the network executive played by Alec Baldwin on the show about a network late-night comedy show. Donaghy is already a Republican – he even went off to work in the Bush administration for a time – and his mannerisms are very much central-casting politician.   

It could be worse for the Republican party. Instead of one of the best shows on TV, its contenders could be drawing comparisons to the cast of “My Name Is Earl,” for instance. Or “Wife Swap.”

Now, about “SNL”: NBC doesn’t comment about who might play whom on the show, and McBrayer couldn’t be reached for comment. The show is in reruns this weekend, the moment the Jindal iron is hottest, at least until the 2012 campaign starts, probably in about three months.

When the show does return, on March 7, the host will be Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But the week after that, the likely host is none other than Tracy Morgan, star of – are you ready? – “30 Rock.”

Stills from the new "Simpsons" intro showing the head of Jebediah Springfield being sawed off and then back on, and Jessica Lovejoy's changing hair color. Plus, just because it's interesting, the price of Maggie. See the full post and comments below.

(And thanks to Tom Comings and Mark Sennott in Tribune Interactive for doing these screen grabs, which they got using the YouTube video Fox posted and SnagIt, a very nice image capture tool that I also use (but didn't realize works so well for video, too).)

Jebediah Springfield's miraculously restored head

Jessica Lovejoy's fickle hair

Plus, the price of Maggie

(UPDATE: See stills from the intro here.)

Normally, a new intro to a television series wouldn’t be news.

Television series themselves are barely news anymore, unless they somehow get mentioned on Facebook.

And whether they draw notice or not, very few of them these days possess the courage to show an introductory sequence that is more than perfunctory. The shows are so worried about people changing the channel, they just plunge right into the script and drop a title in about ten jokes later.

Among the few that do have title sequences, changing it around would be so obviously a ploy for attention that it would be given the collective cold shoulder.

Unless, that is, the show in question is “The Simpsons,” cultural icon, wellspring of much contemporary humor, sagacious educator, trusted colleague, dear friend. (And, always and forever, way, way better than “Family Guy.” Send crass, derivative notes of outrage, lacking fully developed characters, to sajohnson@tribune.com.)

On Sunday, “The Simpsons” unveiled its first really new opening in its 20 seasons on the air. The famous sequence was remade to accommodate the show being broadcast, finally, in high definition, perhaps because someone figured out that yellow cartoon people look that much more sickly in SD.

And in the process, the opening not only got sharper, in the way HD does, but it got wider, it got longer (2 minutes), and it got a lot more detailed.

The arc of the story is the same: Bart writes something comical on his school blackboard (Sunday: “HDTV is worth every cent”), then takes us through his family’s town of Springfield, ending with all the Simpsons on the couch, in front of the TV, watching “The Simpsons.”

But now you can see, when baby Maggie is inadvertently left on a supermarket checkout conveyer, just how much she costs ($245.26 $243.26). And the pan of Springfield characters is more detailed, including gigantic god and devil figures towering over everyone.

What’s not clear is whether the ending will again vary, week to week, as they have done, wonderfully, through the life of the series.

The new opener would be an out-and-out winner if not for the -- gasp! -- continuity error. In the first scene, teenagers saw the head off the statue of town founder Jebediah Springfield. Later, the statue is intact.

At least the town motto at the statue’s base ““A Noble Spirit Embiggens the Smallest Man” remains the same.

There was much chatter on the Web Monday about the new opening. A lot of it was from people asking why “The Simpsons” bothered and, as people on the Web often race to do, proclaiming the show “over.”

Sorry, but that episode, with Homer discovering how his life might have been if he’d been elected senior class president in high school, was solid, a good, but not great “Simpsons.”

And now that the show’s introduction has been itself embiggened, there’s a new reason to take another look at a TV series that, because of its longevity, is too easily taken for granted.

He's "mildly disturbed" by the attention it's received and a little worried about what David Chase might say to him. I interviewed Victor Solomon, who recut "The Sopranos" down to its swear words (plus a few others), by e-mail about the project. Tribune rules mean I can 't post it here, but you can find it at his Web site, link below, at Vimeo, and elsewhere on the Web. My in-print review of the piece is here.

How'd you come up with the idea and why did it strike you as worth doing?

I, as a devout Trinitarian, neither take part, or believe in cursing of any kind. I find it to be a filthy and disgusting act, and ultimately a way for people to punch their ticket for an eternity in hell. I created this piece as a collection of the filth that American television subjects us to, in an attempt to help shake people out of their casual response to such behavior.

How long did it take? Did you have any idea it would end up being so long?

All told, the project took about a year to complete. As a director, very little of my time is actually spent shooting, I'm stuck in either pre-production bull*&$, or post-production purgatory, so poked at it here and there while waiting for projects to either get started, or get finished. Had I sat down and done it all in one pass, it could've been done in a much more timely fashion, but free time is not something I typically have a lot of.

I was actually surprised when I finished as to how short it was. I thought it would have been longer, but taking into consideration that each curse takes up about half a second, I guess 27 minutes is sufficiently long enough.

 Now that it's finished, what does it say?

Now that it's finished, it says, [expletive-expletive-different expletive-expletive-third expletive-expletive]. Actually, it says probably everything ['Sopranos' creator] David Chase is going to say to me when he finds out what i've done.

Are you worried about a takedown order on copyright grounds? What are the rules there?

I don't know what the legality of this is, I'm probably going to jail for a long long time once HBO tracks me down. Should that happen, tell the world my story, I'm far too pretty to go to jail. On second thought, I'm a fantastic poker player, so I could potentially do well for myself in there. Send Camel Lights.

Seems like a lot of reaction to it. What's the most interesting response you've had?

I've strangely been inundated with requests to do the same for "Deadwood", I haven't seen that show, but apparently they do a lot of cursing there too. How degenerate is this country that they actually want to see more curse words? I've also received an email from someone who really wants to show this to his elderly father who doesn't use computers, which seems strange, but I'm glad to bring fathers and sons together with the bond of incessant cussing.

Bigger picture, what is the deal with this whole genre of recuts or, as I've seen them called, "supercuts"?

You know, I didn't really know that other people had done stuff like this before. Naturally, once it was released there was a lot of talk about how unoriginal the idea was, which I could care less about. Once you start getting self-righteous and protective of silly things like this, you've got bigger issues to deal with. 

I will say though, the best one of this 'genre' is NWA's "explicit content only": http://www.ni9e.com/nwa.html

My favorite moment: Tony, all of a sudden, says, “I love you.”

The I love you thing, and subsequent non-curse parts, are actually my favorite. After cutting together the first episode, and watching it back, i realized that it would be monotonous to just watch swear words the entire time, and needed some moments of levity to keep it relatively interesting to watch.

Quick bio on you? Link?

I am a director, and am mildly disturbed that this project has garnered more attention than any of my others. I've recently finished a 30 minute short film entitled "Walker Phillips" which will be making it's run on the film festival circuit, and am preparing to shoot a series of screen adaptations of Dan Rhodes book of short stories, "Anthropology" (the first five of which are on my website now: http://www.victorsolomon.com)