The arthouse home-video heroes at Criterion work with a variety of designers and artists on their high-class covers. Yet the powerhouse has such a distinct house style that various online wisenheimers online have made a habit of imagining what some decidedly non-Criterion titles might look like once filtered through the abstract, arty highbrow filter of Criterion. 

Christian Lynch of Tumblr site Monsterlunch has taken it upon himself to creature a faux-Criterion cover for every film that played at the Simpsons' Springfield Film Festival 20 years ago, back when it brought in visiting celebrity Jay “It Stinks!” Sherman of “The Critic” as a judge. The fest was part of “A Star Is Burns,” an episode that famously caused a rift between Matt Groening and his fellow Simpsons bigwigs; Groening was none too keen on a crossover episode, and made his displeasure plain in only the way a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars can do. 

Nonetheless, I found these faux-Criterion covers to be muy bueno, even the one about Mr. Burns, who, as this particular episode so indelibly taught us, is El Diablo.