Long-running animated series The Simpsons is getting in on the LEGO action next month, and we finally have our first look at a much blockier version of Homer.

The series’ 550th episode, dubbed "Brick Like Me,” is set to air on May 4 and finds Homer transported into a very square take on his hometown of Springfield. Considering the success of The LEGO Movie, and The Simpsons’ willingness to play with different trends, this could make for a fun mashup.

In their defense, producers Brian Kelley and Matt Selman claim they were unaware of The LEGO Movie when they pitched the project. Selman told Entertainment Weekly they had been “dreaming of doing a Simpsons LEGO episode for as long as [they] could remember.” Fair enough, and we’d have to agree that it does sound like a weirdly cool idea.

Here’s how Selman described the plot, as well as the challenges of putting so much time into a project:

“We thought it was cool to start off in the world of Lego and have all the characters think that this was their normal life. Then through a series of bizarre flashbacks, Homer starts to suspect that the Lego world isn’t where he belongs. So he starts tearing away at the fabric of what he thinks is reality, which is never a great idea. At the end of the day, he has to choose between the world of plastic and the world of meat. … And there’s the best Advent Calendar joke I’ve ever seen in a half-hour show… Once we wrote the roughly three-quarters of the show that is animated in CG, we really couldn’t change it that much and we were going to be stuck. … Having two years to work on something also means you have two years to obsess about something. So we did way more obsessing about the rules of the Lego world versus the rules of the real world. But for the sake of this episode, we have to believe that the Simpsons live in the real world — at least they believe they do. And when they’re in the Lego world, there are different rules. So, a lot of jokes, we were like, ‘Oh, that’s funny, but it doesn’t make sense because they don’t have fire.’ When your readers see the episode, they’ll see why we put so much work into that.”

All these decades later, are you still a fan of The Simpsons? Are you digging the LEGO crossover idea?

(Via Entertainment Weekly)