The few times filmmakers have taken on Homer’s sprawling epic, Odyssey

You have to hand it to The Simpsons.

The series told the story of Homer’s Odyssey in six minutes and 30 seconds what Christopher Nolan will take almost three hours to do next week when the British filmmaker’s screen epic is released in cinemas.

OK, OK, so Matt Groening and the gang took some liberties with its retelling, omitted a lot of details and changed quite a bit in its distillation of Odysseus’s 10-year journey back from Troy to Ithaca.

The sight of Patty and Selma as the sirens, and Mayor Quimby as Zeus, Homer eating Lenny, Moe and Carl after their transformation into pigs by Circe, or Marge being wooed by Disco Stu, is not exactly faithful, but it’s actually a pretty good adaptation.

Certainly, for a lot of The Simpsons fans, it’s how they learnt about Odyssey.

The title of the episode, Tales from the Public Domain, even nods to an interesting tension. Odyssey is not copyrighted, so anyone is free to make their own version of it, but very few attempt it.

The tale is so sprawling, artistic ambition alone is not enough to pull it off, you also need a hell of a lot of money. It’s a huge challenge to mount a story which spans a decade and traverses so many locations plus magic and mythical creatures such as gods, a cyclops, a sorcerer and, the rest.

Plus, all that sailing – water is notoriously hard and expensive for any movie production. Just ask Steven Spielberg, who battled the sea to make Jaws.

It’s no wonder that there hasn’t been a defining screen version of Odyssey in more than half a century.

Until now, the best known movie adaptation of Odyssey has been the 1954 film Ulysses, which starred Kirk Douglas as the geographically-wayward hero.

Directed by Mario Camerini from a screenplay with seven credited writers, the film ran for just under two hours – which meant cutting a lot of the story out – and was a lush production. It also starred Anthony Quinn and Silvana Mangano.

It looks fantastic and is a classic swords-and-sandals from an era of filmmaking which loved the genre. Douglas would again play in this sandbox in Spartacus in 1960.

After that, Odysseus largely disappeared from the big screen, except as a character in adaptations of Iliad, such as the 2004 epic Troy, until only two years ago in a little-seen drama called The Return, which starred Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche.

But this was a very different approach to the big scale of an epic. As the title suggests, the focus was on the latter part of the story of when Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca, and it also dispenses with the magical elements of the tale.

On the small screen, there were two notable miniseries, one an eight-episode Italian production called The Odyssey from 1968, and a two-part American one from 1997.

The Italian one, given the length of it, captured most of Homer’s story. The American one was only a two-parter, but it was relatively big-budgeted for the format and had a raft of decent names including Isabella Rossellini, Christopher Lee, Greta Scacchi, Vanessa Williams and Bernadette Peters.

Odysseus was played by Armand Assante, who had previously portrayed mobster John Gotti in a 1996 HBO movie.

But it would be remiss to leave out what is actually the best adaptation of Odyssey, at least in the past 70 years: O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Coen brothers transplanted the story from ancient Greece to the American South of the 1930s. And instead of a war strategist and hero, it’s centred on three convicts that have escaped from a prison chain gang.

The comedy, starring George Clooney (who plays the character Ulysses Everett McGill), Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro, charts their misadventures in their pursuit of a buried treasure.

There are even encounters with the film’s versions of cyclops (John Goodman as an one-eyed mugger), Poseidon and sirens. It’s a hoot, and has a fantastic song by the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys bluegrass group the guys form as part of their quest.

The Odyssey is in cinemas on July 16