It’s the 30th anniversary of the short-lived Simpsons rival Capitol Critters! To commemorate the occasion, we decided to check in on the titular critters and see what they’ve been up to.
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anniversary
The Simpsons Season 1 DVD Turns 20
Today marks the 20th anniversary of The Simpsons: The Complete First Season DVD boxset in North America (tip of the hat to illustrator Bill Mudron for mentioning this). It was, for a time, the best selling TV show on DVD until it was eclipsed by Chappelle’s Show a few years later. Now that physical media has been rendered a relic by streaming services, let’s take this opportunity to look back at what’s been lost.
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Feeble Jab at Fox News Garners Big Press
The Simpsons appended this incredibly minor “jab” at Fox News to the rebroadcast of the first episode, Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, which aired as part of Fox’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration Sunday night:
Despite its severe lameness (We don’t like Fox News! LOL!), it still got a bunch of press coverage from places like the Huffington Post (takes shot!), Hollywood Reporter (skewered! blasted!), and Zap2It (trashes!) … and that was before professional pinhead Bill O’Reilly weighed in.
I can only imagine what font size they’d use for the headlines if the scene featuring CEO Rupert Murdoch in jail had aired today.
The Secret Origin of The Simpsons
The Simpsons turn 20 today (that is, if you don’t count the Christmas special as the first episode and completely ignore the original shorts from The Tracey Ullman Show), and there’s been a number of retrospectives to mark the occasion. An oft-repeated claim in many histories is that creator Matt Groening, fearing the loss of his Life in Hell characters, came up with the Simpsons in fifteen minutes before a meeting with Ullman producer James L. Brooks. But the characters actually originated nearly 40 years ago, in an unpublished novel Groening wrote in high school:
Chat Transcript (April 6, 1999):
Question hobgoblin: How old were you when you first came up with the idea for “The Simpsons”? I know that the show has been on for a long time.
[…]
Matt_G “The Simpsons” originated in high school.
Matt_G I wrote a bleak little novel called “The Mean Little Kids” starring a teenage Bart Simpson with buckteeth and a very bad complexion.
How quickly did The Simpsons gel in your mind?
I needed to come up with an idea really quickly. In the back of my mind was the idea of doing something that might possibly end up spinning off into its own TV show, so I created a family which I thought would lend itself to a lot of different kinds of stories. In high school I had written a novel, a sort of a very sour Catcher in the Rye, self pitying, adolescent novel starring Bart Simpson as a very troubled teenager. I took that family and transferred it, made them younger, and then drew. It took about 15 minutes to design the characters the first time out.
Were they all the same characters that we now know and love?
Yes, but they’ve been transformed.Why didn’t you leave Bart as an adolescent?
TV does children really badly, and I thought there was room for something different. Teenagers are already running rampant on television, but kids are done very unrealistically in sitcoms. Sometimes, a particular character gels with an audience and becomes the star.Was Bart at the center all along?
Yeah. The rest of the Simpsons in my original conception were in a struggle to be normal and Bart was the one who thought that being normal was boring.
And now you know… the rest of the story.
Simpsons To End Next Year
I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that The Simpsons will finally, mercifully end in 2011, after twenty-two seasons.
- The show has yet to be renewed beyond the 2010-2011 season (season 22), so there’s no guarantee there’ll be a Season 23.
- In November, the Animation Guild blog mentioned that the writers were working on “another thirteen episodes”. Each production season, the last couple of episodes become the first episodes of the next season; these are called “holdovers.” The current season (season 21) has eight holdovers – notice the production codes in this chart. Presumably, this means next season will also have eight holdovers, which when coupled with the aforementioned thirteen episodes will fulfill a complete season order of twenty-one episodes, with no holdovers for a 23rd season.
- The show has been losing a million viewers each season for the past couple seasons with no end in sight. It often gets lower ratings than Family Guy. Each episode costs somewhere around $3 million. All of these must be major concerns for Fox executives… but then again The Simpsons is the sixth-highest earner on television, and makes like a billion dollars from merchandise and syndication, so ratings are probably irrelevant.
- The 20th anniversary hoopla feels like a final victory parade to me, a last hurrah before they ride into the sunset. It’s probably wise to end it while goodwill is high.
- I just want to be right so I can look prophetic.
Pope Praises Simpsons…?!?
VATICAN CITY (AP) – To put it as the devout Ned Flanders would, the Vatican’s newspaper thinks “The Simpsons” are an okely dokely bunch.
L’Osservatore Romano on Tuesday congratulated the show on its 20th anniversary, praising its philosophical leanings as well as its stinging and often irreverent take on religion.
If you’re making a supposedly subversive show and the Vatican praises it, you are doing something wrong [Chicago Tribune]
IN 3-D ON ICE
The guy who made a whole movie about how eating a lot of mcdonalds food is bad for you is going to direct a documentary about the simpsons, who gives a shit. The real news is that it’s gonna be called “THE SIMPSONS 20th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL IN 3-D ON ICE,” which is the best name for a thing ever. [ComingSoon.net]