The Simpsons Creator Watched Too Much TV as a Kid

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE has finally arrived after months of speculations about its plot which was shrouded in secrecy. It turns out that Homer Simpson makes a huge blunder and has to save his family and the world from a catastrophe which he himself created. 

Some call them sacrilegious, others shocking but Homer and Marge, together with their children Bart, Lisa and Maggie are idiosyncratic and their adventures are often dramatic and hilarious, yet they have also come to reflect familial stability. Never boring, their stories work so well because as well as portraying life in a blue collar community with conflicts and upheavals they have a great deal of emotional depth and complexity.

Matt Groening, Simpsons’ writer and creator shares what it’s like creating the movie years after the Simpsons debuted on television.

Q: How much of you do you think is there in Bart and Homer?

A: “There is a little bit of everybody who works on the show in all the characters. It is not autobiographical though. Originally the characters were named after members of my family. The only one I will admit to being like anyone in my family is Lisa. My sister Lisa is sensitive, intelligent and pretty. The rest, and my family and I agree on this, are not like the characters on the show.”

Q: Did you ever think of doing the movie in 3D?

A: “I never thought it should be 3 D because THE SIMPSONS are what you physically see. If you render a CG look, it would overshadow and undermine who they are. They are 2 D drawings to begin with. I originally drew the characters in black and white and then Georgie Peluse assigned the color yellow to them for animation. I thought that that was uniquely good because whenever you were changing channel you could always tell that it was THE SIMPSONS.”

Q: What do you think elevated it to the extent that it is huge internationally and these characters have become iconic archetypes?

A: “My brilliance (laughs). No no. I think there is some merit to the design of the show, but it is a collaborative effort and has been from the very beginning when these characters first appeared on THE TRACEY ULLMAN SHOW. So I think it is the combination of great funny sight gags and real emotions. We want to make people feel that they are not alone.” 

Q: Why does this family resonate with so many people?

A: “I think there is a tradition in sitcoms of families that are insulting each other but what we were able to do was to carry that much further and exaggerate it, whereas I think conventional sitcoms hold back and have a certain sentimentality that we do not have. We are a little harder sometimes, though the family does love each other but they drive each other crazy and people can relate to them.”

Q: Where do you draw the line?

A: “Well one of the very earliest jokes was Homer strangling Bart and we talked about this – this is the way it works in my head. I am really not in favor of child strangling, (laughs) but it is all exaggerated of course and it is a cartoon and it is almost as if the cartoon were a stand in for impulsive behavior. It’s not real obviously and that is the way I justify it. One of the difficulties we had at the beginning of the show was that it was unique so we had to get the animators on board with our tone; the tone that we were trying to achieve that was not Disney and not Warner Bros. In fact we had to change some of the animation to make it cruder and more clumsy so that it did keep our unique tone. It is exaggerated physical comedy with underlying real emotions.”

Q: Was there anything in your background that served as an inspiration for your brilliant creations?

A: “I spent a large part of my childhood watching television, if I hadn’t gone into TV I would really have felt that I was wasting my life. It was all research as it turned out. It was a combination of observing people and TV shows. Somebody asked where Marge’s hair came from and it was a combination of THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. Bart in particular came from the TV show LEAVE IT TO BEAVER. My favorite character on that show was Eddy Haskell, who was a very sarcastic, two faced, bad kid and I thought ‘wouldn’t it be neat if he was the star of his own show?’  ”

Matt Groening is the talented creator and executive producer of THE SIMPSONS MOVIE and Fox’s Emmy Award winning series. He became well known for his ‘Life in Hell’ cartoon strip, an irreverent take on life that debuted in 1977 and currently appears in many newspapers around the world. Books based on his cartoon strip include: LOVE IS HELL, WORK IS HELL, SCHOOL IS HELL and CHILDHOOD IS HELL.

He has been nominated for 25 Emmy Awards and has won 10. In May 2003 Groening was honored with the Rueben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of The Year, the highest honor presented by the National Cartoonists Society. 

‘The Simpsons Movie’ is now showing in theaters nationwide from 20th Century Fox distributed by Warner Bros.