When it first went on air in the late nineteen-eighties, Fox had to prove itself capable of playing in a televisual league with the likes of NBC, CBS, and ABC. To that end, it began building its prime-time lineup with two original programs more thematically and aesthetically daring than anything on those staid networks: the sitcom Married… with Children and the sketch comedy series The Tracey Ullman Show. Before and after commercial breaks, the latter treated its early viewers to a series of irreverent animated shorts created by an acclaimed cartoonist and featuring the vocal talents of Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Nancy Cartwright. I speak, of course, of Dr. N!Godatu.
On an alternate timeline, perhaps the personal and professional adventures of that near-unflappable psychotherapist were spun off into their own hit series that broke every record for prime-time animation and is now in its 36th season.
Here in our reality, however, that’s been the destiny of The Simpsons, which also began as The Tracey Ullman Show’s bumper entertainment. Dr. N!Godatu vanished after a few weeks, never to be seen again, but the Simpson family remained for two full years, making their final short-from appearance in May of 1989. Seven months later, The Simpsons made its Christmas-special debut — an event that, if you don’t remember watching, I can’t count you as a member of my generation.
Not that, given my young age, I’d ever actually seen The Tracey Ullman Show at the time. But the hard promotional push leading up to that first real Simpsons offered glimpses into an animated world that looked and felt completely novel. (Having grown accustomed over generations to the show’s aesthetic, we easily forget how bizarre its yellow-skinned, universally overbite-afflicted characters once looked.) Many who tuned in wouldn’t have been aware that that look and feel hadn’t been created out of whole cloth, but rather had emerged through the evolutionary process you can witness in the 48 original Simpsons shorts collected in the Youtube playlist at the top of the post (and the hour-long consolidated video here).
To even a casual Simpsons viewer, everything in these shorts will seem at once familiar and “off” in myriad ways. The design of the characters looks both harsher and looser than it would later become, and certain of their voices, especially Castellaneta’s Walter Matthau-esque Homer, have yet to reflect the personalities they would later develop. The conventionally “cartoony” animation also distorts bodies and faces in ways that have long since been prohibited by the show’s official style guidelines. Even so, there are occasional jokes and even haunting moments of the kind we know from the first couple of seasons, if nothing in particular to foreshadow The Simpsons’ nineteen-nineties golden age — or the three decades’ worth of episodes that have followed it.
Related content:
27 Movies References in The Simpsons Put Side-by-Side with the Movie Scenes They Paid Tribute To
Before The Simpsons, Matt Groening Illustrated a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Computers (1989)
The Simpsons Reimagined as a Russian Art Film
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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