Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation
by Chris Turner
Summary
Here’s the behind-the-scenes story of America’s favorite nuclear family, how the series grew into a worldwide icon, and who brings it to life so brilliantly week after week, year after year. Since its first airing, “The Simpsons” has deliciously skewered the foibles of American life, evolving into a cultural institution that reaches across the generations. As satire, it’s sharp and funny. As a pop phenom, it’s in a league of its own. And with Planet Simpson, it finally gets the sprawling, multidimensional critical look it so richly deserves. This book was not prepared, licensed, approved, or endorsed by any entity involved in creating or producing the television series “The Simpsons.”
Excerpt
According to legend, according to the press, according (more or less) to the word of its creator, The Simpsons was born in a single fevered moment.
They say it happened like this: It was early 1987. Matt Groening, a thirty-three-year-old underground cartoonist, was sitting outside the office of James L. Brooks, an acclaimed Hollywood producer. Brooks had been a titan of network television in the 1970s (executive producer of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Taxi, among others), and more recently was the celebrated creator of the feature film Terms of Endearment, for which he won three Oscars (as producer, director and writer). At the moment, he was the executive producer of a quirky variety called The Trace3y Ullman Show, set to air soon on the infant Fox Network. Brooks had called Groening in for a meeting, which was to start in fifteen minutes. They were to discuss turning Groening’s acclaimed comic strip, Life in Hell, into a series of animated vignettes to fill space between the Ullman Show’s live skits.
Groening and Brooks had met once before, a year earlier, at the urging of Brooks’ producing partner, Polly Platt, who was a fan of Life in Hell. That time, they’d talked about turning the comic strip into a full-blown feature film. Nothing had come of it. But here Groening was, back again in the antechamber of big-time Hollywood, being offered another chance to bring his work to TV.
Maybe Groening was thinking, as he waited, about the years of menial labor that had marked his decade-long tenure in Los Angeles to that point: work as a chauffeur, as a clerk at a punk record store, as a circulation manager for the L.A. Weekly, schlepping stacks of newspapers around the city in a beat-up Dodge Dart. Perhaps he was thinking about the characters that populated his Life in Hell strip: a misanthropic, one-eared bunny named Binky, a dysfunctional duo in matching fezzes called Akbar and Jeff. The strip rarely had much in the way of set-ups or punchlines. It had no sight gags and didn’t even have much movement—sometimes nothing more than the heads of Akbar and Jeff in identical poses in panel after panel. Instead it was long on wordplay and social commentary, chock full of marketing parodies and philosophical musings. How could this world possibly be brought to twenty-four-frames-per-second life? The strip had seen some success by this point—a book called Love Is Hell had sold 20,000 copies in the Christmas rush of 1984, and the strip had been syndicated nationally to several dozen alternative newspapers—but this was network TV, the marketing muscle of a giant media conglomerate, an audience of millions. Another realm entirely. How could Groening persuade Brooks that these static, simple, black-and-white drawings were the blueprint for a cartoon?
And then, so the story goes, Groening came to a sudden and disturbing realization.
Reprinted with permission of DaCapo Press. http://www.dacapopress.com
Reviews
"Smart and funny…just the thing for fellow fans, and for anyone interested in how pop phenomena came to be"--Hollywood Reporter
“[C]ultural historians may value it for its vision of Springfield as a satirical mirror reflecting the trials and tribulations of contemporary life”—Publishers Weekly
“For the show’s sizable hardcore audience, especially the most serious-minded viewers, it’s a feast”--Booklist
Author's Biography
Chris Turner’s pop-culture and technology reporting have earned him four major magazine awards in three years. His writing has appeared in Time, The Globe and Mail, Shift, Adbusters, Utne Reader, and XBN. He lives in Calgary.