In which I watch The Simpsons and comment on it.

Back in the day, when I was still on Twitter, before muskrat ruined the place, shadowbanned me and then tried to permanently ban my account, I would bing watch old TV shows and "live" tweet them. It started whenI would watch Boy Meets World before going to work and then the movie Empire Records. I started doing movie series, Star Trek was a popular one (I tweeted as if I was watching them for the first time ever though everyone knew I had seen them a dozen times each). Perhaps my most popular tweets were when I watched The Rockford Files and would comment on things that aren't around in the modern world, like 59¢ a gallon gas or driving around without a seat belt on. Anyhow one of the shows I wanted to do was The Simpsons. I figured I could do about four or five episodes a night and get through them in 149 days, or half a year. But like I said, I criticized muskrat and trump a lot and my account was targeted by Twitter so I had to leave before they permanently banned me. 

So, here I am on a blog that nobody reads and I'm going to do what I use to do back then. It, of course, won't be a live tweet but I still intend to watch all the episodes and comment on them. Since the show has been on for 36 years, counting the Tracey Ullman shorts, I figured I would write about running gags, the first appearance of characters, the last appearance of characters and jokes that made sense in the day but would probably be missed by anyone born during the Simpsons run. 

If you're going to do the entire Simpsons you have to start off with the Tracey Ullman shorts, which I watched on YouTube since Disney doesn't run them. These early cartoons were about a typical Atomic Age family, two parents, two and a half kids and they watch too much TV. It was mostly site gags featuring the main characters without any depth or character development, but then again they were just filler. However the characters instantly became fan favorites, so much so that Butterfingers recruited them to sell the candy bar, and a year after that they became a regular half hour sitcom. 

The show featured the main family, Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. At the time there wasn't much personality, Marge was a housewife who cooked, cleaned and yelled at the kids. Bart and Lisa were pretty much the same, they fought over the TV and cookies, and generally got into mischief. Maggie was a series of site gags about how babies shouldn't be treated from falling down the stairs to even going over a waterfall. Homer was the dad and not very good at it. At one point he tries to get Bart to catch a football and when the boy goes over a cliff, like the Coyote, Homer just comments that the boy doesn't listen. We aren't told what Homer does for a living, at the time there was a plan to have Krusty the Clown, Bart's hero, be the secret identity of Homer, however they didn't follow through on the storyline.

Of the series popular side characters only two make an appearance. The first is Grandpa Ab Simpson. He appears in pictures on the walls and then in an episode where he's talking to the children about "in his day". He fakes dropping dead to scare Bart. In another short the family is fighting and they all start strangling each other, this will become a running gag in the series although it's Homer doing it to Bart instead of Abe doing it to Homer. Would generational abuse be tolerated in the modern world?

Another side character that makes an appearance is Krusty The Clown. Bart goes to the show and starts a situation when he declares the actor on stage is a fraud and not the real clown. This of course leads back to the idea that it's Homer's secret identity.

None of the other series characters make an appearance. Instead there is a barber, a candy store owner, a connivence store owner (not Apu) and a psychiatrist. The short about the psychiatrist will later be expanded into an episode of the regular show.

One of the interesting things about the series is in the background there are paintings on the Simpson's walls. If you pay attention they change after every cutaway. In one there is a boat and as the short goes along it sinks. In another there is a volcano that erupts and at the end of the shorts we see he aftermath. This won't be carried over into the regular series.

Along with the shorts there were the Butterfinger commercials. The character of Millhouse first appeared in one of these although not by name. There was also a contest where someone stole Bart's Butterfinger and people had to send in a wrapper with a guess as to who did it. Two years later the regular series would do a similar contest over "Who shot Mr. Burns". The Simpsons had predicted something that would happen on The Simpsons.

The Fox Entertainment Channel was struggling to fill airtime so they decided to expand upon the popular shorts and created a full half hour series. They didn't have much confidence in the show since the last popular primetime animated sitcom, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, had aired almost 20 years earlier and only ran three seasons, so they created a Christmas special as a test. The show would become a hit and run for 34 years. 

On a side note Tracey Ullman hated the shorts and wanted to drop them. Later she sued the producers claiming she was owed a percentage of profits from the characters on her show. The court decided that it only pertained to her own original characters and not The Simpsons.

So that's the shorts, next I'll plunge into the regular series.