Hi-Diddly-Ho Simpsons fans! While watching the 24 Hours of Le Mans I read John Ortved's book "The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History." Should you do the same? Eh probably not, I found John's writing to be rather dull as he fills the book with his own personal opinions on The Simpsons, which were largely views I agreed with but simply didn't need to be in a behind the scenes story. The book also spends a lot of time on stuff that simply didn't need to be mentioned, if you're making a book for Simpsons nerds you don't need to describe who Bart Simpson is. Overall I'd give the book a B-, I'm here to tell you the details I found most fascinating.
>Matt Groening has always given off the implication that he came up with The Simpsons being colored yellow, well he only had the intuition that giving The Simpsons a Caucasian skin tone wouldn't be eye-catching. It was actually a Hungarian color designer Gyorgi Peluce who worked at Klasky-Csupo who came up with the iconic Simpsons yellow.
>It's well accepted that Sam Simon was the creative genius that truly made The Simpsons. It's hard to argue otherwise when Simon hired the original writers team and more or less controlled the writers room for the first 4 Seasons. Well I only thought he was skilled as a writer. He in fact was a terrific cartoonist (far better than Matt) and you can see Simon's rough cartoon sketches below.
Note: That Top Middle sketch concept wound up being printed on countless shirts and it remains the image that's on every Simpsons Script. You would have thought Matt came up with it but apparently not. And according to the book it was Simon who came up with the design of Mr. Burns which that alone shows how damn brilliant Sam Simon was. I wonder why Simon didn't just make his own cartoon or comic book? Oh well.
>Ortved and many of the interviews he got or found from old newspapers really paint Groening as credit stealing asshole. Hard to argue otherwise. In the book he also claims that Groening never wrote a script for The Simpsons but that's simply not true as Season 3's
Colonel Homer is individually credited to Groening. And I really like that episode because it doesn't attempt to be the funniest or satirical thing ever but instead just tells the story of Homer helping a struggling waitress make a career for herself and then amicably leaves when she attempts to sleep with him. Ultimately we don't know how much Groening is responsible for that episode since the Simpsons writers room obsessively perfected each script in its day. But the simple plot of the story shows that Groening did indeed understand the animated sitcom Sam Simon ultimately developed for him.
>Besides painting a negative picture of Groening the book also trashes James L Brooks quite a bit. Even giving a story that James L Brooks once saw a man selling bootleg Simpsons Merchandise in the city and Brooks shouted "YOU'RE STEALING MONEY FROM MY CHILDREN!" I simply cannot believe this whatsoever since James L Brooks has been fantastically wealthy since the 70s. He also writes about how Brooks (via Gracie Films and Fox) screwed Tracy Ullman Show Producers out of potential millions of dollars since The Simpsons were a spinoff. I can't take these claims as truth because Hollywood royalties are a very complicated issue. And at the end of the day anyone in showbusiness should have lawyers who read through contracts. I just cannot blame James L Brooks since he wasn't the only major entity running things.
>One thing that was interesting is the claim that Richard Sakai, a man who for his whole career has served as James L Brooks's second in command is actually the inspiration for Waylon Smithers. The book really portrays Sakai to be a piece of shit, essentially blaming Sakai for Sam Simon quitting the show. But when you consider that Sam Simon left The Simpsons with a literal golden parachute and continued working in Hollywood for more than a decade after I really don't know how much of this is just overhyped drama. The book paints a picture that James L Brooks and Matt Groening hate each other as well and I find that hard to believe since they worked together on The Simpsons Movie and recorded quite a few DVD commentaries together.
>I'd say the best thing Ortved did was explain the decline of the show. For the first four seasons Sam Simon ran the show. David Mirkin stepped in for Seasons 5 and 6 and injected a ton of surreal elements into the comedy. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein then took over for Seasons 7 and 8 and they've said it themselves in the commentary tracks they thought they had been writing the final seasons of The Simpsons, in a way they were right. Ortved gets quotes from writers talking about how Oakley and Weinstein would work nonstop on each episode and the other writers were exhausted by having to copy their work ethic. Finally he gives a defense for Al Jean, the show sucks now but Al Jean just gets the trains running on time, the show doesn't have the frustration of the Simon era where the writers demanded last minute dialogue changes to improve the humor. Which FYI the show's original perfectionist ethic pretty much resulted in Klasky-Csupo being fired and replaced with Film Roman. Most of all you just can't expect the show to be what it once was because in the 90s they had literal geniuses writing The Simpsons. The geniuses of today who decide they'd rather work in Hollywood (like Ken Keeler and David X Cohen) I doubt are banging on the doors of The Simpsons writers room because seriously why would they?
So yeah that sums up my thoughts. It was okay. If you want Simpsons goodness in Book Form I cannot recommend enough
John Swartzwelder's novels. Swartzwelder's novels mostly star a bumbling detective named "Frank Burly" who I just pretty much imagine being Homer Simpson in an alternate silly universe.
Sorry for doubleposting, but consider this a part two as I think my first post was long enough as is. These quotes from Ortved's book I found to be insightful.
George Meyer: I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down... One of the main reasons is the tyranny of live studio audiences, which I think have ruined television comedy. Leave It To Beaver, unlike most sitcoms today, was not taped in front of a live audience. If that show were in production now and Beaver made some kind of gentle sweet remark about his collection of rocks, or whatever, that line wouldn't get a laugh from the audience during rehearsal, and it would be cut. With a live audience, you always end up with hard-edged lines that the audience knows are jokes. Audiences hate it when they have to figure out whether something is funny or not.
This really is a quality of The Simpsons that I find gets seriously overlooked, and I see even self described Simpsons fans who don't appreciate it. The ones who say Season 1 and even Season 2 can be skipped by new viewers. The Simpsons came out as a weird novelty of a cartoon and then it captured the audiences hearts by having characters that acted more human than pretty much any other show on television at the time. Even today most sitcoms simply focus on being funny rather than developing the characters.
Colin A.B.V. Lewis: The mentality of the show changed so much. In the early days. the people in the crew had nicer cars than the writers... Then David Mirkin came in, and Mirkin drove an NSX. It's so weird to talk about cars but it really was evidence of the show changing. Mirkin drove an NSX and all of a sudden you started seeing Beamers and Mercedes.
And it stopped being the geeky guys from college writing the show and became people who just wanted to be comedy writers, and wanted to be Hollywood, so they could say, "I work on The Simpsons."
This quote fascinated me because it sounds like Lewis is referring to the show by Season 9 or after, but no this was during Seasons 5 and 6, during the undisputed Golden Age of The Simpsons! And it really just shows how unique and ultimately rare Sam Simon's original writers room was. George Meyer and John Swartzwelder specifically, they are both simply genius comedy writers and yet they were also neckbeards. After the show became a megahit the people who were hired were also Harvard grads but these were Harvard Normies, and simply put Harvard Normies just aren't the type to make obscure jokes like "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."
One writer attributed the show's decline to the division of the now massive writing staff into two or more rooms. Often, one room doesn't know or care what the other is doing, which leads to a lack of cohesion and can effect story lines, as well as more touching, subtle, soft, or tender aspects of the show. Jokes are pumped as if they're on an assembly line. Scripts are assembled, tied together by executive producers with solitary visions, which can sometimes mean the stories become chaotic and disjointed.
And that right there sums up Zombie Simpsons. Al Jean just has a factory. They don't care, and neither should you unless you're a dork like me who takes pleasure in ripping the new episodes. Don't be mad that the show went to shit, be happy that it ended up being so good in the first place.
Lastly I'll end with something upbeat, I never really appreciated this gag until I read this quote:
Bill Oakley: The ultimate Swarzwelder joke that I still remember appears in the episode "Whacking Day." Homer is letting people park on his lawn and he has a sign that says, "Parking: $10 per axle." And this foreign guy in this crazy foreign car, with like eight axles, drives up, and Homer goes, "Woo-hoo!" and the foreign man goes "Hooray!" God, it just makes me laugh.
