It's been said that we'll either die heroes or live long enough to see ourselves become the villains. The internet tells me that this particular saying is to be attributed to Aaron Eckhart's character in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight (2008), although funnily enough I could have sworn that it went back a lot further than that. Ah well, regardless of who first said it, it's a phrase I've been considering a lot in relation to The Simpsons over the past...couple of weeks or so. The Simpsons has been running for just shy of three decades now. It's been part of the cultural landscape for so long that it's easy to forget just how wildly explosive a concept it was when it debuted. When The Simpsons was first starting out, it WAS the rebellion. It was rude, punk and subversive. It made the kinds of honest observations about the modern American family that its live action contemporaries were reluctant to partake in. Adults who were not uniformly good role models, kids who did not unconditionally respect their elders; the series caught on because audiences could identify so many of their own weaknesses and indiscretions in these vulgar yellow demons, to a degree that caused discomfort among some circles back in the day. When George H. W. Bush proclaimed, "We're going to keep trying to strengthen the American family; to make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons," it was a watershed moment for the series - few things say you've made it quite like the establishment publicly marking you out as a threat to everything it's built itself on. Nowadays The Simpsons IS the establishment; the kind of show that apparently sees fit to have its characters break the fourth wall to inform the viewer directly, and without a shred of ambiguity, that if they have a problem with the status quo then they should Shut The Fuck Up. When I reflect on the series' response to long-standing criticisms which have been coming more to the forefront of popular consciousness in recent months, I'm inclined to utilise another movie quote, this one spoken by Samuel L. Jackson's character in Jackie Brown (1997): "What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass used to be beautiful."
I've no desire to go any deeper into the whole Apu controversy for now (although I will happily go on record for saying that I think the series' response was, at best, staggeringly obtuse), but I can't help but contemplate, as I prepare to look over the very first piece of Simpsons media, the profound sadness I now feel in also having to view it from the perspective of where the series was eventually headed. For its past twenty years or so of life, the series has been subject a number of (not invalid) criticisms about its declining quality, as it continues to chug ever along, less out of a creative urge to gift the world with more Simpsons stories, we suspect, than that The Simpsons has been part of the cultural landscape for so long that its stubborn refusal to quit or disappear has become an integral part of its identity. But with this latest development we may have seen the series on the cusp of assuming a new identity, one altogether more sour and embittered at the word's failure to remain frozen in time as its characters have done. The Simpsons' days of being a rebellion were already long behind it, but only in recent days did we arrive at the point at which the series openly and willfully posited itself as the thing to be rebelled against - a series which the next generation of young comedy minds aspiring to see things change can look toward and think "I need to do better." The Simpsons has lived long enough to see itself become the villain.
So yeah, I start this entry on a somewhat more sombre note than I anticipated when I promised it back in January. There, I indicated that I intended to examine "Good Night" from the perspective of what pure, unadulterated nightmare fuel it is. In my idler moments, I try to put myself in the place of viewers who tuned into Fox on that fateful night of 19th April 1987, with no prior concept of who the Simpsons were or what to expect from them, and I invariably wonder how well many of them managed to sleep throughout the early hours of 20th April 1987, after what they had just witnessed. When I was first introduced to the Simpsons, in 1991, they were already stars of their own hit series and had a novelty dance track penned by Michael Jackson which was taking the school discos by storm, although any fan worth their salt knows that the family had far more humble origins on The Tracey Ullman Show, a comedy sketch show starring British comedian Tracey Ullman that ran from 1987 to 1990, and where Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie were regularly featured in a series of crudely-animated commercial bumpers (for simplicity's sake, I will be referring to them here as the Ullman shorts), before their big break arrived in late 1989. I find myself endlessly fascinated by the Ullman shorts, not simply from the standpoint that, as Simpsons buff, it's always interesting to go right back to the series' roots and chart how things developed, but because they show the family verging on an altogether stranger and freakier direction, one that was eventually abandoned as the concept was ironed out and lost its wrinkles. When The Simpsons first came into the world, it was an ugly beast - rough and primitive and dripping with visible afterbirth. The central gag - that the family were dysfunctional and their day-to-day existence was choc full of vulgar and chaotic moments - was deftly reflected in the sheer grotesqueness of those early shorts. They were an eye-searing anecdote to the blandly fuzzy sitcom families that were hogging the airwaves at around the same time (see Growing Pains, Full House and their ilk). This family were not warm or cutesy and for a lot of the time they barely even looked human. Matt Groening has never spoken too highly of his ability to recreate homo sapiens, which is why earlier on his cartooning career his signature characters were leporines. When he pitched the idea for The Simpsons to James L Brooks, it was literally a quickie he threw together in a last minute panic upon deciding not to surrender the rights to his rabbit-orientated strip, Life In Hell, to Fox. Groening didn't think much about the crudeness of the designs he submitted because he took it for granted that they would be tidied up during in the animation process; in actuality, the minute animation team at Klasky Csupo traced over Groening's original sketches, preserving that initial, splapdash primitiveness in all its uncanny glory. In many respects, the crudeness of those initial outings was the perfect accident.
The Simpson family featured in "Good Night" and other early Ullman shorts were not uniformly recognisable as the family that would later become fixtures of our Sunday night viewing, and not just because their appearance erred a tad more on the monstrous side. It's often said of the Ullman shorts that every family member had their familiar character traits right from the start apart from Lisa, who was initially nothing more than a female counterpart to Bart. That isn't strictly true, although in the earlier shorts Lisa was deployed primarily as Bart's foil; she and Bart had a mutually bratty sibling rivalry and there was little hint of the sensitive intellectual she would blossom into when the series proper took off (the decision to make Lisa a saxophonist was arguably the major turning point in defining her entire character). Homer's character was also a little different in the Ullman shorts - he was gruffer and angrier and he took his role as family patriarch a lot more seriously (even if he was never astoundingly good at it). The core voice cast was always the same, although like the animation it had to go through its own messy evolution process before arriving at its familiar state. Whereas Cartwright and Smith had Bart and Lisa's voices nailed pretty much straight off the bat, it took Castellanata and Kavner longer to grow into their respective roles, particularly Castellanata, who was initially doing Homer as a loose kind of Walter Matthau impersonation.
The first season of The Tracey Ullman Show had only seven Simpsons shorts out of a total of thirteen episodes - this is because the Simpsons initially had to share their limelight with another animated segment, Dr N!Godatu (created by National Lampoon cartoonist MK Brown), which took commercial bumper duties in alternate weeks. Dr N!Godatu had considerably less luck than The Simpsons and was ditched after the first season, giving Groening's creation free reign across Seasons 2 and 3 (the family were missing from the fourth and final season of The Tracey Ullman Show, for by then they had moved onto new and bigger things). When I'm not idly wondering about audience reactions to the very first Simpsons short, I'll wonder about that alternate universe in which The Simpsons and Dr N!Godatu's fortunes were reversed; where The Simpsons is now this obscure little footnote in animation history while Dr N!Godatu's wildly successful spin-off is pushing thirty and, just a couple of weeks ago, burned a chunk of goodwill with its odious response to questions about some of the outdated humour it had been preserving in amber since 1990.
For years, "Good Night" was one of the easiest Ullman shorts to track down, as it was featured in its entirety in the Season 7 Simpsons episode "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" and was later included as an extra in the Season 1 DVD box set. It's the kind of exposure which the remaining forty-seven Ullman shorts would surely kill for. As a kid, I desperately longed for a VHS release comprising the complete set of Ullman shorts and was frustrated that no such product existed. I deduced that I couldn't be the only Simpsons fan who was hungry to get acquainted with the family at their most primordial. When DVD box sets became the hot new thing I figured that it could only be a matter of time before they branched out into the Ullman shorts. But alas, that too remained a mere pipe dream. To date, the complete Ullman shorts have never been released on home media, and if Dame Rumour is correct, this is because Tracey Ullman herself was purposely holding onto them for a Tracey Ullman Show DVD release that never happened. By now, it seems safe to say that the Ullman shorts missed the boat in terms of getting a full release on physical media. The best we can reasonably hope for at this late stage would be for the shorts to be made available for streaming - there was talk about the Simpsons app, "Simpsons World", acquiring the rights to the shorts back in 2013, but no idea how that turned out. (Here's a better question - is the Simpsons World app still pushing that old non-canonical biographical information about Sideshow Bob's career pinnacle being a prison production of Evita? Make a note, because we seriously need to talk about that some time.)
Ah well, thank Heavens for YouTube, eh?
For the first two seasons of The Tracey Ullman Show, when The Simpsons segments were used as commercial bumpers, the shorts were broken down into four separate acts, each with their own individual punchline, and interspersed throughout the course of the episode - which accounts for their distinctly piecemeal nature when viewed in their entirety. By Season 3, the Simpsons had proven popular enough to be promoted to their own full slot (and featured in the opening credits sequence), and the shorts consisted of complete stories told in one go (with the exception of shorts 46 and 47, which told a two-part story, "Maggie In Peril"). "Good Night" takes advantage of the four act structure of the earlier shorts to gradually introduce the family members before having their individual arcs all converge in the final act. From the start, we see the Simpsons fulfilling their primary function as a subversion of traditional family ideals, with a perfectly banal ritual of parental devotion - parents tucking their kids in for the night - here getting a dour deconstruction as Bart, Lisa and Maggie spot the unintentionally nightmarish implications of Homer and Marge's bedtime bromides. The true irony of the piece lies in the outlandishly nightmarish energy that the Simpsons clan, as depicted here, themselves give off; we are, in effect, watching a bizarre cartoon in which quasi-monstrous beings are gripped by horrifying fantasies about what could be lurking in the darkened spaces within their own bedrooms (or, in Bart's case, inside his own ill-defined mind - the opening exchange between Bart and Homer is particularly interesting as it seems to suggest that the real bugbears to lose sleep over are to be found in the absurdities of human existence). You can say what you will about the animation in the very first Ullman shorts - it may have been crude as sin, but nowhere else in the family's run have the characters appeared so hypnotically, kaleidoscopically animated. Observe how the eye animation for each individual Simpson child acts as the the punchline to their their respective segments; the unique expressiveness with which those eyeballs writhe and squirm on being plunged into the dead oblivion of night, from the dizzied delirium in Bart's eyes to Lisa's fearful, darting pupils, to the sheer, unbridled terror emitting from Maggie's urgently convulsing peepers. There's a spunkiness to the proceedings which helps to overcome the limitations of the rough animation, and this is most evident during Maggie's segment, as Marge regales her impressionable infant daughter with that most ominous of lullabies, "Rock-a-bye Baby". We see a lot of very obvious looped animation going on in Maggie's fantasy, which nevertheless plays like a convincingly minimalist nightmare about the terrors of free-falling for all eternity (we never do see Maggie hit the ground, which only accentuates the horror).
Still, central to the entire conceit of The Simpsons was that these monstrous beings were never anything less than fundamentally human. When we reach the fourth act and get past the inevitable punchline (in which Homer and Marge muse that they may just be the best parents in the world, right before their own bedtime tranquility is disrupted by their severely panicked offspring) the short concludes with a display of family unity as they all scramble into the same bed together. It closes off with Homer, ever the conscientious family patriarch, attempting to be the voice of reason and reassure his kids that there is nothing out there that they should be afraid of (a few years' worth of character development later and Homer would undoubtedly have been as terrified as his kids in the exact situation and this responsibility would have fallen onto Marge). The very last words, however, go to none other than Maggie, who can be heard gurgling out the titular statement (voice credited to Liz Georges) while the rest of her family slips away into the darkness. This might seem like a curiously cutesy note on which to end such a doggedly unconventional animation. But then the Ullman Simpsons were always too distorted to be particularly cutesy, even when they were affirming that they were, when all is said and done, a pretty loving bunch.
As the shorts continued and Groening's visual style slowly became more polished and assured, the circus freak show element that those early installments had pushed for all it was worth inevitably started to be phased out. To an extent, the Simpsons cast will always be an intrinsically odd-looking bunch, what with their massive bug-like eyes, gaping overbites and neon yellow complexions, but their designs definitely softened and became rounder-looking over the years, making them seem warmer and more approachable, and overall less like the kind of ghoulish creatures you always feared might be lurking down in your grandmother's basement as a kid. Groening was also dead-set on his series maintaining a certain level of fundamental realism, so the early cartoon freakiness of the character mannerisms was likewise ditched. Which is why I find the Ullman shorts so eternally fascinating. They offer glimpses into roads ultimately not taken - among them, a time when the Simpsons universe was every bit as demonically surreal as it was disarming; when making your skin crawl was as high on its agenda as giving your ribs a good tickling. Back when the Simpsons were a family we could all love and relate to, yet also secretly fear would eat us alive if we ever found them prowling underneath our beds at night.
Pleasant dreams, all. Sleep tight, and don't let the bed bugs bite.
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