Simpsons
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Born in 1954, Groening started drawing monsters for his neighborhood Creature Club as early as in fourth grade. After graduating from high-school, where he “attempted to rewrite the constitution to give himself absolute power”, the “mordant alternative” cartoonist opted to attend Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington because of the institutions “no-grades, no-exams policy”.
“Then in college, I studied Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. [] You study that in the winter, in a rain forest in Olympia, Washington, and you get very moody,” Groening points out the reflection of the disillusioned and ironic zeitgeist of the 1970s in his personality and work. Upon graduating from college in 1977, the man who originally intended to become a professional writer soon celebrated his first success as a cartoonist, when his Life in Hell comic strip debuted in the Los Angeles magazine Wet in 1978. Featuring “crudely drawn angst-filled characters”, such as the two rabbits Binky and his one-eared son Bongo, as well as the human Jeff and Akbar, Groenings comic strip “recapitulate[s] the human lot with a lack of sentimentality that borders on the savage” – an “irreverent portrayal of broken life”, evidencing Groenings qualities as a watchful observer, a personality trait which is an essential prerequisite for any socio-critical satirist.
“The frivolity of drawing rabbits can get to me. […] Thats why I hope to write something that will be taken a little seriously.” – And so the husband and proud father of Homer, his almost ten-year-old son, doubtlessly did: When asked to create a series of short animated vignettes to be aired as so-called “shorts” on the then extraordinarily popular The Tracey Ullman Show on the Fox Network, Groening, in an office foyer, within fifteen minutes sketched a yellow-colored family of five: the Simpsons. –
This was the birth of an animated series, which – packed with vicious social satire and at times subtle, at other times profound pop-culture allusions – would evolve to have a considerable impact on the television landscape of the nation in the following years. Due to its enormous popularity, The Simpsons was soon extended to become a half-hour series, attracting not only children and teenage viewers, but also an audience of adults well beyond their Mickey Mouse and Looney Tune years.
Today in its tenth season on prime time television, the shows value and popular conception can impressively be documented by reviewing its critical recognition in generally accepted and established publications: In 1990, Entertainment Weeklys Ken Tucker called The Simpsons “one of the few current works of popular art that posses wit and integrity”; in 1991, David Bianculli from the New York Post referred to the series as “the most multi-layered cartoon since Rocky and Bullwinkle”; in 1994, Time magazines very own Richard Corliss