Shorts season 1

Shorts season 1 is the first season of The Simpsons shorts and consisted of seven shorts. One of these shorts, ("Good Night") was released on DVD (as "Goodnight Simpsons"), and another ("Burp Contest") was released on Volume 10 of  tapes.

Production
Matt Groening conceived of the idea for the Simpsons in the lobby of James L. Brooks's office. Brooks had asked Groening to pitch an idea for a series of animated shorts, which Groening initially intended to present as his Life in Hell series. However, when Groening realized that animating Life in Hell would require the rescinding of publication rights for his life's work, he chose another approach and formulated his version of a dysfunctional family.

The Simpson family first appeared as shorts in The Tracey Ullman Show on April 19, 1987. Groening submitted only basic sketches to the animators and assumed that the figures would be cleaned-up in production, but the animators merely re-traced his drawings, which led to the crude appearance of the characters in the initial short episodes. The animation was produced domestically at Klasky Csupo, with Wesley Archer, David Silverman, and Bill Kopp being animators for the first season. After season one it was animated by Archer and Silverman. Georgie Peluse, the colorist, decided to make the characters yellow.

In the fourth and final season of The Tracey Ullman Show, the Simpson family already had their own half-hour series, The Simpsons. In the first two seasons the shorts were divided into three or four parts, but in the third they were played as a single story. Tracey Ullman would later file a lawsuit, claiming that her show was the source of The Simpsons success and therefore should receive a share of the show's profit. Eventually the courts ruled in favor of the network.