| Shorts season 1
|
Season Information
| Original run:
|
April 19, 1987 – July 12, 1987
|
| No. of shorts:
|
7
|
| Next season:
|
Shorts season 2
|
| DVD and VHS releases:
|
 "MG01"
 "MG06"
|
|
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 The Best of The Simpsons tapes.
List of shorts
| Picture
|
#
|
Title
|
Original airdate
|
Prod. code
|
|
1 - 1
|
"Good Night"
|
April 19, 1987
|
MG01
|
| Marge and Homer say goodnight to their kids but all does not go to plan. Bart philosophically contemplates (first time and last) the wonders of the mind, Lisa hears Marge say "don't let the bed bugs bite" and fears that her bed bugs will eat her, and Maggie is traumatized by the lyrics of "rock-a-bye-baby"
|
|
2 - 2
|
"Watching Television"
|
May 3, 1987
|
MG02
|
| Bart and Lisa quarrel over what channel they should watch. Repeatedly Maggie comes up to the television and changes the channel. The only thing they eventually agree on is to stop Maggie changing the channel. Later Homer is saying a speech about family matters and stops when the show comes back on.
|
|
3 - 3
|
"Bart Jumps"
|
May 10, 1987
|
MG03
|
| Homer makes several attempts to have Bart jump into his arms. Each time Bart jumps Homer is distracted and fails to catch him.
|
|
4 - 4
|
"Babysitting Maggie"
|
May 31, 1987
|
MG04
|
| Marge puts Bart and Lisa in charge of babysitting Maggie. They totally ignore her, and she gets electrocuted, falls down the stairs and chases a butterfly onto the roof only to fall off the roof.
|
|
5 - 5
|
"The Pacifier"
|
June 21, 1987
|
MG05
|
| Bart and Lisa take Maggie's pacifier away to stop her from sucking on it. Maggie has an entire drawer full of them and refuses to kick the habit.
|
|
6 - 6
|
"Burp Contest"
|
June 28, 1987
|
MG06
|
| Bart, Lisa and Maggie compete in a contest to see who can make the most disgusting burp. Marge objects several times, but to no avail.
|
|
7 - 7
|
"Eating Dinner"
|
July 12, 1987
|
MG07
|
| Marge serves the family dinner and the family sits down for the meal. Marge insists that family should have table manners, but the family's crude eating habits are hard to stop.
|
|
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.
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