The Simpsons shorts

Development

While working on The Tracey Ullman Show, producer James L. Brooks wanted short animated segments to bookend the commercial breaks. After seeing a Life in Hell comic strip by Matt Groening, Brooks asked him to pitch a series of animated shorts. Groening first planned to use his Life in Hell characters, but realized that animating them would mean giving up the rights to his life's work. So, while waiting in Brooks's office lobby for the meeting, he quickly came up with a dysfunctional family, which became the Simpsons. He named the characters after his own relatives, using "Bart" in place of his own name. Bart was based on Groening's older brother Mark, but his name was chosen because it is an anagram of "brat." Groening wrote and storyboarded the shorts. The family looked very crude because Groening gave the animators basic sketches, expecting them to be refined; instead, the animators simply traced his drawings. This is most noticeable in the first season from 1987, where the characters look very different from their later Fox versions. By the third season in 1989, the characters had become more neatly drawn and detailed. The animation was done domestically at Klasky-Csupo, with Wesley Archer, David Silverman, and Bill Kopp handling the first season. After that, Archer and Silverman took over the animation. Gyorgyi Peluce, the colorist, made the decision to color the characters yellow.