In anticipation of the success of the show, I thought, “This will be cool everyone will think it’s their Springfield.” And they do. I also figured out that Springfield was one of the most common names for a city in the U.S. When I grew up, I realized it was just a fictitious name.
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The only reason is that when I was a kid, the TV show “Father Knows Best” took place in the town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was the town next to Portland, my hometown. Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon.
OK, why do the Simpsons live in a town called Springfield? Isn’t that a little generic? I think of it as a very heroic name in that Homer, even though he is getting kicked in the butt by life, he is his own small hero. It is this basic name, but I can’t separate the name Homer from The Iliad and The Odyssey and from Odysseus, even though Homer is the teller of the tale. She named one son Homer and another son Victor Hugo. My grandmother, his mother, was a voracious reader. My father was named after the poet Homer. The name Homer has been wall-to-wall around you-your father, your son, Homer Simpson. My dad didn’t even like doughnuts that much. So the idea of dramatizing the family-Lisa, Maggie, Matt-I think was the inspiration for doing something kind of autobiographical with “The Simpsons.” There is an aspect of the psychodynamics of my family in which it makes sense that one of us grew up and made a cartoon out of the family and had it shown all over the world.Īny other commonalities between your father and Homer Simpson?
My father recorded the telling of the story by Lisa to Maggie, and then he used it as the soundtrack to a movie. I told it to my sister Lisa, and she in turn told it to my sister Maggie. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals. My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word “simp” in it, which is short for “simpleton”-I just went with it.ĭid your father contribute anything besides his first name? I took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. In my novel, Bart was the son of Homer Simpson. I had this idea of an angry father yelling “Bart,” and Bart sounds kind of like bark-like a barking dog. I thought it was a very unusual name for a kid at the time. I was going to name the main character Matt, but I didn’t think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart.īack in high school I wrote a novel about a character named Bart Simpson. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. While I was waiting-I believe they kept me waiting for over an hour-I very quickly drew the Simpsons family. I soon realized that whatever I pitched would not be owned by me, but would be owned by Fox, so I decided to keep my rabbits in “Life in Hell” and come up with something new. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show. Matt Groening: I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, “Life in Hell,” for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing “The Tracey Ullman Show” for the brand-new Fox network. In 1987 you were waiting for a meeting with James Brooks and you started sketching. UPDATE: "The Simpsons" responded to this interview with a new chalkboard gag before the Sunday, April 15, episode proclaiming that "The true location of Springfield is in any state but yours." Check it out.Ĭlaudia De La Roca: So take us back to the Simpsons’ foundational moment. The Simpsons™ and © 2009 TTCFFC All Rights Reserved Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, was going to name the main character Matt, but didn't think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so he changed the name to Bart.
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