The Odyssey of Homer

U of C chairman gives presentation about TV’s animated family

By Samantha Swindler / Managing Editor

In what he called “the post ‘South Park’ America,” Keith Semmel, chairman of the communication and theater arts department at University of the Cumberlands, said it’s hard to imagine “The Simpsons” as a highly controversial TV show. But when the series debuted in 1989, little Bart’s quip famously posted on a T-shirt, “I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” had many parents concerned. 

The show prompted then President George H.W. Bush to say in 1992, “We’re going to keep trying to strengthen the American family. To make them more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.”

But Semmel argued during a presentation at the Laurel County Public Library titled “The Odyssey of Homer, and the Other Simpsons,” that the show, while showcasing “benign anarchy,” ultimately affirms traditional family values. 

“The Simpsons,” he noted after the lecture, was not the first animated series to seek a prime-time audience, although it has been the most successful. 

“Back in the early 1960s, Hannah-Barbara was the first studio to really experiment with a prime time, half-hour, sitcom format — that was ‘The Flintstones,’” he said. The show was designed to appeal to both children and adults, and Semmel said it was described by Joe Barbara as “a blatant rip-off of ‘The Honeymooners.’”

“When The Flintstones first came on, there were a lot of people who hated that program because of Fred Flintstone,” Semmel said, “that he was not a lovable, fuzzy character like traditional cartoons had been, that he was so loud and nasty and obnoxious. It took a lot of heat from critics back then.”

Some of the same criticisms hit “The Simpsons,” which first debuted in 1987 on “The Tracey Ullman Show” as the short bumper clips between segments. Eventually they grew so popular, Fox gave the Simpsons their own Christmas special in 1989, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire.” The show was made into a regular series on the Fox network in 1990.  

Semmel called it, “a smash hit pretty much right from the start.” In 1990, Simpson merchandising alone was estimated to bring in $750 million. 

That prompted Tracy Ullman to try to sue “The Simpsons” cartoonist Matt Groening and producer James L. Brooks to get her part of merchandising rights, but the suit was thrown out of court, Semmel said. 

“Almost from the start, as well, there was a great deal of controversy about ‘The Simpsons,’” he said. “It’s hard nowadays, in the post ‘South Park’ America and the age of ‘Family Guy’ and some other very controversial TV programs, to image that ‘The Simpsons’ ever infuriated anybody. But you may recall, there was a great deal of controversy about the program, in particular a lot of the merchandizing.”

T-shirts on which Bart Simpson proclaimed himself an “underachiever and proud of it” were banned in schools across America. 

“The controversy sort of came to a boil when Fox decided they had a hit on their hands, one of the first really big hits Fox ever had or has had, and they decided to take on ‘The Cosby Show,’” Semmel said. In 1990, the Simpsons were moved to Thursday nights, but were “very quickly” returned to Sunday after they proved to be no ratings match for “The Cosby Show.”

At the time “The Simpsons” premiered, Semmel said some critics “wrote it off because they thought all it did was subvert. They thought it was just satire, that it was mean-spirited, that it was just about taking on the institutions in an animated form. What I want to suggest to you here tonight is that ‘The Simpsons’ not only were a slightly subversive cartoon, but at the same time they manage to reaffirm a lot of the same kind of values that go all the way back to the days of Ozzie and Harriet.”

He noted, also, that the Simpsons live in Springfield, the same town name of the Andersons in the old sitcom “Father Knows Best.”

Semmel showed a series of clips in which Simpson characters showed life affirming values, including “Bart Sells His Soul.” In the episode, Bart, not believing in the existence of one’s soul, writes “Bart’s Soul” on a piece of paper and sells it for $5 to his friend Milhouse. While poking fun at organized religion, by the end of the episode, Bart does come to feel his soul is real, and his sister Lisa performs an act of charity by buying the “soul” back and returning it to him.  

Semmel said some critics say the show has become more cartoonish in later years, with nonsensical plots and “mind-numbingly improbable events.” But one could also argue that the characters have matured. Even though Lisa has remained eight years old for 20 years, he said, her character grew from just a sweet girl who loved jazz music into an outspoken activist — a vegetarian, Buddhist and often the leftist voice of the show. 

Semmel has been teaching since 1980, and although some topics come and go from his lectures, “The Simpsons” have remained a steady topic, still relevant in the study of mass communications. 

“I still talk about them because I think ‘The Simpsons’ are the ultimate synthesis of everything that came before in television and everything that came after in television, all those nasty cartoons that came after ‘The Simpsons.’ It’s the perfect distilling of all those basic ideas that television was teaching in the 1950s all the way up to the 1980s,” he said.