Dead Homer Society

To celebrate the 300th or so episode of Zombie Simpsons, The Hollywood Reporter interviewed some of the more illustrious members of the staff and put together a couple of photo streams.  They talked to Groening, Brooks, Jean, O’Brien, Scully, Cartwright, Castellaneta, Kavner, Smith, and Azaria; and they got pictures from inside the production offices.  The main article is here, and the behind the scenes pictures are here.  In an artful attempt to dredge some pageviews out of their archived content, there are also some links to older articles and photo collections as well.  Those aren’t as interesting.  In fact, the one called “Meet the Cast” is just a collection of generic red carpet photos that they slapped together last fall after the renewal was announced. 

The interviews and the behind the scenes photos are pretty cool though.  Some highlights:

“In every half hour of every day, an episode of The Simpsons is broadcasting somewhere around the globe.”

I doubt that.  I’d doubt that if it was in The New Yorker, and The Hollywood Reporter is a long way from The New Yorker.  Then there’s this:

So I started drawing my comic, Life in Hell, and sold it as a zine at the record store. Production designer Polly Platt showed it to James L. Brooks. He was curious and called me for a meeting at Paramount. My 1962 Ford Fairlane had just bitten the dust. Luckily I was living right across the street from Paramount. They wouldn’t let me in because I didn’t have a car. I said, "But I have a meeting with James L. Brooks!" That was 1985. Nothing came of the meeting until a couple years later when James asked me to come over to the Fox lot to meet again.

I didn’t know Groening and Brooks had a meeting two years before the shorts started.  I’ve also never heard this story before:

"The Simpsons series began like many things begin: with an animator getting drunk at a Christmas party. We were already doing Tracey Ullman, and David Silverman, who was with us then and would go on to direct The Simpsons Movie, cornered me and poured out his heart about what having a primetime Simpsons show would mean to animators.

Granting that memories of parties from a quarter of a century ago might not be the most reliable information in the world, I do like the image of David Silverman cornering Brooks and demanding he do a half hour show for the sake of animators everywhere.  Viva la animación!

Here’s Conan O’Brien describing something that has gone by the wayside:

When I got there, they told me, first and foremost, "The Simpsons characters are a family who love each other. They need to exist in that reality. Bart can’t take out a gun and shoot Homer in the face; it’s not the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote."

There are a lot of Zombie Simpsons counterexamples of that, but right now I’m just thinking of that episode they did last year with all the popped eyeballs.

Anyway, the article and the slideshow are worth seeing, particularly for the picture at the top of the first page of Brooks, Groening and Jean.  Brooks is the only one who looks even remotely comfortable, Groening and Jean look like they’d rather be anywhere else.  Jean especially has a look on his face that’s a mixture of “who farted?” and “I just sat on something sharp”.