“I want you to throw away these old calendars and TV Guides.” – Marge Simpson
“Are you mad, woman?  You never know when an old calendar might come in handy.  Sure, it’s not 1985 right now, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.  And these TV Guides?  So many memories, ‘Gomer upsets Sergeant Carter’, oh, I’ll never forget that episode.” – Homer Simpson

Remember The Face magazine?  I don’t.  But I’m not British, so it’s okay.  Wikipedia informs me that:

The magazine, often referred to as the "80s fashion bible", was influential in championing a number of fashion music and style trends, whilst keeping a finger on the pulse of youth culture for over two decades;

It folded in 2004, but blogger Lady Lixa has a hard copy of the June 1990 issue (Madonna was on the cover) and scanned in some of the pages.  Here’s what it had to say about The Simpsons, post Season 1:

The text reads:

In America, Bart Simpson is hipper than De La Soul, Air Jordans and African pendants.  For a drawing, that’s an achievement.  The Simpsons started life as animated shorts breaking up the sketches on The Tracey Ullman Show.  (The BBC, in its infinite wisdom, bought Ullman’s series but cut the Simpsons from it.)  By Christmas ’89 they were so popular with American viewers that a special became inevitable.  Now on Fox TV for 30 minutes every Sunday night – the first prime-time cartoon since The Jetsons in the Sixties – the show is essential viewing for Yank youth.  Drawn by Matt Groening, the Simpsons make the Flintstones look stone age.  The format is simple – middle-American family dealing with the tribulations of modern life – but the style is anarchic.  Homer, the grumpy dad, works in a nuclear plant and is a sentimental slob.  Marge, his wife with a metre-high blue beehive, keeps the family together.  Bart (anagram: Brat), a kid with a spiky flat-top, is perpetually in trouble: he enjoys taking snapshots of his own butt, and loses his dad’s job for him.  Lisa plays the baritone sax and aims to get everyone in the poop as often as possible.  Maggie is a gooey, dummy-chewing infant.  All have mouths that swallow their faces when they open them.  The pace is utterly manic, the bickering relentless and the colour lurid; to some The Simpsons is a half-hour headache.  No UK broadcast date has been fixed, but Sky are picking it up for autumn.  In the meantime, Bart is appearing in bootlegged form on American dance flyers and T-shirts everywhere.  If that’s not a sign of a legend in the making, nothing is.

Awesome.  I love how the image they have is from the shorts and not from the series.  (Also, The Flintstones, not The Jetsons, was the last primetime cartoon before 1989.)  Two questions for our British readers:

1) Are pacifiers called “dummy”s the same way botulism is called steak and kidney pie?
2) What the hell does “aims to get everyone in the poop as often as possible” mean?

There’s more:

Text:

T-shirts of the cult US cartoon show The Simpsons (see p16) are becoming standard club wear in America.  Quick off the mark, Passenger of Beak St and Floral St, London, are stocking them at £15

£15 . . . in 1990 . . . for a T-shirt?  Ouch.  I didn’t pay that much for my Spinal Tap Tour ’92 shirt.

The article and the little t-shirt blurb are great; in the era of Zombie Simpsons it can be tough to remember how revolutionary the show really was when it first started (“cult US cartoon”).  But there it is, straight from the horse’s mouth in June of 1990.

Ten thousand thank yous go to Lady Lixa for having these, scanning them, and letting me copy them.