– By Gabe Kagan

All evidence from the past points to my father being a big fan of The Simpsons. He watched the episodes, he had many of them on VHS, and his collection of Simpsons comics is comprehensive and remains mainly in mint condition with many of the more obscure series from the early ’90s. So it’s basically to be expected that this fandom would rub off on me. One problem, though: I was born in 1992. So while everyone at DHS was reveling in the early, golden seasons of the show, I was a small child learning the skills of life and watching the usual kiddie TV.

Fast forward to about 1997 or so. I’m not exactly sure when, but at this time, my father (an electrical engineer) was apparently working late shifts, so in the morning and early afternoon I would frequently see him pull out (if not a training video, most likely on advanced mathematics), a rerun of Simpsons or something. So at this point, I knew the show existed, and could laugh when Homer got hurt, or care for the inhabitants of Springfield when Bart’s comet was on its way to doom them all, but not much else. I do remember not being perturbed by Homer strangling Bart. Nothing like cartoon violence to warp one’s mind. Despite having the tapes, my access to early Simpsons was patchy at best. For the longest time, I thought the first episode ever made was "There’s No Disgrace Like Home", because I never paid much attention to the credits. In any given season, I’d probably seen about 3 episodes at best, and there was a huge gap from Seasons 4 to 6 where I basically saw no episodes of the show until many years later. Besides, shows like Beast Wars, Animaniacs, Pokemon were more to my liking early on, so I didn’t really make any effort to watch The Simpsons as it unfolded for quite a while. Even my exposure to the media at large was very odd. I read a great deal of the comic books and played a few of the licensed games (Everyone loves Konami’s arcade game, but they also published a good action adventure game on PCs called "Bart Simpson’s House of Weirdness"). Of course, they were mostly crap, but that was hardly abnormal by the standards.

It was about 2002 or so when a trifecta of events happened:

1. Our family started buying the full seasons on DVD (Only the first three, but still). I remember watching these religiously for a while – now that I was older I understood many more of the references and had a better attention span.

2. The local syndication had a good run of many episodes of the golden years, allowing me to fill in a few holes in that crucial Season 4-8 bracket.

3. We started sitting down and actually watching the episodes as a family. This lasted until about Season 17, then I stopped following the newest seasons.

Zombie episodes go down better when A: You’re a teenager with an immature sense of humor, and B: You watch the episodes with your family. With dim memories of the classic seasons and decaying VHS tapes removing their frame of reference, they found it laugh-out-loud funny. I found it laugh out loud funny, too. I can look back on these seasons and remember why I thought they were funny (especially Seasons 15 and 16), and it serves as a useful reference.

Eventually, I decided that, to seal the remaining cracks, I needed to watch every episode. I started with the early seasons (mostly, because I wasn’t watching them in any fixed order). It doesn’t bare repeating that I enjoyed those – more importantly, I became very aware of the gap between the older and the newer episodes. The key here is the wave of "edgier" shows competing with the Simpsons, because the landscape of television was obviously far different in 1997 than it was in 1991. Shows like Seinfeld, Beavis and Butthead, South Park, etc. count, obviously, but even outside TV, there was a market for extremity of a sort. If thrash, death metal, hardcore existed in the ’80s and had a small market, grunge and nu-metal were often far more tailored towards mainstream tastes while offering small doses of aggression and pain to a much larger audience. Had this not appeared, and the show’s writing declined in a similar fashion, the crappiness DHS writes about would probably tend towards the glurge of "Marge Be Not Proud" and similar. Extremity explains much of your hatred of the Simpsons. More importantly, extremity often appeals to the teenage demographic, so it makes sense that Season 16 Simpsons would have a hold on me at my age. It must be more zany! It must be more contemporary! It must be more subversive! It especially must be more profitable! Consider the episode "Itchy, Scratchy, and Poochie", and the scenes that reveal the cartoon dog Poochie as nothing but an avatar of carefully plotted commercialism. Then again, that’s what happens when you rastafy your character 10% or so. Personally, I think it’s a fun, self-aware episode, but one must be aware that The Simpsons had relatively little executive meddling. Hence, the problems come from within.

I digressed there, but it’s the conclusion that continued watching has impressed upon me. The show is certainly, in a way, more extreme than it is now, but it’s basically made such a strong impression on me that I was able to enjoy or at least tolerate it for much longer than the people at DHS, and that it’s probably influenced me in more ways than it has them.

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Note: In the process of writing, I was reminded of an episode of Stuart Ashen’s tech reviews in which the product in question is emblazoned with a horribly mutated Bart Simpson. Adequate visual metaphor? You decide. [Editor’s Note: I know we’ve linked this before, but I couldn’t find it just now.  It’s funny.]