“Very few cartoons are broadcast live. It’s a terrible strain on the animators’ wrists.”
– The Simpsons, ‘The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show’
There are, of course, other reasons to be wary of live broadcasts – it puts you at the mercy of stage fright, corpsing, fluffing a line, or even the rarer instances of actors going off-script and launching into tirades of profanity. But that sort of improvisation can also have a freshness and spontaneity that soars above what prearranged content is capable of.
What tends not to have a potential upside, however, is when things are dangerously overcooked and trying to satisfy dozens of different demands at once. This was at the core of the problems with The Simpsons Movie, which had been through a good number of test audiences and over a hundred subsequent rewrites before it was finally released upon the public. We had its plot, big, audacious set-pieces that were all fairly tangential to each other – most notably, the family go from being on the run, to wandering around a county fair without fear, then immediately become fugitives again after the scene change.
(Likewise, the ‘Spiderpig’ sequence – done to death in the trailers before the film ever hit the screen – was a bit of improvisation by legendary composer Hans Zimmer, which was thrown in at the last minute.)
Long before The Simpsons Movie, in the show’s golden era, the writers nailed this design-by-committee ethos to the wall when the creators of show-within-a-show Itchy & Scratchy polled a sample of children, who found themselves asking for ‘a realistic, down-to-earth show, that’s completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots’ – a summation to which famous non-meme Milhouse immediately added ‘and also, you should win things by watching’. While the more recent Rick and Morty did indeed blend down-to-earth and magic robots, the lesson to be learned is clear – try to please everyone and you end up pleasing no-one.
The bitter irony of this is that The Simpsons started out very firmly against any sort of interference in the writing process, whether this came from below or above. In the initial contract, producer James L. Brooks included the strict proviso that Fox would not interfere with the show’s content in any way. At the time, the Fox network was a mere stripling compared to the old guard of ABC, CBS, and NBC, and so reluctantly swallowed this. By some wild coincidence, the resulting show – where executives couldn’t, say, demand a season-long plotline about magic robots to please their infant children – did incredibly well.
However, this talk of ‘writing’ and ‘quality plotlines’ may be missing the wood for the trees. When the first Simpsons Movie came out, it had been an incredibly popular and successful franchise for eighteen years. People – such as your humble narrator – had lived their entire lives in the shadow of The Simpsons, including, by that point, legal adults. It would have drawn healthy audiences even if it had been two hours of the family telling knock-knock jokes, or flinging shit at each other (though the latter might have bumped up the age restriction).
So, like any sequel, this second Simpsons Movie is banking on the fact that it’s a proven format, and when I say ‘proven’ it’s a euphemism for something as raw as ‘proven to be profitable’. True to form, the show also saw this coming, with their 137th Episode Spectacular seeing host Troy McClure (the still-sorely missed Phil Hartman) wonder ‘who knows what adventures they’ll have between now, and the time the show becomes unprofitable?’, the kind of barbed line they used to be very good at but haven’t pulled out in a while.
The show itself is nowhere near this point. Even with the Fox network being cut loose from its parent company 20th Century Fox, who are to merge with Disney, Fox bigwigs Dana Walden and Gary Newman specifically reassured audiences that the show would go on. During the Television Critics Association press tour, Walden said “The Simpsons is so much a part of the brand…there are no plans for them to go anywhere other than Fox,” adding “There’s no consideration of not ordering more Simpsons.” This isn’t exactly a courageous business decision. While future seasons will have to be licensed from Disney, it’s still a matter of having the self-restraint to not kill the goose that’s giving the golden eggs.
Of those eggs, though, the show itself isn’t so much a goose egg, as it is that of a wren – at least, when you compare it to the huge amount of merchandise out there. Quite apart from non-canon side works (comics, tie-in books, etc) there’s a dizzying array of branded clothing, toys, collectibles, snack foods, board games – well, if you can imagine it with a Simpsons aesthetic, it’s probably out there. In 2003 – fully 14 years after the show premiered, mind you – Peter Byrne, Fox’s executive vice president of licensing and merchandising, called it ‘the biggest licensing entity that Fox has had, full stop’. The same article puts the franchise’s t-shirt sales alone at $20 million for that year.
(As early as season 2, the episode ‘Dancin’ Homer’ had Marge remark ‘A Simpson on a t-shirt! I never thought I’d see the day’.)
Ultimately, then, the second Simpsons Movie is nothing more than another piece of Simpsons merchandise – and I say this because the expression ‘cash grab’ seems a little too opinionated. It certainly wasn’t the result of some bright spark having a white-hot feature-length story idea and pitching it so well the execs were convinced, at least not if the first was anything to go by.
Interestingly, Family Guy – which has shamelessly imitated The Simpsons since day one, but at least has the dignity to admit it now and again – has also recently announced a film adaptation, which will apparently blend animation with live action. And, in what must be a blow to the ego for The Simpsons, it is the Family Guy movie that has taken precedence in more than a few news articles, which perhaps conveys just what a mediocrity the first Simpsons Movie was. For all Family Guy’s faults, its film adaptation is at least a fresher item on the menu.
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