Q: Best promotional tie-in ever?

A: Mmmmmm...verisimilitude.



Get your own eerily lifelike avatar over at the official Simpsons Movie site.

Q: Who's the real brains behind "The Simpsons"? or: Who put the spring in Springfield?

A: The new Vanity Fair feature on The Simpsons is full of great details of the show's history and pre-history — among them:

• Producer James L. Brooks discovered Matt Groening when the production designer on Terms of Endearment bought Brooks one of Groening's Life in Hell cartoons she thought he'd appreciate. That cartoon was called "Success and Failure in Hollywood" (not available on the Interwebs, sadly), and the gist of it was that in Hollywood, success and failure both end badly. It's funny to think that if Groening hadn't drawn that cartoon — or if the designer hadn't come across it in an L.A. alt-weekly, or if Groening had already sold the original to someone else, or etc etc etc — one of the greatest works in TV history wouldn't even exist.
• Groening and original show-runner Sam Simon hated one another. Simon comes off as a kind of unbearably mad genius, but is credited with "taking Groening's crude characters from The Tracey Ullman Show and making them into the Simpsons that the world knows and loves," including literally redrawing them (he's a cartoonist himself, which I didn't know).
• Animator Gabor Csupo says Brooks originally conceived the Simpsons' segments on The Tracy Ullman Show to be black-and-white, as Groening had drawn them. So the characters' yellow skin and Marge's blue hair were added by the animators, not by Groening himself.
• Art Spiegelman, Maus author and current New Yorker toon editor, originally "pleaded" with Groening not to work with FOX. "'They're gangsters! They're gonna take your rights away!"' Spiegelman recalls telling him. "He's never let me forget it."

Spiegelman's advice is particularly funny given the creative freedom the show has famously enjoyed — but it seems like the network wasn't always completely hands off. According to production supervisor Colin Lewis, "David Mirkin was the first [show-runner] who said, 'Why do we have to change it? We're The Simpsons. We're in control because they want their hit show, and I will get to Saturday night and I won't deliver them a show, and then they will have to air what I give them.'"

But elsewhere in the article, Mirkin and the show-runners who followed him are indirectly cited as partly responsible for the show's post-season-eight decline (before Al Jean returned in '01). So maybe the occasional network input wasn't as harmful as one might assume. [CORRECTION / CLARIFICATION: Mirkin ran the show's fifth and sixth seasons. The show may have been in decline by then, considering how strong the third and fourth seasons were, but it wasn't a huge dropoff.] Incidentally, Rupert Murdoch comes off as an okay dude (I don't really blame Murdoch for Fox News' existence, but that's fodder for a different post).


As to who provided the real brains behind the show, you could go a lot of different directions — Simon or the voice talent would both be solid picks there — but I was particularly struck by the degree to which former Harvard University nerds shaped the show.

I knew a lot of the more prominent early writers, like Conan O'Brien, were Harvard Lampoon vets, but I didn't realize the degree to which they dominated the writing room. Says writer/exec. producer Bill Oakley, "From Season 2 to Season 8, there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff."

Given that Seasons 2 through 8 is the show's golden age, maybe Hahhhvahd deserves more of the credit that I ever realized.

BONUS: From Season 9's "All Singing, All Dancing," here's the "We Put the Spring in Springfield" sequence.



Even the "down" years have their share of great bits.

DISCUSS: Is Harvard still pumping out funny people these days? I suspect it's a different type crowd there than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

(Oh, and Dear Lampoon staff: Maybe you should give a call to your peers over at MIT and ask them to build you a Web site that doesn't blow. Just a thought. Love, t.a.m.s.y.)

Q: What does Fox hope to accomplish by subpoenaing YouTube?

He thought his problem was the Chinese

A: On the surface, the subpoena Twentieth Century Fox recently sent YouTube's way is just a means of acquiring information about ECOTotal, the user responsible for uploading four episodes of 24 and 12 episodes of The Simpsons to the Google-owned video site. The subpoena was filed Jan. 18th, but didn't receive media coverage until it was tipped to Steve Bryant's GoogleWatch blog Wednesday.

The part about the Simpsons episodes is almost certainly incidental; people upload illegal content to video sites (including Fox's own MySpace) all the time. What really pissed off Fox was that the episodes of 24 -- comprising the four-part season six premier -- appeared on YouTube more than a week before their Jan. 14th and 15th air date. Fox also served a subpoena to the lesser-known video site LiveDigital, targeting a user with the handle "Jorge Romero" who also uploaded the premier.

The premier was a big deal for Fox; 24 is its hottest show, and season five ended on a much-discussed cliffhanger. The new episodes were so hotly anticipated that, in addition to blocking out four hours of prime time over two days for their airing, the company poised itself for an extra cash-in by releasing them to DVD on the 16th.

ECOTotal has been suspended by YouTube, but with a little help from the Google cache, we can uncover a tiny bit of information about him. For one thing, he was popular, rating as the third-most subscribed-to uploader as of Jan. 9th (maybe thanks to the 24 leak). I also strongly suspect that he's German, given that his uploads of an episode of CBS's King of Queens were targeted to sprechers of Deutsch.

The most damning evidence: ECOTotal watches King of Queens.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess LiveDigital's "Jorge Romero" is probably Chicagoan Jorge Romero, whose blog includes tips for light hacking of video sites. Romero's profile lists him as 23, and a tiny bit of detective work identifies him as popular Digg user kal-el (current rank: 430 -- not too shabby). That will probably come in handy if he ever needs a legal-defense fund.

Once Fox receives the two users' IP addresses and email accounts from the subpoenaed sites, the next step is presumably a lawsuit. Which leads to the more important Q: What would be the point of suing these dudes?

The answer may surprise Fox, if they think this brings them any closer to revealing who leaked the premier in the first place, or to preventing future digital piracy.

The real source of the problem for Fox is the leak itself, which points directly back to sources within the company. The only reason ECOTotal and Romero had access to the premier is that the four episodes were posted to BitTorrent sites three weeks ago, by the well-known pirate collective AsiaTeam. And it's not the first time such a thing occurred; the premiers of the current Simpsons' season¹ and the previous season of 24 were also available on BitTorrent trackers prior to their air date.

Pirates: Arrrrr Jack's real problem.

Suing a couple of people at the bottom of the piracy food chain -- both of whom are probably young and broke, and one of whom might have to be extradited from Germany -- would serve little purpose for Fox. It's like targeting the Mob by arresting its drivers.

And considering that there are thousands or millions of citizens worldwide with access to the dozens or hundreds of Torrent trackers where these episodes are originally posted, it'd do very little to prevent anyone else from doing the same thing in the future. It only takes one person to post a video to YouTube or anywhere else.

At best, these subpoenas are nothing more than a litigious temper tantrum. Maybe it makes them feel bigger to scare a couple of college kids, or to force Google's hand on anything. In the real world, it accomplishes zilch.

---

¹ When the Simpsons' Halloween premier leaked in late October, I wondered if it wasn't an act of aggression against Fox perpetrated by the show's staff. The network's contract to air the World Series means that the annual "Treehouse of Terror" special usually doesn't air until November, which can't sit too well with the people who make it.

But that's just baseless speculation on my part; the leaked episode was watermarked as a preview for critics, so it could have come from any number of sources.

Q: Was I a fool to criticize Google?

A: Yuh huh. I'm sorry, baby, please take me back.

Last night, I was complaining about how fast the Google copyright cops were, to have removed the new Simpsons trailer from YouTube so quickly. But I guess it was just a temporary glitch, cuz the link works fine now. Enjoi.

Q: Why is Bart Simpson not having a cow?

A: Because he employed the techniques learned in L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" to manage his stress level.

On a related note, Simpsons voice talent Nancy Cartwright is a Scientologist. And like South Park's now-dead Chef, she is rumored not to take too kindly to Scientology jokes in Springfield, says TimesUK blogger Chris Ayres:

"The writers figured they could slip the joke past her," smirked my Simpsons insider. "But they were wrong. Nancy's line was something like, "Mormonism? That's the second freakiest religion in America!'. Nancy caught it, and she wasn't happy. We had to drop it."

Cartwright's publicist denied the story, which means it's probably true.

SO, YEAH: This was supposed to be a post with the newly unveiled trailer for the Simpsons movie... but then it got taken off of YouTube within like five seconds (damn you, Google, and your cripplingly effective copyright police!). So I guess you're just going to have to download it from Apple. Whatevs. T.A.M.S.Y. expects the movie to be the awesomeyest, even though that trailer relies pretty heavily on a stupid sight gag.