Memories DECEMBER 17, 1989
How iconic TV family stole Christmas thanks to Santa’s Little Helper
It is one of the longestrunning series in television history and will soon celebrate its 700th episode.
But The Simpsons’ first episode was a punt by a TV network unsure if primetime viewers’ attention would be held by a half-hour of animation.
Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie have become one of the most famous fictional families of all time and their adventures started with a Christmas special that first aired 31 years ago this week on American TV.
The cartoon family, created by Matt Groening, had started as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, but the Fox network saw potential in the dysfunctional family and commissioned 13 episodes of its own series.
The Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire debuted in the slot before sitcom Married With Children, and a respectable 13.4 million viewers watched the opening episode.
Remarkably, it was the first primetime animated show on television since The Flintstones ended in 1966.
The Christmas special was never intended to be The Simpsons debut, but technical issues with other episodes saw it brought forward. The voices may sound a little different, the animation more crudely drawn and the colours a little off, but what was there from the beginning was the acerbic wit, the touching moments, the offbeat humour and the dark satire. The story was based in realism, with Homer struggling to bring in enough cash to provide a perfect
Christmas for the family. It was a marked difference from so many sitcoms of 1980s yuppie-obsessed America, where families lived in luxurious houses and money wasn’t an issue. Although Homer’s financial worries aren’t solved, a happy Christmas is found thanks to the newest addition to the family, failed racing greyhound Santa’s Little Helper, abandoned by his owner at the track and picked up by Homer, who had gambled the last of his cash on the loveable no-hoper.
The episode was written by cartoonist and illustrator Mimi Pond, one of the few women to write for The Simpsons in the early days. She claimed she wasn’t invited to be part of the writers’ room permanently because the series’ then-showrunner wanted it to be all male. It was the only episode of The Simpsons Mimi would write. Laying out some of the scenes in the episode was Eric Stefani, older brother of singer Gwen Stefani. As well as being an animator, Eric was a founding member of No Doubt, the band Gwen first found fame with. The Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire was
Looking back at what made the news in years gone by nominated for two Emmy awards. The series quickly became embedded in pop culture and many of its quotes a part of the everyday lexicon, none more so than Homer’s annoyed grunt, “D’oh”, which became part of the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001. The actor who voices Homer, Dan Castellaneta, said he took inspiration from an expression made by Scottish actor James Finlayson, who appeared in a number of Laurel And Hardy films.
While the outstanding quality of The Simpsons inevitably tailed off, the show remains popular among tens of millions of viewers around the world, with its 32nd series about to begin, and it all began with a festive special that aired to low expectations.