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The Simpsons turn 20 today (that is, if you don't count the Christmas special as the first episode and completely ignore the original shorts from The Tracey Ullman Show), and there's been a number of retrospectives to mark the occasion. An oft-repeated claim in many histories is that creator Matt Groening, fearing the loss of his Life in Hell characters, came up with the Simpsons in fifteen minutes before a meeting with Ullman producer James L. Brooks. But the characters actually originated nearly 40 years ago, in an unpublished novel Groening wrote in high school:

Chat Transcript (April 6, 1999):

Question hobgoblin: How old were you when you first came up with the idea for "The Simpsons"? I know that the show has been on for a long time.
[...]
Matt_G "The Simpsons" originated in high school.
Matt_G I wrote a bleak little novel called "The Mean Little Kids" starring a teenage Bart Simpson with buckteeth and a very bad complexion.

How quickly did The Simpsons gel in your mind?

I needed to come up with an idea really quickly. In the back of my mind was the idea of doing something that might possibly end up spinning off into its own TV show, so I created a family which I thought would lend itself to a lot of different kinds of stories. In high school I had written a novel, a sort of a very sour Catcher in the Rye, self pitying, adolescent novel starring Bart Simpson as a very troubled teenager. I took that family and transferred it, made them younger, and then drew. It took about 15 minutes to design the characters the first time out.

Were they all the same characters that we now know and love?

Yes, but they've been transformed.

Why didn't you leave Bart as an adolescent?

TV does children really badly, and I thought there was room for something different. Teenagers are already running rampant on television, but kids are done very unrealistically in sitcoms. Sometimes, a particular character gels with an audience and becomes the star.

Was Bart at the center all along?

Yeah. The rest of the Simpsons in my original conception were in a struggle to be normal and Bart was the one who thought that being normal was boring.

And now you know... the rest of the story.

Upon being reminded that Simpsons creator Matt Groening grew up in Portland, former Simpsons writer and future Tonight Show host Conan O'Brien said this:

"He'll always be my boss. You know how you feel when you run into your third-grade teacher at the supermarket? Your worry that you're going to get in trouble, even if you're 45? That's how I feel when I see Matt Groening."

The LA Weekly has dropped Matt Groening's weekly comic strip Life in Hell after 22 years. As far as I can tell, no other Los Angeles periodicals are carrying it, which means Life in Hell is no longer available in the city that inspired it. [CNN]

Simpsons creator Matt Groening has always enjoyed a favorable relationship with the press. Serving as a sort-of go-to cultural commentator, the head of Fox's billion-dollar cartoon franchise is often quoted on everything from animation to music to high school to Olympic mascots. These days, however, he is often asked to comment on Fox's other billion-dollar cartoon franchise, Family Guy. In a Wall Street Journal article about Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, MacFarlane's contemporary is relegated to a handful of sentences, including a paragraph which curiously reads like a line from a Fox press release:

Cartoonist Matt Groening, creator of "The Simpsons," says, "He's laid the groundwork with this smash hit show and now, with new media opening up and Seth's specific kind of rapid-fire visual humor, how to exploit it just depends on how ambitious he wants to be."

Along with at least 100 other showrunners, Matt Groening and James L. Brooks joined in solidarity with the WGA strike, signing a pledge and vowing that they "will do no writing" until a deal is made. Wait, they still work on the show? [WGA.org]

Popular celebrity-stalking website TMZ has posted an article by Melissa-Mindy Trump Hilton, who bears strong resemblance to comedienne Amy Sedaris, in which she declares her intentions of becoming the Akbar to Matt Groening's Jeff:

People have been saying that I have "set my cap" on becoming "Mrs. Matt Groening." And they say that for the entire summer, I have been drunkenly throwing myself at Matt, in a way that appears almost desperate, making plans to cross his path during movie industry events and parties and receptions, always popping up at his side. And that one incident where I got kind of drunk at the Viper Room with Matt that caused my banning. Anyway: Matt Groening and I are "just friends," as they say. We do like to go to the beach together, we've been to a few local spas, we enjoy board games like Twatch and Scrabble. But we are just friends. Period. Oh, well, I have my hopes ... like any girl does. But for now those hopes are private and I know that TMZ won't betray my confidences.

The Simpson [sic] creator Matt Groening has snubbed new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown by insisting he'll never have a cameo on the hit animated series. While Brown's predecessor Tony Blair guest starred on a show in 2003, cartoon genius Groening is adamant there won't be another British statesman on the show for years. He says, "One Prime Minister per century is enough."

The aloof creator of The Simpsons will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Playboy! Here is a funny quote:

As a parent, Groening says, "I'm the dad I wished I had. I try to let my kids have a good time." His reward? "[My kids] tell me I'm not funny anymore. ... My son said he wishes ['Family Guy' creator] Seth MacFarlane were his father."

In a top ten list of the top ten environmental films (#9: FernGully), Ken Eisner rounds off his appraisal of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with a solicitation to "look for some of these themes to emerge in The Simpsons Movie, from Al's pal Matt Groening." [straight.com]

iF: For everyone who worked on [Futurama], it's been off the air much longer, since Fox had a whole season left in the can to air once production had stopped.

GROENING: That's the nature of animation. When the SIMPSONS finally ends, there will probably be another season and we'll do a long farewell tour and wave to people.

TW: Fans talk of the golden age, seasons three through eight or nine. Now that you're into season 18, haven't there been other phases, maybe a new renaissance?

MG: I don't feel like I want to defend the show to people who don't like it, but I would say that the animation is better, that we're doing shows that I defy anybody to say that we've already done. We're coming up with, I think, ideas that are certainly surprising to us. And the show still makes me laugh. That's all I care about. I hope that it makes other people laugh, too.

For comparison to other executive producers:

Al Jean: "I think the last couple years have been among our best"
James L. Brooks: Season 17 is "a classic"
Matt Groening: Animation is better, surprising new ideas, still makes him laugh[The Wave]

At least according to the author of a new book, Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and Rich: Spike's Guide to Success:

"I'm not saying that being good looking won't get you a date, but as for success - forget it," said [Richard] St. John, who names multimillionaires Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates as examples of that principle.

"I apologize for calling them ugly," he said. "In fact, I think they are just average, but there's an inverse relationship between looks and success. The uglier they are, the richer they are."

No, really:

Mr. Mann, whose subjects have included underground cartoonists ("Comic Book Confidential") and avant-garde jazz musicians ("Imagine the Sound"), takes a light, zippy approach to his material. His main conceit is to have much of the story told by the hot rods themselves, voiced by sympathetic celebs like Jay Leno (a car and motorcycle hobbyist), the Smothers Brothers, and "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening, with John Goodman as the disembodied voice of Big Daddy himself, speaking to us from the great body shop beyond.

As a cartoon animator, Mike Gerard always wanted to produce the best drawings he could.

But when he started work on [the first season of "The Simpsons"], he was astonished to be told that the creators did not want good animation.

...

"Matt Groening (creator of "The Simpsons") was adamant that the show should be about humor, the characters, and that the animation should not look good. That was really difficult for me and I would get frustrated when he would tell me something was too good. So one day I picked up a scene I had thrown in the trash and he loved it."