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Margaret Groening, the mother of Simpsons creator Matt Groening, died in her sleep on April 22 at age 94, as reported in an obituary in The Oregonian.
Born Margaret Ruth Wiggum, to Norwegian-born parents in Everett, Washington, she went on to become high school valedictorian, May Queen of Linfield College and a high school English teacher. Her late husband, Homer Groening, whom she met in school and she “chose because he made her laugh the most,” passed away in 1996.
A spokesperson for The Simpsons confirmed the obituary in the LA Times and said that her son had declined any public comment. She is survived by her brother Arnold; her children, Mark, Matt, Lisa and Maggie; eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Further confirmed by the obituary, Groening famously used names from his own family when creating Simpsons characters, with the exception of the name Bart, which is an anagram for “brat”.
0 Comments on Margaret Groening, Inspiration for Marge Simpson, Dies at 94 as of 5/8/2013 12:43:00 PM
Controlling creative people appears to be a popular topic in the mainstream media nowadays. Following on the heels of Harvard Business Review’s incendiary article “Seven Rules for Managing Creative People”, Bloomberg Businessweek has published a short piece titled How to Manipulate Creative People. Unlike the HBR article which sounded as if it was written by someone who had never met a creative person in their life, the Businessweek piece (which is part of their annual how-to issue) is written by Matt Selman, an exec producer on The Simpsons who has run the writers’ rooms for over a decade.
Agree with what he says or not, Selman’s advice clearly stems from experience:
If your team is still irritated with you, badmouth anyone not in the room. Dumping on an unseen third party or revealing tantalizing office gossip always takes the heat off for a few minutes. Though if you’re going to make fun of people who work for you, be prepared to be made fun of by them. No matter how mean it gets, have the thickest skin in the room. Reward the completion of assignments with YouTube clips: Key and Peele, octopus vs. shark, bank robbery fails. If nothing else works, stall till lunch. It’s hard to be full and angry.
0 Comments on “Simpsons” Producer Offers Tips For Manipulating Creative People as of 4/18/2013 2:26:00 PM
TweetSo, once again, Hollywood confabulates and celebrates the best of motion picture arts and sciences tonight, at the 85th Academy Awards. Among the many awards will be two showcasing the best in animation: Animated Feature Film and Short Film Animated. Many people have seen the feature films (or had a chance to…dunno how many actually [...]
3 Comments on The Beat’s Annual Guide to Winning the Oscar® Pool: Best Animated Shorts 2013, last added: 2/25/2013
Christopher Moonlight said, on 2/24/2013 1:01:00 PM
My money is on Paperman.
Santiago Casares said, on 2/24/2013 1:15:00 PM
I’m torn between Paperman and Adam and Dog.
Something interesting to note is that this year you could find all of the nominated shorts to view in the internet in a legal way. I guess the directors/studios have decided that their chances to win increase with more peolple being able to see their shorts.
Torsten Adair said, on 2/25/2013 6:34:00 AM
Yes. But then Magnolia had them pulled because it conflicted with their theatrical release.
The Academy also sent out screeners of the short subjects, including documentary, for the first time.
The winners and nominees are obscure, no matter the year. Warners and Pixar have issued DVDs, but from UPA onward, the films trend to be independent and film festival based.
Bill Plympton made a new Simpsons couch gag, titled “Film Noir,” that will premiere on this Sunday’s episode of the perennial TV series. The whole thing is posted online and can be seen below. Plympton also made a Simpsons couch gag last year.
Bill also just released the trailer to his new short Drunker Than a Skunk adapted from a poem by Walt Curtis:
0 Comments on Watch Bill Plympton’s New Film Noir-Inspired “Simpsons” Couch Gag as of 3/9/2013 3:20:00 AM
Ryan Humphrey posted this fantastic Simpson/Akira mash up comic on his tumblr last night and it’s been picking up a healthy number of notes since. The comic (which you can see below) is really striking, mainly, I think, because of those splashes of colour against that rich cream background, in the sense of drama and dynamism Humphreys evokes, and also in seeing the usually effusive Simpson’s characters strangely non-committal. The comic also struck a chord with artist James Harvey, who picked up the ball and ran with it, proposing to recreate the whole of Akira with The Simpsons cast, with artists who want to take part signing up to do particular sections. Here’s more from Harvey:
I took this idea to him (Ryan Humphrey), he gave it the go-ahead. Milhouse is Kaneda. Lisa is Kei. Bart is Tetsuo. Let’s do it.
I figured it all out. If you’re down, email the address below. In a few days, I’ll send you the cast list (which character from the Simpsons is which Akira character, though the minor characters will be left up to you) and I’ll tell you which 5 pages you’ll be working on. You can request a particular page, but it’s first come, first served.
If 468 people take part, we get to do all six volumes. Even if only 78 are down, we’d still get the entire first volume.
Since it’ll be non-profit, parody/satire, crowdsourced and distributed peer-to-peer, I feel like it’s juuust on the right side of the legal grey area it inhabits. If not- let’s do it anyway. I’ll take the rap.
if you want to be a part of this, drop me a line at bartkiracommittee@gmail.com
I’m interested to see how this goes: it sounds hugely fun. Often comic jams on the internet throw up some fantastic stuff, with artists putting their own interpretations on things and a host of styles and techniques on display. If you’re interested in taking part, contact James at the email address above. Or just enjoy the comic like I did.
0 Comments on Behold: Bartkira! An intriguing comics jam proposal as of 3/19/2013 11:57:00 PM
Abstract from one perspective, recognizable as animation icons from another. Check out these cartoon-based perspective sculptures by UK artist James Hopkins. Most of his subjects are recognizable even in their distorted form – either way, they are a lot of fun.
Click on thumbnails below to see even more of these incredible pieces of art:
All Simpsons, All The Time? News Corp. COO Chase Carey said earlier this week that Fox is considering starting an entire digital TV channel devoted to airing only The Simpsons. With over 500 episodes in the can (486 have aired to date) and no cancellation in sight, it seems like a very profitable idea. I love the concept – but why stop there? If successful, perhaps someday they’ll be channels devoted solely to South Park, or even Looney Tunes. Cowabunga – Count me in!
Last year, The Simpsons commissioned an opening couch gag from British street artist Banksy that contained a cockeyed look at the working conditions of overseas animators. This year, which marks the show’s remarkable 23rd season, the producers of the mustard-family went a step further and debuted a new couch gag last night by Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi.
Banksy mocked the idea of mass-produced corporate art, but his message was muddled because it was made using the same system he was satirizing. There’s no such confusion in John’s approach, which he produced on his own. John’s opening is, in fact, far more subversive because he focuses almost exclusively on making a pictorial statement, relegating the show’s dominant literary elements to the back seat. In 35 short and sweet seconds, he liberates the animation of The Simpsons from years of graphic banality. The visual look of the show, which has been so carefully controlled by its producers, becomes a giddy and unrestrained playground for graphic play, and the balance of creative authority is shifted from the writers’ room to the animators in one fell swoop. Now that’s revolutionary.
On a personal note, I worked on the revival of Ren and Stimpy nearly ten years ago, and artistically, this is not the same John Kricfalusi that I remember from that time. Like any painter or filmmaker worth their salt, John doesn’t stay still, constantly evolving, growing, experimenting, and challenging audiences with new graphic concepts. He continues to be, in my book, one of the most exciting and influential artists working in animation today. Whether everything works perfectly in this opening is besides the point. As John says in our interview, “The day I make a perfect cartoon is the day I’ve run out of creativity.”
In our interview, we talk about how the opening came about, Matt Groening’s reaction to it, how his style has evolved in recent years, and his switch from Flash to Toon Boom. (Note: This is an edited version of an interview that was conducted via email this past weekend. Click on any of the images for a larger version.)
Question:First things first, how did you end up animating an opening for The Simpsons?
John Kricfalusi: Matt Groening and Al Jean [executive producer] asked me to do it. They showed me an opening that Banksy did that satirized the animation production assembly line system in Korea and told me it was really popular, so they wanted to do something similar with me.
At first they just wanted me to do a storyboard and have their regular crew animate it. If we had done it that way, no one would even have known that I had anything to do with it because it would have ended up on model and all pose to pose. I showed them the Adult Swim shorts I had been doing and pointed out that the way things happened was even more important than what was happening in my work. You can’t write visual performance. You have to actually draw it.
This project was the most fun I’ve had in years. It has really hammered home (to me) the importance of animation in animation. I think it’s possible to bring animation back to this country and make the core of it fun again, not be a mere tertiary addition to some high concept or executive’s “vision.” The pure act of animating is the most fun part of animation. I am so grateful to Matt for letting me have some real fun this summer.
0 Comments on EXCLUSIVE: John K. Talks about his “Simpsons” Opening as of 1/1/1900
Yesterday we had a fabulous Children’s Literary Salon at the library with Jules Feiffer, Laurie Keller, Nick Bruel, and Dave Roman. Afterwards we swapped stories and someone started to tell me that once Maurice Sendak paired with the Pilobolus Dance Theater for a theatrical presentation. And since this is the 21st -century I was able to assess the veracity of this thanks to a handy dandy site going by the name of “Youtube”. As you can see, tis true.
I heard about this next video at a work holiday party this week. Hanging out with reference librarians has its advantages. For example, I might not have paid attention to this video featuring one of our resident Cullman scholars had it not been for the fact that the man is translating something utterly unique. It seems that back in the day Anton Chekhov wrote a Jules Verne parody. Yep. He wrote a story where he claimed to have found a lost Jules Verne tale, and then he had his brother illustrate it. Mighty fun and silly and not the kind of thing you might expect from the guy behind The Seagull.
Ed Spicer has a regular series where he interviews various authors and illustrators (with the full list here). And one of those folks is Atinuke, the woman behind the Anna Hibiscus and The No. 1 Car Spotter books. I seethe with envy that Ed got to meet her. That voice . . . oh, that voice. She also covers why she doesn’t call the location in her books “Nigeria” rather than “Africa”.
Zoe, fear not. I’m looking forward to your interview with the woman as well.
Just think. There are 21-year-olds out there who can drink and drive and vote and have lived their entire lives without ever knowing a world in which The Simpsons did not exist. Just take that in for a moment. I heard that Neil Gaiman was on an episode and though The Simpsons ain’t what it once wuz, I took a gander. Yeah, I’m one of those people who feel the show jumped the shark 13 seasons ago. In this particular episode it’s a pity they still can’t tell the difference between children’s and young adult literature, but I’m kind of loving the take on writing books for kids. The barely obscured Alloy Entertainment reference is pretty amusing and there’s an R.L. Stine joke. Bonus.
(How’d The Apothecary get a shout-out amongst those fake books in the screen shot here?)
Finally, for our off-topic video, I may not be running out to buy its app anytime soon, but this brand new and second Marcel the Shell with Shoes On video just sorta, kinda, in a way makes my day. Yep. It really does.
1 Comments on Video Sunday: Best fake children’s book title – “There’s a Rainbow in My Basement”, last added: 12/4/2011
Thank you for posting this video! I loved meeting Atinuke and, you are correct, her voice is absolutely mesmerizing. She told stories during her talk and I wish I had thought to arrange to film her talk. As it is, I have 24+ minutes of Atinuke that I had to whittle down to 10 minutes. Among the cut footage is her answer about whether or not she has Canadian roots (no, she has never been to Canada but has always wanted to go). We also spoke about the story in which Auntie Comfort is coming back to Africa and the grandparents are worried that she will no longer be African (and Anna keeps sending text messages to her). Anyway, thanks for sharing this video. I do hope lots of folks listen to her, including publishers and agents and others in the education world. She came all the way to Madison smack dab in the middle of the NCTE conference and neither her publisher nor her agent thought to arrange for her to attend NCTE! Ouch! KT had a dinner at her house and Atinuke attended and the conference organizers had a dinner at a restaurant and I got to sit next to her. She is such a delight! I have many stories! Her video demeanor does not completely show just how funny and spontaneous she can be (although the section about dogs does show some of this quite well). I am one lucky and grateful interviewer. And NONE of this would have happened if not for KT Horning, who sent me an email sharing the fact that what I thought was going to be a Skype presentation, was now an in person presentation. I was not planning to attend. I am so glad I did. Certainly Atinuke is worth the cost of admission all by herself, but I was also able to do another interview with the wonderful Mitali Perkins! Thanks again for posting this, Betsy!
Three cheers to everyone involved with The Simpsons for achieving the unheard of goal of producing 500 episodes! There has been a lot of deserved hype this week in honor of this milestone – I especially love the $500,000 contribution by Matt Groening to UCLA’s Animation program, an endowment which will “allow visiting master artists to teach classes” and “bring working professionals with wide-ranging expertise” to work with students. Groening also got a star this week on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. All well and good.
But someone explain to me these looney “Simpson’s fashions” (below) which made their debut this week in New York. Designer Jeremy Scott, whose previous designs were inspired by The Flinstones and Mickey Mouse, unveiled an entire line devoted to The Simpsons which – as much as I love Bart – are embarassingly bad.
Regardless, I’ll be tuning in this Sunday for the 500th time and, like these fashions above, I’m sure the show will get many laughs. Congratulations Matt, and to the crew at Film Roman.
“Realigning My Thoughts on Jasper Johns” is an art project by Baltimore-based JK Keller that digitally reprocesses the animation from The Simpsons episode “Mom and Pop Art” into a glitchy, bright hot mess. Keller explained his process:
I ripped all the frames, then used software to turn the ripped images into vectors. Then I processed the files through Illustrator using the default Alignment & Distribution tools (23 different combinations). The resulting files were then brought back together for the 23 final videos.
With the audio, I used a similar process, making a spectrogram image of the audio from each cut in the episode. Then I applied a variety of processes to the image to mimic the alignment/distribution used. Then took the resulting image and turned it back into audio.
The project is intended to be shown as an installation of a 9 screen grid. Viewers would be able to adjust dials and switches to adjust volumes & video sources to create their own juxtapositions of the 23 videos.
Interested in the incorrect use of default software tools and how they can be used to generate new forms, and the absurdity that results between default digital manipulation and purposeful manual influence.
The results of Keller’s experiment are visually mesmerizing. The introductory video is below followed by the rest of the project on this YouTube playlist.
Here’s more from ZAP2it: “In the intro, all the buildings in Springfield rise like they do in the Game of Thrones intro, complete with the theme music. Springfield as Westeros. Actually, we’d love to see an entire show with that theme. Although Bart and Lisa as Jaime and Cersei … maybe not.”
The “Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart” Simpsons’ episode did not feature a Game of Thrones story line. We’ve embedded the HBO credit sequence below–should the show do a full parody of George R.R. Martin‘s story?
Wow. To quote one of my favorite comediennes (Chelsea Handler), "What a whirlwind!" Last week was so much fun and I'm thankful to all the Buzz Girls for their wonderful features. I bet you all know more about me than you ever wanted to now, ha ha!
Today is a very special day for one of the TV programs I mentioned in the post Heather put together for Thursday. The Simpsons has made it to 20 years! 20 years with the same core people, the same TV network, the same irreverent, silly, quirkiness. "Long before now, endruging life for 'The Simpsons' and its brightly jaundiced folk was simply assumed. What began 20 years ago as a fluke then erupted into a pop-culture juggernaut has continued to spin yarns, spawn characters and lampoon society with no end in sight." -Frazier Moore of the Associated Press. Congratulations to Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons.
And here's some more buzz: Ellen DeGeneres will be an American Idol judge this season, which starts Tuesday, Jan. 12. I, for one, am excited because I think it will breathe some new energy into the show, which is one of my (many) guilty pleasures.
Now, without further ado, I will announce the winner of the $10 Borders/Waldenbooks gift card. There were nearly 60 entries! My son wrote the names of each entry onto little pieces of paper and shook a bowl vigorously and drew the paper with ... YA Book Nerd written on it. Woot! Congrat's, YA Book Nerd. If you'd be so kind as to email me at roxyinlights at yahoo . com with your mailing address I'll send it on its merry way. Thank you to everyone who commented! What a treat to get to know each of you a little better. :)
Have a great week, everybody! xoxo
4 Comments on Winner Announced!, last added: 1/10/2010
Emily, I agree AI is getting old. Fingers crossed Ellen can work some magic! And my 9 yo son (the one in the pic) just bought a huge collection of used Simpsons DVDs so it's even popular with the youngsters. Thanks, Tina! And proseandkahn, we actually filmed the drawing and I was going to post the video but I guess I have a lot to learn b/c it didn't work. Oh well, Maybe next time! And it was cute b/c he memorized how to spell the ones who commented multiple times and even did some math to figure out who all had the best chances. Good times at the Toliver breakfast table! :)
Last week Ypulse Youth Advisory Board member Amber Gibson weighed in on whether Pepsi could strike a chord with Gen Y by staying on the bench this Super Bowl season. Today we tap our own Dan Coates, president of Ypulse Insights, for his expert take... Read the rest of this post
Last week Ypulse Youth Advisory Board member Amber Gibson weighed in on whether Pepsi could strike a chord with Gen Y by staying on the bench this Super Bowl season. Today we tap our own Dan Coates, president of Ypulse Insights, for his expert take... Read the rest of this post
Ilove to watch cartoons, and The Simpsons has always been a favorite. I love the departure from reality, the characters’ flawless hairstyles and ruthlessly stereotyped accents, the invariable outfits. As a student of mathematics, however, I can’t escape my fascination with how different their world must be, solely based on the number of digits their hands have. In the world of the Simpsons, and in many cartoon worlds, each person has four fingers on each hand.
When it’s a commercial break, I think about what this would do to keyboard configurations. I imagine how it must affect musical instruments. Suddenly Lisa’s skill at playing the saxophone is a little more impressive. A world dominated by hands with merely four digits would reduce a high-five to a high-four. The name high-four loses the high-five’s delightful assonance, but I imagine it probably has the same satisfying and celebratory features in practice.
And imagine the implications on their counting systems! They would naturally operate on an octal, or base eight, number system.
Take for instance their address, 742 Evergreen Terrace. In our base-ten counting system, we know this means: 7 hundreds + 4 tens + 2 ones.
In the base-eight system that their cartoon digits suggest, the number 742[base 8] would represent something else:
In the Simpsons world, Lisa strives for 100% on her tests. 100[base 8] is equivalent to 64[base 10]. Instead of comparing everything to 100, would an octal world use 64 as its frame of reference?
In the octal system, 3 + 6 = 11, since 11 represents 8^1 + 8^0. In other words, the sum is one group of eight and one single.
In the octal system, 4
1 Comments on The High-Four: Implications of a World With Fewer Digits, last added: 4/20/2010
Longboarding (A twist on traditional skateboarding sparks a new, inclusive movement becoming "the fastest growing segment in an otherwise sluggish skateboard market") (New York Times, reg. required)
- Comic-Con 2010 (Nice preview from USA Today. And... Read the rest of this post
'Kids are not going to want to see 30-minute infomercials' (says an exec behind The Hub by way of curbing revived concerns around the commercialization of shows built around Hasbro products. CEO Margaret Loesch adds that those will comprise less... Read the rest of this post
British street artist/prankster Banksy “directed” the intro to tonight’s episode of The Simpsons. It’s provocative, but the statement lacks potency because it was created by the same mass production infrastructure that he’s protesting. A reader on Gawker who goes by the handle “ReelMissing” stated this most eloquently:
“You don’t protest something by indulging in it. That’s the opposite of the point. Banksy was in part protesting Fox animation’s brutal treatment of its animators, but guess who animated the sequence? Fox animators did.
“It’s like killing a kitten and writing ‘ANIMAL CRUELTY IS WRONG’ next to the corpse in the dead animals’ blood. Maybe not on that scale of evil, but you get the point.”
0 Comments on Banksy directs “Simpsons” show intro as of 10/10/2010 11:33:00 PM
If a Hell exists for animation artists, I imagine it would involve having to work on later seasons of The Simpsons. There’s an interesting thing going on here though. Anybody who knows their animation history knows that virtually every classic cartoon character from Mickey to Bugs to Woody to Yogi became stiffer and less appealing as the years passed. It’s a good argument for why repetition is unhealthy for artists, and how it leads to artistic stagnation and an overreliance on formulas.
I don’t think we’ve ever done this before – post an entire episode from a current TV series – but this episode of The Simpsons must be seen by all loyal Cartoon Brew readers. So stop what you are doing for 22 minutes and watch Episode 14 of Season 22: Angry Dad: The Movie:
Just spoke with the great David Silverman, and he informed me of an impressive milestone: today marks the 24th anniversary of production of The Simpsons. (The series of David’s drawings above are from the early Tracey Ullman Show episodes.) As he tweeted earlier:
24 years ago, we first started drawing The Simpsons on March 23, 1987. Wes Archer, Bill Kopp, and myself. Happy Anniversary!
Last night’s episode of The Simpsons parodied the credits of HBO’s Game of Thrones adaptation. 
My money is on Paperman.
I’m torn between Paperman and Adam and Dog.
Something interesting to note is that this year you could find all of the nominated shorts to view in the internet in a legal way. I guess the directors/studios have decided that their chances to win increase with more peolple being able to see their shorts.
Yes. But then Magnolia had them pulled because it conflicted with their theatrical release.
The Academy also sent out screeners of the short subjects, including documentary, for the first time.
The winners and nominees are obscure, no matter the year. Warners and Pixar have issued DVDs, but from UPA onward, the films trend to be independent and film festival based.