OUAN403 - Animation Skills - Identify: Matt Groening's "The Simpsons"

OUAN403 - Animation Skills:

Although it's been a while since I last watched this amazing satirical TV show, I still remember the good ol' first season like it was yesterday. I remember the hype about how good The Simpsons was back in primary school when I was around the age of five or six. I remember how unlike South Park (a very similar show in terms of humour, albeit a lot stronger and edgier!) there wasn't a massive divide in who liked The Simpsons and who didn't; we all simply loved it!

Although it first aired in 1989, it was the talk on most of our lips for a good few years as it was just so popular! From the way the characters looked - it was extremely unique in the Noughties (2000's) to see these bright yellow characters with blue, green and goodness-knows-what-else coloured hair - all the way down to their extravagant personalities, all of us remember The Simpsons.

The Simpsons' family consisted of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. (Santa's Little Helper and Snowball (the family pets) came later on in the show) and were introduced slowly). Looking back, I liked how Groening slowly drip-fed his audience the hundreds of characters he had created over many seasons to keep his audience interested instead of simply throwing them all in your face right at the start. for a good few of the first episodes, I just remember getting to know the family and their individual personality traits and habits. This then slowly moved onto showing us their neighbours (the Flanders) and so forth.

Unlike a lot of animations, the opening sequence for each Simpsons episode was always different, and with my experience in watching these episodes, I'm fairly positive I could tell you exactly what episode was going to be shown just by the opening sequence. This kept the audience hooked right from the start and I understand that Groening must have thought about how dreary and repetitive most opening sequences were. He wanted to give us something different, something unexpected and because of that, I'll never forget the impact and joy The Simpsons had on/gave my childhood.