They were skinny. They were crude. And they were yellow.
And he loved them all.
Ken Priebe is an animation instructor working at VanArts in British Columbia. He was in middle school the first time he and his parents watched The Simpsons on TV.
He remembers seeing the sloppily-drawn family when they made their debut in a short skit on The Tracey Ullman Show.
But it wasn’t until they appeared on their own, full-length program that the animated family made their first real impact.
“It was a huge success. They were huge,” he said. “It was a really big deal to have an animated show like that on primetime.”
The Simpsons first premiered on the Fox network on December 17, 1989. The show featured the donut-loving father Homer, his scraggly-voiced wife Marge, rabble-rousing son Bart, super-intelligent daughter Lisa, and the pacifier-sucking infant Maggie.
It wasn’t long after the show hit the airwaves that the family began to take North America by storm.
Priebe remembers the massive wave of merchandizing, mostly centred around Bart and his bad-boy attitude.
“He was the superstar of the show,” Priebe said. “He was like the cool kid, the troublemaker.”
The spiky-haired ten-year-old became a cultural icon. Kids would show up at school wearing t-shirts and backpacks bearing catchphrases like “Underachiever and proud of it” and “Eat my shorts,” much to the horror of their teachers.
“This show was seen by a lot of people as a sign of the end of civilization as we know it,” said Robert Thompson, an expert on popular culture and television history at Syracuse University.
Before its first season had ended, one Ohio principal had already banned all Simpson T-shirts in his school. And other teachers soon followed his example.
But the outcries of disgust aimed against the show quickly died down.
“Most people who had actually bothered to watch the show began to start coming around to the fact that they were going to have to grudgingly admit that this show was the best thing on television,” Thompson said.
“It really was some of the best social commentary and political commentary out there.”
Priebe said The Simpsons is one of the reasons he is able to work in animation today.
According to Priebe, animation was a dead-end industry prior to the 1990s. But with its slick style and clever characters, The Simpsons was “one of the things that made animation cool.”
As the show grew in popularity, so too did the number of its imitators.
Shows like Beavis and Butthead, Family Guy and South Park all took cues from The Simpsons, lampooning celebrities, politicians and pop culture in general.
“The Simpsons success spawned this whole new era,” Priebe said.
But for Priebe, a lot of the newer shows relied too much on crude humour and shock value rather than creating endearing characters.
“That’s what made The Simpsons work. The characters were like the people in your own town and the people in your own family. ”
Priebe hasn’t seen the show in a while, but not because he thinks it’s not funny anymore.
“I haven’t watched it regularly. It’s not cause I don’t like the show, but life gets busy.”
Thompson said the show has declined in popularity over the past few years because it no longer stands out in the landscape it created.
“I’m not willing to say The Simpsons is no good anymore,” Thompson said. “But it’s not innovative, it’s by definition old fashioned.”
But Thompson also said the show’s longevity is one of its crowning successes.
“The biggest thing about The Simpsons is when people ask, ‘Where is The Simpsons?’ 25 years later, the answer is it’s still on the air.”