UPDATE: According to Entertainment Weekly, "The Simpsons" will make a reference to Springfield's origins in the opening credits of this Sunday's episode. Stay tuned.
Claudia De La Roca: So take us back to the Simpsons’
foundational moment. In 1987 you were waiting for a meeting with James
Brooks and you started sketching. What were you thinking?
Matt Groening: I had been drawing my weekly comic
strip, “Life in Hell,” for about five years when I got a call from Jim
Brooks, who was developing “The Tracey Ullman Show” for the brand-new
Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little
cartoons on that show. I soon realized that whatever I pitched would not
be owned by me, but would be owned by Fox, so I decided to keep my
rabbits in “Life in Hell” and come up with something new.
While I was waiting—I believe they kept me waiting for over an hour—I
very quickly drew the Simpsons family. I basically drew my own family.
My father’s name is Homer. My mother’s name is Margaret. I have a sister
Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. I was going to
name the main character Matt, but I didn’t think it would go over well
in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart.
Bart. Why?
Back in high school I wrote a novel
about a character named Bart Simpson. I thought it was a very unusual
name for a kid at the time. I had this idea of an angry father yelling
“Bart,” and Bart sounds kind of like bark—like a barking dog. I thought
it would sound funny. In my novel, Bart was the son of Homer Simpson. I
took that name from a minor character in the novel The Day of the Locust,
by Nathanael West. Since Homer was my father’s name, and I thought
Simpson was a funny name in that it had the word “simp” in it, which is
short for “simpleton”—I just went with it.
Did your father contribute anything besides his first name?
My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to
tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving
around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a
brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the
woods with animals. I told it to my sister Lisa, and she in turn told it
to my sister Maggie. My father recorded the telling of the story by
Lisa to Maggie, and then he used it as the soundtrack to a movie. So the
idea of dramatizing the family—Lisa, Maggie, Matt—I think was the
inspiration for doing something kind of autobiographical with “The
Simpsons.” There is an aspect of the psychodynamics of my family in
which it makes sense that one of us grew up and made a cartoon out of
the family and had it shown all over the world.
Any other commonalities between your father and Homer Simpson?
Only the love of ice cream. My dad didn’t even like doughnuts that much.
The name Homer has been wall-to-wall around you—your father, your son, Homer Simpson. What does the name mean to you?
My father was named after the poet Homer. My grandmother, his mother,
was a voracious reader. She named one son Hugo. It is this basic name, but I can’t separate the name Homer from The Iliad and The Odyssey
and from Odysseus, even though Homer is the teller of the tale. I think
of it as a very heroic name in that Homer, even though he is getting
kicked in the butt by life, he is his own small hero.
OK, why do the Simpsons live in a town called Springfield? Isn’t that a little generic?
Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon. The only reason is
that when I was a kid, the TV show “Father Knows Best” took place in the
town of Springfield, and I was thrilled because I imagined that it was
the town next to Portland, my hometown. When I grew up, I realized it
was just a fictitious name. I also figured out that Springfield was one
of the most common names for a city in the U.S. In anticipation of the
success of the show, I thought, “This will be cool; everyone will think
it’s their Springfield.” And they do.
