Written by Robert Scucci | Published
Have you ever wondered why everyone is inside The Simpsons is it yellow? There are some fun theories out there, like the entire town of Springfield suffering from radiation poisoning, or that Homer is suffering from cirrhosis from drinking too much. But for those ideas to work, we need to ask ourselves why all the citizens who marry cousins in Shelbyville are also drunk, and why Homer’s drinking would turn his entire family drunk. The real reason The Simpsons the yellow ones are actually the result of a clever hunch from Georgie Kovacs Peluce, one of the colorists at Klasky Csupo.
In the beginning, The Simpsons the shorts were going to be black and white, until a new animation studio told The Simpsons creator James L. Brooks that they would mock the colored character designs for free. There were several iterations and approvals of the characters before they were seen on screen, some of which used the traditional peach tones and dark tones used by other animated series. Peluce had something else in mind, and undertook to design characters with yellow skin and, in Marge’s case, blue hair. This initial concept was met with pushback for a “weird” look from some representatives of Gracie Films, Brooks’ production company, but Brooks, Groening, and other partners liked it because they knew it would pique the audience’s curiosity.
From Throwaway Idea to Final Design
It’s hard to imagine the world you’re in The Simpsons it wasn’t there, but the world wasn’t always there. Back in 1987, a few years before the Simpsons mania conquered the world, the “nuclear” family was nothing more than an urgent project of creator Matt Groening, who was asked by James L. Brooks to produce a show based on his idea. Life in Hell comics, intellectual property that the cartoonist would not feel comfortable selling the rights to. Instead, he quickly hit a cartoon family based on his own, and was cast The Simpsons to Brooks, and we would first meet Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie through short-form animated skits on The Tracey Ullman Show.
Groening, having no experience with television at this point in his career, thought his drawings would be shown in black and white, but the animation studio behind the shorts, Klasky Csupo, had something else in mind. In accordance with Stupid TV, Get Funnier: How The Simpsons’ Golden Age Changed Television – and America – Foreverit was an animation studio that inspired The Simpsons shorts to be colored in the first place. They were asked to animate everything in black and white as a way to cut costs, until Gabor Csupo insisted on trying color versions, promising to do more work for free.
Several iterations of The Simpsons were mocked, but one version from Georgie Kovacs Peluce stuck out above all others. Georgie’s design involved yellow skin and blue hair, something that “didn’t look like anything that had come before,” and the design won over Brooks and Groening. The idea was simple: when people surfed the channel, they felt more inclined to stop dead when they saw a cartoon family that looked very different.
Back in those days, home viewers didn’t have much choice, often switching back and forth between ABC, NBC, CBS, and the struggling new Fox network. Basically, the reaction you want will involve someone watching one of the other networks flipping through channels during a commercial break, catching a glimpse of The Simpsons, saying “what the hell is this?” he ended up looking all short.
Peluce’s logic paid off because that’s exactly what happened, and it was only a matter of time before The Simpsons it took the nation by storm, eventually becoming the longest-running animated show in television history. And to think, we almost found a black and white species that may have been suppressed before anyone knew who they were.
The Simpsons can be streamed on Disney +.
