The show itself centres around the lives of the eponymous family, Homer , Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, as well as a whole host of other characters, in the town of Springfield. Several famous people have made guest appearances on the show as part of a storyline, including David Duchovny, Adam West, Spinal Tap, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Barry White. Much of the cartoon's subject matter is clearly aimed at adults, with a fair smattering of popular culture and film references in many episodes .
Apart from the high quality humour and animation, the show is famous for its long running gags, including Bart's blackboard punishments during the title sequence, and the subliminal messages that pop up when Maggie is scanned into the shopping till, as well as for the numerous catchphrases that have wormed their way into common parlance, including such 'classics' as Aye Carumba, and most notably D'oh!
The Simpsons was originally broadcast on 19th April, 1987, as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. It was so popular that is was spun off as its own series hosted on The Fox Network as of 17th December 1989. The original three series were animated by Klasky-Csupo, and subsequent series have been made by Film Roman. The voices for the family are provided by Dan Castellaneta as Homer, Julie Kavner as Marge, Nancy Cartwright as Bart and Yeardley Smith as Lisa .The show has run for over 250 episodes stretched over 11 series making it one of the worlds longest running animated programs, and has won many awards including a Peabody Award, 16 Emmy Awards, 8 Annie Awards, three Genesis Awards, three International Monitor Awards, three Environmental Media Awards, and also has a star on The Walk of Fame.
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(Written mostly in the order they occured to me, with a mind to not creating too many useless nodeshells. Please /msg me with any omissions/misspellings)
Many Harvard graduates find themselves working for or writing for The Simpsons. The list of Harvard graduates grows longer and longer, which may be part of the reason of the shows major success.
The list of writers who graduated from Harvard includes:
Al Jean Dan McGrath John Collier Patric Verrone Bill Canterbury David Cohen Jon Vitti Rich Appel Bill Oakley David Sacks Ken Keeler Steve Tompkins Conan O'Brien George Meyer Max Pross Steve Young Dan Greaney Jeff Martin Mike Reiss Tom Gammill Nell Scovell
Conan O'Brien, who now has his own late night TV show at NBC was the president of the Harvard Lampoon, which is Harvard's humor magazine, and Bill Oakley served as vice-president of the magazine.
With all these Harvard graduates working for it, its no wonder that The Simpsons have so many Ivy League references as well as jokes. Examples:
The Simpsons was a four player arcade game released by Konami in 1991. It allowed you to take control of four "wacky" characters (Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Bart), on a mission to rescue "Maggie" who has been kidnapped by the evil Smithers.
This was one of the most successful arcade games of the early 1990s, and it was ported to several different console systems and was even available for MS-DOS based computer systems (the ports play pretty much the same, but are lacking in the area of graphics and sound).
Smithers bumps into the Simpsons family after pulling off a diamond theft, and the diamond ends up in baby Maggie's mouth. Smithers opts to grab the baby and make his escape, and it is up to the rest of the Simpsons family to save her.
You begin the game by selecting your character, from either Homer, Marge, Lisa, or Bart. You may get to select from a menu, or each character may have a specific joystick that controls them, it all depends on which version or port you are playing, in the dedicated four player arcade version each character has a specific joystick. Each character acts a little bit differently in the game (and they each have a different weapon), Marge has a vacuum cleaner, Lisa (my personal favorite) has a jump rope, Bart has a skateboard, and Homer fights with his fists. You fight your way through the town of Springfield battling goons, thugs, zombies, drunks, firemen, and a whole host of other enemies. At the end of each stage you will face a "boss" character, before finally facing Mr. Burns at the end of the game.
The game itself had great graphics (which looked a lot like the work of Matt Groening, although he didn't actually participate in the creation of this game), and wonderful sound (much of which was done by professional television voice actors such as Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, and Yeardley Smith to name a few). The levels are full of wonderful little details and jokes (such as a poster in the game advertising the game, which shows a smiling Homer Simpson playing a Simpsons arcade game). One feature that the casual player may miss out on is the ability to "team up" with another player and do some really funny combination attacks (which are only mildy effective, but are fun to watch).
This is a beat 'em up game at heart, and if you like that kind of game, then you will love this one. I have found it is easiest to defeat the enemies by attacking them one at a time, just keep hitting them until they go down. The enemies do not tend to attack very often, so you can usually just walk up to them and take them out. On the other hand, groups of enemies are best handled with hit and run tactics, just don't let yourself get surrounded.
There were several distinct versions of this game available in the arcade, the four player dedicated cabinet, the four player conversion kit (designed to retrofit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but a lot of them ended up on Gauntlet machines too), and the two player conversion kit (designed to retrofit almost anything). The only real difference in gameplay between versions was
