"The Simpsons" (90's Era) Retro Talkback (Spoilers)

[wonderfly]

These forums started in 2001, so there's a lot of material in the archives of the forums on the Simpsons from 2001 onward. But I don't see a thread devoted more to the "Golden Age" of the Simpsons - aka "The 90's". So I'm starting up this thread. If there's any relevant threads that can be merged into this one (from the archives) let me know.

Maybe I'll eventually merge old threads and make threads for "The Simpsons (2000's Era)" and "The Simpsons (2010's Era)".

Here's the thread for "The Simpsons" (2020 Onward).

 

[wonderfly]

From the front page of AnimeSuperhero.com:

"Thirty Years Ago, Homer Simpson Entered The Third Dimension"​

"On October 29, 1995, the third segment of The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror VI went where no prime-time cartoon had gone before…CGI. Homer entering “THE THIRD DIMENSION” and wandering around a green grid with bouncing primitive shapes was seen as a very breathtaking, expensive stunt to mid-90s eyeballs. EW.com just published an extensive write-up of the making of the Homer3 short, and here’s everything we learned about how it was done.

You have to realize what the state of computer animation was in 1995…very young. CGI animation was just starting to become possible for movies and TV shows. There was ReBoot in September 1994, VeggieTales in December 1993, and Toy Story a month from now…and that was it. For the most part, you just didn’t see it outside of expensive photo-realistic shots in high-budget features.

And what The Simpsons was asking for was a step above Canadian blue people or talking tomatoes — they needed fully formed 2D cartoon characters to be rendered in 3D, with total accuracy. It needed to be unmistakably Homer from every angle, even angles that were never seen. This hadn’t really been done before."

Read the full article here.

 

[Pooky]

Strangely I don’t have any memory of the first time I saw Homer Cubed, but I can tell you I loved it for the rest of the 90s. It’s perhaps difficult to convey how novel computer animation was at the time and how long it took for that novelty to fade; just because A Bugs' Life was a lot more impressive didn’t suddenly make this or Reboot or Beast Wars or a lot of music videos uncool over night. At least it didn’t for me.

I did even see this on the London Southbank IMAX Screen, at the time I believe the only IMAX Screen in the UK, in 2000 or 2001 as part of CyberWorld, a compilation “film” of around 45 minutes also featuring clips of Antz, a Pet Shop Boys Music video and some original material, which has now gained some niche infamy online as Lost Media.




I think we might be at the point now where some of this early “grids and polygons” CGI has gone beyond dated into having a unique aesthetic appeal all of its own. Not all of it, but some of it; I thought the high point of the recent Tron film was the little “retro” section where they recreated the aesthetic of the original film.

 

[wonderfly]

I know I saw this episode live when it premiered, in October 1995. I was watching it with my friends, though I can't remember where we were watching it at (my friend's house, maybe). We thought that was the "coolest thing ever", of course.

This was back when Simpsons was on top of the world. Simpsons was just as big as Seinfeld or X-Files or Friends (actually, I think Friends got big a year or two later - or at least, that's when it appeared on my radar).

 

[Classic Speedy]

Related: On the night Treehouse of Horror V aired, they had a marathon of previous Treehouse of Horror episodes before and afterwards, so I was able to tape THOH 2-5. That tape got a lot of replay back then.

 

[harry580]

fun fact: pdi, who did the Shrek films did the animation for the third dimension scene