The Simpsons has been on television since December 1989 (and since April 1987 if you include The Tracey Ullman Show shorts). It is the longest running sitcom in American television history, and as such the very definition of a Long Runner.note However, as television evolved, and societal trends and norms shifted, many of the show's characters and themes did not. It's still very much an early 1990s show, even though new episodes would be made for several decades afterwards. It's an Unintentional Period Piece, even as it tries to update itself, and it still has the same premise and characters as it did when it started. And it also doesn't have much of a continuity and sticks hard to Comic-Book Time. Even the writers don't always remember why things are the way they are. As such, it has a lot of artifacts:
America's Favorite Family
It can be difficult to understand that the entire concept of The Simpsons is a deconstruction of the Dom Com, which was the dominant form of sitcom from The '50s to The '80s. Every member of the Simpson family is a send-up of a specific archetype from a typical sitcom family:- Homer was a sendup of the breadwinning, impatient, Bumbling Dad. One of the show's first Running Gags was Homer strangling Bart — this was considered very shocking to late 1980s audiences, who would be used to this character archetype but unaccustomed to him having such a Hair-Trigger Temper (which was part of what made it hilarious). As time marched on, Homer would be surpassed in his violence and stupidity by sendups of him like Peter Griffin, and scientific studies of the effects of child abuse made the joke hit differently with later audiences (to the point that the show had to devote an episode to it). Homer's job at the nuclear power plant is also a sendup of the typical sitcom dad having a blue-collar job, which became more awkward once TV sitcoms shifted to good-looking singles with a One-Hour Work Week.
- Marge is a Housewife with no job. This kind of thing was common in the 60s and 70s, but only barely plausible in the 80s, and by the 21st Century, it was practically impossible for Homer to support a five-person family on his own with a single blue-collar job. More likely, Homer and Marge would both be working multiple jobs (and even that might not get them a house that big). Marge was something of a throwback character even back then — Groening based her iconic Beehive Hairdo on the style his mother used to wear in the 60s, although she could still get away with it as a form of '80s Hair. Later episodes like "Moho House" address how hopelessly retro Marge's hairstyle is.
- Bart was meant to be a hellion Bratty Half-Pint. Matt Groening created Bart specifically in response to the Menace Decay of Dennis the Menace—he was poking fun at how sitcom children were always well-behaved, even when they had the opposite reputation. As such, Bart was so mean and disrespectful that he was very shocking to the 1990s audience—particularly through his habit Calling Parents by Their Name. This is also why his slingshot (the kind of harmless weapon that you would expect to see in the hands of a mildly mischievous kid in a 1950s sitcom) became his Iconic Item; it was a vaguely anachronistic detail that made his genuine disdain for authority that much more ironic. He drew the ire of a ton of Moral Guardians, which helped raise the show's profile. But once Bart became a pop-culture phenomenon himself, he was himself subject to Menace Decay, especially compared to characters like Eric Cartman. Lisa, meanwhile has long been the show's "voice of reason", but in the early seasons, she was also a handful who on occasion even served as Bart's partner in crime—it was only in later seasons that the writers, needing to rely more on being socially conscious, turned her into the Soapbox Sadie we know today.
- Maggie was originally intended by Groening as rounding out a Power Trio with her trouble-making older siblings, a dynamic which can be seen in both the the Ullman shorts and "Some Enchanted Evening", the first episode to ever be produced. This dynamic however was very quickly dropped as Bart and Lisa underwent major Divergent Character Evolution and it became clear that a completely mute baby wasn't someone with the potential for interesting stories, which left Maggie relegated mostly to a Living Prop used for occasional sight gags and little else. Despite this, she continues to be treated as a member of the main cast in marketing and the opening, even with her role being largely superfluous at best.
The characters became so iconic that they became archetypes in themselves. Meanwhile, sitcoms began to move on to be about bachelors instead of families, and they became more edgy and modern. One might even say that the pop-culture phenomenon that was The Simpsons effectively killed the "wholesome family sitcom" genre, and so decades later, people don't even realize that it was a parody.
It's particularly interesting to consider the "modern" example of an animated Dom Com, Family Guy. It was pretty clearly Inspired by… The Simpsons, but it was essentially a vehicle for more "modern" humor of the 2000s and 2010s — Denser and Wackier, more political, more controversial, more pop-culture references, and its trademark Cutaway Gags. It's a very different style of humor from The Simpsons, reflecting the length of time The Simpsons has been airing. In fact, many fans criticized later seasons of The Simpsons for trying to compete with Family Guy by adopting its style of humor, which doesn't work nearly as well with The Simpsons' original premise.
This is part of the problem with such a groundbreaking show becoming a Long Runner. Had The Simpsons ended in the 1990s, it would have been considered the father of modern animated television comedy. But because it's still on, it now has to compete with all the shows that are building off its style and humor, none of which are firmly grounded in the early 1990s like The Simpsons is.
The other characters
- Ned Flanders was meant to be a "traditional" sitcom dad, being everything Homer wasn't—cheerful, kind, and successful, not to mention to make a joke out of how Homer hated and looked down on what was would be the ideal neighbor out of sheer pettiness and jealousy. The whole point was to contrast Homer with someone who was better than him in every way. Nowadays, Flanders is the resident religious handwringer, but this is a product of Flanderization so severe that the trope was named after the character. Originally, Flanders' religiosity was just a way to show that he was more honest and generous than Homer—he cared about people, he was a part of his community through his church, and he looked forward to going to church (while Homer could barely stay awake). However, this was clearly never intended to have any explicit political or religious commentary. In fact, before the 1990s in America, there was no correlation between church attendance and partisan voting patterns (and if anything, the Democratic Party was the slightly more religious one). Viewers latched on to his religiosity as time wore on and regularly going to church stopped even being a thing among the show's audience. By the 00s, religiosity and right-wing voting patterns were increasingly correlated, especially after President George W. Bush made his faith so connected with his governance. Also, shows like South Park were making frequent reference to this, so Flanders' defining trait became his hardcore religiosity. Around the same time, Flanders' life also took a noticeable downturn; he lost his wife in a tragic accident, and Rod and Todd became increasingly sheltered and unstable, both of which threw major dents into his idealized persona. This changed the character significantly, to the point that it completely 180'd the joke about Homer and Flanders' relationship by not only making it completely nonsensical that Homer was jealous of him, but also justifying Homer's dislike of his patronizing bible-thumping moral busybody of a neighbor. Then, starting around Season 33 and Matt Selman taking over as primary showrunner, Ned's role was reduced even further as Homer's character saw a marked shift into becoming considerably less aggressive and immature, meaning even the dynamic Ned was design to work around no longer made sense, with him now only rarely appearing if at all.
- Jeff "Comic Book Guy" Albertson was originally established as a composite parody of rude, nerdy shut-ins, the kind of people who complained the most vocally about shows like The Simpsons. At the time, only nerds used the Internet, and that's what made their voices the loudest. By the 2020s, the Internet has become so pervasive that everyone has a voice, and quite a few people from all sorts of backgrounds are willing and able to complain about The Simpsons. Furthermore, the Internet has also introduced people to obsessive fans of things other than comic books, like anime, Doctor Who, and My Little Pony (the so-called "Bronies"). While the image of a lonely, angry, fat white man obsessed with comic books is still understood, it's nowhere near the archetype it once was. The showrunners have started to modernize Comic Book Guy by expanding his nerdy repertoire to include things like Japanese stuff.
- Julio was introduced in Season 14 as a gay character. It was a little weird even back then—although in the early 1990s it was rare for any gay character to be on TV, The Simpsons did show a few, and they were shown respectfully as nuanced, ordinary people. Problem is, Julio came about when shows wanted to be edgy about this kind of thing, to be like shows like South Park, so he could accurately be seen as a relic of a misguided attempt to be socially conscious. Except Julio was a very stereotypical, flamboyant, wealthy, cultured Hispanic gay man who looked like a young boy-toy and talked with a lisp. Granted, this portrayal is not ENTIRELY out of nowhere: the character's appearance and mannerisms are clearly inspired by Agador, the very flamboyant gay Guatemalan housekeeper in The Birdcage, who was also played by Hank Azaria. As cultural and political views shifted over the next few decades, some saw the character as an offensive stereotype.
- Disco Stu started as a sight gag involving Homer's "Disco Stud" jacket, but he became a character who was still engulfed in an uncool culture. But the character was still someone people could relate to in the 1990s—many viewers still remembered disco, and the huge backlash against it in 1980. Nowadays, Disco Stu is a recurring character, but he's seen as a Refugee from Time rather than someone who hasn't gotten the memo yet. It also didn't help that most people in the 2020s who were that into disco were approaching senior citizen status (which doesn't fit Disco Stu's relative youth and energy), nor that dance music of later decades was quite happy to incorporate disco.
- Barney Gumble's original gag was simply being a drunken barfly with flashes of brilliance who acted as Homer's best friend. Over time, though, the writers seemed to run out of ideas for how to handle him; as early as Season 5, they felt they had exhausted the supply of drunk jokes. (In fact, an early pitch for "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" was that it should be Barney, as a means of writing him out of the show.) In Season 11, Barney got an episode where he became sober, but the writers couldn't decide if it was actually a revamp for the character or a Very Special Episode, and in any event they found that "coffee drinker" offered even less room for gags. Later episodes go back and forth on whether Barney is even sober or not—he still appears, but less often, and it's clear the writers don't know what to do with him anymore.
- Moe has a gag where he calls Marge "Midge". This is an artifact of Moe, in the early years, having very little interaction with the Simpsons aside from Homer's frequent visits to his tavern; he cared so little about Homer's home life that he could hardly remember his wife's name. This gag made much less sense in later years when Moe interacts with the rest of the family (e.g. working with Marge to build a British pub, taking care of Maggie, getting help from Lisa to write poetry) to the point that he's essentially a family friend. It no longer makes sense for him not to know Marge's name. What makes it especially stand out is that later episodes show Moe is attracted to Marge, and jealous of Homer. This aspect of his character was addressed in Season 28 with "Moho House", where Moe says he has no idea why he does it.
- Every mother introduced in early seasons is a housewife just like Marge. Sarah Wiggum, Maude Flanders, Helen Lovejoy, Bernice Hibbert... even Luann Van Houten, post-divorce, somehow avoids getting a job. All the same things that apply to Marge in this regard apply here; even in the 1990's it was a throwback to the writers' childhoods and to early sitcoms - it was extremely unlikely even in the 90s that so many families could be supported by a single job or that essentially every mother or married woman in an entire town would stop working. By the 2020s, it became another artifact of the show's initial focus on lampooning a type of sitcom that no longer existed, reflecting a world that no longer exists.
- Krusty the Clown's design looks a lot like Homer...and that's because at one point he was going to be Homer. The writers wanted to create a Dramatic Irony where Bart would hate his father but would admire the clown that looks like him, without knowing they were one and the same. As the series' development continued, the overall idea proved to be complicated to work with and they dropped it by the time the series began, but the design remained, even though now there's no reason why they would look alike. This, however, served as a plot point in "Homie the Clown" and on one later episode was used for a brief joke, given that Homer was right next to Krusty when his face was shown.
- Gil Gunderson was designed a homage to Jack Lemmon's portrayal of Jack Levine in the 1992 adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross. This was already a pretty niche reference, given the film was five years old at that point and a Box Office Bomb, but made sense given that the episode he was designed for was a send-up of the real estate industry. However, due to the writers enjoying Dan Castellaneta's performance - along with the tragic death of Phil Hartman requiring Lionel Hutz to be retired - Gil was promoted to a recurring character, with continued appearances as an unsuccessful businessman in the vein of Lemmon's character. By the time he received his first A Day in the Limelight, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who even understood what he was supposed to be a reference to.
Some characters were references to figures who were popular in The '90s, or even earlier:
- Drederick Tatum was an obvious parody of Mike Tyson, and his manager Lucius Sweet was an obvious parody of Tyson's manager Don King, with Homer even explicitly pointing out the similarity in the character's first appearance. In the 1990s, Tyson was a very prominent and famous (and infamous) boxing champion, so satire of him was common across all media. Nowadays, Tyson is seen as a novelty at best, having long since retired from boxing and fallen out of the public consciousness. The Season 31 episode "Highway to Well" would attempt to update the parody somewhat, depicting Tatum as retired and now involved in the cannabis industry, and sporting Tyson's famous facial tattoo, but this was ignored completely by later episodes.
- Dr. Julius Hibbert was an obvious parody of Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show, one of The Simpsons' biggest competitors in its early years. He even had a family and a house very similar to that of the Huxtables, and wore similar sweaters to Cliff when off-duty. When The Cosby Show ended in 1992, Dr. Hibbert kept his mannerisms, although he was never a true Expy and had his own quirks and personality. His family, meanwhile, was almost completely forgotten over time. Modern audiences still remember Bill Cosby, but for... reasons other than his TV show. This may be why when he was recast in 2020, Kevin Michael Richardson's voice ended up sounding almost completely different from its inspiration, even when the same actor had previously voiced another Cosby expy more accurately to its basis.
- Judge Snyder, who presides over almost every plot-relevant case on the show, is based on former judge Robert Bork, who had become very well known in the 1980s as an appellate judge, a legal activist, and most famously his failed nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. Although Bork had retired from being a judge in 1988, making Judge Snyder already a somewhat outdated reference, people still got the joke. By 2012, the year Bork died, nobody got the reference anymore.
- The Blue-Haired Lawyer, who represents Mr. Burns and most other powerful characters, is a sendup of Roy Cohn, the New York attorney most famous for helping Senator Joseph McCarthy in his anti-Communist witch hunts and also representing several of New York's most prominent mafiosos and businessmen in the 1970s, including Donald Trump. In 1986, he was revealed to be gay and died of AIDS. He was still pretty well-known in the 1990s, but he was still a figure from the past. The Blue-Haired Lawyer shares a nasal New York accent with Cohn, and he's notably extremely competent and diligent, even as he ruthlessly defends some real unsavory characters. Modern viewers don't get the connection at all and simply see him as a lawyer with an unnecessarily silly voice.
- Mayor Joe Quimby still works today as a satire of the Corrupt Politician, but he's clearly supposed to be a parody of the Kennedy family—note the Bostonian accent, the liberal reputation, the womanizing, and the large Catholic family with its own compound. The two Kennedys who made the biggest impact, however, were both assassinated in The '60s—John F. Kennedy in 1963, Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. The Baby Boomers of the 1990s would still talk about them, and the younger Kennedys were still influential, including longtime Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, so people would have gotten the joke. But the Kennedy family mystique started to fade after the 90s, especially as people started to reconsider their womanizing and major transgressions, and John F. Kennedy Jr.'s tragic death in 1999 contributed to that quite a bit. After Ted Kennedy died in 2009, the family's presence in politics drastically fell, although there were still family members in political office. With the even greater passage of time, as of 2024, the Kennedy family's presence in American politics has largely been limited to working as ambassadors or advisors on national policy (or in the case of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promoting anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories and transphobia).
- Professor Frink was heavily based on Jerry Lewis's character Julius Kelp from 1963's The Nutty Professor. In the 90s and early 2000s, this character was still well-remembered by Baby Boomers and pop culture, but by the mid-to-late 2000s, most of the newer generation had never heard of Jerry Lewis, or more often associated the title with the 1996 Eddie Murphy version. With Jerry Lewis's death in 2017, the character Frink is based on has become a relic.
- While Rainier Wolfcastle's direct inspiration is a trope unto itself, he and the McBain film series were intended more broadly as a parody of the Rated M for Manly action films that were massive staples of cinema when the show debuted, lampooning the often thin, melodramatic stories, gratuitous amounts of violence and cartoonish morality that was associated with much of the genre. These films however would fall out of favour massively in the tail end of the 90's however, and thus McBain was retired as a recurring skit after Season 9, taking the entire central purpose of the character with it. While Wolfcastle would continue making appearances well into the 2010's, he's now almost exclusively treated as just another member of Springfield's elite, and it's not even clear if he still does acting in-universe anymore.
Internet Killed the TV Star
One particular aspect of the sitcom that Matt Groening wanted to skewer was the fact that none of the characters ever watch television. Groening thought it was ridiculous for characters who are supposed to represent the viewer not even acknowledge TV's existence. That's why the Simpsons are so obsessed with TV. The Simpsons was revolutionary in how its characters' lives revolved around television, how that was how they learned everything, how it used the Show Within a Show to absolutely skewer pop culture in an unprecedented way.Unfortunately for them, that couldn't last, because the Internet was becoming a thing. In 1989, only 15% of households owned a computer, and the World Wide Web had only just been invented. By The Simpsons' latter years, everybody had a computer and Internet access. And if you wanted to actually be a relevant satire of pop culture, you had to address Internet culture, with its vast, varied, and unique references. The Simpsons couldn't do that; it was stuck with its same few universal characters (e.g. Krusty the Clown, Troy McClure, Rainier Wolfcastle) and had to sell the idea that everybody knew them, even as they were relics of 80s and 90s television.
It's important to remember that back when The Simpsons started, there were only three major TV networks in America,note not everyone had cable or satellite TV, and those channels were not yet showing much in the way of original programming (HBO and TBS had a few scripted shows in the 80s but they were fairly niche and nowhere near as critically acclaimed compared to the original shows that both networks would air in the 90s onwards). And nothing was on demand, either—the only things to watch were whatever was on Prime Time. As such, the show could rely on everyone being able to get the same pop-culture references. Once cable TV and then the Internet hit, it became much more difficult to effectively parody pop culture, first because not everybody was watching the same thing anymore, and second because the rate at which new pop culture was being made exploded—by the time you could parody something, it was already too late. Shows like South Park, with more innovative animation styles which allowed for ridiculously fast production times, had a clear advantage over The Simpsons in this field.
The kind of TV the family watches is also pretty outdated, even for its time. The Krusty the Clown Show was already something of an anachronism when the show started, resembling 1960s shows like Bozo the Clownnote . Once kids in the 1990s started getting cable, they had all manner of specialized channels for programming (e.g. Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel)—no one was watching local TV clowns. If anything, Krusty was more of a joke about how Springfield was such a dump that one of its biggest celebrities is the local TV clown, and the show's Variety Show setup allowed it to show a greater cross-section of TV programming. The Itchy & Scratchy Show, meanwhile, is an obvious parody of Tom and Jerry and similar plotless chase cartoons — which were regularly being aired in the '80s and '90s as part of Animated Anthology programs — but with the violence ramped up from cartoonish to Gorn and the Designated Hero-Designated Villain dynamic escalated into a full-blown Villain Protagonist bullying a victim that could never have been aired back then, designed to show how TV is being a negative influence on Bart and Lisa (but mostly Bart). But since the 1990s, shows like South Park and Family Guy could get away with considerably more graphic violence on a regular basis, and anthology shows of classic cartoons became a relic of the past by the 2000s thanks to specialized channels like Boomerang and, later on, video-on-demand.
Character Designs
The show has undergone a lot of Art Evolution, but characters tend to retain their designs from when they were first drawn. This gives the Simpson family a Non-Standard Character Design, even though they're the protagonists.The early art style from Season 1 and the Tracey Ullman shorts was rather crude, and the Simpsons' character designs reflected that. Bart, Lisa, and Maggie don't really have hair—their heads are oddly drawn to represent their hairstyles, suggesting that their hair and skulls have blended together. This is a simple but iconic look—and only those three characters have it (from Season 2 onwards, that is; in the first season, several background characters had similar hair). Meanwhile, Homer's baldness is represented by two lines drawn on his head, whereas later bald characters (e.g. Monty Burns, Kirk van Houten, Superintendent Chalmers) have patches of hair colored in on the sides of their heads. Marge's Beehive Hairdo was drawn to ridiculous proportions, even for the specific style. The family also has big Sphere Eyes, whereas later characters' eyes tend to be smaller (subtly lampshaded in Season 25's "Steal This Episode", in which a theater audience is shown wearing 3D glasses that are too big for them
◊ but sized perfectly for the Simpson family).
Season 2 saw the first Art Shift, as the show had become a hit and had a budget bump to boot. But character designs were still pretty idiosyncratic. Notably, characters displayed unusual hair colors, like the blue hair sported by the Van Houtens and Chief Wiggum. Characters with Perma-Stubble—including Homer, Abe, Krusty, and Lenny—had brown muzzles to signify it. Homer and a few other characters (most notably Krusty the Clown, because of a long-Aborted Arc which would have revealed that Homer was Krusty) had a distinctive cylindrical head design. No characters introduced after the second season had these elements; everyone had a realistic hair color, head shape, and eye shape. There were a few exceptions—for instance, Herb Powell has a muzzle (almost certainly to show his family resemblance to Homer), and occasionally there would be blue-haired extras in crowd shots, but even these eventually stopped.
All this has the effect of making the Simpsons look remarkably crude and weird compared to most of the other characters. About the only thing they have in common with everyone else are their Four-Fingered Hands and their yellow skin (the latter of which is almost certainly an artifact considering the more natural skin tones of Groening's later works like Futurama and Disenchantment).
Time Marches On
Certain aspects of the show cannot be covered up by Comic-Book Time and betray its original creation in the late 1980s:- War veteran characters have gotten implausibly old. Abe Simpson was said to have fought in World War II, but if we assume he was 19 in 1945, that would mean he's pushing 100 in the 2020s—he's old, but he's not that old. Flashbacks to his childhood continue to show him growing up in the Interwar period. As of late 2023, of the 16 million original American war veterans, only around 119,000, or about 0.7% of them, were still alive. And Homer's clearly in his thirties, and Abe is clearly shown raising him in flashbacks in the 60s and 70s, which would put the show in the 90s. Similarly, Principal Skinner is a veteran of The Vietnam War—if we assume he was 19 in 1969, he would have been middle-aged in the 1990s (so a stern school principal with this backstory would make perfect sense), but into his seventies in the 2020s, and again, he's not that old.
- Homer's mom Mona Simpson was introduced in 1995 as having fallen in with the hippies during The '60s and run away from her family to escape the police in 1969. Homer is shown to have been around 10 years old when that happened, which makes sense if he's in his thirties in the 1990s, but not thirty years later. Mona made two more appearances before dying (and many others afterward in flashbacks), and she still has the same backstory, even when it becomes increasingly nonsensical.
- Montgomery Burns and memories from before World War I would make him absurdly old by the 2020s. True, Burns' age was exaggerated as time went on, but in the show's heyday in the mid-1990s, he's generally considered to have been around 100 years old, which would explain his childhood memories of the era. Having him still be alive in the 2020s, when the last person born before 1900 died in 2018, would be stretching it to absurdity, even for a character who's the subject of a lot of age jokes. In his case, it might be deliberate.
- Homer and Marge are shown in early seasons as having been teenagers in the 70s, which makes sense if they were in their thirties in the 90s. Then it started getting absurd. The show tried to fix this by moving their teen years to the 80s and 90s, but episodes that established this (e.g. "That '90s Show", "Four Regrettings and a Funeral", "Three Scenes Plus a Tag From a Marriage") generally didn't stick. Fans refused to accept that Bart could claim to know nothing about the 1990s when he helped define The '90s as a character. The "Bart and Homer's Excellent Adventure" segment from "Treehouse of Horror XXIII" pokes fun at this by depicting Bart travelling back to the events of Season 2's Whole Episode Flashback "The Way We Was" in 1974... from 2012.
- Sophie, Krusty's illegitimate daughter, has a backstory heavily centred around the Gulf War, as her conception came about when Krusty slept with her mother while she was trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Given that Sophie is clearly around Bart and Lisa's age, this dates her specifically to around when the episode she first appeared in aired (November 2000), which became a problem when she was brought back 16 years later and made a semi-regular background character. Noticeably, while her return does explain that Krusty has limited custody of her, it avoids ever mentioning what the circumstances behind it are.
Ethnic Stereotypes
The show made great use of Funny Foreigners, such as Luigi Risotto, Groundskeeper Willie, and especially Apu. When they were created, this type of character was far more acceptable. By the 2020s, cultural shifts had ensured that no show would create characters like them anymore.In fact, Apu was the subject of controversy in the show's latter years, starting with the documentary film The Problem With Apu, by ethnic Indian comedian Hari Kondabolu. He described Apu as "a white guy doing an impression of a white guy making fun of my father." Apu was created to be a stereotype of the ethnic store clerk, and in many respects, it was Fair for Its Day—Apu was a relatable, fleshed-out character with a realistic, down-to-earth backstory. Back then, Indians were pleased just to have representation of any kind on television. But the problem with The Simpsons is that it was such a Long Runner that people couldn't really accept that "fair for its day" could apply if the show was still going on—and as the Indian community grew in America, they grew increasingly angry at the presence of a stereotypical relic on television (though Apu did garner some defenders in said community
who thought the outrage was blown way out of proportion (criticizing Hari for blaming a fictional character for him getting bullied, seeing it as absurd) and there are still Indian fans that defend him to this day (especially first-generation ones who can relate to him)). Their biggest gripe was that he wasn't actually voiced by an Indian, but rather by the white Hank Azaria doing an accent. Azaria eventually apologized for voicing the character, but even this was controversial as some claimed it was "cancel culture". Even the documentary admitted that Apu wasn't the worst representation of Indians on TV, but he was effectively the only one. The show itself provided a rebuttal to the documentary in the Season 29 episode "No Good Read Goes Unpunished", where Marge wants to share with Lisa a book she loved as a child but realizes it's rather offensive by modern standards...and shows a photo of Apu (which Hank Azaria thought was a bit too dismissive). Groening and co. however had already recognized that Apu was becoming outdated and had made the decision to stop giving him speaking roles a whole year before "The Problem with Apu" even came out (ironically making the documentary itself coming off as outdated) with 'Much Apu About Something' being his last major speaking role, with the episode addressing Apu's stereotypical nature head on and he was relegated to background roles from then on. There was some debate about bringing him back with a different voice by an actual Indian actor, but the debate had gotten so toxic the creators couldn't find anyone willing to take on the role, so the decision was ultimately made to remove Apu from the show entirely, though he has still made silent background appearances.
Other characters were based on perceptions of certain groups of foreigners in the 90s. Apu, for instance, was the stereotypical Asian Store-Owner, whereas nowadays a stereotypical Indian might be a Bollywood Nerd. Similarly, Bumblebee Man was specifically a parody of the strange Spanish-language sitcoms you might find on obscure channels in the 90s (like El Chapulín Colorado), which modern viewers with much more exposure to Latino media (whether or not they speak Spanish) won't get at all.
America's Crud-Bucket, Springfield
The whole concept of Springfield is the idea that it's an Everytown, America with a name so ambiguous that it could be anywhere in the country—an idea famous enough that it's the Trope Namer. It's a sendup of 1950s sitcoms that were so invested in the idea of being an Everytown, America that they made the setting as generic as possible—Father Knows Best was actually set in a town called Springfield. The name "Springfield" is so common that there are over thirty of them in America alone, and The Simpsons relished in lampshading the ridiculousness of it by poking fun at the impossibility of Springfield's geographic location.But this was a relic of sitcoms of the era, who wanted to be as relatable as possible to an audience that was still nostalgic for a far less urban country than America is today. Once sitcoms started shifting to young twenty-somethings, they moved out of suburbia and into interesting big cities, often based on New York City. Over time, The Simpsons also started running out of plots that could take place in its cozy suburbia, and so Springfield picked up all manner of weird locales and concepts — so much so that it became implausible for Springfield to exist just anywhere. Matt Groening eventually realized that he was unconsciously adding elements of his home state of Oregon (which has a Springfield) to the Simpsons' Springfield and "admitted" that it was in Oregon, but this contradicts other elements of Springfield (perhaps added subconsciously by writers from other states). Nowadays, there's no reason to poke fun at Springfield's nonexistent location other than for its own sake.
Appliances
- The Simpsons' car is a station wagon that was already outdated by the early 1990s; by then, families were using them because older varieties were still reliable. Cars have substantially changed in appearance, performance, and features since then, but the Simpsons' car still looks straight out of the 1970s. Occasionally, an episode comes along when they are driving a new car, which usually fits the episode's time period, but they always go back to the original car by the next episode.
- The family TV was an ancient CRT television until the late 2000s. Up until the 1980s, TVs were so expensive and bulky that most American families only had one (although this is often ignored...occasionally Homer and Marge have another TV in their bedroom, and another TV in the rarely-seen rumpus room, and once or twice one of the kids has a TV in their room as well). and they kept it for as long as possible. The prices of TVs started dropping in the late 1990s with the advent of cable and satellite channels; soon after came DVR, and soon after that became the much lighter, flat-screen high-definition TV. The family finally got an HD flat-screen in 2009, to symbolize the show itself moving to HD—but in some scenes during its first season, it goes back to the original design.
- The Simpsons still have a 1970s-era landline phone. And so does Moe's Tavern—which is exactly how Bart can enact his prank calls, because there was no way for Moe to figure out who he was. In fact, the gag is a sendup of a series of prank calls made to a bar in New Jersey in the 1970s. Even in the 1990s, last call return ("*69" in the United States) became mainstream. Then came caller ID. And then came cell phones, which not only could show you who was calling, but which obviated the need for anyone to even call the bar to speak to one of the patrons—you just call the person's cell phone. But almost into the 2020s, Bart was still doing the prank calls, and Moe still answers his 1970s-era phone and has no idea who's calling. (It also doesn't fit with the characterization of the tavern, which went from being a bustling bar with many patrons to a rundown dive bar whose only customers were the regulars—so Moe would already know everyone there and wouldn't need to call someone's name to get them to come to the phone. Though the bar being so rundown and dilapidated might explain why Moe still has such an outdated phone.)
Culture
- The nuclear power plant was established early on as a major element of the show's anti-corporate satire—a pollutant-pumping, outdated trainwreck that constantly seemed on the verge of meltdown, kept alive through regular infusions of bribery. All this was pretty cutting in 1990, within living memory of Three Mile Island and only four years after Chernobyl, when the nuclear power industry was one of the most notoriously corrupt of the Atomic Age. The joke being that only a cold-hearted misanthrope like Mr. Burns would ever dare run such a dangerous business. But it was also a sendup of sitcoms from the 1950s and 1960s idolizing the idea of nuclear power. Nowadays, with a stagnating nuclear power industry, the standard "old-fashioned conservative industrialist" is much more likely to be in coal or natural gas. The Running Gag of the plant's terrible environmental record wouldn't be so funny to modern audiences, especially not in an age where the perception of Nuclear Power has done an almost complete 180 (now up there with solar and wind in terms of green energy) thanks to its almost non-existent carbon footprint, as well as advances in dealing with the resulting waste. And the plant is also an artifact of Homer being the blue-collar sitcom dad—nowadays, he seems to work everywhere except the plant.
- The comic book shop was a gathering place for nerd culture in the 1990s, and Springfield's version, the Android's Dungeon, fits that bill. But after The Great Comics Crash of 1996 and the advent of the Internet, this is no longer the case, while comic shops do still exist, they're nowhere near as ubiquitous as they once were, with many of the remaining ones also selling other things besides just comics. Nowadays, the idea that a comic shop could survive in Springfield—let alone with kids still interested in it—borders on absurd. It's addressed in Season 19's "Husbands and Knives", when Comic Book Guy gets a competitor who's much nicer and has a much wider selection of stuff, eventually driving Comic Book Guy out of business (not that it sticks).
Tales That Will Shatter Your Spine and Boil Your Blood
The "Treehouse of Horror" episodes were introduced to the series in season 2 with the intention of them being the one place, once a year, when the show's crew would be able to break all the rules regarding the show's conventions by making three non-canon stories that were far too dark, violent, and/or unrealistic for an average episode of the series at the time. However, not only has the series become far more reliant on shock humor, gruesome violence, and flatout cartoony plots in its later seasons in an attempt to keep up with the adult animated series that succeeded it, but there have also been plenty of non-"Treehouse" episodes in those newer seasons dedicated to non-canon story anthologies ("Simpsons Bible Stories", "Margical History Tour", "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times", "The Fight Before Christmas", "I, Carumbus", etc.). Despite this, new Treehouse of Horror installments are still being made, simply because they're such a well-known tradition of the series (which the show has acknowledged in its first non-"Treehouse" Halloween episode).
