Bart Simpson

• 1. Origins And Creation

  ›

  Matt Groening sat in the lobby of producer James L. Brooks's office in 1987, sketching a new family while waiting for his pitch meeting. He had been invited to create animated shorts for The Tracey Ullman Show but decided against adapting his comic strip Life in Hell. Groening realized that using his existing characters would require him to give up publication rights. Instead, he drew a dysfunctional family and named them after his own relatives. For the rebellious son, he chose the name Bart, an anagram of brat. He felt that naming the character Matt would not go over well in a pitch meeting. This new character first appeared on the 19th of April 1987, in a short titled Good Night. The series later premiered as a half-hour show on Fox Broadcasting Company on the 17th of December 1989.

  1624

• 2. Design Evolution

  ›

  Bart Simpson wore nine spikes of equal length on his head by the time the animation style standardized. His early design featured hair with spikes of varying lengths before animators refined the look. Director Mark Kirkland described Bart's head as a basic rectangular shape resembling a coffee can. In the season-seven episode Treehouse of Horror VI from 1995, Bart became one of the first characters rendered in three dimensions. Pacific Data Images created the computer animation for the Homer3 segment. Animators purchased vinyl dolls of Bart to use as a physical model for the 3D hair structure. The original black-and-white sketches did not account for eventual color usage when Groening designed the spiky hairline.

  3035

• 3. Voice Performance

  ›

  Nancy Cartwright auditioned for the role of Lisa on the 13th of March 1987, but switched her focus to Bart after hearing the character description. Casting director Bonita Pietila felt Yeardley Smith sounded too high-pitched for a boy and cast her as Lisa instead. Cartwright found the character devious and irreverent, which suited her better than the middle child role. She received the part immediately after reading the lines during that session. Her speaking voice has no obvious traces of Bart according to The Guardian newspaper. Cartwright records five or six takes of each line to give producers more options. Fox Network barred her from interviews during the first season to prevent revealing she was a woman voicing a boy. Her salary rose from US$30,000 per episode to $125,000 following a pay dispute in 1998.

  414752

• 4. Schoolboy Antics

  ›

  Bart wrote lines on a chalkboard at Springfield Elementary School during the opening sequence of many episodes. He told Principal Skinner Eat my shorts on his very first day of school in the early 1990s. His teacher Ms. Krabappel taught him in fourth grade while he frequently clashed with authority figures. Bart befriended Milhouse Van Houten during recess and began entertaining classmates with rude jokes. He worked as a bartender at Fat Tony's social club in the season-three episode Bart the Murderer from 1991. Later, he became Krusty the Clown's assistant in Bart Gets Famous during season five in 1994. He also owned his own factory briefly in Homer's Enemy which aired in 1997.

  9395

• 5. Family Dynamics

  ›

  Homer Simpson often called Bart the boy and sometimes impulsively strangled him out of short-tempered rage. Marge described her son as a handful but also knew what he was like inside. She defended him against criticism by saying he had a spark that made him do bad things. Bart shared a deep bond with his sister Lisa despite their frequent physical disagreements. He apologized when he went too far and recognized Lisa's superior intellect. In the episode Marge Be Not Proud from 1995, Marge struggled to adjust her parenting after catching Bart shoplifting. The volatile relationship between father and son created a turbulent home environment for years.

  5097

• 6. Cultural Phenomenon

  ›

  Millions of Bart-themed T-shirts sold during the early 1990s as part of a trend known as Bartmania. The merchandise generated $2 billion in revenue within its first 14 months of sales. A T-shirt reading Underachiever and proud of it man! now sits in the National Museum of American History. Entertainment Weekly named him Entertainer of the Year in 1990. Time magazine included Bart on its list of the 100 most important people of the 20th century in 1998. The album The Simpsons Sing the Blues peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 chart in December 1990. Do the Bartman became the number-one song in the United Kingdom from February 16 to the 9th of March 1991.

  8388