The Simpsons shorts

The Simpsons shorts are a series of animated short films that aired as a recurring segment on Fox variety television series The Tracey Ullman Show for three seasons, before the characters spun off into The Simpsons, their own half-hour prime-time show.

The series was created by Matt Groening, who designed the Simpson family and wrote many of the shorts.

These five shorts were "Good Night", which was featured in its entirety, and portions of "The Perfect Crime", "Space Patrol", "World War III", and "Bathtime".

[3] In "You Kent Always Say What You Want", the short "Family Portrait" replaces the entire opening sequence in celebration of the 400th episode.

He therefore chose another approach while waiting in the lobby of Brooks's office for the pitch meeting, hurriedly formulating his version of a dysfunctional family that became the Simpsons.

[6] Bart was modeled after Groening's older brother, Mark, but given a different name which was chosen as an anagram of "brat".

[9] The family was crudely drawn, because Groening had submitted basic sketches to the animators, assuming they would clean them up; instead, they just traced over his drawings.

[11] Homer's voice sounds different in the shorts compared to most episodes of the half-hour show, as Castellaneta originally tried to impersonate Walter Matthau.

Although he would retain this characteristic through the early episodes of the regular series, it was gradually dropped as Homer's personality evolved away from that of a stereotypical sitcom father.

Some time later, Yeardley Smith, a 22-year-old B-movie actress whose most notable accomplishment to date was featuring in the notorious 1986 Stephen King film Maximum Overdrive, was brought in to do Lisa's voice.

[11] The recording of the shorts was often primitive; according to Cartwright, the dialogue for the Ullman shorts was recorded on a portable tape deck in a makeshift studio, which consisted of the video engineer suite, above the bleachers on the Ullman show set.