Here's to alcohol: the cause of, and answer to, all of life's problems.
Matt Groening
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
The scary thing about the future... there will be tiny cameras everywhere, and they'll be flying around like mosquitoes and drones. That will be bad. Drones are scary. You can't reason with a drone.
I think there is a certain charm to the hand drawn image that I like. My problem with CGI is that it's so rich in texture that my eyes actually get tired. Everything is in focus down to the littlest leaf.
There's always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there's plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.
My standard comment is, 'If you don't want your kids to be like Bart Simpson, don't act like Homer Simpson.'
Donuts. Is there anything they can't do?
Love is a perky elf dancing a merry little jig and then suddenly he turns on you with a miniature machine gun.
On 'The Simpsons,' I will say that we definitely like to comment on what's going on in the world, and we try to be funny. If we can figure out a way of being funny about it, then we've gone part of the way of accomplishing our task.
Living creatively is really important to maintain throughout your life. And living creatively doesn't mean only artistic creativity, although that's part of it. It means being yourself, not just complying with the wishes of other people.
I think 'Family Guy' and 'American Dad' have definitely staked out their own style and territory, and now the accusations are coming that 'The Simpsons' is taking jokes from 'Family Guy.' And I can tell you, that ain't the case.
Don't have a cow, man.
Charles Schultz is a really interesting case. He wrote that comic strip and drew it himself from beginning to end, and it's a work of genius. It's very simply drawn, but it has some really deep emotions that you don't expect in a silly-looking comic strip.
The best stories in our culture have some sort of subversiveness - Mark Twain, 'Catcher in the Rye.' You provide kids with great stories and teach them how to use the tools to make their own.
Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.
'The Simpsons' is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but who drive you completely crazy.
I always say that 'Futurama' is real, and 'The Simpsons' is fiction.
Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.
In 'Futurama,' the skin color is no longer yellow. They have actually evolved to cartoon skin tone. But they still have four fingers.
It's a funny show. The characters are surprisingly likable, given how ugly they are. We've got this huge cast of characters that we can move around. And over the last few seasons, we've explored some of the secondary characters' personal lives a bit more.
I grew up completely overwhelmed by TV, and part of the reason why I have gone into television is as a way to justify to myself all those wasted hours of watching TV as a kid. I can now look back and say, 'Oh, that was research.'
My father was a really sharp cartoonist and filmmaker. He used to tape-record the family surreptitiously, either while we were driving around or at dinner, and in 1963 he and I made up a story about a brother and a sister, Lisa and Matt, having an adventure out in the woods with animals.
Well, most grown-ups forget what it was like to be a kid. I vowed that I would never forget.
When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
I don't know why I did it, I don't know why I enjoyed it, and I don't know why I will do it again.
As astute followers of 'Life in Hell' will notice, Akbar and Jeff wear the same striped T-shirt as Charlie Brown. 'Peanuts' was very important to me.
When The Simpsons came around, there really was nothing else like it on TV. It's hard to imagine, but when Fox first took the plunge with it, it was considered controversial to put animation on prime time.
With Charlie Brown, it was about loneliness and isolation. I always thought that the thing about Charlie Brown and those characters was the absence of the parents. Half the strip was about who wasn't there. The parents were never in the picture.
I want it to go on, but I want us to go out on top.
You've got to embrace the future. You can whine about it, but you've got to embrace it.
'Adult Swim' on the Cartoon Network is unbelievable. And 'South Park' continues to do great stuff. And 'Family Guy' and the various other Seth MacFarlane projects are amazing.
With 'Futurama,' I was just worried that somebody would beat us to it; it seemed so obvious that there should be an animated science fiction show set in the future. And one of the reasons why it's not, I learned, is that it's really, really difficult.
One of the great things about the Internet is that you can read what everybody has to say about everything. It is fascinating to me, the critiques about humor by people who have no sense of humor.
I've loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I've read quite extensively as an adult.
Families are about love overcoming emotional torture.
Our solution on 'The Simpsons' is to do jokes that people who have an education, or some frame of reference, can get. And for the ones who don't, it doesn't matter, because we have Homer banging his head and saying, 'D'oh!'
With 'Futurama,' I wanted to do unrequited love, and David Cohen agreed, and although our original plan was never to have Fry and Leela get together, we finally just said, 'You can only string the fans along so far.'
I have less to do with 'The Simpsons' every season, but I stick my nose in here and there. Basically, it's just trying to keep the characters consistent and making sure the show has a soul.
When DVDs finally disappear, I'm going to be sad. I'll miss the commentaries.
I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level.
With animation, because you can draw anything and do anything and have the characters do whatever you want, the tendency is to be very loose with the boundaries and the rules.
I went to Bali, and I was in a small village, and somebody who was with me showed a woman a little figurine of Bart and asked: 'Do you know who this is?' And she said: 'Mickey Mouse.'
I basically drew my own family. My father's name is Homer. My mother's name is Margaret. I have a sister Lisa and another sister Maggie, so I drew all of them. I was going to name the main character Matt, but I didn't think it would go over well in a pitch meeting, so I changed the name to Bart.
I was always frightened by taverns. They just seemed like very unpleasant places to go.
I've conducted an experiment on my kids. Instead of denying them access to media, I've encouraged it. They read comic books, play Nintendo and watch way too much TV.
We've been running a little behind schedule. But only by about 15 years or so.
Basically, everything I try to do is to present an alternative to what somebody else is doing.
I know for a fact, obviously, because my kids grew up watching the show, that there are some things they are introduced to from 'The Simpsons', and then later in life they see the thing we're parodying. My kids had not seen 'Casablanca,' and we'd done parodies of 'Casablanca.'
Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.
The nice thing about 'Futurama' for me personally was that it was a way to honor some of the traditional ideas in literary science fiction, not so much movie or television science fiction - although we have that too, obviously. Our situation, a workplace comedy, led to all sorts of stuff.
