The Simpsons has gone from ‘Eat My Shorts’ to binge my shorts. While the world was introduced to Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie during a series of brief cartoons on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, The Simpsons’ latter-day history of bite-sized adventures have been a far cry from that crudely-drawn era – and a chance to really flex the team’s animated muscles.
The show’s first theatrical short ‘The Longest Daycare’ was nominated for an Academy Award, while the post-Disney acquisition has seen the one-time Fox poster child roll out a series of celebrity and character-driven shorts on Disney Plus for their new mouse-eared overlords. Now, to mark Disney Plus Day on September 8, Lisa Simpson is all set to forgo dreams of becoming a Disney Princess to break bad with some classic villains in ‘Welcome to the Club.’
12DOVE recently had a chance to sit down with Al Jean – The Simpsons showrunner, writer, and producer who has been involved since the show’s very first season back in 1989 – to discuss the latest short. From working with The Little Mermaid’s animators and Disney’s surprisingly hands-off approach, to the show’s bizarre second life as an internet shitposting standout, The Simpsons mainstay is the most qualified person to cover the evolution of the show from counter-culture phenomenon to its place under a corporate umbrella. In our interview ahead of ‘Welcome to the Club’s’ release, Jean also discusses how a new generation of writers are keeping the show’s "great tradition" alive and well. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
GR: Where did the idea for Welcome to the Club come from? And why was it the right idea to do this one now? Because you must have dozens of ideas tucked away in a drawer somewhere…
Al Jean: We have literally hundreds of ideas for each story, and we really go through them again and again. We were starting on one about Lisa joining the Disney Princesses and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun if she joined the villains? Hanging out with Ursula and Scar and so forth. When we thought of that, it immediately became a lot easier [and] a lot more fun to write. [We] make a few comments about the Disney Princes, the men in the shorts, that I really enjoy.
What limits were there on what Disney would allow you to do? Did they give you a set of rules or a bible on how characters should look?
Everything we wanted to do, they said OK. That’s the way it’s been since we joined Disney. When they bought Fox they said, ‘We know what you are and we want you to be who you are.’ They’ve been great.
What were you able to achieve in Welcome to the Club both animation-wise and character-wise that maybe you couldn’t typically fit into a traditional 22-minute episode?
One of the things I’m most proud of – we had director David Silverman [and] people who had worked on The Little Mermaid who did the original drawings for Ursula working on this, which is just fantastic. I think the animation is incredibly beautiful and lavish and reminiscent of those classic ‘90s Disney features.
We’ve had a few shorts now featuring Lisa. What different side to her do we see in this?
She sort of emerged as the star of the shorts because we had her singing a song about Disney Plus in one and then she teamed up with Billie Eilish in another. She’s sort of our everywoman in the Disney world and it’s funny how quickly she enjoys hanging out with the villains!
It certainly feels like The Simpsons is going to be around forever. Are these shorts potentially testing the waters for when the day comes where the main series is no longer here but the characters are still around?
Not that intent. When we joined Disney Plus, [producer] Jim Brooks thought it would be great to do these shorts to make our presence on the site stand out. And Disney was great. They said you could do different crossovers with different characters.
Star Wars was great, Marvel’s been fantastic, the classic Disney characters [too]. It was just an idea to basically say Disney Plus has so many great things, but we’re on it too.
The Simpsons got their start [on the Tracey Ullman Show] with shorts, then you had The Longest Daycare in 2012…
Oscar nominated!
Looking back, how have you evolved from The Longest Daycare, through to these Disney Plus shorts, and now Welcome to the Club?
David [Silverman] and I joke that movies evolved from shorts to features and now we’re just returning to the cinema of the 1910s. It’s like a loser going back to Buster Keaton.
When I was in college, I loved watching shorts. I love Keaton and Chaplin and Harold Lloyd – and of course the great animated shorts like Disney’s. So it’s a thrill for me to go back to that era and make our version.
You’re now working with writers who have grown up alongside The Simpsons. How have you noticed the way they handle these characters compared to maybe 20-30 years ago? Is there a reverence there?
Yeah, it’s a weird thing. Luckily for me, I’ve been inside the show the whole time and when people talk about watching it in college or [how big] fans they were, it’s really interesting to me because it’s a different experience.
In terms of the reverence, the great thing is – whether it’s a writer or animator – it feels that they’re part of a great tradition and they don’t want to let anyone down.
The Simpsons has taken on a life of its own in the past 10 years or so with internet meme culture as a sort of second language. What’s your take on Simpsons shitposting?
I love it all. It wasn’t the first, but what really hit home for me was when ‘Old Man Yells at Cloud’ became a thing. The fact that people express themselves from Simpsons language – I’ll give you an example: I produced the show when ‘He said the quiet part out loud’ [from “A Star is Burns”] came into being. I was reading something [that used the phrase] and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, we invented that!’, Ken Keeler, one of the writers [wrote that].
I’m like, oh my gosh, this is now part of the vernacular. And I forgot that was on our show first! [laughs]
The Simpsons’ new short ‘Welcome to the Club’ launches on Disney Plus Day on September 8. For more, check out the best Simpsons episodes of all time.
