It's the cops!
Worse.
The police cops.
This is the 13th episode of the 10th season of The Simpsons,
titled "Homer to the Max."
It's about a fictional TV show airing in Springfield
called Police Cops, a parody of Miami Vice,
that stars a heroic character named Homer Simpson.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Our Homer Simpson loves it because he
shares the same name as this character, and in turn,
receives a ton of attention.
But then Police Cops rewrites their Homer,
turning him into an inept imbecile.
And the Homer Simpson we know hates the change, so much so
that our Homer changes his name to--
Homer Si-- uh, Max Power.
--to try to become someone else, and takes on a new identity
to escape being associated with this fictional idiot.
It plays like a critique on bad character development.
It also maybe accidentally is a very meta look
at what happened to Homer Simpson.
Relax.
What is mind?
No matter.
What is matter?
Never mind.
[LAUGH]
Homer has changed.
Let's start with the design as it's the simplest and least
dramatic of the changes.
This is how The Simpsons characters were originally
imagined by Matt Groening, as silhouettes.
He wanted the characters to be recognizable by shape only.
He succeeded.
Homer's original design is here.
His features are sharper, he has constantly visible eyebrows,
and a sharper mouth.
While cartoony, he carries the features of something
recognizable to a human being.
But almost immediately, Homer begins to change.
Now, while I think the design change is for the better,
it's also kind of foreshadowing for his less fortunate
character shift.
This image here Homer three seasons into the show.
His hair takes the M shape, which by the way,
is meant to be Matt Groening's initials at one time.
His head and eyes become rounder and bigger,
his belly gets larger, and his appearance in general
becomes more cartoony and oafish.
And as the show would progress, these cartoony features
would only become more pronounced.
But while his design changes may have been for the better,
it's his personality where things take a weirder turn.
Oh, looks like young Simpson is going to kill himself.
Oh, maybe not.
Maybe he's just taking his boulder for a walk.
This is "Homer's Odyssey," a season one episode
that marks one of the first times Homer loses his job.
But things go differently than they would, say, now.
There are consequences.
After Homer becomes unemployed, his search for a job,
while humorous, leads to less than desired results.
And then suddenly, there's humanity in Homer.
So much so that he tries to end his own life.
Yes, it's dark, but it's meant to articulate
Homer's natural human emotions.
This original Homer is a very different man.
He's inept, but he cares.
He cares about his family, his intentions
are almost always good, and he cares about his image.
These things are important.
Early Homer makes a lot of mistakes,
but because he's rarely doing things
to be mean spirited or out of absurdity,
we understand why Marge would stick around.
He's dumb, but he shows flashes of intelligence.
He isn't cartoonishly stupid, so we
understand that he has enough self-awareness
to care about what people think of him
and try to be a member of society.
And importantly, early seasons' Homer has a heart.
Sometimes a big one.
The show was more often focused on relatively happy endings
and presenting Homer as a father that truly cared.
His physical design, especially very early on,
was a great more human representation of this.
Every once in a while, however rare,
we the audience were OK with Homer thinking of himself
as Max Power, as a hero.
Despite his characteristically mean treatment of Bart
even early on.
But there was minutia under all this
that would slowly fall apart.
For example, this is Homer reading.
Cosby's his first law of intergenerational perversity.
No matter what you tell your child to do,
it will always do the opposite.
As you're about to see, this one scene is very important.
Far more important than it probably should be.
So let me give you this.
Oh, look.
She's presenting.
We thought this would take years to happen.
[HOMER SCREAMING]
[CROWD CHEERING]
The Simpsons, and its own Homer, was
built around a deconstruction of the family sitcom that
dominated the decade prior.
It was built almost as a satire of
that happy, nuclear household.
It was meant to be a semi real depiction of American families
that we didn't see on TV.
But by the sixth season, most of the show's
original primary creative team were preoccupied
with other projects, and The Simpsons
was falling into new hands.
There's a much cited Slate article
by Chris Sullentrope that points to this moment
as the pinnacle of that foundation falling apart.
This is Homer being, well, I don't know
that it needs any explaining.
Let's say he's being taken advantage of by this panda.
It's one of the most hated scenes in Simpsons history,
because this became the norm.
Homer slowly became an irredeemable idiot,
and we can pinpoint where this really began.
A lot of the humor written for Homer after the first four
seasons became about one-upping his stupidity.
This was fine for a while, but the writers realized quickly
they'd have to top each moment of stupidity to keep it funny.
A.O. Scott once said that Simpsons creator Matt
Groening's strength was using animation to address reality,
but around season eight, the Simpsons writing
staff kind of ballooned, and season nine
saw the ten years of Mike Scully and Ian Maxtone-Graham.
And The Simpsons absorbed itself.
It lost sight of that realism, however exaggerated it was,
and Homer would quickly fall apart
in the world of the new Simpsons.
The world of the cartoon.
Scully would executive produce seasons nine through 12,
and Maxtone-Graham would write, partially during his tenure.
It was these three seasons where we'd meet this guy.
Oh.
Boy, I'm feeling this.
Oh.
Ooh, my head's going to be sore in the morning.
Remember that scene with Homer reading?
Well, to top Homer's stupidity, suddenly Homer
was completely illiterate.
Gym?
What's a gym?
And the decline was rapid from there.
Homer would get dumber and dumber
until he became a nearly functionless member of society.
That illiteracy being a mark of a joke that changed who homered
was without much thought.
He was always inept at his job, but now he
was a caricature of himself.
He no longer cared at all for how
he was viewed by society, quickly becoming
entirely self obsessed.
There also became no consequence for Homer's actions,
and thus, no emotional pull from Homer in any way, shape,
or form.
Originally he was held responsible for things
and the episodes played out through Homer's reaction
to those consequences.
Suddenly, Homer could do whatever he want,
get away with anything he wanted,
and there was no emotional response or recognition
of fault at all.
But worst of all, in all the stupidity and self-obsession,
he lost the heart that made his behavior funny.
He became a malintentioned villain.
As Slate put it, these endings very quickly turned into these.
He was no longer a funny, well-reasoned representation
of the American dad.
He was himself a joke, an animated oaf.
It got so bad that Dan Castellaneta, Homer's voice
actor, ended up rejecting parts of scripts
where Homer's mean spirited, brazen new behavior got out
of control.
So how did we get here?
I got a fever of 453.
I'm hot, so very hot.
[SCREAMING]
Well, Scully's three-season run, nine through 12, as producer
marked the most dramatic change in Homer,
as the bloated writing staff lost an appreciation
for what the show was.
Writer Maxtone-Graham would say in an interview
that he had hardly watched The Simpsons
before joining the staff.
He'd then go on to mock Matt Groening's writing rules,
point to episodes without Matt's name as great, and say of fans,
go figure.
That's why they're on the internets,
and we're writing the show.
At some point, probably around here,
Groening's vision spiraled out of control.
It was lost as it was handed to people that didn't understand
what the original intent was.
And Homer suffered.
He became the embodiment of Maxtone-Graham's attitude,
intentionally or not.
He became spiteful, harsh.
His existence spit in the face of who Homer was.
There's irony in Homer's rounder, softer, character
design because as Homer got easier on the eyes,
he became harder to listen to, and in turn, rueful.
This mark of seasons nine through 12
was the most dramatic and obvious shift in the character
yet.
And still Homer's stupidity after Scully's 12th season
would only continue to become exaggerated.
He'd continue to lose any semblance of relatability.
He continues to become less of a character
and more of a punch line.
He lost his personality.
He'd be an oaf when it was funny and then
a sensational talent at a new job
when the joke called for it.
He'd be mean when it seemed cool and then a victim when it
wasn't.
He became a blank slate of stupidity
with no voice to call his own.
As Sam Simon once said, as the show got bigger and its writing
staff ballooned, The Simpsons became this homogenized version
of itself.
And Homer is the best microcosmic example
of this homogenization of ideas.
Do not press the Core Destruct button.
Press-- [RADIO STATIC] --destruct button.
Scully and the team's creation of Jerkass Homer,
as fans have dubbed him, make Scully's own episode,
"Homer to the Max," a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Even Homer doesn't want to be the guy that they turned him
into.
Even Homer knows that that guy isn't the one that people love.
But this isn't all two people's faults.
They just represent the problem.
It's collaborative drain on personality and the character,
as much as it has improved and fluctuated in quality since,
and he has had better moments, never really recovered.
Because Scully and Graham were just
symptoms of a bigger issue.
Maybe this is just what happens when
your character lives for 30 years, when it loses its heart.
Much like SpongeBob, Matt Groening's original vision
for Homer in The Simpsons was pure.
It wasn't watered down.
It was self-assured and confident in itself.
But as the creators begin to hand their vision to others,
that vision becomes diluted.
The brushstrokes stop flowing in one direction.
It becomes messy.
This is Homer Simpson, and this is an attempt
to recreate that guy.
This is Max Power.
Yes, this is the original Homer Simpson.
I wish.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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