I’m a big fan of The Simpsons, although I’ll admit I’ve only seen a handful of the Tracy Ullman shorts. I did look up a few of them online, though, and noticed something rather odd. The animation on the last handful of the shorts looks pretty smooth, maybe the quality of the second season of the series. Then you see the first handful of episodes of the first season of The Simpsons, and it’s all over the place in terms of animation. Everything seems rubbery, stilted, and inconsistent. How come the animation took such a drastic step backwards?
It didn’t. At the time they began producing full length episodes, it was a six month process from start to finish. They began working on the first season episodes well before they aired.
Yeah, but I mean the style of the show’s animation looks better in the last handful of Tracy Ullmann shorts than it does in episodes like “Some Enchanted Evening” (the real first episode), “Bart The Genius”, and “Homer’s Odyssey”. It seems like they made new, inferior model sheets from scratch, when they already had superior model sheets from the shorts.
No, they were working from the same crappy model sheets. Season two would have been started about the time they were finishing up producing the shorts for the Ullman show.
Can you honestly tell me that the short “Bathtime” (seen in “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular”) doesn’t look better than “Homer’s Odyssey”, though? I’ll admit the first season of the series is animated better than the really early Ullmann shorts, but to me, the last of the shorts looks more like the second season of The Simpsons than it does the first season.
You keep missing the point of what I’m saying. They were still doing the Ullman shorts when they started working on the second season. They did not finish up on Ullman and then start on the full length episodes for the first season. The final eps on Ullman and the first eps for the full length episodes were done concurrently.
I remember when the Ullman show was on, and when Fox announced that they were going to be spinning off the Simpsons. Everyone thought that it was going to be at most a few months before the first Simpsons episode aired, instead, it was nearly two years later.