Sunday, February 23, 2014

Cool: Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, in 1969 film with sisters Maggie and Lisa, made by his father Homer

The Story” is a short film starring Maggie, Lisa, and Matt Groening (wiki), who would go on to create The Simpsons (wiki).  The film was shot by their father Homer in 1969. In the film Lisa recounts an adventure that she and Matt have in the woods. 

Homer Groening worked in advertising but found time to make cartoons and write stories with his children. Matt talks about “The Story” and how he was influenced by Homer in this 2012 interview with Smithsonian Magazine (see excerpt below the video)


From the interview cited above:
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. I told it to my sister Lisa, and she in turn told it to my sister Maggie. My father recorded the telling of the story by Lisa to Maggie, and then he used it as the soundtrack to a movie. So the idea of dramatizing the family—Lisa, Maggie, Matt—I think was the inspiration for doing something kind of autobiographical with “The Simpsons.” There is an aspect of the psychodynamics of my family in which it makes sense that one of us grew up and made a cartoon out of the family and had it shown all over the world.
via Dangerous Minds

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