About the time I was ten a new fad was sweeping the nation and that
was a cartoon in prime time about a young man who sassed and
skateboarded his was onto every cool kids tee-shirt. We didn't have
television so we had no idea what was going on a school with this
yellow 'don't have a cow man' saying young iconoclast embraced by the
trendsetters. We wanted in on it, of course, but we didn't know what
it was exactly. One Sunday we were over at my Grandma
'Other-Mother's' house and 'The Simpsons' was coming on so we finally
got to see what all the hype was. It was an episode about Bart
stealing Lisa's cupcakes she made for her teacher and my mom hated
everything about it. She thought the animation was poor, the writing
and voice acting was stilted and Bart need a spank and to be sent to
his room. I honestly didn't really like it myself but if it was what
the cool kids were up to then I was on board. I was so so intolerable
that my mom shut it off ten minutes in and we played a game instead.
She forbade us from purchasing Bart's sass mouth slogan tee-shirts,
many of which contained the word 'hell' and we banned from school
anyway. Soon the writers shifted the focus of the show off of Bart
and onto Homer and the writing and animation improved and my mom
became a huge fan of the show and would watch the new episodes every
Sunday and the taped episodes her friend made for her. In her defense
that was a pretty lame episode and not a great season at all but it
got better and then it got worse, much worse. She stopped being a fan
about the tenth or eleventh season and has pretty much stayed away
ever since.
