The Guys Who Go With the 'D'oh!'

Brooks, who produced "Mary Tyler Moore" and "Taxi," was then working with "The Tracey Ullman Show" and wanted Groening to do animated shorts for Ullman's comedy and variety program.

Brooks (helpfully, and obviously for the reporter's benefit): "Didn't you draw them in my office waiting area?"

Groening (going along with it): "Yeah, yeah . . . originally I was going to pitch the 'Life in Hell' characters I draw, my bunny rabbits, but because Fox network was brand new, and it seemed the history of animation was full of disasters, I thought, I'm not going to ruin my bread and butter, my weekly characters, so I'll come up with something new, and that was the Simpsons."

The characters are named after Groening's own mother and father (Marge and Homer) and his sisters Lisa and Maggie. Bart is, interestingly, an anagram of "brat."

"My secret ambition for all this is that it would be a TV series," Groening says. "And so I laid into those early cartoons, even though they were very short, characters like Krusty the Clown, Itchy and Scratchy, the idea of the cartoon within a cartoon, which was inspired by '101 Dalmatians,' where the puppies are watching TV commercials."

Silverman, who animated the original Simpsons for the Ullman show, says: "And things kept changing. At first, Homer was more of a belligerent father and Bart was almost at his mercy. And in the second season, we start seeing Bart being the Peck's Bad Boy. It was the first time Bart said, 'Yeah, Homer.' "

Groening: "That was very much inspired by my younger sisters Lisa and Maggie, who actually did call my dad Homer. Which I considered outrageous."

Even in the 15-second shorts, the struggle between father and son -- which is a meta-narrative of the Simpsons today, in the television show and the film -- was there.

"Very early on, the original idea for Krusty the Clown was a clown worshiped by Bart, who has no respect for his father," Groening says. "If you look at the design of Krusty and Homer, they're equivalent to each other."

Getting. Heavy.

"Krusty," Groening continues, "is just a clown version of Homer. Homer with Bozo hair. The secret that was supposed to be laid in at that time was that Homer was really Krusty in disguise."

Like Clark Kent and Superman?