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What the Hell Was Bartmania?
Thirty-five years ago, The Simpsons’s breakout underachiever became a controversy, and Matt Groening is still proud of it, man.
In 1987, while waiting outside James L. Brooks’s office to pitch a cartoon for The Tracey Ullman Show, Groening hastily doodled a crude-looking family, naming the characters after his own father, mother, and sisters: Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Maggie. No child calls him or herself an ‘underachiever.’” Bart was reclaiming “underachiever,” a word first recorded in 1953 in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, in a 100 percent cotton protest against the kind of education system that would dismissively label children with the term. Nevertheless, viewers saw a softer, sweeter side of season one’s unapologetic hellion in “Bart Gets an F,” which Nielsen Media Research estimated was watched by 33.6 million people, making it the highest rated episode of the show to this day.
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