25 facts you didn’t know about The Simpsons

To mark the 25th anniversary of The Simpsons, we’ve unearthed 25 facts.

1. Creator Matt Groening made the characters yellow so they would catch the attention of people who were channel hopping.

2. None of The Simpsons ever age, but if they did Bart would now be 35 a year older than his mum, Marge.

3. Homer, Marge, Lisa, Maggie and Patty were the names of Groening’s real-life parents, sisters and aunt. Bart was chosen because it’s an anagram of brat.

4. God and Jesus are the only characters to have appeared with five fingers on each hand (all the rest have four).

5. D’oh was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001, with the definition: “expressing frustration at the realisation that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish. Also implying that another person has said or done something foolish.”

6. Dan Castellaneta, the man who voices Homer, based the sound from Jimmy Finlayson’s “Dooooh!” in the Laurel and Hardy films.

7. The word d’oh has never appeared in a Simpsons script. Instead it is written as “annoyed grunt”.

8. The six main voice actors now make $300,000 per episode, that’s $6.6m per season. This was cut from $400,000 an episode a few years ago. In the show’s earlier days, they made $30,000 per episode.

9. The name of The Simpsons’ hometown, Springfield, was chosen because there are scores of cities with that name throughout the States.

10. Lots of people know Bart is voiced by a woman, Nancy Cartwright, but she actually first tried out for the part of Lisa.

11. An exact replica of The Simpsons’ house was built in Nevada in 1997 as the grand prize for a contest run by Fox and Pepsi. It cost $120,000.

12. The Simpsons hold the Guinness World Record for Longest Running Primetime Animated TV Series and is also the longest-running primetime show in American TV history.

13. In the opening credits, baby Maggie is shown going through the supermarket scanner. The price tag for Maggie was $847.63 the average monthly cost for raising a child in the States back in 1989.

14. The Simpsons Movie, released in 2007, made more than $527m at the box office.

15. The hometown location of Scottish character Groundskeeper Willie has become a bit of a mystery. In previous episodes he’s said to have come from Glasgow, Aberdeen and even Orkney.

16. There was a live-action spin-off in the works in the early 1990s. Castellaneta, who also voices supporting character Krusty the Clown, was to play Krusty as he moved to LA to host a talk show. The series failed to materialise.

17. The Simpsons is, of course, translated into a number of languages and the French actors who voice Homer and Marge, Phillipe Peythieu and Veronique Augereau, married in real life. They met during auditions in 1989 and wed 13 years ago.

18. Producer James L Brooks worked out a deal with Fox that meant the station had no creative control over episode content, which is why the broadcaster is openly mocked in the episodes.

19. Homer is the most downloaded sat-nav voice in the world.

20. The fiercely-patriotic Groundskeeper Willie gave his views in the run-up to Scotland’s independence vote, urging his fellow Scots on with the message, “Aye or Die”.

21. Around 100 animators in South Korea work on putting together each episode, which takes around six to eight months to complete.

22. In a 1990 interview, former First Lady Barbara Bush said the show was the dumbest thing she’d ever seen. In response, the White House received a personalised letter from Marge, basically saying her family tried as best it could. Mrs Bush apologised and complemented Marge for setting a good example to the rest of the country.

23. The most-watched episode in the show’s history is the second season premiere, Bart Gets An F, which was watched by 33.6 million viewers in America. That’s despite it being put up against The Cosby Show, which at the time was the country’s number one show. The Simpsons beat it.

24. The short-lived Arabic version had a fair number of changes. Homer became Omar Al-Shamshoon, Bart became Abar, Homer drinks soda instead of Duff beer, all scenes at Moe’s Tavern were removed and the family go to a mosque instead of church.

25. Homer Simpson may not be too bright, but even he knows The Sunday Post is Scotland’s best newspaper. That’s why he agreed to be the interview subject for an Honest Truth column in 2002.