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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

The Simpsons was never really that controversial was it? It's fairly family-friendly. Didn't have any bad language, almost zero sexuality, zero nudity, any violence is very cartoon, its satire is pretty gentle, plot-lines are usually wholesome in the end.

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It totally was controversial in the beginning. It was considered worse than South Park or Family Guy are today. George H.W. Bush (the father) even made a statement that the American family should be "more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons." ("The Waltons" was a series about a wholesome family in Virginia surviving the Great Depression)

> George H.W. Bush (the father) even made a statement that the American family should be "more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons."

Yeah... I get that the plot is that the family in the show are chaotic.

But that doesn't mean that the show itself is controversial, does it? It's not advocating for being like the Simpsons are.

It's not now but is was 1990. The Simpsons and Married With Children were pretty much unlike anything else on TV at the time. The Cosby Show was pretty popular if that gives you a contrast.

I guess what people like Bush didn't like about it was that Homer was seen as stupid (and traditionally the father figure on shows was wise and could give good advice to his children) and that Bart was a troublemaker.

Father figures have been buffoons and families have been chaotic on TV for decades - the Flintstones back in the 60s for example.

What parents didn't like about it was it dealt with grown up themes, had grown up jokes, and covered grown up problems, but it was a cartoon, one of the first of it's kind on regular tv aimed at adults. It was a show for adults. Just because the show was probably clean enough to air on tv doesn't mean kids should be watching it.

On top of that all the characters are mildly annoying when their catch phrases are repeated ad nauseam by little kids.

The early episodes focused on Bart and glorified his delinquency. That was the primary moral panic surrounding the show.

To echo that it was the 90's, Bart Simpson says "Hell" in one of the earlier episodes - not even interesting these days, but there was a huge uproar over such indecent profanity, in a cartoon to boot! Also keep in mind that back then, cartoons were the purview of kids - (the thinking went) no self-respecting adult would watch cartoons. Thus, Simpsons had to pave the way for cartoons being aimed at mature audiences, and not just the Saturday morning kids slot.

> cartoons were the purview of kids - (the thinking went) no self-respecting adult would watch cartoons ... Simpsons had to pave the way for cartoons being aimed at mature audiences, and not just the Saturday morning kids slot.

This just isn't true - the Flintstones was prime-time back in 1960, shown at 8:30pm, exactly the same slot as the Simpsons. Fred and Wilma were shown in bed together. That was almost thirty years before the Simpsons.

> Bart Simpson says "Hell" in one of the earlier episodes

And Wilma said 'bollocks' in a Flintstones episode!

It was at a time when cartoons that came even remotely close to dealing with serious subject matter was deemed to be an adult cartoon. It was a big deal at the time and a lot of the tropes and stuff in the Simpsons that seem tame and trope like today were originally from the Simpsons.

It’s main character is an incompetent drunken father who regularly strangles his son for annoying him.

It started out controversial and the success normalized it. Now we all just laugh at the kid being strangled.

When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch it :S

Also, before it was a full TV show, the characters were used in small scenes on ‘The Tracy Ullman Show’.

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