"The Simpsons": Homer Was Originally Going To Krusty The Clown

Also Read

There was originally supposed to be a twist on The Simpsons: Krusty the Clown was meant to be Homer Simpson in disguise, but that's not what happened in the end. All 30 seasons of TV's longest-running scripted primetime animated series will be available on Disney+ at launch. This means generations of Simpsons fans can experience one of the greatest TV shows ever from the very beginning - and they'll see just how much The Simpsons has changed since its awkward first season.

Of course, Krusty (voiced by Dan Castellaneta, who is also the voice of Homer) is one of The Simpsons' greatest characters and he's arguably the town of Springfield's biggest celebrity. Krusty hosts The Krusty the Clown Show, the favorite weekday program of Springfield's children. Krusty's show is the home of Itchy & Scratchy cartoons and, as Krusty once bragged, "It's the tightest three hours and ten minutes on TV". Krusty is also Bart Simpson's personal hero; Bart's pure-hearted worship of Krusty defies the realities and many failings of the narcissistic clown. Krusty never seems to remember all the things Bart has done for him like re-ignite his career with Krusty's Komeback Special, serving as his assistant, the "I Didn't Do It! Boy", and reuniting Krusty with his estranged father, Rabbi Krustofsky (Jackie Mason).

The Simpsons' Homer/Krusty Twist Explained

Krusty's first appearance was in The Simpsons short "The Krusty the Clown Show", which aired on The Tracy Ullman Show. Bart attends a taping of Krusty's show but he suspects the clown host isn't the real deal; Simpson yanks off his nose and it's revealed Krusty is an imposter - before a smash cut shows Homer and Marge watching the debacle on TV. But originally, Matt Groening planned for Bart to discover that Homer was Krusty before it was changed. As Groening told EW:

”The original idea behind Krusty the Clown was that he was Homer in disguise, but Homer still couldn’t get any respect from his son, who worshiped Krusty. If you look at Krusty, it’s just Homer with extended hair and a tuft on his head.

This explains the obvious physical resemblance between Homer and Krusty. Groening also said that it was too complicated a story to do during The Simpsons' tumultuous beginnings so they (wisely) dropped the idea and kept Homer and Krusty as separate characters. The Simpsons later did a hilarious spin on Homer being Krusty in season 6 episode, "Homie the Clown", where Homer enrolled in Krusty's Clown College but then the two identical harlequins ended up as targets of Springfield's Mafia because of Krusty's $48 debt to the mob.

The Simpsons Did Something Much Better With Krusty

Dropping the Homer-as-Krusty plot allowed Krusty to become a fan-favorite recurring character. The famous clown went on to become one of The Simpsons' best supporting cast members who has been featured in many great episodes. Moreso, Krusty fulfills an invaluable function in the series by encapsulating every negative stereotype about celebrities, thanks to Krusty's improbable 61 years in show business. This includes Krusty's penchant for slapping his image on any substandard product to support his lavish lifestyle of eating dodo eggs and lighting his cigars with $100 bills.

Krusty's venal nature has also been mined for laughs: In "Bart the Fink", the Clown once faked his death because of his IRS debts and posed as "Rory B. Bellows" until Bart and Lisa goaded him back to bring Krusty because he couldn't stand the idea of not being admired for being famous. When his outdated (and racist) comedy bombs in "The Last Temptation of Krust", Krusty stages a comeback by "telling it like it is", only to immediately sell out when he's offered the chance to be the spokes-clown for the Canyonero. While Homer secretly being Krusty would have been an interesting twist, it can't compare to the dividends reaped by Krusty's many hysterical adventures on The Simpsons over the decades.

Credits: Screenrants

The Simpsons Brings An End To Strangulation

Also Read

Nothing lasts forever. In time, the continents will crash into each other once more, the sun will swallow the planet and, at some point long after that, The Simpsons will end. But that isn’t to say that it’s incapable of moving with the times before then. Because, in yet another nod to shifting tastes, Homer Simpson has revealed that he will no longer attempt to strangle his son to death.

In the third episode of the current 35th season, Homer greets his new neighbour by shaking his hand. When the neighbour comments that he wasn’t expecting such a firm grip, Homer replies: “See Marge, strangling the boy paid off,” before acknowledging that he doesn’t actually do that any more. “Times have changed,” he adds.

The move has, inevitably, riled a number of feathers. The famously tolerant GB News shrieked that The Simpsons had gone woke by refusing to depict any more scenes of an adult human repeatedly gripping a 10-year-old child by the throat so hard that he struggles for breath and his eyes bulge. Twitter has similarly been ablaze at the snowflakes in charge of their show and their apparent disdain for child abuse.

However, it’s worth pointing out that the episode wasn’t about Homer reaching a point of realisation about never strangling Bart again. It was him pointing out that he doesn’t do it any more. And he really doesn’t. Homer hasn’t strangled Bart since season 31. An entire global pandemic has come and gone in the time since Homer last strangled Bart. The fact that nobody noticed until Homer verbally acknowledged it is either a sign that the outrage machine often operates outside the realms of basic human context, or that people don’t really watch The Simpsons any more.

Either way, despite the howls of the naysayers, this is probably the right thing to do. Homer strangling Bart never sat particularly well in the bigger picture of The Simpsons. Back in 1992, when the show was in its infancy, president George HW Bush publicly remarked that American families needed to be “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons”. The line went down badly, because it only demonstrated that Bush didn’t understand The Simpsons. Yes, they were dysfunctional and often at loggerheads with one another, but the Simpson family was bonded together by a tight and permanent love. If you watched the show, you understood this perfectly.

However, it was nevertheless a loving family where the patriarch routinely punished his son by strangling him. I basically came of age with The Simpsons – I was Bart’s age when it first started airing – and the strangulation gag always seemed a bit too near the knuckle to me. I couldn’t properly verbalise at the time, but to me it undermined the basic premise of the entire show.

What’s more, it was never actually funny. The strangulation gag was unyielding in its rigidity. Other running gags, like the prank calls to Moe, could evolve and change over the years. And yet, with staggeringly few exceptions, Homer always strangled Bart in the exact same way. It was an overdone catchphrase. Even if times hadn’t changed, it would still be the weakest part of any episode.

But times have changed, and this is a sign that The Simpsons is doing its best to keep up. It wasn’t always like this. By sticking to its guns when Hari Kondabolu made his documentary The Problem with Apu, keeping Hank Azaria as the voice of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in the face of growing criticism, The Simpsons was dragged into a long and ugly public spat. Compare this to its quiet recasting of Black characters like Carl, Lou and Dr Hibbert, replacing Azaria with Alex Désert and Kevin Michael Richardson three years ago, and you’ll see a show that doesn’t want to get its fingers burned again. Also, it might just be coincidence, but since doing this, The Simpsons has regained a lot of its old form.

And there are always workarounds. I mentioned the strangulation development to my children, who hoover up episodes of The Simpsons in vast quantities on Disney+. At first, they were just as appalled as the worst recesses of Twitter. “It’s a classic gag!” my eight-year-old wailed. “Why are they taking this away from us?” I explained that it might not be very good for a TV show to depict scenes of a father strangling his children. Eventually they agreed. And then they suggested that Homer could punch Bart instead, or maybe throw him around a bit. So, if Matt Groening happens to be reading, maybe this could be an acceptable way forward.

The Simpsons: A Look At Proposed Spinoffs That Never Got Time Of Day

Also Read

When The Simpsons debuted 35 years ago as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, it was hard to expect that it would become one of the most successful and longest-running franchises in movie and TV history. While The Simpsons spun off from (and quickly eclipsed) The Tracey Ullman Show, it seems a little odd that, given the show’s rampant popularity, we have yet to see a spin-off from The Simpsons, itself. The show has occasionally mocked the concept of TV spin-offs – most notably in the Troy McClure-hosted “Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase” – but that doesn’t mean Fox and the Simpsons creative team haven’t attempted to use the show as a springboard to launch another series. Let’s take a look now at some proposed spin-offs of The Simpsons, all of which sound infinitely better than The Cleveland Show.

A Krusty the Clown Series (1994)

One of the first side characters the Simpsons writers fleshed out was Krusty the Clown, so it makes perfect sense that he was the first one Matt Groening tried to develop a series around. With The Simpsons at its creative zenith as well as the peak of its cultural relevance in the 90s, it would have been the perfect time to launch a second series, but the plans for the Krusty show sound a little out there. Groening wanted it to be a live-action series starring Dan Castellaneta, who voices Krusty, Homer, and a solid 1/3 of Springfield’s male residents, as Krusty the Clown. Matt Groening, with King of Queens creator Michael Weithorn, wrote a pilot script about Krusty moving to L.A. to host a talk show. Several visual jokes that seemed a better fit for animation caused trouble with the network. Here’s Groening describing the difficulties:

“We had this running joke in the script that Krusty was living in a house on stilts and there were beavers gnawing their way through the stilts. But somebody at the network pointed out how expensive it was to hire trained beavers – and an equally prohibitive cost would be to get mechanical beavers – so I said, ‘If we animated this, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.’”

Matt Groening and Fox then began to work on an animated Krusty spin-off, but contract negotiations stalled, and Groening moved on to developing Futurama, a series that does not require the use of beavers – mechanical or trained.

Tales from Springfield (1996)

The greatest strength of The Simpsons has always been its deep bench of supporting characters. While many of these tertiary Springfieldians seem like broad cartoonish characters on the outside, they’re often revealed to be rich, three-dimensional figures underneath who are capable of carrying their own episodes of the show. After the success of the 1996 episode “22 Short Films About Springfield,” an episode composed of nearly two dozen vignettes centering on the show’s recurring characters, the writers began batting around the idea of developing a new series following these lesser-known Springfieldians. Tales from Springfield would have told three different short stories each week, focusing on secondary characters and occasionally telling stories about the Simpsons family members’ past and future.

Matt Groening concluded that the show didn’t have enough writers to script two simultaneous series, so the idea was shelved. The Simpsons has enough wonderful recurring characters to fill several additional series, and this seems like it would have been a logical and worthwhile spin-off at the time, but it wasn’t meant to be.

A live-action Troy McClure movie (mid-90s)

Prior to his tragic death, Phil Hartman, who voiced recurring Simpsons characters Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz, amongst others, expressed an interest in starring in a live-action film based on McClure. While Matt Groening has said that this was only an idea and no script was ever written, several of the writers were fond of Hartman’s idea. While the Krusty spin-off seems a little harder to pull off, Phil Hartman has proven he’s adept at playing smug, superficial guys like McClure in live-action roles, and it’s a shame we never got to see him play Troy McClure in non-animated form.

Credits: Bradford Evans