Regular Brow Beat readers know that Matt Groening drew inspiration from a lot of people in his own life when he created The Simpsons. You may not know—I didn’t, anyway—that his dad, Homer, was “a prominent and award-winning advertising executive and made a series of films about water.”
That bit of information is from a terrific post by Richard Metzger over at Dangerous Minds, which explains the backstory behind “The Story,” a short film by Homer from 1969, uploaded by the A/V Geeks to YouTube. As Metzger notes, Matt Groening, in a Smithsonian interview, actually credited this movie with helping to inspire his animated masterpiece. The “idea of dramatizing the family—Lisa, Maggie, Matt—I think was the inspiration for doing something kind of autobiographical with The Simpsons,” he says, adding, “There is an aspect of the psychodynamics of my family in which it makes sense that one of us grew up and made a cartoon out of the family and had it shown all over the world.”
You can watch the sweet and somewhat eerie film in its entirety below.
