Someone ‘Fixed’ the Yellow Skin ‘Glitch’ on ‘The Simpsons’ and It’s Absolutely Unholy

Imagine if the Simpsons were all horrible freaks with pink skin, no overbites and five fingers on each hand — pretty soon, you might not need to.

The physical characteristics of characters on The Simpsons are the most immediately recognizable of any show in animation history. In other cartoon universes, a person sporting Homer’s pigment of “Metallic Yellow” would have to be portrayed as heavily jaundiced to justify the strange skin tone, and a character with a real-life Caucasian’s pale pink complexion would be rightly reviled by the denizens of Springfield. This coloring decision is an intentional design move to make The Simpsons instantly recognizable and utterly unique, and to remove it would be to remove the series’ soul from its characters’ bodies.

That’s exactly the kind of moral crime that Twitter user and visual artist AMERICANGOAT set out to commit when they posted a color-corrected clip from an iconic Simpsons episode last week, claiming that the flesh-toned Simpsons monstrosity is the “fixed” version. 

When Matt Groening and his animators first designed the central family for his cartoon segment on The Tracey Ullman Show, they struggled to find a unique aesthetic that would separate The Simpsons from all the other cartoon characters on TV during the late 1980s. Eventually, one unnamed artist proposed that, in order to make Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie stand out from the rest of the animated shows of the era, the natural pigment of (white) people in the Simpsons universe should be yellow, and the rest is TV history.

“An animator came up with the Simpsons’ yellow, and as soon as she showed it to me, I said, ‘This is the answer!’” Groening told the BBC of the lightbulb moment back in 2007. “When you’re flicking through channels with your remote control, and a flash of yellow goes by, you’ll know you’re watching The Simpsons.”

Whatever I just watched on Twitter makes me wonder whether AMERICANGOAT plans to continue their quest to “fix” The Simpsons, maybe by removing the bug that limits everyone on the show (besides God) to four fingers per hand, or by rectifying the malfunction wherein the hairlines of Bart, Lisa and Maggie are nonexistent and their scalp seems to sprout extensions of their fleshy skulls. 

God save all our souls if they ever add lower eyelids.