‘The Simpsons’ Went to Great Lengths to Animate Homer’s Least Favorite City

One of the most inadvertently problematic episodes of The Simpsons found Homer reluctantly taking his family on a trip to New York City, purely in order to recover his car, which Barney abandoned at the bottom of the World Trade Center. Because of the Twin Towers’ prominent role in the story, “The City of New York vs Homer Simpson” was temporarily pulled from syndication in the wake of the September 11th attacks, thus costing the crab juice industry millions of dollars-worth of free advertising.

While Homer may have hated New York with a fiery passion (owing to a bad experience he had as a teenager) that sentiment clearly wasn’t shared by the Simpsons’ staff, who went to great efforts to recreate Manhattan’s urban landscape in cartoon form — from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, to the Statue of Liberty, to Mad Magazine’s head office, which we assume looked exactly like it did on the show in real life.

As legendary Simpsons writer Bill Oakley explained on the episode’s DVD commentary, capturing the nuances of New York was of the utmost importance. “One of the things we wanted to do was make this a fairly realistic, although Simpson-ized, depiction of the streets of New York,” Oakley recalled. “So (foundational Simpsons animator) Dave Silverman went with a camera and took hundreds and hundreds of photos around the World Trade Center, and all the buildings, and the pizza parlors, and even the traffic cones.”

So the scenes set at One World Trade Center feature, not only realistic renderings of the towers, but also the surrounding buildings, several of which were destroyed on 9/11. According to the episode’s director, Jim Reardon, “Lance Wilder and the design department were slavish in making sure that everything looked just like it does in real life. When September 11th happened, just beyond what it did to everyone in the studio, the guys who designed that stuff had an extra feeling of pain.”

Perhaps the most impressive moment in the whole episode is the very final shot, in which the Simpson family leave Manhattan behind as they drive across the George Washington Bridge. The animation mimics an epic helicopter shot, like you’d expect to see in a movie, and the bridge actually appears to be three-dimensional. That’s because it was created using a combination of early computer graphics, and traditional hand-drawn animation.

“We got a computer model built of the bridge, and then did printouts and they had to be Xeroxed and traced onto cells,” Reardon revealed. The overseas studio went berserk — they said what the hell are you doing? They had people questioning my sanity.”

The Simpsons crew also contacted Fox to make sure that the network wouldn’t “run a commercial over this beautiful bridge shot.” It would have been quite a bummer if all that effort was ruined by a 30-second promo for The X-Files. 

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