Tracey Ullman Once Sued ‘The Simpsons’ for Millions of Dollars
As devoted fans and ancient people who were alive in the 1980s are well aware, prior to the premiere of The Simpsons, Homer and his family made their TV debut in the sketch series The Tracey Ullman Show. Matt Groening’s animated shorts were a staple of the short-lived comedy series, although, today, they play about as well as Worker & Parasite.
But Ullman wasn’t always the biggest fan of the now-iconic cartoon characters. According to Ken Estin, the co-creator of The Tracey Ullman Show, “she was not fond of any of the bumpers, because she didn’t think they were the quality of her show.” Still, Ullman did end up guest starring in a Season Two episode of The Simpsons, playing the uptight obedience school instructor in “Bart Gets an F.”
Despite her prominent role in the show’s origins and prodigious talent for voicework, she never returned for any future episodes of The Simpsons. That may have something to do with the fact that she sued their parent company for millions of dollars following the show’s success.
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In 1991, Ullman filed a lawsuit against 20th Century Fox, claiming that she was owed some of the profits from Simpsons merchandise, which her lawyers valued at around $2.5 million. And we probably don’t have to tell you that there was a whole lot of Simpsons merchandise in 1991.
While Ullman wasn’t creatively involved with The Simpsons shorts, her claim wasn’t without cause. Her case was based on the fact that she had signed a contract (reportedly mere “hours” before filming the first episode of The Tracey Ullman Show) that entitled her to “five to 10 percent of the net receipts of the merchandising and other profits from products or programs based on spinoff characters, including animated characters, even if those characters were originated by others.”
Incidentally, Estin then filed his own suit against Fox, claiming that his contract “called for him to receive 7.5 percent of revenues from the show, including portions of merchandising on The Simpsons.”
But Ullman ultimately lost the case. As Variety reported in 1992, James L. Brooks, who produced both The Simpsons and The Tracey Ullman Show, testified that “the characters were created by cartoonist Matt Groening and that Ullman wasn’t involved.” In the end, the jury deliberated “for less than five hours” before “rejecting Ullman’s claim.”
During her 2005 special Tracey Ullman: Live and Exposed, Ullman mined her displeasure with The Simpsons for laughs, without ever mentioning the lawsuit. After noting that the characters that started out on her show spawned “DVDs and books and cereal and candy bars and suppositories and barbecues and bath foam and tampons,” she unconvincingly concluded, “But I’m not bitter. I’m not bitter because Bart Simpson makes more money than me. What could he buy, he’s a cartoon isn’t he?”
While Ullman is no doubt sick of being asked about The Simpsons, she’s seemingly warmed to the subject in recent years, telling the hosts of Today that “I’m thrilled to be associated with it.”
Either that or she didn’t want to get into a lengthy story about America’s legal system during a five-minute interview with Al Roker.
