Quote:
Originally Posted by ufriend2912
|
I know, I know... This is a joke... I'm failing to parse an invisible smiley or embedded "<humor></humor>" tags, but...
The Simpsons as cartoon characters started out in short animations embedded in Fox's
The Tracey Ullman Show back in 1987 (they got their own show a bit over two years and ten months after that).
Just because I can, here's a picture (from Wikipedia Commons), showing the "evolution" of Homer; he's changed a bit over the years:
From left to right, that's Homer in 1987 (the
Tracey Ullman Show years), Homer in 1989 (First year of
The Simpsons), and Homer in 2007.
I did a quick search of that avatar image on Google Images (ok, I confess, I wanted to try their "drag and drop" image search function, so I dragged the avatar photo from the ECCIE profile into Google Images). Google Images identified it as Homer Simpson (one of the things the drag n' drop search tries to do is identify the person in the picture, then pull similar pictures as well as links to other webpages where that exact picture was posted). As far as I can tell, Google can't retrieve any postings of that image earlier than 2008 or so, with the image appearing to go viral on blogs, etc., in 2010 (i.e., the vast majority of hits that can be dated are dated sometime last year).
It's much, much more likely that Homer inspired that avatar, and not the other way around (though if you can prove that avatar photo dates to 1987 or before, I'll gladly reconsider that). Sorry if I'm raining on your parade, or worse, spoiling a good joke by going all geek on you.
ObHobby: I need to play around with that drag 'n drop search, though; it looks like it may be a supplement to TinEye for doing searches on TGTBT Backpage ads, etc., when you're doing your hobby research. At least it does seem to have some promise...
Cheers,
bcg (never one to resist the temptation to go all geek...)
What inspires the cartoonist?
