PRIMITIVE SCREWHEADS

The Simpson's on Tracey Ullman

The Tracey Ullman Show was where The Simpsons got their start. The family appeared in 48 short stories that can be found on this website. The shorts first aired on April 19 1987 and ran through May 14 1989. The family sure looks different and voices aren't quite the same. For some reason they haven't ever appeared on dvd. That's the same thing with The Tracey Ullman Show. That's mostly song rights issues and who knows if that will ever get solved. I had VHS tapes of the series which I transfered to DVDr several years ago. They don't all look great but they are watchable. It reminds me to seek a peek sometime soon.

Simpsons Collectible Minifigs

The Simpsons Collectible Minifigs will be coming out in May. There's 16 figures and the pictures got released yesterday. I pulled them off Bricktimes Photostream but they'll be turning up all over soon enough.

The figures are Chief Wiggum, Scratchy, Ralph Wiggum, Nelson Muntz, Marge Simpson, Milhouse, Maggie Simpson, Lisa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, Itchy, Homer Simpson, Grampa, Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, Bart Simpson and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Here's a larger version of each character and their accessories.

 

Homer, a donut and his remote. He looks like you normally see him in the show. Marge has a Friends purse and a copy of Donut Fancy. That easily could have been an accessory that was more Marge-centric.

      

Bart and his skateboard. Lisa and her sax. Maggie and her worn out teddy. All good icons for their characters.

  

Grampa Simpson and his newspaper. Ned Flanders and his toolbox and a lefthanded cup. Mr Burns and a fuel rod and three headed fish.

  

Milhouse and a copy of Biclops. Nelson Munz and a bat. Ralph Wiggam and his Choo choo choose me valentine which was one of my favorite sight gags on the show. Poor Ralph.

Itchy and Scratchy with impliments of death. Not my favorite sculpts of the characters.

 

Apu and a Slushee. Krusty and a yellow pie. Chief Wiggum and a bullhorn. 

It's a good assortment of characters and seeing them makes me glad I didn't rush off to get the house. The costumes on these figures are more like the ones they usually wear in the series. They are also more re-useable for making new characters in new MOCS. I know I'll be picking up a set no matter what.

The Simpsons Replica House

Back in 1997 The Simpsons house got built for real near Las Vegas. Here's the Wikipedia entry for the contest.

A replica of the house at 742 Evergreen Terrace, known as "The Simpsons House", was constructed in 1997 by California-based Kaufman and Broad homebuilders at 712 Red Bark Lane in Henderson, Nevada. The house was designed to closely mimic the design of the house in the series.

The $120,000 house was constructed for use as the grand prize in a contest known as "The Simpsons House Give Away", sponsored by Pepsi, Fox, and the homebuilder The contest was announced on July 10, 1997. The rules of the contest stipulated that the winner either accept the house or a $75,000 cash payment. In addition, the winner of the house, if they chose to occupy it, was contractually obligated to repaint the exterior in accordance with local homeowner's association rules. Contest entries were included on various Pepsi products and 15 million were submitted nationally. The winner was Barbara Howard from Richmond, Kentucky. Howard chose not to accept the house, instead taking a cash payment per the contest rules. In 2001, after most of the details relating to the television series were removed, the house was sold by the builder to another owner.

The house, located in a subdivision that was permanently named "Springfield South Valley Ranch", took 49 days to build and was unveiled to the public on August 1, 1997. Construction on the house was nearly complete by July 1997, and by September 1997 thousands of people were lining up to see the finished product.During the time it was open to the public in August and September 1997, more than 30,000 people visited the house, including The Simpsons creator Matt Groening.

 

The house looks pretty good but I can see not taking it. I wouldn't be much interested in living in that area. Plus you have to pay all the taxes on it.

   

It some point they added a fence and then took it away.

 

At a couple of different points people were dressed up as the family. No idea where these pics came from and what they are about.

      

Fireplace, dining room and stairwell.

     

The kitchen is pretty fun, huh.

 

I like the couch and the picture on the wall.

  

Matt Groening came to see the house.

     

     

Lots of great props in the rooms.

   

Sadly, after the hosue was shown to the public it was renovated into a dull gray piece of shit. That's some sad shit, huh. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

71006 The Simpsons House Part 3 The Simpsons And Their Stuff

That's the Simpson family and their neighbor Ned Flanders. There's only the 6 figures in the set. It's a $200 set and unless you want the parts it's a lot to pay for the figures. Of course the sets a great parts pack for the right person. The figures will run you $90-100 on Bricklink, for double that you can have the other 2500 parts in the set, the mix of parts is well worth that. I just looked ont he LEGO [email protected] and the set is sold out already.

hat's the hand drawn family for some sort of comparison. Here's some nice big pictures of the minifigs. First up Homer.

        

I'm not sure I care that much for the expression on Homer's face. I'd like a happier look with his eyes wide open. His beard shadow looks kind of dark but if you look Google some pictures of him the shade changes from a much lighter tan to a darker tan. This is Homer in his work clothes. I would have prefered to see a Homer without the tie and badge. Maybe they'll be one in one of the forthcoming sets or the Collectible Minifigs series. I like the medium blue pants but they seem a bit too light of a shade.

     

Marge's hair looks better than her face. Her dress is almost the right shade and but the apron looks odd what the torso joins the legs. Like some of the other Simpsons figures this Marge fig makes me want more costume changes. If you watched the show you'd probably see less of Homer in his tie than you would see Marge in her apron. I was a fan of the Playmate series of Simpsons action figures and they sure had a great variety of costumes on the figures.

  

Again I'm not finding joy in the Bart figures face sculpt but I do like his short sleeve T-shirt. Skateboard is ok but I already have several of them from the Collectible Minifigs series. Nice printing on the shorts and sneakers.

 

I like the Lisa figure better than most even though the brick shape doesn't capture the triangle shape her and her dress form. On the other than the company has done some fun fabric accessories and this dress is no exception. The nice thing about some of the Simpsons costumes is that they have a great potential for re-use in other themes.

   

There's Maggie and Ned Flanders. I like both of these head sculpts. Maggie looks ok as a figure. Ned has a bit of a limited re-use costume.

Here's some of the stuff that comes in additon to the house and the figures.

 

Bart's got a skateboard thingy in medium blue. Those inverted arches are always good to have and anything in the medium blue is welcome in my house. The BBQ is ok.

    

I like making minifig furniture. I like the design on the orange chairs. They aren't practical for me, I want something that attaches to the MOC so it won't slide around when it gets moved. The mailbox is pretty good. It's much nicer than the hand drawn mailbox the tv show has but there you go. I like the wheelbarrow. I have some red ones but not that color. Do I need more, probably not. but I'd take one or two of pretty much any other color. I do like the Property Of Ned Flanders sticker that goes on the wheelbarrow. Nice touch. Almost makes me want to make up a bunch of them in stickers that are my size and stick them onto random stuff out in the world. Leave a bit of a puzzle or a joke for the person who finds it.

 

That's a really great lounge chair. Simple yet elegant. Good design to steal and the reason I like downloading the instructions to sets I don't buy. I don't use that grill piece that forms the back of the lounge enough. There's a lot of parts that I don't think to use but could if only I was spurred on by example. From a practical point of view I'm lazy, and really, who has time to think everything out. I have tv to watch.

Again I'm holding off buying one of the sets and so far it's been fairly easy. I don't need the parts in the set that much and while the figures are nice I have enough reservations about them that I don't feel any great urge to have them. Especially since I know there are other options coming in the summer. I can wait and see what happens. It's also the $200 price, which if I bought one I might wind up building it and keeping it intact instead of parting it out and turning it into working parts. If you got one and never opened it you could sell it for more in a few years but there's little fun in that. You could do like a lot of people and sell the figures to lower the cost per piece of the rest of the bricks. I've become quite happy with having a digital copy of somethng physical that I like. It saves on storage space and there's little or no cost to have a picture. Mind you I've had decades of having stuff and the novelty is wearing off. Especially books, they are so damn heavy. Lego on the other hand is lighter per square foot but much bulkier. Ah, well, life goes on.

71006 The Simpsons House Part 2 The Interior

I stopped in the LEGO store at the Mall Of America and saw the set sitting on the shelf. That's all there was, just the one set. I didn't buy it, I'm still not convinced that I need one. I have enough tan and brown. It's mostly the minifigs that I want. There are some other smaller sets that might be worth picking up but when you get down to it I don't even need the minifigs that much. Breaking the havin' something for the sake of having it habit is hard.

There was a built set in the front window of the LEGO store and I looked at that for a bit before I left. It is kind of nice and I did find some nice shots of the interior online. They are big pictures when you click on them.

  

I like the crib and the vacuum. That's a Droid body in blay there. Very versitile part, huh. You can't tell but the crib sits in one end of Homer and Marge's bedroom. Maggie doesn't get her own room in the LEGO version of the house. Bart has a nice square Radioactive Man comic. The lamp is great use of the hot dog. Nice decorations and a good bed.

  

There are some nice bits in the garage. There's a cell door in there somewhere. The wrench, drill and tire iron were in some racing sets last year. They wouldn't be something that I buy. I'm sure they will turn up in other sets. I see that the wheelbarrow belongs to Ned. I wonder what else does? If Homer's poorly treated neighbor is coming back to reclaim some of his stuff I'm betting he won't do so well. The couch and tv look fine. It would be more accurate to take a plier and put a bend, or two, in the levers that are pretending to be the antenna.

  

Lisa has a nice room but I don't remember Maggie being so mean. Lisa has her backpack and a cute little bed. There's a bit more of Lisa's room on the other half of the house. Not the best toilet I've seen but decent.

  

There's Maggie making a mess and Lisa playing the purple piano. Odd that she's standing up to play. Nice kitchen cupboards with a few Friends accessories. Both rooms have bay windows. You can see partly how that was done from the picture. A nice bunch of shots of the family at home.

I do like the rooms for the most part but sadly Maggie's bedroom isn't the only change to the house. I'm sure if they built the house as it was supposed to be it would be much more than $200. I could see it being nearly double. It needs to be something special for people to fork out that kind of dough.

I found this cool cut-away of the house on the internet. You can compare it to the top down shot of the Brick Built version below and see plenty of changes. The garage is now an attached side along instead of a partial tuck under. The TV version has 5 rooms on the ground floor plus the garage. The LEGO version only has three and those rooms have everything smushed together and re-arranged. The kitchen has a bay window that over looks the front street. The room behind the garage is missing completely. If I was personally making a model of the house I would have made it more like the tv version. I could imagine that it would be way more than 2500 pieces. Re-creating the color scheme would be hard and expensive. So, that leaves me out.

The brick built house isn't the same color as the TV version either. The TV version is a riot of color and the brick version is much more subdued. They change up a lot of the color details. Look at the stairs to the second floor. You'd have to build the house with walls 2 studs wide so you could have a different color inside and outside. That would sky rocket the list price of the set. Still having a big pile of that dull orange color might be nice and look at all the pink you'd get if the set were built true to the original.

The second floor has 4 rooms and two bathrooms. There's a little storage room by the bathroom that shows up better on the floor plan layout at the bottom of the post. Each of the kids has their own rooms and they have a lot more furniture in those rooms.

Marge and Homer share the room on the left with Maggie. There's just the one bathroom. That would be a nightmare, sharing a bathroom with Homer. At least Marge would clean up after him. The rest of the floor has the two kids rooms and the stair way. There is a lot of doors and they are solid ones in what looks like medium flesh or nougat. It's not listed anywhere yet. I like some of the older doors but you can only use that one with the window so often. It's nice to have a different looking solid door.

Here's that floow plan I mentioned. It pops up to be pretty large when you click on it.

That's pretty much it for this part. Next couple of days I'll do a post on the figures and then some more pictures of the Contest House.

71006 The Simpsons House Part 1 The House

I'm actually interested in the new LEGO set of that famous cartoon house at 742 Evergreen Terrace. It's a pretty large set and I don't usually buy many of them. Still, I might be tempted to keep it together, Parting it out would make good sense but who has that. It's got 2523 pieces and the cost is 200 smackers. That's just over 8 cents a part with the tax added. Very good for a licenced theme set. Here in Minnesota the tax adds about 15 bucks. It would be a good set to find on sale. From the picture above you can see that a good chunk of that part total will be made up of tan pieces. I'm a big tan fan. I figure it's always good to have a lot tan parts. For someone who wanted to stock up on tan this might be the set to stock up on. There are a lot of reddish brown plates and tiles that make up the roof. The nougat or medium flesh color on the chimney is another color I'm interested in.

There's the house as it appears on the tv show and the LEGO version. I thought the house shape and window placement was pretty good but it's not quite the house in the cartoon. It's taller than it should be, less thick than it should be and the garage is too narrow and tall. On top of that there's a whole section of the house missing. You can see it peaking over the top of the garage in the tv version of the house. I'm sure the changes are to keep the set to a certain set price. It's harder to sell the large sets. I know in TwinLUG the majority of the members just don't buy a lot of the sets that list ove $150. Recently we had a chat about it. Sets over 50 bucks but under a 100 are more common purchases. Especially if you can get them on sale. Once the price starts to go north of $150 less and less people manage to buy them and these are people that buy a shitload of LEGO.

That's the house they built for a contest. It's not much like the real tv version either. That garage placement is totally wrong. Someone won that house but she never lived there. Here's a bit from the wikipedia page on the house:

A replica of the house at 742 Evergreen Terrace, known as "The Simpsons House", was constructed in 1997 by California-based Kaufman and Broad homebuilders at 712 Red Bark Lane in Henderso, Nevada.The house was designed to closely mimic the design of the house in the series.

The $120,000 house was constructed for use as the grand prize in a contest known as "The Simpsons House Give Away", sponsored by Pepsi, Fox, and the homebuilder. The contest was announced on July 10, 1997. The rules of the contest stipulated that the winner either accept the house or a $75,000 cash payment. In addition, the winner of the house, if they chose to occupy it, was contractually obligated to repaint the exterior in accordance with local homeowner's association rules. Contest entries were included on various Pepsi products and 15 million were submitted nationally. The winner was Barbara Howard from Richmond, Kentucky. Howard chose not to accept the house, instead taking a cash payment per the contest rules. In 2001, after most of the details relating to the television series were removed, the house was sold by the builder to another owner.

The house, located in a subdivision that was permanently named "Springfield South Valley Ranch", took 49 days to build and was unveiled to the public on August 1, 1997. Construction on the house was nearly complete by July 1997, and by September 1997 thousands of people were lining up to see the finished product. During the time it was open to the public in August and September 1997, more than 30,000 people visited the house, including The Simpsons creator Matt Groening.

The Simpsons House was designed by Kaufman and Broad homebuilders. The primary designer was Mike Woodley, Senior Vice President of Architecture at KB Home. Manny Gonzalez was the project's supervising architect. The project was first conceived when designers were working on 3D visualizations at Fox Interactiv for the video game Virtual Springfield.

In preparation for the project the design team viewed episodes of The Simpsons to use as a guide for the home's design. Dozens of episodes were viewed so that the design was drawn directly from the animation. Early on it became clear that the cartoon house was not structurally sound; in the show the home has no load bearing walls. The finished replica, however, met all building codes. The architects focused their efforts on Bart's bedroom and the television room, making sure those rooms were as close to the reality of the series as possible. One of the challenges architects faced was the constantly changing nature of the onscreen house. For instance, the bay window has changed shape through the years.

When it was constructed the four-bedroom, two-story house was painted bright yellow and baby blue on its exterior, to resemble the exterior of 742 Evergreen Terrace. The house included exterior details from The Simpsons such as Bart's treehouse, a swing set, and a back yard barbecue. The 2,200-square-foot (200 m²) house also has two bathrooms, and two front bay windows, again mimicking the cartoon house. The supervising architect characterized the house as "90 percent normal". For example, the first floor was concrete and the upstairs floor was sanded-down plywood that had been painted. The lot size necessitated the house be just 40 feet (12 m) wide, compared to the cartoon house, which is at least 50 feet (15 m) wide.

Before it was altered, the interior rooms were designed to mirror those in the series. The television room included Homer's favorite spot: the large sofa. On the wall hung the distinctive sailboat painting. The living room had brightly painted walls, matching those in the series, and a two-tone orange fireplace. The kitchen kept up the motif, featuring a checkered linoleum floor. The house included 1,500 Simpsons-themed props, such as Duff Beer cans and the corn cob curtains in the kitchen. Some of the paint colors used on the interior included "Power Orange," "Generator Green," and "Pink Flamingo".

That's sad that she never lived in the house. I guess I would have taken the money too. I have little interest in living in Nevada. I drove through it one summer in the early 1980's. I only stopped in Las Vegas for a day or so and Reno for the evening and I'd like to say we raised the roof but I spent more money on books in LV than I did on gambling. The only thing that stayed in Vegas was my money.

The house opens up to a nice playset. The hinges are in the chimney. The garage door opens up to reveal the iconic Simpsons car. If you click on that picture and look at it full size you can see that the rooms are fairly well furnished, even the garage has stuff along the walls. There are lots of tiles and odd parts in interesting color to make up the furniture and the room decorationss. Sadly there aren't enough rooms. Maggie is missing her's and the downstairs has been reduced to the entry way, the kitchen and the living room. I'll cover that on the next post. I found some neat pictures of the inside of both the tv version and the LEGO version. You'll see them soon.

I'm liking the set but honestly I'll probably skip buying one. There are some other Simpsons sets coming at the same time, not sure when yet, and I think my money might go a few of those. It's not Harry Potter so I don't figure I need everything but I wouldn't mind having a set of the figures. I'm glad I don't actively try to collect all the minfigures I can. There are just an insane number of them now and some of them are seriously crazy expensive.