The guest on the third-to-last episode of Marc Maron's WTF podcast is Matt Groening, cartoonist and creator of The Simpsons.
In the very entertaining conversation, Groening reveals, for the first time he says, that he based his creation of Homer Simpson on a real-life person he had seen in a documentary.
I've never mentioned the original inspiration for Homer Simpson, and it was from a 1982 documentary on PBS. It was part of the Middletown series about Muncie, Indiana. And one of the episodes was called Family Business, and it was about a guy who had a Shakey's Pizza franchise, and he was going nuts.
He couldn't make his monthly due. And it was just about him trying to make pizza and have the straw hat on and playing the piano and running around and stuff. And he had his kids working there.
And his kids loved him, but he didn't have enough money to pay his kids. And one moment in the documentary, the kids just can't take it, and they go to a movie instead of coming to work. And he's there by himself, and of course the camera crew is there documenting this guy going crazy.
And I thought, this is a man, a sweet man who's getting kicked in the ass by life. I want to write about that. And that's where Homer came from."
Here is that documentary. Unfortunately, he never says, "D'oh!"
