I was born in 97. How popular was it in the 90s?

28 comments

  1. Very. I’m American but lived in Taipei 92/93 and it was a very popular show there (on the other side of the world). All us American kids would watch it too but I remember certain pubs seemed to have it on all the time.

  5. It was a cultural force in the early 90s. Lots of bootleg tshirts all over the place, video games, action figures. So many products.

  6. When I was a kid, I’d watch it every day at 6pm. All my friends did, too. It was really popular.

  11. It was the most revolutionary show on television. It not only altered TV forever, it changed the culture, and gave rise to new vocabulary.

    It was for television what the Beatles were for popular music.

  12. my favorite episode by far is the family therapy episode from early on. hilarious.

    i remember when they were a short on the tracey ullman show – the animation was much cruder though. her show lasted one or two seasons and the simpsons is still going.

    if i have to pick though, i’m on team futurama.

  13. There were two phases of popularity. Initially when the show first came on, there was a sort of “Bart-mania”. Kids loved the irreverance of the show, and there was an accompanying marketing blitz. T shirts, books, posters, etc. It seemed like the kind of fad that would quickly burn out.

    Bart-mania fizzled out after about a year, and with it, the merchandising blitz. But at the same time, people started to realize the show wasn’t just a 1990s Dennis the Menace, it was much smarter than that and had a lot more to say. As the stories shifted more towards Homer, older teenagers and adults started to catch on.

    I was in high school and university during this time, and I can tell you that virtually everyone watched it and talked about the show the next day. Certain lines became instant catch phrases, like “But the point of the story was, I had an onion in my belt, which was the style at the time” or “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.”, to quote just two of many.

    By the early 2000s, the consistent quality of the show had dropped, and this is when most people I know stopped watching it so religiously.

  18. So popular that even though it’s not nearly as popular as it was back then, it still survives because nobody wants to be the person who kills The Simpsons

  19. Extremely. It’s still one of the most widely recognized and referenced TV shows out there. Most of the references people make to it though are from the older 90s episodes and not the ones from the last 20 years or so.

    I was a little young to watch it in the 90s, but I got into it from watching reruns of it in the mid 2000s

  22. It was huge. Especially as a kid. I don’t think there has been a single TV show which dominated American culture the way the Simpsons did since the Simpsons. I don’t actually think it was the best show of the era (I give that to Married with Children) but in terms of a cultural phenomena it was probably bigger than grunge and rap music put together. It was huge.

  23. Very popular. However, Bartmania in 1990 and 91 was almost a separate phenomenon. Look up bootleg Bart T-Shirts.

  25. I don’t know anyone who was around in the 90’s that didn’t watch The Simpsons at least sometimes. It was something the whole family would sit down to watch in the evening.

  26. According to my dad, it was one of the greatest things he had ever seen. I was born in ‘98 so its prime was before my day but I will say the original few seasons still hold up amazingly well. Every now and then, I’ll watch some of the older episodes and they’re just as funny and relevant today

    ‘Cape Feare’ is probably one of the best episodes of television I’ve ever watched

  28. Very popular. I can recite the entire first 10 seasons by memory. I have original art from Like Father Like Clown hanging on my wall.

    I haven’t seen a new episode in 15 years.

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