English practice 47

Genius at the Last Minute

He was born in Oregon in 1954, the son of a schoolteacher mother in a Mennonite community. He and chose to attend a “hippie college” in Washington State that had been founded only five years earlier and didn’t even give grades.

He stayed in college for five years, writing articles and drawing cartoons for the campus paper.

he moved to Los Angeles to try to become a writer, but couldn’t catch a break and wandered through a series of jobs: busing tables, washing dishes, and even working at a sewage treatment plant. Finally, he ended up working a record store, a job he was able to stand.

To amuse himself and make a little extra money, he drew comic books about how miserable he was in Los Angeles and sold photocopies of them in the store.

The black-and-white doodles featuring a family of odd-looking, dysfunctional rabbits, became popular with neighborhood artists and intellectuals, and soon he was getting paid to draw a daily strip featuring his odd rabbits for a local alternative newspaper. (The paper also gave him a music column, but he lost that after admitting just made up the names of all the bands and albums he reviewed as a joke.)

The rabbit strip, called Life in Hell, came to the attention of a successful the thirty-one-year-old cartoonist about the possibility animated shorts for television. The artist was thrilled, but while waiting in the lobby of the producer’s building before his big meeting, he had a series of terrifying thoughts. What if the television series bombed and ruined the reputation of his beloved comic? Or what if he had to give up the rights to the characters, and no longer had any control over how they were used?

So just before being called into the meeting, he quickly drew another group of characters and named them after his own family: he used the real names of his parents and two little sisters, but invented another for the sarcastic, academically unmotivated male child, thinking that using his own name would how little work he had put into the idea. To the animator’s great relief, the producer loved the hurriedly created new characters. Their first animated short debuted in 1987, and by the end of 1989 they had their own half-hour show.

By now, you may have guessed that the cartoonist’s and that the family he invented off the top of his head in that lobby is now known to the whole world as The Simpsons. The has become the longest-running sitcom in TV history, as well as one of the most beloved, by viewers and critics alike. Although it may not happen every ever let anyone tell you that a work of genius was never done at the last minute.