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Another illustrative example lies in the army of merchandise and spinoff products that surround The Simpsons. The Simpsons is, of course, one of the world’s most successful television programs worldwide, having produced more than four hundred episodes by the time of writing. But surely few if any know The Simpsons solely as a television program, for it is also a brand, a world, and a set of characters that exist across clothing, toys, videogames, a film, ads, books, comics, DVDs, CDs, and many other media platforms. For the purposes of my argument here, though, I wish to focus on one particular platform: a set of online ads for The Simpsons Game (2007). Since this videogame followed in the wake of The Simpsons Movie (2007), in effect we have a third-level paratext: an ad for the game that followed the movie of the television program. As such, if we were to examine this as media studies has more traditionally examined such products, we would focus on it wholly as a hypercommercialized money-grab, as a synergistic attempt to squeeze as much as possible from a successful media product. Ads for games of a movie of a television show rate low on most traditional scales of artistic value.

However, upon closer examination of these ads, we can see a viable source of The Simpsons as text. Upon navigating to the webpage for The Simpsons Game, a visitor was met with a series of links to parodic trailers for supposed stand-alone videogames, each of which used The Simpsons to parody established and popular games or game genres (and each a level in the actual game). Thus, for instance, Medal of Homer deftly parodies both the Medal of Honor games specifically (1999–) and war games and war films more generally. With a somber yet sweeping orchestral and choral soundtrack worthy of Saving Private Ryan (1998), the ad opens with a series of zoom-and-pan scratchy black-and-white war “photos” (yet drawn in Simpsons style), playing with the visual style of Ken Burns documentaries, and of Medal of Honor’s cut sequences (fig. I.2). Title cards interlace such photos, reading “In the Last Great Invasion” “Of the Last Great War” “They Gave Each Other the Strength” “To Make History.” This reverent spectacle is interrupted following the third title card, though, as we cut to a shot of Homer and Bart in which Homer is scratching his butt. The irreverence then bubbles up further following the last title card, as a prancing Homer interrupts, “Oooh, I’m France, I’m a little girl. I don’t want to be bombed and attacked.” The ad continues to its conclusion, cutting between shots of, for instance, Homer belching flame, or rolling around as a huge human blob, and shots framed to mimic war movie trailers.

In short, many of the key ingredients of The Simpsons are in the ad. We see significant irreverence and bodily humor, especially from Homer. We see The Simpsons’ signature brand of attractive animation. We see and hear a smart, brilliantly executed media parody that lampoons the seriousness with which both war games and war films take themselves. And we see the snark for which the show is famous. All of this takes place in a brief, eighty-second clip, again replicating the television show’s style of offering short bursts of media parody. And while the Medal of Homer ad is executed with great skill, a deeply funny piece of work, so too is the Mob Rules ad, which parodies the Grand Theft Auto series’ (1997–) trailers and camerawork to a tee. The Mob Rules ad also parodies GTA’s signature use of violence and male bravado, parodically recontextualizing the line “we’re gonna clean up this town,” for example, as Marge’s appeal to Lisa to help her rid Springfield of the violent videogame. Two other ads parody Everquest (1999) and other role-playing games, and odd Japanese puzzle games, respectively. After watching these ads, one has gained an experience similar to that of watching the television show. As ads, the clips may be seen by some as less authentic, as simply hawking their wares, and as purely secondary to the primary text that is The Simpsons television show. But the clips produce and continue the text of The Simpsons with considerable skill. These third-level paratexts, in other words, are part of the text, becoming sites not only of the production of the text but also of engagement with it.

Fig. I.2. An online ad for The Simpsons Game parodies the Medal of Honor franchise, complete with its nostalgic documentary-style cut sequences.

Nor are they alone in this regard, as The Simpsons’ history, and many of its public meanings, has often relied heavily upon its paratexts. While above I suggest that the paratexts were viable parts of the text, at times the show’s paratexts have done more to create the text as it is known than has the show itself. In particular, we might look at the furor that surrounded the show in its early years, directed primarily at Bart as irreverent youth, but one that centered on—and was in many ways ignited by—the mass popularity of t-shirts labeling Bart an “Underachiever,” while he responds, “And Proud of It, Man.” Many parents, teachers, principals, and pundits around the United States worried about children learning a slacker attitude from the t-shirt’s sentiment, and as a result, many schools banned the t-shirts, and conservative rhetoric and complaints swarmed around the show.¹² This rhetoric completely failed to realize the sly message in the t-shirt: as Laurie Schulze notes, “Bart has managed to turn the tables on the system that’s devalued him and say, ‘In your face. I’m not worthless, insignificant, or stupid. If you want to label me an underachiever, I’ll turn that into a badge of courage and say I’m proud of it.’”¹³ Nevertheless, as paratext, the t-shirt created an image for many Americans of The Simpsons as a show of little to no values, intent on corrupting children’s minds.

Then, in 1992, at the Republican National Convention, another para-text further sealed this image of the show, when President George H. W. Bush insisted that the United States needed more families like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. Just as Bush’s vice-president, Dan Quayle, had brought Murphy Brown (1988–98) into the culture wars between conservative and liberal America, Bush made The Simpsons a front in that war (as did First Lady Barbara Bush, who also shared her hatred for The Simpsons with the press). While The Simpsons was already infused with Matt Groening’s anti-establishment beliefs, sly satiric edge, and irreverence, the t-shirt controversy and the Bush speech suddenly amplified these qualities. Now, to watch The Simpsons and/or to wear the t-shirt was to posit oneself proudly against Bush’s neo-conservatism, while to dislike the show and/or to ban one’s children from seeing it was to publicly declare one’s allegiance to those ideals. The paratexts made the show considerably more controversial, edgy, and anti-establishment than many of its episodes made it; certainly, in England, where the t-shirt controversy never bubbled up to the same degree, and where Bush’s comments received considerably less attention, the show was often seen as endearingly pro–family values, to the point that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has often proudly and unflinchingly sided with Bart over Bush, claiming that The Simpsons is “on the side of the angels.”¹⁴

We must also turn to The Simpsons’ paratexts if we wish to understand its relationship to advertising and consumerism. As I have examined elsewhere, The Simpsons is one of the only commercial television programs in the United States to have consistently attacked American consumerism and capitalism.¹⁵ It regularly savages advertising’s ethics and style, and rarely involves product placement while doing so (thus avoiding the Wayne’s World [1992] mock-yet-show strategy of parodying product placement), and many of its key figures serve allegorical functions with relation to consumerist capitalism—see, for example, Homer, the anti-hero who mindlessly buys anything he is told to; Krusty the Klown, the Ronald McDonald sell-out children’s entertainer; Mr. Burns, the evil corporate overlord; and Lisa, the hero whose environmentalism and anti-consumerist ethos is all too rare on American television. So, were we to evaluate the show’s relationship to and messages regarding advertising based solely on the television program, we would likely judge it as resolutely leftist in sentiment. However, to do so would be to overlook the apparent hypocrisy that while it criticizes Krusty’s lust to put his brand on everything, so too does The Simpsons brand at times appear to be on everything, and while it criticizes advertising, from the early use of Bart to advertise Butterfinger candy bars to countless other appearances in ads, The Simpsons has been complicit with more advertising than have most other shows on television.¹⁶ Yet some of its other paratexts also criticize ads, as with The Simpsons Hit and Run Game (2003, discussed further in chapter 6), in which destroying ads rewards one with money and quicker travel time, and whose story is based around advertising run amok. Matthew McAllister notes Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s commitment to privileging licenses that are self-conscious and mocking of their commercialism.¹⁷ Thus, at the paratextual level, or, rather, between the level of the show and the level of the paratext, the text is deeply conflicted, complex, and contradictory when it comes to advertising, consumerism, and capitalism. Individual audience members will see it as either anti-consumerist, rampantly consumerist, or somewhere in between, based in large part on their own interaction with not only the television program, but also the paratexts. Once again, a central popular understanding, or understandings, of The Simpsons come to us in part through the meanings created by the paratexts, not just the show.

To understand why paratexts might be so powerful, we might reframe the issue as being one of time and place. In the United States, at the time of writing, The Simpsons plays on the FOX network, on Sundays at 8 p.m. when in season. Thus, the show itself is strictly contained by time and place, even if we factor in its syndication, and VHS, DVD, and DVR recordings and replayings. However, The Simpsons’ paratexts allow Springfield to exist well beyond those boundaries. Echoes of Springfield are in most shopping malls, throughout cyberspace, in countless souvenir stores worldwide (as Russian nesting dolls in the Czech Republic, as porcelain Homers in the night markets of Tijuana, and as soapstone carvings in Kenya, to list a few), in games and electronics stores, on newsstands, in comic stores and bookstores, in TV specials, lying on the floor of many a child’s room, on many an adult collector’s shelf, on people’s chests and heads, and in countless other venues. Such is FOX’s strategy of synergy: that people will not be able to escape Springfield. But when Springfield is seemingly everywhere, many people will only experience Springfield outside of the television show, and even many of those who regularly watch the show at its scheduled time and place will also experience Springfield in countless other locales. In a very real sense, then, The Simpsons often exists in the paratexts, and those paratexts are fostering many of its meanings and its fans’, non-fans’, and anti-fans’ reactions.

My task in this book, then, is to engage in a textual cartography of sorts, mapping texts and making sense of the complex social geography not only of Springfield, but of multiple other storyworlds. I will be examining the types of meanings created by paratexts, how they variously dovetail or clash with meanings from their related texts, and how paratexts give value and/or identity to texts. I will move through various types of paratexts, and various entertainment properties from film and television, offering both a theory of paratextuality and numerous illustrations of how it creates textual meaning.