Five billion years later, The Simpsons is still on television, running half-assed Disco Stu cameos into the ground for the remaining cockroaches and a landfill full of plastic Bart Simpsons.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. In the year 2023, we are merely on the series thirty-fifth season, and there are probably still a few humans watching the current crop of half-assed Disco Stu cameos. Not too much to get excited about there. But for those of us who remember when you could tune in one Thursday night and watch a spot-on Beatles parody called "Homer's Barbershop Quartet", and on the following one, take in Sideshow Bob stepping on rake after rake in "Cape Feare", and just seven days later see a bee bite Homer's bottom and make his bottom big in "Homer Goes to College", and do it all while snuggling a Bart Simpson doll, it seemed as though The Simpsons could pump out sheer comic brilliance and colorful, bug-eyed merchandise forever.
While the first part of that statement is wrong, the second one is right, although by Warren Evans's estimate in Collecting The Simpsons, "50 percent of the Simpsons merchandise that is still in circulation today was created and released within [the series'] first three years" of the series existence. That's just one of the fascinating factoids his and James and Lydia Hicks's book coughs up. Want to know why so much early Bart Simpson merch depicted the kid who only owns orange shirts in blue ones? It's in here. Want to know whatever happened to that life-sized Simpsons house that actually got built in Nevada in 1997? It's in here. Want to know Matt Groening's feelings about African-American appropriation of Bart Simpson as a cultural icon? It's in here. Want to know who really wrote "Do the Bartman"? It's in here. Want to know where you can get an actually-edible, Simpsons-accurate donuts the size of a small-child's head? It's in here.
That Collecting The Simpsons is more than just brilliantly colorful images of brilliantly colorful toys, banned T-shirts, fast-food premiums, Doritos bags, theme-park rides, kitchenware, bath products, games, books, comics, CDs, and clocks really justifies its existence, but those full-color pictures are what makes it an absolute joy. The writers' enthusiasm for and sense of humor about all this stuff doesn't hurt either. It's been 25 years since I've seen a new Simpsons episode that was really worth getting excited over, but Collecting The Simpsons definitely is.
