22 years ago, when The Simpsons first aired as a 30-minute animated sit com on the Fox Network in 1989, with the Christmas special ‘Simpsons Roasting on an open fire’ (Telegraph., 2011) and it was an instant hit with viewers. By this time The Simpsons was nothing more than a comedic depiction of the American family, with Homer being the idiotic and overweight dad, Marge as the stay at home caring mother, Bart shown as the naughty kid and Lisa as the perfect child.
Allen Graham explains that Intertextuality reflect visions of society and human relations (Graham, A., 2000. p.5) and during 1989, the pilot episode of The Simpsons provided a comedic take on viewers lives and the type of society people in 1989 lived in, this can be employed to make comments on, or even capture the characteristics of, a section of society or even a period of history Graham explains (Graham, A., 2000. p.5).
Over the next two decades, there were a lot of changes in society, media and history, and during these changes The Simpsons were still able to reflect on what was happening in the majority of viewer’s lives and make a joke or an episode about it, therefore the show being named by Time Magazine as the centuries best TV show in 1998 and in 2008 was awarded Empire’s greatest TV show of all time award (Telegraph., 2011). On top of this, 20th Century Fox had also gained widespread success, with movies such as Die Hard (1990), Titanic (1997) which was their first film to reach $1 Billion global box office, X-Men (2000) and owning the rights to multiple Marvel Studios franchises.
With the global success of 20th Century Fox over these two decades in mind, both Groening and Brooks who act as executive producers of The Simpsons, began to take advantage of the wide cinematic rights 20th Century Fox had to offer, with each episode bringing together multiple types of parody (Gray, J., 2005. p.5-6). The more popular The Simpsons got the more intertextuality was employed in the show in different ways, for example, in the classic ‘couch gag’ or Halloween ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episodes.
Compared to The Simpsons in the opening season, this new way of using intertextuality adopted by The Simpsons has brought about many jokes about other texts that 20th Century Fox owns. Jonathon Gray believes Intertextuality is often invoked in a merely hit-and-run manner (Gray, J., 2005. p.20) which implies that the moment where intertextuality or parody was used in The Simpsons, was only a brief encounter, where fans of the other text referenced will be able to pick up on it fast. Fans of The Simpsons have always enjoyed spotting references to other texts in episodes and once found this led to many online conversations trying to find other Simpsons fans who noticed the text inside The Simpsons.
Once the intertextuality of The Simpsons reached the online playing field of the fans, this led to the common textual poaching of The Simpsons text. This was not a niche art form because fans were not unique in their status as, textual poachers, yet they have developed poaching into an art form (Jenkins, H.,2013. p.80). Poaching of The Simpsons came in multiple methods, as I mentioned earlier, these being fan art, fan fiction, and memes.
De Certeau’s term “poaching” forcefully reminds us of the potentially conflicting interests of producers and consumers, writers and readers (Jenkins, H.,2013. p.80), so this considered, why did the fans of The Simpsons poach the text? Was it right for producers Groening and Brooks to let people do this to The Simpsons? And what does this mean for the future of The Simpsons?
Due to the intertextual references shown in The Simpsons, it is quite likely and reasonable to say that intertextuality was a key reason for the textual poaching of the show and even encouraged fans to poach. Though initially during season 1 textual poaching was not practiced by fans regularly, however due to the rise in the internet during the 90s this allowed more creative freedom for fans, enabling them to start poaching The Simpsons.
The Simpsons 