Talking Simpsons - The Mimi Pond Interview - Special Simpsons 30th Anniversary Rerelease

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

December 17, 1989, was the debut of the first-ever episode of The Simpsons, and thanks to various production issues, the show debuted with its holiday episode: Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire aka The Simpsons Christmas Special. We're doing lots to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of that debut, starting with sharing our 2017 interview with the episode's writer, Mini Pond! Mimi Pond is a very accomplished artist and writer, but her side of the story on writing this landmark episode is rarely heard. Mimi talked with us about her time working on the show in its earliest months and so much more, so please listen to this interview recorded in late 2017. And if you enjoy it, be sure to listen to our many other interviews with Simpsons veterans all available to Patreon subscribers! Also, if you'd like to see more of Mimi Pond's work, check out her comics Over Easy and The Customer Is Always Wrong, as well as her other work including recent New Yorker comics and more on her website.

Hello everybody, it's Henry Gilbert, recorded December 17th, 2019, and that is a very special day because it's the 30th anniversary of the premiere of the Simpsons Christmas special, aka Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire. This is quite an important day in Simpsons history, so of course we're going to do some cool stuff with it. You're going to see a really cool podcast go up tonight on the Patreon feed, and then a week later on the free feed and a really cool poll that's going to be open to the public that I want all you guys to vote in. But first, we're starting out with a blast from our past podcast recorded a couple years ago with Mimi Pond, the writer of this episode. She is a very accomplished comic artist and television writer who is the creditor writer

of this major episode of television history but it's not all smiles and sunshine with this story unfortunately but i think it's a important to hear mimi's side of the story too when we're celebrating this amazing anniversary of the simpsons. So previously only available to our Patreon supporters, we're opening it up to you guys on the free and Patreon feed again today so you can hear it and hear the story in her own words. And of course, subscribe at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons

if you want to hear another really cool anniversary podcast going live very soon soon a week ahead of time and ad free there but for now let's go back in time a couple years to our interview with Mimi Pond. The fourth grade will now favor us with a melody medley of holiday flavorants. Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh o'er the fields we go laughing all the way ho, ho, ho, bells on a cocktail ring making carrots cry

Isn't Bart sweet, Homer? He sings like an angel. Oh, jingle bells, Batman smells Robin lays an egg. The Batmobile broke its wheel, the Joker got a... Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle... Ahoy, ahoy, everyone! Bob Mackie wasn't feeling too well, so it's just me for this exclusive interview,

but it's a very important one, and we certainly couldn't miss this date. In case you don't know, this week marks 28 years since the premiere of The Simpsons with the Christmas special, also known as Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire. Now, we've talked a ton about the history of the show and how there was production problems, all that stuff, and the Christmas special was the first one to air in December of 1989. But one thing we really didn't talk about when we did that episode way back when we started talking Simpsons, and one area that isn't explored enough, is the writer of the episode, Mimi Pond.

Was not any commentaries. She hasn't been involved in many stories about the Simpsons history. And she's a figure in Simpsons history that I didn't really know a ton about either until some recent interviews this year that were eye-opening to say the least. If you've been listening to our Talk to the Audience podcast where we engage in the community bob and i definitely talked about the information she had shared in other interviews that she wasn't on staff because sam simon didn't want any women on staff at the time he was executive producer of the show in the early years and that's some tough medicine to swallow but i think it's something that as fans of the show you have

to recognize as part of its history and we were were fortunate enough to reach out to Mimi for a podcast interview on this very subject and her history with The Simpsons, as well as a ton of her work in the world of comics, other television shows, including Pee Wee's Playhouse, and what she's been up to now. Like Mimi Pond has had an amazing career and one that I think is certainly worth exploring, even if she had nothing to do with The Simpsons. But her story of working on that first episode of The Simpsons is certainly eye-opening and one that a lot of fans haven't heard, but I really think would benefit from

hearing. So I was able to interview for a good 30 minutes about her career, including her work on this episode. And, you know, I think you folks will really enjoy it she is a very funny woman and i'll just say up front if you are looking to read more work by her i would first suggest reading her two recent autobiographical comic memoirs i guess you'd put it over easy and the customer is always wrong i've been pouring through both of them they're really great it's kind of her life story and it's very it's very engaging to say the least but so without further ado let me get into my interview with a very important Mimi Pond on this big anniversary of her episode of The Simpsons.

Well okay so here I am with the Mimi P, the comic artist and writer of the first ever aired episode of The Simpsons. How's it going, Mimi? It's going good. How about you? Oh, it's all right. You know, I have a giant IKEA couch I got to put together, but other than that, I'm doing okay. By yourself? Or yourself? Or do you have someone to deal with? My boyfriend's going to help me, but he's busy. It's just, it's tough. It's tough to find the time. It's either, it's a kind of a relationship maker or breaker, I've found.

Honestly, I was amazed that my husband and I turn out to be really good at doing that together. I thought it was going to be a deal breaker. But I kind of cede to the fact that he has a superior mental visualization of how things are constructed. And so I just follow instructions and go along with him instead of trying to argue. So that's a good tip. I'll keep that in mind. We bought the couch together fine. We were like, oh, we decided on it it fine so i'm hoping putting it together will go just as well but we'll see i think there definitely needs to be a leader and a follower in the ikea construction projects i wanted to chat with you today you know you were

the writer of the first episode the the dare to the simpsons simpsons roasting on an open fire but what would where does your you know career in the arts begin well actually it begins in oakland when i was still a waitress at mama's royal cafe and i was had been doing cartoons amateur comics for a long time anyway and uh someone told me they had a friend who worked for the berkeley barb and i should go see them and I did and the guy said well we already have Zippy the Pinhead but there's always the Spectator and I said what's that he said that's our other paper and he points it got at the next desk over and it turns out the Spectator is the adult classified newspaper that was at that point keeping the now kind of failing

Berkeley Barb which had been a radical firebrand newspaper of the 60s. Now it was the late 70s, and they were kind of floundering, and the Spectator, their adult classifieds weekly sister paper, was really what was keeping them afloat. And so they let me run a cartoon, a weekly cartoon, in the pages of the Spectator for the princely sum of $12.50 a week. Wow. I'm curious what the Bay Area was like back then.

I've lived in Berkeley now for 11 years and I love the place. But I moved here in like 2006. What was Berkeley and Oakland all that like back in the 70s and early 80s well it was kind of like the wild west it was cheap um it was it was cheap to to get a an apartment or a whole house it was funky it was you know rockridge was just starting to get gentrified at that point but every you know every place else was still pretty pretty funky but it was always beautiful i always i just fell in love with it uh when i when i moved there to go to art school to california college of arts and crafts in 1975 and i just always thought it was so much better

than san francisco because it was it was cheaper and it was warmer and it was friendlier and just full of all kinds of weird, hidden possibilities. And really, a lot of really strange, quirky, working class, kind of working class commie, eccentrics, iconoclast type people. But not like wild, hairy, hippie commies from Berkeley. Oakland was more blue-collar. Yeah, that's kind of still the feel I get today, though. It's definitely a lot more gentrified now, I'm expecting. Yeah. Anyway, it was really fun.

It was so much cheaper than San Francisco. I couldn't afford to live in San Francisco even then. So it really felt like there were kind of like endless possibilities. But it was also like the kind of place where people could and did like basically just fuck off for years. And then like, you know, they woke up in middle age and went, I don't own property. And rents are going up and I don't have a career. Well, yeah. So I was reading some of your new book that came out, your new comic, The Customer is Always Wrong.

And I get a lot of the feel of that in there, too, which is it's really interesting to see your character imagine the book is kind of struggling with with what she wants her life to be while all her friends are kind of uh either dealing drugs or just kind of spinning in circles right right there was a lot of that um you know and i think i think that's kind of tends to be the case in restaurant work um to this day because there's you know you you get you wind up with a lot of cash in your hands at the end of a shift from tips. And the immature impulse is to like, let's go to the bar and fritter away your day's wages by the end of the night. And it's not a good model. I know that book ends with Madge going off to New York City, but what ultimately brought you to L.A.

and into the bigger entertainment industry? Well, we were living in New York, and my husband, Wayne White, was working on Pee Wee's Playhouse as a production designer and as a puppeteer. And there were more job opportunities for him here in television at that point. I'd done my Simpsons script, and I'd done an episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse that I wrote with Lynn Stewart, Missy Vaughn, the most beautiful lady in Puppet Land. And we both were thinking there would be more opportunities in show business and in television here. And we were living in New York, and basically, we were at a point in about 1989,

where we could afford like a one bedroom apartment in New York, but we couldn't afford a two bedroom apartment. And everything here was a lot cheaper. And there were more opportunities. I'm from San Diego, we were thinking of starting a family. And, you know, neither one of us was really wanted to do that in New York City. And at that point, back in 1989, the thought of moving to Brooklyn was just too horrible to even contemplate. It was like giving up. It was like you were moving to Idaho.

Wow. I had a friend who just, she and her girlfriend got priced out of the city and they're like, well, we don't have enough money for San Francisco anymore. We have to move to New York. And then they're pretty happy in Brooklyn now, I think. Well, my daughter just got priced out of Brooklyn into Queens.

Oh, boy. Man, that's rough. I was, as a kid, I was a big viewer of Pee Wee's Playhouse. Like, what was it like working on that show back then? What brought you to that? Well, we'd become friends with lynn stewart and she had been working with paul rubens and and john paragon and and george mcgrath who were writing most of the episodes and she asked them if we could write an episode and

they said sure so this is the thing that ruined me for hollywood is that she and I wrote this episode and they took our script and they shot it. No problems at all. Which never happens. It never happens ever. I mean, I just thought that was the way it worked. They took your script and they shot it. And instead, in every other circumstance, in every other show known to man, they take your show and they completely disassemble it and they add gags and they take stuff out and they totally change it around and and then if you're lucky your name goes on it and you get residuals i mean but it's just it's it's a very you know it's always much more of a group

effort but peewee was operating as such an anomaly from the get-go that they could do anything they wanted yeah and i have to say back then in thes, it was probably pretty unheard of to have two women as the credited writers on a script. Yeah, we were probably, I mean, I'm not sure if Lynn wrote other episodes with any of the guys, but I think we were probably the only two women who wrote an episode together on Pee Wee. I've never really checked it out. What brought you into The simpsons and how how were you approached to write a script in the first season well my husband wayne and i had well wayne had worked with gary panter on doing the production design for peewee's playhouse so we had become friends with gary and gary introduced us to matt graining in la and we became friends with Matt. And then, you know, like, this was like 87 or so.

And like by, you know, 86, 87, I forget. Anyway, Matt was like calling all his cartoonist friends and asking them if, I could be wrong here, but it seemed like he was asking his friends if they wanted to write an episode of this new show he had going. And apparently I was the only one who didn't go, oh, poo-poo, I'm like so far beyond the constraints of commercial television. I went, yeah, sure. So, you know, I wrote an episode and then I went in for one rewrite meeting.

And then I was with Sam Simon and Mike Reese and Al Jean and Matt. And then that was all she wrote. Literally, I was not asked to be on staff. And, you know, I spent years thinking, gee, was I just not good enough? And then, like, finally through the grapevine, I learned that Sam Simon was going through a divorce and didn't want any women around. Meanwhile, nobody, including Matt, ever called me to explain to me what was going on. And, you know, nothing. And so, yeah, it was and you know, and I get to be the turd in the punch bowl every single time I tell this story

because nobody wants to hear anything bad about the Simpsons. But you know, Sam Simon did a lot of really great things for animals, you know, in the world of Hollywood, he had a reputation of being a not very nice person. I had heard that in other biographies of him as well. And I mean, that's just so, as fans of the show, you want to think everything's perfect all the time. And so it's very disappointing to hear something like that. I'll tell you, male comedians and many male comedy writers are horrible, damaged people. They're really horrible, unpleasant, very competitive, nasty human beings.

This is a fact. That's right. Well, so did that rewrite session, at least, did that go well in the moment? It was interesting. It was kind of tense and weird but i i really felt like there was one thing i i i definitely learned a lot from sitting in that meeting and the thing that stands out was that i had made up like there's that that part about like christmas of many lands and i had just made up some stuff and and sam said no you know there's got to be something really weird that's real and of course back then

there was no internet so he was able to send some like naturally female lackey off to the fox library to look up christmas traditions of many lands and bring them back and indeed indeed there were things that were much better than what i had made it made up and so that the lesson there is like truth is always funnier than fiction in the long run just to backtrack a little bit i was also curious like what uh now i i know a lot of independent comic uh creators thanks to like online and social media you get to you get to see them know each other a lot better but back then what well like in the mid 80s when when you got to know mac reigning what was the independent comic scene like then well it's basically just

a bunch of funny nerdy guys i mean i have to say male cartoonists were always much nicer to me than than any comedian or comedy writers ever were and uh and and that goes for i'm mike reese and lg and i had known them from the lampoon and um you know they weren't very nice to me then and they weren't very nice to me when i ran into them at at the simpsons either and and you know the the most of the male writers at the national lampoon were kind of sexist creepy guys i mean it's just like you know this whole me too thing it's like this is it's not even me too it's just this is the air we breathe this is the attitude that men bring to us every single day it's not even me too. It's just, this is the air we breathe. This is the attitude that men bring to us every single day. It's like that you're, you know, you're to be talked down to and condescended to, or you're a threat because you actually have something to offer that, that makes them think that you could be some kind of competition. So they have to do their best

to crush that in every way. Now i mean this last year i think for a lot of people has exposed them to what to stuff maybe they didn't want to know or understand about famous comedians or other just well pretty much every man in the entertainment industry i would say do you get the sense that it has improved some since uh you know no i mean i know it's improved because there's there's people like amy poehler and tina fey and and lots of really wonderful up-and-coming female comedians and and writers and producers so those voices can't be ignored anymore so that's that's encouraging and and there's also a more of an awareness of like every that the fact that any movie you see is like all the parts for women up until really recently have been like you know

the women are just there to be like the the happy helpmate or the sex object or the you know the supportive female in the background who wants the man to succeed yeah or the evil bitch who doesn't or the the evil wife of the character's best friend who says stop doing this thing i'm glad to hear at least it feels like it's improving a little but uh with the script for that that episode the simpsons this episode wasn't intended to be the premiere of the show right it was just uh an accident that it was the first episode because they were behind on their they were behind their schedule and cranking out episodes from you know getting getting the the animation done and it

just happened that this one was ready and it was christmas time and so they ran it as far as i know yeah i mean you know i mean i yeah and and this is all i know because i've been out of the loop for how many years is it I mean uh 28 now I think it's been since the episode aired yeah yeah so no you know no communication with me whatsoever so that's I'm just telling you what I know you know because nobody god forbid anyone would ever contact me to tell me anything or ask me anything about it from their end. I mean, I've been asked this question. I've told this story in interviews countless times, and no one on their end has ever been in touch with me

to tell me anything or anything. That's very disappointing as well to hear. I was hoping, I'd seen you mention this Sam Simon thing in previous interviews like this year. And I had hoped that maybe it had spurred like a new conversation on the topic. Or I do believe I saw that the- They make too much money to care.

I mean, I thought perhaps there was a recent hire of a big name woman on staff, but yeah. I don't think there were any women on staff there for like the first five years after. I think I wrote an episode and Nell Scovell wrote an episode. And then there was like nothing. Yeah, in season six, Jennifer Crittenden was hired and she was the first on staff. But I believe even that was kind of a junior position when she was hired for it. I wouldn't know and and honestly i've never really been able to enjoy the show because it left a bad taste in my mouth and i kind of i like king of the hill better

anyway i think i think it's got more depth of characters i mean the characters have more depth and everyone has more depth i think i just it's just more my kind of thing i understand i mean it's less gag driven and more character driven oh yeah totally totally it's much more they're both funny shows but definitely king of the hill is more focused on like the people and also more down to earth not as uh not as crazy uh you you then went on uh staff writing at uh designing women like did did at least that simpson script like open doors for you or was that kind of you know it really it really it opened doors that then slammed shut right away it just it was like an entree into my both my

husband and i because we we both had like we had this we were both working the angle. I'd done the Simpsons things and he'd done Pee Wee. And we pitched shows separately and together for like, oh, I want to say about six years, seven, maybe seven or eight years off and on in Hollywood. And it was still like, it was, this is the late 90s, mid to late 90s. So it's still very old school. It's very network driven. The cable hasn't really exploded. The internet is like just in its infancy and nobody wants to hire unknowns to be showrunners.

Right. You know, because there's a whole factory system of like you have to have come up from the bottom and worked on a show for a while. And then maybe you got to, you know, be a bottom and worked on a show for a while and then maybe you got to you know be a showrunner on a show you didn't create that had been on for a while and then so it's still that system still is in place with with the way the networks work um and you know so people weren't taking any wild chances on unknown talent at that point and so it was just like you

know ramming our head against the wall over and over again for years so we pitched till we were blue in the face we pitched this one idea and with this this producer who took it to nickelodeon and like we had to rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and like i remember like him calling me one afternoon my daughter was about three and it was like you know i was trying to make dinner and he's like this guy just loved the sound of his own voice and and he was like telling me that like they'd passed yet you know for like the 17th time and and he was just talking and talking and talking and and i i finally i couldn't i just opened my mouth and i said you know what i'm sorry i I just can't listen to you anymore. And he went, oh, oh, well, okay then. All right, well, goodbye.

And that was kind of like the tail end. I'm guessing he wasn't used to hearing something like that. Yeah, it was just like, I don't know. And then happily, my husband miraculously found this midlife career as a fine artist, as a painter. And and we were both able to kind of just turn our backs on Hollywood. And I wasn't getting any work. And at that point, I was like, well, I might as well just finally begin on on this story that has been nagging at me since I, you know, began working in this restaurant in Oakland in 1978. So no one else is

paying me to do anything so I I you know I should just get started on this so that's how that happened well yeah so ovary uh is that what turned into over easy and the customer's always wrong those are like I how long did you work on them because yeah they are massive, massive books. Well, because I was raising my kids, it was like between about 2000 and 2014 for Over Easy. And then I continued to work on Customers Always Wrong. So up until like from 2000, basically from 2000 to 2016. You know, with all those ideas you had pitched, I mean, have you thought now with there being a lot more places to pitch things to, have you ever considered going back to that stuff? I've been writing screenplays on and off for years with a friend of mine. And right now we're tinkering with one of our scripts to try to turn it into a series about a beauty school in New Zealand.

Oh, that sounds interesting. I mean, do you see it as an animated show or as live action? Right now, live action, but, you know, I'm open. How has been the response to your autobiographical books as well? Oh, it's been really great, actually. It's been very satisfying, you know to to have something like that that's you know this story that is like this was like the story i had to tell before i died to be able to like actually get it out there was very very gratifying and then you know to have people respond to it in the way that i hope they would has always has really been wonderful no

that's great and i mean drawn and quarterly they they publish so many great works it's it seems like a pretty good publisher too oh yeah they're wonderful uh other than that uh show you're working on are like you working on more comics now or yeah i've been i've been doing stuff for the for the new yorkers for the new yorker online um i've been uh contributing comics to to the newyorker.com since last fall and so i've done how many now one two three four four i think five well five they they also did an excerpt from uh customers i was wrong which was nice of them yeah no that's i mean i worked in the print media industry uh somewhat recently and i've just been the last decade has been seeing magazine after magazine and newspaper close like

has that has that affected uh your your work as a cartoonist yeah i mean i i watched my career basically fall off a cliff you know in the late 90s and i thought it was because i'd moved to la but then you know it wasn't it was like people in new york have and i thought it was because i'd moved to la but then you know it wasn't it was like people in new york have been hurting just as bad yeah i mean i had a real career in the 80s you know i worked all the time all the time and you know moved to la and i was i was doing a regular monthly comic strip full page comic strip for 17 magazine up until the the mid 90s and then they they um canceled that and then magazines just started falling one after the other and the work just just completely dried up and then and now nobody wants to pay for anything nope they really don't yeah it's not good yeah

oh yeah i'm sorry it's kind of a bummer ending but the new yorker has a new young woman cartoon editor which is really great news and she's been publishing a lot of variety of she's been publishing a lot of sequential comics on on the uh newyorker.com and and she also just got my friend emily flakes had a two-page comic story in The New Yorker last, I think it was last week, about her teenage love of a Bay Area punk band when she was in the early 90s. Oh, yeah, I read that one. That was a great comic, yeah.

Yeah, it really was. So I think there's hope for more sequential comics in the pages of The New Yorker coming up. I mean, I've always loved their single panel stuff, but single panel is not really quite my métier. So the American Bystander magazine is coming out, I think, quarterly and is trying to be a humor magazine, an actual print magazine in the vein of the Lampoon being done by some really great people.

And they're getting all the old gang back together, you know, like seriously. That's great. A lot of people who, young people and people who had been back in the Lampoon back in the day. And they've been great. Other than that, I don't know so much. Now that you've kind of, I read you said,

you know, over easy and customer's always wrong or kind of like two parts of an opus like now that now that you've told that story do you see yourself doing another kind of long form autobiographical thing like that again i don't know about more i mean people people want to see madge the main character go off to new york and become a cartoonist and stuff they think madge goes off to to New York and is partying with Madonna and it's just not the way it happened, you know? I mean, so I'm trying to figure out how that, if that, I don't think it would be nearly as dramatic a story because I went to New York and met my husband and I was happy.

It's like, not as much, if anything, it would be less about my character and more about just new york in the 80s which was you know an interesting time to be there yeah no that's a i mean that sounds like a pretty interesting time yeah it was but i don't know i also have toyed with with uh two other pet obsessions of mine one of which is patty hurst and the other which is the the mitford sisters but i i haven't really gotten anything together yet uh a last question i have is like do you feel there's something do you feel that the situation with you and the simpsons could be made right or what would you or are you just happy to just leave it in the past uh god i don't know i never even considered that they would ever come back to me

it wasn't that it's not like i've been sitting around going oh if only right right i don't know i don't think it's really quite my my thing at this point i understand but all right but thank you so much for for your time mimi and And this was a very, I learned a lot in this interview. And I really appreciate that. Oh, well, it's a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you.

Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. And again, I'd like to thank Mimi Pond so much for her time and what she wanted to talk with us about. Again, I think this is really important stuff for Simpsons fans to listen to and engage with. And I really hope that you enjoyed this interview as much as the other interviews we've done about the history of the show.

This is the kind of stuff I'd like us to keep doing in the next year. And I just want to say that I think this year has been such a great year for Talking Simpsons. And I'm really glad to cap off our year of going independent with this great interview with Mimi Pond. And so I just, again, would love to thank her. And you should check out her work. Like she mentioned, she's been doing work on The New Yorker. She just put out her newest book, Withdrawn and Quarterly, The Customer is Always Wrong.

And there's tons more of her work out there. You can check it out online. I'll have some links in the description for this episode as well. So thanks for listening. And I hope you all enjoyed learning more about the life of Mimi Pond. Put off the red-nosed reindeer

Had a very shiny nose And if you ever saw it You would even say it closed Like a light bulb Of the other reindeer I never saw it. You would even say it was. Like a light bulb. Bark! Of the other reindeer. You still have to call him names. Spice Cazola!

Lisa! I never left for Rudolph. It's only a reindeer game. Like strip poker. I'm warning you, too. Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to save. Take it, Homer! Hi, Rudolph.

Get your nose over here so you can guide my sleigh today Oh, Homer! And all the reindeer loved him And they shouted out with glee Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer He'll go down in history Like a tale of the Little