Early episodes of The Simpsons are many things: ground breaking and hilarious come to mind – but having stellar animation with great attention to detail? Not so much. I’ve been re-watching the early seasons recently and I have to ask: what are the Purple Mush Dinners the Simpsons family keeps eating at dinnertime? Exhibit one is from Bart the Daredevil, but there are many more…
Exhibit Two – Lisa’s Substitute:
Even the PETS are eating the Purple Mush!
The weird thing is that Season One includes some fairly detailed dinner shots such as “The Crepes of Wrath”:
And the Season Three episode “Dog of Death” is good too, featuring chub night!
For some reason, in Season Two, the animators didn’t want to bother creating a detailed meal as the family sits around the dinner table and so they settled on “unidentifiable stuff on a plate” as the go-to food option for the Simpson family. Why the Purple Mush Dinners though? Almost any other color would better represent food since so few foods are actually purple.
I’m not sure what a reasonable representation would be for this type of meal: Eggplant? Ground beef dyed purple? Fruit (purple is a fruit)? I guess I’ll never know…
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