The Simpsons Xmas Book

The Simpsons Xmas Book was released in November 1990, and is a rather interesting addition to any collection of Simpsons merchandise. It is the first ever official book based on the series to be released, and it is the only time one of the television episodes was adapted for print format. As you may have guessed, the episode it adapted was “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”, the very first full-length outing for Our Favourite Family. It translates the episode into a storybook format, using a mixture of stage direction-like prose, quotes and stills from the episode with speech bubbles added. The overall effect is somewhere between a novelisation and a scriptbook. Some pictures probably get the idea across better than that (click for bigger versions, and also to see more of my disgusting keyboard due to the extremely unprofessional nature of these photos):

But – and this is the interesting bit, or at least the reason I’ve written this article – the episode itself and the book don’t quite match up. There are a couple of bits in the book that aren’t in the original episode, and vice versa. So why not list them all? (The version I have is the 1991 UK paperback version. There was also the original US hardback version from November 1990, which is also very common in the UK due to how widely it was distributed, and a paperback US reissue in 1992; I doubt there are any differences between the three, though.)

Material that’s in the book but not the TV episode is green, material that’s in the TV episode but not in the book is red, and material that changes, or has both additions and deletions is in purple. It’s worth noting that I’m not going to cover every single minor dialogue change, such as “Maybe Bart is a little more realistic” to “Let’s see if Bart is a little more realistic”.

Page 6: As the Simpsons are entering the Springfield Elementary School auditorium for the Christmas pageant, Marge has an extra line: “Where’s the program? There’s no program.”

Pages 12-13: Everything about Homer looking for the utility cord, and his dialogue about how he loves Christmas so much, is missing from the book; it’s simplified to a speech bubble saying “…every year, stupid cord… what th--?!!” This bit probably warrants another picture to explain it better:

Lisa’s line about how she really wants a pony and she’s been really good this year is omitted from the book, and the dialogue about Bart’s tattoo is truncated.

Page 14: All of Selma’s dialogue from her side of her phone conversation with Marge is missing; we get a new line from Marge in its place, “and no, he’s not always rude to you…”

Page 15: Homer prefaces the turning on of the Simpsons’ Christmas lights with “OK kids, get ready for the deluxe and spec-tac-c-u-lar Simpson Holiday Light Show Display!”, which he doesn’t in the episode.

Page 19: In the episode, Smithers prefaces Mr Burns’ announcement with “Attention all personnel.  Please keep working during the following announcement.  And now, our boss and friend, Mr. Burns.” In the book, this changes to Burns himself giving the announcement: “Attention all personnel! This is your boss and friend, Mr. Burns. Please keep working during this announcement!”

Page 21: After Bart says he thought Marge would like has tattoo, there’s another (rather good) line that’s not in the episode: “Why would I like a tattoo that says ‘Moth’?”

Page 24: All of the “ow, quit it!” business is removed from the book.

Page 28: The entire scene with Homer and Marge in bed that opens act 3 in the TV episode is reduced to “Homer decides he’ll buy the presents.”

Page 28: Homer has loads of extra dialogue when he goes shopping for the presents in the book: he notes of the panty hose he buys for Marge “And a six-pack is only $4.99…”, and then later: “And for me, some breath mints… which the family will appreciate too. This is going to be a great… a terrific…a… oh, who am I trying to kid! This is going to be a rotten Christmas and it’s all my fault.”

I’ll break off the transcriptions for a moment to add my two cents to this bit. Homer buying himself breath mints for Christmas is utterly pathetic, and really hammers home just how bad his budget shopping is; it seems a shame that line (along with the ‘moth’ one from above) didn’t make it onto television. His realisation that his family’s Christmas probably isn’t going to be much fun is already obvious to the viewer/reader without him saying so, though, so that dialogue seems surplus to requirements. And a minor plot hole/odd thing in the episode is that Homer never gets Lisa a present… but even with all its extra dialogue, the book still doesn’t fix that!

Page 28: Homer’s encounter with Ned as he leaves the shop is missing.

Pages 29-30: Barney does not announce “Drinks all around!” as he enters Moe’s Tavern, and Homer’s application for Santa School is cut so we move straight on to his first lesson. However, at the start of the lesson, there’s a new line which is similar to the last line from the cut scene: “Now, before we send you out into the world, we require that you successfully complete our training program.”

Page 30: …But then we lose the scene with the teacher role-playing an encounter with a child who says “You’re not really Santa, tubby!” with Homer.

Pages 34-35: Homer telling the kid before Bart that he’ll feel better once Mrs. Claus’ sisters are out of town is not in the book, as is his knocking his head and swearing when he returns to the job after Bart finds out the truth.

Page 37: The Happy Little Elves Christmas Special, and pretty  much all of the rest of that scene in the Simpsons’ home, has been removed from the book; we keep only “Where’s your husband?” “He said he went carolling with Bart.” When we get to the dog track, the father and son who open their presents at the eighth race are also missing.

Page 38: When Homer sees Whirlwind, Bart says in both versions “Come on Dad, they’re all scrawny little bags of bones.” On TV, he responds “Yeah, you’re right. I guess Whirlwind is our only hope for a merry Christmas.” In the book, he says “With a name like Whirlwind, something big, strong and blurry.”

Page 39: A new line from the vendor after Homer decides to put everything on Santa’s Little Helper: “All thirteen bucks?”

Page 40: Back at the Simpsons’ home, we’re still missing everything concerning the Happy Little Elves, which is all replaced with a different line from Grampa which isn’t nearly as good as “unadulterated pap”: “These reruns get more boring every year.”

Page 40: Selma has a rather out-of-character addition when she notes that Homer still isn’t home: “This should be a time of family togetherness and joy.” (Probably meant to be sarcastic, but the nature of the book makes it hard to convey that.)

Page 42: My favourite line from the episode is missing from the book: “I don’t want to leave until our dog finishes… ah, forget it, let’s go.”

Pages 44-45: When Homer returns home, all of the Bouvier siblings’ dialogue from the scene before he actually arrives (“Maybe I should call the police” up to “Smelling of cheap perfume”) is not in the book. Marge’s “God bless him” is also gone.

Pages 46-47: The rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that was originally shown over the credits is represented with a big double-page image, but the lyrics themselves are not given in the book. Part of the spread is taken up with an alternative version of the “Merry Christmas from the Simpsons” message that appears at the end of the episode:

Now, I think most of the removed content in the book (and the first two changed things) is down to constraints in the adaptation and having to fit the story into so many pages (a lot of the book is big illustrations and pictures). But all the extra dialogue – and the changes which don’t feel like they were the result of simplifying the adaptation, like the different ‘Whirlwind’ line – is intriguing. Was whoever adapted the book working from some earlier version of the script, or was it specially written for it? I’m tempted to go with the former – this is a sort of scriptbook, and it’s not uncommon for scriptbooks to include dialogue deleted from the final version. The book credits Matt Groening as the adaptor (or “transmutated by”, as it puts it)… but, for various reasons, I’m not sure if he definitely actually did it. The same page also credits Mimi Pond for writing the original teleplay with no mention of anyone else, which makes me more inclined to think that the dialogue exclusive to the book is indeed material she wrote for the episode – and the fact that some lines are changed rather than all of the new stuff just being additions to existing things makes me think that even more. And lines such as the ‘moth’ one feel to me like something that was written for the original episode, rather than being written some months after the fact for the book.

One other thing that is maybe worth considering is this: On the DVD commentary for the season 1 episode “The Tell-Tale Head”, producer & writer Mike Reiss states that during the first season, it was common for episodes to be changed after they’d aired the first time. Indeed, if you look at this page, you’ll see that that very episode was changed for repeat runs to remove some dialogue and add some new lines, and there is at least one other case of an early episode (“The War of the Simpsons”) having an extra scene added (and possibly others removed) for repeats for no apparent reason. Is it possible that the same thing happened to “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire”? There were three broadcasts of the episode before this book was released – the premiere on 17 December 1989, and two repeats on 23 December 1989 and 1 July 1990. Is the version on the DVD that we’re all familiar with not the only version there is? (It’d be far from unique if that was the case.) Was the episode’s content changed for one of the repeats, and that’s where the extra dialogue in the book comes from?

I should probably add that I don’t think that theory is a terribly likely one, as it would have to mean that every known version of the episode – the one on the DVD, all VHS releases, international and syndication copies – is the same one. And even if the episode did change between FOX broadcasts, then most of the other cases where that happened are quite minor changes to one scene only, so it seems unlikely that that would account for all of the new dialogue in the book. But it’s a possibility, and one that is far more interesting to end this article on than just saying “well it’s probably just material cut from the script they thought they’d stick in the book for some reason”.

Just to finish this piece off, there’s a couple of other items of trivia about the book:

• The book is dedicated to the memory of Snowball I –virtually every other official Simpsons book that was to follow would carry a similar dedication.
• The UK version has a promotion for forthcoming Simpsons titles, including: “Bart Simpson’s Style File”, which as far as I can tell was never released anywhere; plus “The Simpsons Rainy Day Fun Book” and “The Simpsons Uncensored Family Album”, neither of which would receive a UK edition until 1997 (the US editions had already been released at the time, so copies of that might have made it over to the UK). It also promotes the childrens’ books featuring Maggie, which unlike every other item on the list were actually available in the UK at the time.
• One of the people credited with putting the book together is Mili Smythe, who served as a design consultant on most of the video games based on the show and was also a co-producer on Futurama.
• The book ends with a page of credits for the TV episode, which are entirely correct except for the fact that they wrongly list Sam Simon as an executive consultant instead of creative supervisor.

And that, I think, is about as thorough an analysis of any 26-year-old book based on an episode of an animated sitcom as you are going to find anywhere on the Internet.