Black and Grey

Here's something that really does live up to this blog's name. I was looking through the archives of the newsgroup alt.tv.simpsons -- an amazing history of contemporary fan opinion on the show, stretching back to 1990! -- when I came across this post by Matt Garvey, regarding a 2012 repeat of "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire" on Fox:

At around 12 minutes, when Homer asks when he gets paid, the Santa school instructor barks "not a dime till Christmas Eve!" In the version just broadcast tonight, there's a funny cloudy coloring over that line (see some of the original takes for 7G01), and the right arm is noticeably lighter, with the suit close to black. The entire suit snaps to the lighter gray in the same shot as he gathers himself and continues. On the DVD, it looks like a retake, perhaps from a later (1989-90-91-93-94, though I'd suspect 89 or 90) repeat... it seems unlikely to have been done at the DVD stage. The only other copy of the episode I have is from a tape of unknown origin (full-length, possibly an airing or the retail VHS), and it does have the glitchy take. I don't know about syndication.

I am able to go one better than Matt's description, and provide visual comparison of the two. This is from the DVD version of the episode:

And this is the erroneous version, taken from the old The Simpsons Collection UK VHS from 1992 (the one with "Bart Gets an 'F'" on the same tape):

It should be noted that this is pretty much in keeping with what we already know: If, for some reason, an episode from the early seasons changed in any way between broadcasts, then the VHS release retained the original version, but the DVDs had the revised version, and the 2012 repeat somehow ended up with the original (probably since those were the ones also used for US syndication).

However, you may recall that a few years ago I compared "Roasting" to The Simpsons Xmas Book -- the one and only novelisation of a Simpsons episode -- which has a large amount of new or different dialogue compared to the TV version. I theorised at the time that, as producer Mike Reiss stated that it was not unusual for episodes to change after the first run, there was a possibility that some of that dialogue was also present in some alternate version. This probably discounts that theory, since we can now directly compare the original broadcast (as used on the Fox repeat) with a revised version (the retake was most likely made some time during the episode's original runs on Fox; the first repeat of "Roasting" was just six days after its 17 December 1989 premiere, which seems too soon, so more likely the correction was made for the second repeat in July 1990), and Matt's post notes that was the only difference between the two. Most likely the extra dialogue in the book is just from some earlier draft of the script, presuming it wasn't specially written for it.

But I would not at all be surprised to learn of more animation retakes in very early episodes (it seems a little odd that this would be singled out for change and not, say, Sherri's body disappearing in "Homer's Odyssey"), and at some point it might be worth making more comparisons between what's on the old VHS releases and what's on the DVDs.