How To Never Age

In cartoons. Apologies if you expected life-extension tips.

It may be startling to realize that Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and Bart from The Simpsons were both born in 1979. Yes, these two children are actually 45 years old (in a sense)! How so?

Although the Simpson family first came to television in April 1987 in short segments on The Tracy Ullman Show, The Simpsons did not debut as its own program until December 17, 1989. Bart is 10 years old, so while we are subtracting from the latter start date for the conceit of this post, we get a birth year of 1979.

Calvin and Hobbes ran in newspapers from November 18, 1985 through December 31, 1995. Calvin was 6 years old throughout the run, and so if you again subtract from the character’s debut, you get a birth year of 1979.

And The Parents?

Bill Watterson never gave names to Calvin’s parents, let alone ages. The average age for a first-time mother in the United States in 1979 was about 22, but that seems a bit low for Calvin’s family. Calvin’s mom did work for a while [October 10, 1990¹], and Calvin’s dad is a patent attorney, giving him a college education with three years of law school on top. On the other hand, they apparently went to prom together [November 9, 1987], so maybe they tied the knot sooner than later anyway. Who knows; I’m guessing.²

There are more age markers for Homer and Marge Simpson, so we could also just assume that Calvin’s parents were the same age as them when their kid(s) were born.

But, of course, their ages are equally a pain to figure out. Homer is anywhere between 34 and 40 depending on which episode you’re watching, meaning he was between 24 and 30 when he had Bart.

Source: Wikipedia

Marge is just about the same age as Homer.

Source: Wikipedia

Let’s take the midpoint and call them 37 during the show and 27 when Bart was born.

Calvin’s dad is somewhat more white-collar than Homer, but did once imply that he lived on his own for two years after college [November 5, 1986], with the further implication that his wife did the cooking after they moved in together.³

It’s completely plausible that Calvin’s dad finished undergrad, married and moved in with his wife within 2-to-3 years of that, then finished law school and had their kid, all by 27. (Remember, this would have been the 1970s, not the 2020s. Maybe slightly less plausible now!)

All that gives us firmly Boomer parents and Gen-X kids in both universes. So why do we give a shit?

When To End The Simpsons?

The Simpsons, of course, is still on the air after 35 years. This forced the showrunners to make a decision: Is it more important that the characters retain the same age or the same generational cohort? Most animated media pick the former, but The Simpsons has been on the air so long that they’ve pushed every character forward two whole generations. Most dramatically, the baby Maggie has gone from a Millennial to by far the most famous Gen Alpha character in TV history. Homer and Marge, still assuming 37 years old, were now born in 1987.

The results haven’t always been pretty (key part starts at 5:37):

The effect on the Bart, Lisa, and Maggie—largely because they naturally lack as sizable a backstory—is fortunately not quite as dramatic as it is on Homer and Marge.

By contrast with The Simpsons, South Park did age its kids once, between seasons 3 and 4 (1999 and 2000)—which is not a lot, but one time more than most cartoons do. Parker and Stone still showed far more self-awareness in an infamous pair of episodes from 2011 than you’d ever get in modern Simpsons. They handled the passage time in a much smoother and more memorable way, with an eight-year-old character no less.

Meanwhile, The Simpsons is stuck changing its adults’ backstories every few years. South Park, in its 27 years, just hasn’t gotten stuck in this corner. Maybe that’s because, unlike The Simpsons, it has been headed by the same two people the whole time; maybe because it is much more focused on current events (and has much shorter seasons nowadays) and doesn’t need as many flashbacks for storylines.

When To End Calvin & Hobbes?

Calvin and Hobbes largely avoided having to confront any of these problems, due to its relatively short run. It ended in just over 10 years and, while every strip stands alone—as it has to in a newspaper comic format where readers need to get the joke without any context, should they pick up that day’s paper at random—Watterson also retains some continuity.

But even if he’d felt the need for explicit flashbacks establishing a floating timeline, by the end of it we have Calvin’s parents born in 1962, late baby boomers but still boomers. It’s just not as much of an issue.

Now, had Calvin aged, he would have been 16 by the time Calvin & Hobbes ended in December 1995.⁴ That also makes his parents 43—younger than current Bart had The Simpsons done the same thing!

In some ways, the difference is merely that Watterson knew when to quit. Meanwhile, the longer The Simpsons goes, the further its characters drift from their original, well, character—and that would have been the case even if the family had been aged throughout the run.

TV comedies in general age poorly, and rarely last more than 10 seasons. Simpsons fans bemoan the long-passed “golden age” of the show, but what’s unique isn’t the show losing its luster; it’s lasting so long in any shape or form at all.

Newspaper comics, on the other hand, can last decades. Blondie has been in papers for almost a century.⁵ That made Watterson quitting after 10 years—and really less, given his two sabbaticals—all the more dramatic. But in terms of enduring art, that seems preferable to a world where he is still trudging through this decade with a 6-year-old Calvin born in 2018.

Today’s Takeaways

1. The “entropy” takeaway from last week applies to this post too, I think.

2. A certain president once said, “At a certain point, you’ve made enough money.” Bill Watterson, at least in the context of his own situation, agreed—and his audience is better for it. The same can’t be said of the people running The Simpsons.

3. “You can’t please all the people all the time. And last night, all those people were at my show.” – Mitch Hedberg
   A lot of those people must also still watch The Simpsons.

Trivia Question Of The Week

This is the first “official” Trivia Question of the Week (TQW), although I posed a question in the body of the very first post.

Leave a comment with the answer and I might start a running tally of who has answered the most questions. Research is allowed, only because I wouldn’t be able ot enforce a no-research rule. That might kill this idea down the line, but we’ll see how it works for now.

This week’s question:

• Did the lives of the namesakes of the title characters from Calvin and Hobbes overlap? If so, how many years of overlap were there? If not, how many years apart did they live?

Show your work for leaderboard credit!

Your Turn

I don’t really have any leading questions for you this time. Anything you found interesting, let me know in a comment! Is this particular comparison between The Simpsons and Calvin & Hobbes at all compelling? It probably depends on whether you were/are a fan of one, both, or (gasp!) neither.

1. I wish I could just embed the strips, but there’s some copyright protection on them.

2. Obviously.

3. Yes, it’s safe to say Calvin’s parents are married. [January 18, 1988]

4. He’d also, presumably, have “grown out” of Hobbes (if you feel the need to strictly interpret the tiger’s consciousness as part of the kid’s imagination and nothing more). Suffice to say, plenty of fan ink has been spilled speculating on how their relationship might change under various circumstances, and I don’t want to do that here.

5. Surprisingly, its history seems to have plenty of fodder for a post at some point. I mean, maybe if it weren’t Blondie.