Waylon Smithers has been one of the most memorable characters on The Simpsons since its early days, but the season 1 Smithers had a much different look than fans are used to. The Simpsons has been running since 1989, so it’s understandable that it once looked very different from how it does now. With Disney+ making all 30 seasons of The Simpsons available, many fans can look back on those classic early episodes and one surprise they would get is seeing Smither presented as Black in his first appearance.
Waylon Smithers is one of many The Simpsons characters voiced by Harry Shearer and one of the show’s most popular ancillary characters. He’s the longtime assistant to Mr. Burns and he’s utterly sycophantic to his ancient, billionaire boss while it is also revealed that he is homosexual with a particular attraction to Burns. While the idea of Smithers being gay was apparently the play from the beginning, him being Black in the first episode is a bit more complicated, which led to the show making the noticeable change that followed.
Waylon Smithers’ first appearance in The Simpsons was in the third episode of the first season, “Homer’s Odyssey.” In it, he was animated with black skin and blue hair while he was giving a tour of the Springfield Nuclear Plant. The reason for this jarring sight is simple: it was an early mistake in the animation by the color stylist, Gyorgyi Peluce. However, with various contributors to the show commenting on the now noticeable difference in the character, there is a little discrepancy in what the original plan was.
Part of the reason for the original appearance could have been because Black Smithers was the early concept for the character. Executive producer Jay Kogen explained, “Originally [Smithers] was gay and black…But we thought it was too much, so we just kept him gay.” The idea for Smithers being gay came from The Simpsons‘ original showrunner, Sam Simon, who also didn’t want too much attention drawn to it. The Simpsons‘ creator Matt Groening later reiterated to TMZ that the Black Smithers in “Homer’s Odyssey” was “a mistake” but that the producers didn’t have enough money at the time to correct it.
The Simpsons‘ longtime director David Silverman claimed that Smithers was always intended to be “Mr. Burns’ white sycophant” and the producers ultimately decided that it “would be a bad idea to have a black subservient character to a rich white man,“ so Smithers was literally color-corrected for his next episode. The first appearance of the proper yellow Smithers with grey hair was in “There’s No Disgrace Like Home”, the fourth episode of The Simpsons season 1.
The original appearance of Smithers isn’t the only strange sight in The Simpsons season 1. The early episodes of the series were littered with crude animation and off-model characters; as the show proved to be a hit on FOX and benefited from an increased budget, The Simpsons‘ animation style gradually improved, and the character models were altered and perfected as the series continued. For many fans, The Simpsons season 1 is more like a proto-Simpsons as the series went through necessary growing pains until it truly found its voice and became one of the greatest shows in TV history.
There are also a number of other animated characters who have been around for a long time and evolved as the animation did. Mickey Mouse is an obvious example as his first appearance in Steamboat Willie with his black-and-white coloring, was eventually replaced with a light brown face and red trousers. His black eyes with small white pupils were also switched to white eyes with black pupils. Interestingly, the 2020 series The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse reverted to the original design.
Even a show like South Park which has embraced its crude animation style as part of its charm went through some big changes. The early shorts by Trey Parker and Matt Stone show the barebones approach to characters like Cartman which were turned into more expressive 2D animated characters. It shows that animation provides an interesting opportunity for the show to alter characters on the fly, improving or simply changing how the world sees these creations.