The Butterfinger Group

General

References

Appearances

Transcript

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The Butterfinger Group

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The Butterfinger Group
Topic	Butterfinger
Production number	MC17
Airdate	1988
Commercial length	30 seconds

The Butterfinger Group is the first Butterfinger commercial. It originally aired in 1988, the year when The Simpsons shorts were still on the Fox program The Tracey Ullman Show.

Synopsis

Bart and Milhouse argue about the existence of the Butterfinger food group.

Plot

Milhouse asks if he can trade lunches with Bart, but Bart doesn't want to, as he has the four food groups: sandwich group, cow group, jungle group, and the Butterfinger group. Milhouse protests that there isn't a Butterfinger group, but Bart tells him about it. Milhouse is sad because he doesn't have the Butterfinger group.

Trivia

• This was the first Simpsons Butterfinger commercial produced and aired.
• This commercial was the first ever appearance of Milhouse in the entire Simpsons franchise.
• This is the very first time that one would see a gradient-colored background in the Simpsons' animation, which is a type of visual appearance and look of a color gradually fading into another color. The crew's animators would continue this feature completely and remotely into the last 2 mini-shorts that were created, aired and produced as part of The Tracey Ullman Show (for specifics, Family Therapy (that short would have the code reading MC47) and TV Simpsons (which was produced directly after that, it has MC48, and was the last for the 1987-1989 Tracey Ullman-era) and would also be into usage into the oldest episodes ever produced for the actual show itself (here are examples: Some Enchanted Evening (which has code 7G01), Bart the Genius (7G02) and Homer's Odyssey (7G03, the final episode to have this). This would eventually be stopped by an episode entitled There's No Disgrace Like Home (which contains code of 7G04) and ever since then, fully-colored and completely solid and smooth backgrounds were put to permanent use all the way until nowadays.
• Milhouse was originally designed by Matt Groening for a Saturday morning cartoon that didn't get past its' pitch, Melvin's Inferno, and was decided to include the character in the Simpsons' own TV series (already in its' development stages by 1988), and thus Milhouse was tested out in this commercial.