On October 29, 1995, the third segment of The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror VI went where no prime-time cartoon had gone before…CGI. Homer entering “THE THIRD DIMENSION” and wandering around a green grid with bouncing primitive shapes was seen as a very breathtaking, expensive stunt to mid-90s eyeballs. EW.com just published an extensive write-up of the making of the Homer3 short, and here’s everything we learned about how it was done.

You have to realize what the state of computer animation was in 1995…very young. CGI animation was just starting to become possible for movies and TV shows. There was ReBoot in September 1994, VeggieTales in December 1993, and Toy Story a month from now…and that was it. For the most part, you just didn’t see it outside of expensive photo-realistic shots in high-budget features.

And what The Simpsons was asking for was a step above Canadian blue people or talking tomatoes — they needed fully formed 2D cartoon characters to be rendered in 3D, with total accuracy. It needed to be unmistakably Homer from every angle, even angles that were never seen. This hadn’t really been done before.

They contacted the big boys — Pacific Data Images, a company that had been crafting computer graphics since it was first possible. The T-1000 was their creation. Their render farms were as advanced as CGI got at the time. PDI was asked to create four minutes of animation for The Simpsons, on a tight deadline, and with a major catch: the show couldn’t really pay them what that animation was worth.

PDI agreed to do it, and accepted the paltry sum of around $6000 for renderings that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why eat the cost? The real value for PDI was in exposure. The Simpsons was a huge show, and their animation had never been given such a public focus before. Doing this gig could lead to greater opportunities…and it indeed did, as PDI was bought by Dreamworks a short time later and were responsible for animating the first Shrek.

PDI could only animate two characters in the time they were given, so that’s what was boarded. Homer carried most of the sequence solo and then Bart came in at the end. The writers thought of a 3D scene for Flanders, but the computer boys refused. “In Homer’s case, he had one zig-zagging line for hair. And in Bart’s case, it was some type of atomic Brillo pad on top. But if we had to do Ned’s mustache, I think it would’ve killed us.”

As for the ending, where Homer crosses over into the “real” world, they originally planned to use somebody in a Homer suit, because they didn’t know the CG Homer could be superimposed over real footage (I said this was early, didn’t I?) PDI informed them they could do it, and a section of Ventura Boulevard was shut down to quickly film a tennis ball on a string being carried by a crane out of frame. Painting out visual markers is par for the course now, but PDI was worried…so a retake was shot where someone just walked out of frame and made noise so the extras would know to turn their heads. That take was used.

And no, there was no “Erotic Cakes” business…that was the writers’ naughty invention. It was a photography studio they briefly took over with their own neon sign…which still exists today, in the window of the writers’ room, though it has long since quit working.

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