On October 29, 1995, just over 12 million viewers tuned into the newest episode of Fox’s hit animated (and very 2D) comedy, The Simpsons, and were shocked to see Homer become 3D. Pulling this off was incredibly challenging, but the end result is a wonderful time capsule of early computer animation.
The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VI is one of the best installments of the show’s annual Halloween special. In fact, two parts of the episode made our top 13 best Treehouse of Horror segments list. One of those two segments is perhaps the most ambitious and wildest thing The Simpsons has ever done. In the segment Homer³ (Homer Cubed), we see the famous cartoon father and husband leave his 2D dimension via a portal behind a bookcase and enter a 3D computer-generated landscape. What follows is about four minutes of a 3D, computer-generated Homer exploring an odd world filled with simple objects, random pools of water, and even the library from the game Myst.
At one point while exploring this bizarre 3D world, Homer says, “Man, this place looks expensive. I feel like I’m wasting a fortune just standing here.” And he wasn’t joking. As explained in the fantastic oral history of this segment, written up by Entertainment Weekly in 2018, it was estimated that the four minutes of 3D animation seen in Treehouse of Horror VI cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.” However, Fox only paid Pacific Data Images–the CG studio behind the animation–a measly $6,000 for the work. Tim Johnson, the head of PDI’s character animation group, broke the news to the company’s founder, Carl Rosendahl.
“Here’s the good news: The Simpsons has this amazing script, and we can participate,” said Johnson. “Carl just got up out of his chair and paced the room—he was so excited. I said, ‘Well, here’s the bad news: They don’t have any money to pay for it.’ So Carl sat back down and ran the numbers.”
Ultimately, the company agreed to do the animation because it was seen as a big opportunity for the company. And it did pay off, in the end. Not long after this episode aired, Dreamworks bought up a big chunk of PDI, and Johnson would end up co-directing Antz. The company even helped on Shrek. PDI was still making CG shorts for Dreamworks up until it shut down in 2015.
The end result was something that hadn’t really been seen on TV before, and it blew people’s minds. Today, this kind of thing could be created by a single person with one computer in a few days or hours. But back in October 1995, a month before Toy Story hit theaters, this kind of 3D animation was incredibly rare. And the only reason it happened was because PDI decided to do it basically for free. The end result is something very special. 30 years later, this segment is still great, even if the then-impressive tech has aged a lot since it first aired in the ’90s. Sure, it’s not the scariest or funniest segment in The Simpsons’ long history, but it’s one of its most memorable, even three decades later. (Oh, and you should totally read the full EW history of this segment if you are a Simpsons nerd. So much good stuff in there!)