The Simpsons has been on for so long, that many people don't remember how they discovered the show. But if you scrunch your forehead and think hard, you'll probably remember that Matt Groening's signature creation did not start life as a half-hour cartoon sitcom in 1989. No, it started life in 1987 as a series of shorts that bracketed the commercial breaks on The Tracey Ullman Show, and it looked a whole lot different than it does today.

Until now, there was no easy way for a person to view those shorts in their entirety (well, I'm sure there were Torrents of the shorts, but those aren't that easy to find). The site Simpson Crazy has taken care of that, though; they have made all 48 shorts available for download. Just looking at the download page is a great illustration of how much the characters changed in the two years' worth of shorts, to the point where they look pretty much like the Simpsons that you saw during the half-hour show's first season.

Two caveats: The videos are in AVI format, and you need the DivX codec in order to play it in Windows Media Player. The site has the link.

[via Netscape]