“The story that The Simpsons‘ creator Matt Groening once illustrated a brochure for Apple back in 1989 has been making the rounds of the internet for awhile now,” Linus Edwards reports for VintageZen. “However, in addition to that brochure, Groening did other artwork for Apple around that same time period.”
“For anyone unfamiliar, Apple hired Groening to produce illustrations for a brochure about Macs that was aimed at college students. At the time, Groening was best known as the artist of the comic Life in Hell, as The Simpsons has not yet premiered,” Edwards reports. “The brochure was titled, ‘Who Needs a Computer Anyway’ and interspersed Groening’s Life in Hell style illustrations with standard information on Apple’s Mac computers.”
Edwards reports, “However, Groening also did other artwork for Apple. Before his brochure, he created a poster titled, ‘Networking in Hell,’ which was also based around his Life in Hell characters. The poster is rather amusing… [also] he did a poster titled, ‘Bongo’s Dream Dorm.’ The poster was a very densely illustrated vision of a cartoon dorm, which included the Apple tagline, ‘Macintosh. Part of every students wildest dreams.'”
Read more – and see the posters – in the full article here.
[Attribution: The Loop via Twitter]
Oh man…I had that dream dorm poster on my dorm wall! Wonder what ever happened to it.
I remember that brochure – had a chance to read it in the day, but it was borrowed.
I have a ton of that stuff including at least one if not more mint copies of Who Needs a Computer Anyway.
I didn’t collect it for later resale, I collected it because Apple’s advertising and collateral paper materials were spectacular back then and it’s all great stuff. The early HyperCard stuff is incredible. I also have a mint Apple rainbow baseball hat… All the early BYTE magazines including everything about Lisa and Mac, many copies of the first issue of Macworld with Jobs in a suit, etc. All great stuff.
I gave that poster to my eleven-year old last year and it is currently hanging above his desk. That poster, along with the Jim Henson “Think Different” poster, is among my favorite Apple posters.
I think I might have that book in a box somewhere too…
While it’s before the Simpsons as a separate show, they were airing as shorts on “The Tracy Ullman Show”, starting April 19, 1987.
Seems like I saw a Simpsons cartoon before a movie at the theater years ago? Many years ago. I’d like to say somewhere in the 80s? Maybe not?