Matt Groening was in a bind. Here was this national television network offering him a chance to put his popular newspaper strip “Life in Hell” in animated form in front of a national audience of millions; but they insisted on owning all the rights to it. Groening chose to go with option C – make a completely new series, with original characters, and develop that for Fox. Thus The Simpsons were born.

On this day, January 14, 1990, The Simpsons television series began running on the Fox channel. It was actually the second full-length Simpsons episode to run – a standalone Christmas special appeared December 17th the previous year.

The Simpsons’ influence on popular culture cannot be underestimated. Show-coined words like “D’oh” and “Aya Caramba” entered the lexicon, while phrases, such as a character dubbing the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” became a staple of political discussion around the time of the second Iraq war. Ten years to the day of their premiere the Simpsons family joined notable animated luminaries like Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.