Dr. N!Godatu (the OTHER Tracey Ullman Show animated shorts) (Released)

So, this is a weird one.

You might know that The Simpsons originated as animated interstitials on the Fox variety series ‘The Tracey Ullman Show’. But you might not know that there was another series of animated shorts that more or less alternated with The Simpsons in the first season of the show. They were created by National Lampoon cartoonist MK Brown and focused on the often surreal misadventures of a therapist named Dr. Janice N!Godatu.

They’re nothing spectacular (there’s a reason why they didn’t launch a 32-year-and-counting prime time series), but they’re a pretty interesting piece of forgotten history. And I’ll admit that I got a few chuckles from them.

As The Tracey Ullman Show is extremely hard to come by these days, the Dr. N!Godatu shorts have very rarely seen the light of day. All told, six episodes of the shorts aired (they’re broken into 3 or 4 scenes each, like the early Simpsons shorts). Three episodes can be found on YouTube with a little digging but the latter three eluded me for months…

Until I somehow made contact with the world’s biggest Tracey Ullman fan. So I now have the complete collection of Dr. N!Godatu animated shorts, and they’re in surprisingly good quality.

But, yeah. PM for a link to all six. I edited them all together into a single video (runs just over 8 minutes). You’ll also see a folder with a bunch of screenshots, including some from the two additional episodes that never aired.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot, actually. It felt a bit of an imposition to get as much as I did from this guy, but he was pretty friendly and the video quality was really good. It would probably have to be the kind of thing where I buy him an external hard drive and have him mail it to me.

Definitely a possibility though. I’d love to get the Simpsons shorts in better quality/without watermarks as well. Watch this space!

(P.S., I’ve got family from Guam. It’s always cool to see someone else from there)