Alright, so.

If you are a human being living on planet earth, chances are you've watched a bit of The Simpsons. And if you haven't, get off this website and go do it immediately. Thanks. The show is a staple of most of our childhoods, adulthoods, and just our hoods in general, really. But even after all these years of stunning satirical humour and eventual less-funny and intelligent bits, there is still one question left lingering in our collective psyche. 'Why are they yellow, though?' Well, we finally have the answer. The Simpsons writer, Mike Reiss, wrote a book recently and he shared a lot of the show's secrets that he probably shouldn't have shared but he's clearly a ledge who don't play by no rules so whatever. According to him, the decision to make the family yellow wasn't exactly a well-considered one. Rather, one of the artists simply thought she'd draw them that way because it made more sense considering most of the main characters don't have hairlines. He said:

“Bart, Lisa and Maggie have no hairlines — there’s no line that separates their skin from their hair points. So the animators chose yellow — it’s kinda skin, kinda hair.”

Interesting. And also a bit sick because if Lisa and Bart just have a load of spiky skin sticking up from their faces that is absolutely nasty. Nobody wants that. Reiss also revealed a lot of other vaguely interesting things in his book too, like why the town is called Springfield (plagiarism), whether they actually got Michael Jackson's voice for that episode (they did for a bit, but not all of it), and why The Simpson's title emerges from behind a cloud (because they're Simps. Get it?). Lots to think about. Lots to digest.