Okay, well, I have to tell you just initially how I even got involved.

In early 1989, Nancy Overfield was the head of marketing and special events for the children's division of J.C. Penny.

So I went to Toy Fair in New York. I was young and ignorant. So I went into the toy building, got in the elevator.

Oh my gosh.

It's like how many hundreds of people can fit in one elevator at one time.

After it had stopped, like at about 10 floors, on one floor, the doors opened, and

his costume character's hand came into the elevator to stop it right as it was almost closing,

which annoyed all of us. And then the hand came back and the door closed. I looked at the guy next to me

and I said, what in the world was that? And he said, oh, it's a character called Bart Simpson.

Bart and his family were still relatively unknown.

They had only appeared in short segments on the Tracy Olman Show, a critically acclaimed

but low-rated variety series airing on the then-new Fox Network.

But 10 months after Nancy Overfield saw Bart in an elevator, the Simpsons premiered in prime time, and the spiky-haired smart-mouthed Bart was suddenly everywhere. Hey, Mr. Burns, did you get that letter I sent? Letter, I don't recall any letter. That's because I forgot to stamp it. The Simpsons was Fox's first real hit, a rating smash, but it was also a merchandising machine.

Do you have a sense of, like, how much was The Simpsons stuff selling?

Oh, my gosh.

During its heyday, I mean, it's millions and millions of dollars.

It was the biggest, you know, thing out there.

In 1990, an estimated 15 million Bart T-shirts were sold, shirts that had Bart saying things like,

Don't have a cow man, and I'm Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you? One in particular showed Bart

pointing a slingshot at whoever was looking at the T-shirt while he was standing underneath

the word underachiever in quotes saying,

and proud of it, man.

...