Internet History: Simpsons Icons by Jeanette Foshee

In the early 90s, Jeanette Foshee began creating these Simpsons themed icons and shared them online for other people to use. She took requests, and referenced images from the show and promotional materials- hard to do in the years before video streaming was possible and limited home releases were confined to VHS. Screenshots of episodes were a genuinely exciting feature on people's websites, because they were such a novelty. The icons were bundled into icon packs for Mac, but were also shared online as windows .ico and .ani files, and quickly became very popular. So popular, in fact, that in 1995 Jeanette was hit with a super aggressive Cease and Decist notice from Fox warning her that if she didn't remove all of the icons and give names and addresses of anyone who might have ever downloaded them, she'd be liable for up to $100,000 fines per violation.

There are archived versions of this letter online, if you're interested. It was a huge deal at the time. People were pissed.

Just to be clear, Jeanette never made a single penny from making these icons, they were created with love and passion for the series and distributed for free to fans of the show so that they could customise their desktops and websites. To people who weren't around at the time this might seem like an insane thing for a company to do in response to fan art, but the early days of the internet were kind of a wild west as far as navigating copyright and fandom went, and many companies would sue first, ask questions later. Fanfiction, fanart, fan sites--none of them were safe. It's why you might see disclaimers on old webshrines ("I don't own this, I'm just a fan! All rights belong to XYZ, pls don't sue!") because it was a very real risk that someone from the legal department of your favourite show might send you a threatening letter at any given moment. The landscape of fandom has changed significantly in the last few decades, thankfully, and most companies have realised that it harms them more than helps them to aggresssively protect their copyright and trademarks in this way.

Unfortunately, threats like this made it common for entire websites to disappear overnight, and unless they were archived by webcrawlers or fans, the content they hosted is now lost forever. That's why I think it's super important to preserve and showcase these icons with context.

Jeanette passed away in 2015 at the age of 53. Her google site is archived here, which as far as I know is the last website she actively maintained before her death. There are .sea file downloads for her icon packs for macintosh, which I'll hopefully extract in the near future when my imac stops complaining, but until then, here's everything I've been able to scrape from the net in .png form. I'm missing some, but currently there are 888 on this page (some repeat, the names and categories are exactly how I found them, unaltered). There are backups on archive.org of some of her icons in windows compatile format too. If you use these icons on your website, please credit Jeanette, and keep her memory alive.