"I recently read your criticism of my family… Heaven knows we're far from perfect and, if truth be known, maybe just a wee bit short of normal, but as Dr. Seuss says, a person is a person," Mrs Simpson had written to Mrs Bush.
"Ma'am, if we're the dumbest thing you ever saw, Washington must be a good deal different than what they teach me at the current events group at the church," Mrs Simpson continued.
"I always believed in my heart that we had a great deal in common: each of us living our lives to serve an exceptional man," the letter finished.
"Dear Marge, how kind of you to write," Mrs Bush wrote, in a tender response.
"I'm glad you spoke your mind; I foolishly didn't know you had one," she said.
"I am looking at a picture of you, depicted on a plastic cup, with your blue hair filled with pink birds peeking out all over," Mrs Bush continued.
"Evidently, you and your charming family – Lisa, Homer, Bart and Maggie – are camping out. It is a nice family scene. Clearly you are setting a good example for the rest of the country."
Mrs Bush signed off with, "Please forgive a loose tongue," and added a post-script: "Homer looks like a handsome fella!"
Mrs Bush's offending remarks had originally been published in the US magazine People in 1990.
The response has been referenced in several books, but the original letter has rarely been seen in public.
Two years later after the historic exchange of letters between the fictional TV mother and the American First Lady, during his re-election campaign, President George H.W. Bush referenced the series.
Speaking at the National Religious Broadcasters' convention in Washington, D.C., Bush said: "We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons".
The Simpson family.
Photo: AP
For those whose grasp of American television history does not reach further back than the 1990s, The Waltons was a long-running series about a family in rural Virginia during the Great Depression and World War II.
The Simpsons responded to that criticism almost immediately by adding a scene to an existing episode in which the family, seated in their living room, were watching Bush's speech on television.
"Hey, we're just like The Waltons," son Bart Simpson declared. "We're praying for an end to the Depression too."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bush lost.
The series responded more fully two years later, in an episode titled Two Bad Neighbours, and credited to writer Ken Keeler.
In the episode, George H. W. Bush and Mrs Bush move into the house across the street from the Simpson family and, after George spanks Bart for destroying his memoir, George and Homer became implacable enemies.
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Michael Idato is a Senior Writer based in Los Angeles for The Sydney Morning Herald.
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