Monday, Oct 7, 2019 • 48min
Bart Simpson Mania
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In the early 1990's Bart Simpson became a breakout star while also becoming a target in the culture war, culminating in president George HW Bush speaking out against The Simpsons as an example of a degenerate American family. Today on Decoder Ring we try and figure out why the H-E double hockey sticks people were so worked up about Bart Simpson by examining the great underachiever t-shirt controversy, bootleg Bart merchandise, the rise of the religious right, and more.
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Talking about
Speakers
(13)
Willa Paskin
Nancy Overfield
Philip Cunningham
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Transcript
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Nancy Overfield
00:05
Okay well I have to tell you just initially how I even got involved.
Share
Willa Paskin
00:09
In early 1989 Nancy Overfield was the head of marketing and special events for the children's division of
J. C. Penney
. So I went to toy fair in New York. I was young and ignorant.Share
Nancy Overfield
00:19
So I went into the toy building, got in the elevator. Oh my gosh, it's like, how many hundreds of people can sit in one elevator at one time! After it stopped about 10 floors, on one floor, the doors opened, and it's a custom character's hand that 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
Bart Simpson
"Share
Willa Paskin
00:53
Bart
and his family were still relatively unknown. They'd only appeared in short segments on The Tracey Ullman 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 mouth Bart
was suddenly everywhere.Share
01:24
The
Simpsons
was Fox's
first real hit, a ratings smash. But it was also a merchandising machine.Share
01:30
Do you have a sense of like how much was
The
Simpsons
stuff selling?Share
Nancy Overfield
01:35
Oh my gosh. During its heyday? I mean millions and millions of dollars. It was the biggest thing out there.
Share
Willa Paskin
01:43
In 1990, an estimated 15 million
Bart
t shirts were sold. Shirts that had Bart
saying things like, "I don't have a cow man", and "I'm Bart Simpson
, who the hell are you?". One in particular showed Bart
pointing a slingshot and whoever was looking at the T-shirt while he was standing underneath the word "underachiever" in quotes saying, "and proud of it, man."Share
Nancy Overfield
02:03
Things are going along fine. Then they come out with an underachiever teacher, and it was amazing. I really hadn't fully experienced the rest of customers.
Share
Willa Paskin
02:15
Were you getting letters like what was...
Share
Nancy Overfield
02:17
Letters? Oh my gosh! People tore up credit cards. This grandmother called me to tell me that I was killing kids. She explained to me that kids are going to do what
Bart Simpson
says and if he isn't underachiever, and he is sending that message, they of course are not going to try in school, which means they won't graduate, which means they're going to turn to drugs, and then they were well overdosed, and they will die.Share
Willa Paskin
02:47
Wow.
Share
Nancy Overfield
02:49
Okay. They were outraged that we would bring in something that sent a negative message to kids.
Share
Willa Paskin
03:06
This is Decoder Ring, a show about cracking cultural mysteries. I'm Willa Paskin. Every month we take on a cultural question habit or idea, crack it open and try to figure out what it means and why it matters.
Share
03:20
In 1989 America came down with
Bart
fever. Way more obnoxious, badly behaved and oddly, given that he was a four fingered cartoon, more realistic than the smart Alex of sitcoms past. Bart
went over the youth of this nation, me included. I was in elementary school when The
Simpsons
premiered, and I desperately wanted a Bart
shirt. Not because I loved the show so much, I didn't even watch it because he was just that cool.Share
03:46
But not everybody liked
Bart
or The
Simpsons
provocative attitude quite so much. It wasn't just JC Penney
that was getting phone calls from aggrieved grandmothers. The
Simpsons
Bart
and his T-shirts briefly became a chip in the culture wars band in some schools and department stores, and held up by the most powerful people in the country as an example of America gone wrong.Share
04:07
30 years later getting upset about
Bart Simpson
, his fresh language, lackluster attitude and minor rebellions seems impossibly quaint. I mean, if only we were fighting about whether it was appropriate to print H. E. double hockey sticks on a kid's t shirt, but what's not so quaint is what's lurking underneath the Bart
panic. A set of ideas anxieties, in this case about Pop Culture's prescriptive powers, its ability to shape the world just by showing it to us.Share
04:35
So today on Decoder Ring a surprisingly complicated history. who was afraid of
Bart Simpson
?Share
George H. W. Bush
04:55
We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like
The Walton's
and a lot less like The
Simpsons
.Share
Willa Paskin
05:05
That's President
George H. W. Bush
speaking at a rally at the 1992 Republican National Convention, months before he would lose his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton
. At the time of this speech, The
Simpsons
had been on the air for three years, averaging over 20 million viewers a week.Share
05:26
It was
Fox's
first top 10 show, its first top 30 show, even if it had been on the cover of Newsweek time and Rolling Stone
and already won a pair of Emmys.
Bart
, brilliantly voiced by Nancy Cartwright
was the breakout star, and he sold countless pieces of official and bootleg merchandise, not just shorts but toothpaste pinball machines, snow boots, butterfingers and talking Bart
dolls.Share
05:48
The show was such a sensation that a 1990 record called
The
Simpsons
Sing The Blues
, went to number three on the billboard charts. Led by Do The Bartman
, which featured backup vocals by Michael Jackson
. A fan of the show.Share
06:15
Though,
The
Simpsons
was boundary pushing and irreverent.Share
06:26
It was also a show about an intact, churchgoing nuclear family where the father works. The mom stays at home and everyone eats dinner together. I mean, they are trying to get their kids to say Grace, but here was the president of
the United States
attacking it. Anyway, as an example of a degraded and degrading American family.Share
06:46
Bush
wasn't the only one. William J Bennett, the national drug czar, had walked into a rehab center, seen a poster of The
Simpsons
and ad-libbed, "You guys aren't watching The
Simpsons
, are you? That's not going to help you." First Lady Barbara
Bush
had called the show the dumbest thing I've ever seen.Share
07:01
Their stance has softened after
Marge Simpson
had written her a letter in response. Principles all over the country had banned Bart Simpson
shirts for containing the word "hell" and potentially making underachieverness aspirational.Share
07:13
This time, it is Bart's wisecracking t shirts that are in trouble. This one has been expelled from some schools for its profanity. Another, underachiever and proud of it, has been kicked out of classes from orange, California to Fremont,
Ohio.
Reaction to the T-shirt Tempest is mixed.Share
07:31
It's just a cartoon, and we won't act like
Bart Simpson
.Share
07:34
If you're an underachiever, you shouldn't be proud of it.
Share
Willa Paskin
07:38
And there were plenty of parents, not conservative ones, even. Who are a little wary of
Bart's
fresh mouth in my recollection and my mother does not corroborate this version of events by the way, I wasn't allowed to get the bar t shirt I wanted where he says "eat my shorts" and had to settle very disappointingly for one where he says "cowabunga dude" while hanging 10. I rarely wore it.Share
08:00
Bush
and insulting The
Simpsons
was drawing on all of this. The way the show had become in certain circles. A short end for how popular culture was leading the American family astray. To begin to understand how The
Simpsons
,
now an American institution could ever have seemed like such an alarmingly bad influence, I'm gonna first look at the network it was airing on.Share
08:22
Because the story of
The
Simpsons
is also the story of Fox
. The Fox
Broadcasting company, co-founded by Rupert Murdoch
and Barry Diller
began airing its first prime time series on Sunday nights in april of 1987 at the time. ABC,
CBS
and NBC
dominated television.Share
08:42
And previous attempts to create a 4th network had failed.
Fox
at the start was operating at a deficit. It was only available in 80% of homes. It was never going to be able to beat the big three networks, who are richer and more established at their own game. So it decided to counter-program, long before Cable
and Netflix
. Fox
started out by trying to
find a niche.Share
Jonathan Gray
09:03
Fox, when they launched, had a pretty bold, interesting strategy of thinking that they're not going to be a big umbrella. They're going to go after a very specific demographic.
Share
Willa Paskin
09:13
Jonathan Gray is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University Of Wisconsin, Madison. And he wrote a book about
The
Simpsons
.
Share
Jonathan Gray
09:20
Rather than just sort of gently going after that demographic, they're going to actively exclude and sort of capitalize upon the exclusion of other demographics
Share
Willa Paskin
09:29
And what demographic is that Like?
Share
Jonathan Gray
09:31
Older, boring people. I mean that's where they're excluding and who they're going after sort of younger folk who get it, who are sick and tired of the big tent, gentle humor, who wants some edge, and it's really going after that group. And what that means is it's sending clear messages that it just doesn't care about a parental group.
Share
Willa Paskin
09:55
Disdain for the parental group was very much on display in
Fox's
first to prime-time series, one of which was the raunchy comedy Married With Children
, which thumbed its nose like crazy at the uplifting family sitcom.Share
10:07
The other was
The Tracey Ullman Show
, which featured short interstitial videos of a googly eyed jerk lee drawn family called The
Simpsons
.Share
10:14
Well, goodnight Son.
Share
10:16
Dad, what is the mind, Is it just a system of impulses or is it something tangible?
Share
Willa Paskin
10:26
Given how famous the characters are, and how widely it's style has been adopted, it's really hard to understand how new
The
Simpsons
was when it first premiered. But when it arrived, it was unprecedented. For one thing, it was a cartoon. The last cartoon to air on Prime-time had been The Flintstones
from 1960 to 1966, which needless to say I had a very different vibe.Share
10:50
The
Simpsons
in contrast was edgy, adult referential satirical, anti-earnest, and it assumed that people watching at home could keep up. Hari Kondabolu
is a comedian, and he grew up loving The
Simpsons
.Share
Hari Kondabolu
11:02
There was one thing where episode where I remember like
Lisa
was talking about Pablo Neruda
.Share
11:07
Pablo Neruda
said laughter is the language of the soul.Share
11:11
I am familiar with the works of
Pablo Neruda.
Share
Hari Kondabolu
11:13
And it's just stuff like that, like it was just so you felt cool kind of being on the inside, even if you didn't know the references, you wanted to know the references. It made it okay to have an inside joke, it made you want to learn more.
Share
Willa Paskin
11:28
The show was also uniquely disrespectful. On
The
Simpsons
, the powers that be, could be stupid or worse, it was skeptical of everything. Dads, principals, bosses, religion. And the TV sitcom itself.Share
11:40
But I've stumbled upon the most delicious British sitcom.
Share
11:45
Do shut up.
Share
11:46
It's about a hard drinking yet loving family of soccer hooligans. If they're not having a go with a bird, they're having a row with a wanker.
Share
Bill Oakley
11:55
There was nothing like that on primetime TV or late night TV.
Share
Willa Paskin
11:58
Bill Oakley
, a comedy writer, became a staff writer on The
Simpsons
in his third season and was co showrunner of season seven and eight.Share
Bill Oakley
12:04
This is what is very hard to remember. Most sitcoms were extremely corny and formulaic television was it was not caring at all, and it was all about really formulating things about like respecting, you know, like respecting your father and the family and not using profanity and there was an immense number of rules.
Share
Willa Paskin
12:23
The 1980s, generally speaking, was a time of cute tame middle class family shows full of sage grownups, adorable quipping kids and neat moral lessons. There were dozens of series like this.
Full House,
Growing Pains
, Family Matters
.Share
12:36
But the best example was the dominant sitcom of the 1980s.
The
Cosby
Show
. Starring the affluent, genteel loving African American family The Huxtables.Share
12:45
Instead of acting disappointed because I'm not like you, maybe you can just accept who I am and love me anyway. Because I'm your son.
Share
Willa Paskin
12:59
The
Simpsons
along with Married With Children
and Roseanne
which began in 1988 on Abc
was a direct challenge to the idealized family show.Share
13:08
I think you'll find that this will win you the respect of your family and friends respect.
Share
13:13
Respect! No!
Share
Willa Paskin
13:14
The
Simpsons
,
for one thing, were not aspirational at all. In the fourth ever episode of the show, Doofy Dad Homer
becomes so upset about his family's embarrassing bad behavior that he brings them to a therapist, the therapist, after trying everything including having the family administer electric shocks to each other, gives up, he can't fix them. They are unfixable, he eventually refunds their money, which of course they use to buy a new TV.Share
13:39
Excuse me, dear, shouldn't we be heading down to the pawn shop to get our TV back?
Share
13:44
That piece of junk. Forget it, we're going to get a new TV. 21-inch screen, realistic...
Share
Willa Paskin
13:52
The conflict between
The
Simpsons
and The
Cosby
Show
was made explicit at the start of The
Simpsons
second season, when Fox
moved the show, so it would air at exactly the same time as Cosby
where it bested it in the overnight ratings.Share
14:05
The story was a very big deal at the time. Like such a big deal. I remember talking about it with my classmates, and that's not because we were ratings obsessed nine-year-olds, but because it was everywhere, a business story. But one freighted with meaning.
Share
Mark Anthony Neal
14:18
And when
The
Simpsons
finally take down The
Cosby
Show
, it was a moment folks were like it was almost like a social panic.Share
Willa Paskin
14:25
Mark Anthony Neal
is a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke.Share
Mark Anthony Neal
14:29
We gave you this wholesome version of American family, and it was multicultural and diverse, and instead you know we get
Bart Simpson
.Share
Willa Paskin
14:39
In the face off between
The
Simpsons
and The Cosbys
. Neither was understood entirely as a fiction. There were symbols and stand-ins for the American family, and here was the dysfunctional, rude, struggling Simpsons
. A thorn in the side of phony American idealism toppling The Huxtables the pinnacle of highly functional domesticity. Theo could eat Bart's
shorts.Share
15:01
George H. W. Bush's
remarks about The
Simpsons
would have been a lot more current if he'd used The Huxtables instead of The Waltons
. He didn't because for a number of reasons. The Huxtables didn't conjure the nostalgic vision of the American past he was trying to ply his voters with, The Waltons
kind of did.Share
15:23
A period TV drama that aired in the 1970s.
The Waltons
was about a large close white family in Virginia in the 1930s and 40s, it did not represent exactly what Bush
wanted it to. For one thing, much of it was set during The Depression
, and The Waltons
went through lots of hard times.Share
15:40
But
Bush
was attributing to it a sunnier, 1950s-ish sensibility. The vibe you do get from the most lasting thing about the series, the sequence in which The Waltons
say goodnight to one another.Share
15:50
Good night mama. Night, Ben, Goodnight everyone, Goodnight mama, Goodnight, daddy, Good night children. Goodnight.
Share
Willa Paskin
15:57
Professor Jonathan Gray. Again.
Share
Jonathan Gray
15:59
I mean,
Bush
is really trying to go to this sort of weird nostalgia for the 50s. And I say weird because it's a nostalgia that's always kind of been based in fact upon sort of sitcoms and suggesting like believing that leave it to beaver actually is how things looked in the 50s, which they didn't.Share
Willa Paskin
16:18
So yeah, back in 1992 the President of
the United States
was saying that America's
future ought to be more like its past when the world looked a certain way. Families were still wholesome and respectful and times were, yes, great.Share
Jonathan Gray
16:32
When people talk about how the nation was great. It wasn't great for all sorts of people. And the lie that was being told to us by a lot of these sitcoms is precisely what
The
Simpsons
are making fun of. And I think that's why The
Simpsons
could be recognized as threatening because what The
Simpsons
are saying is, is not just that families don't look like this, but that they never looked like this.Share
Break
Willa Paskin
18:26
The
Simpsons
was a rebellious show on a rebellious network, challenging the way things have been done, oddly. So was its merchandise?Share
18:36
The
Simpsons
merchandising situation was not just robust, it was unheard of. There have been some kids TV shows like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
that had sold a lot of merchandise. But The
Simpsons
sold more, two different kinds of people from different places of different ages of different backgrounds, and a big chunk of that merchandise wasn't even official product.Share
Philip Cunningham
18:58
I am a child of the, you know, late eighties, early nineties, that's when I'm in high school actually.
Share
Willa Paskin
19:03
Philip Cunningham is an assistant professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University.
Share
Philip Cunningham
19:08
And I am the owner of, at that time, of several bootleg
Bart Simpson
t shirts.Share
Willa Paskin
19:13
At the height of
Bart
mania, bootleg. Bart Simpson
t shirts were everywhere. The most common of these reimagined Bart Simpson
as a person of color. Black Bart
. There were t shirts of Black Bart
with Nelson Mandela
of Air Simpson of Bart
Marley Bart
and Maggie
in front of an outline of Africa under the heading, "It's cool being black."Share
Philip Cunningham
19:32
The ones I can definitely recall is I had one that had
Bart Simpson
to sort of dressed like flavor flavor, Public Enemy
. So you know, he had the gold chain with a clock on it. I know I had this sort of roaster Bart one that was fairly popular and that's the wealthy ones I can remember, I'm sure I had more.Share
Willa Paskin
19:53
Did you have any legit like did you have any non-
Share
Philip Cunningham
19:56
Had absolutely, have absolutely no legit Simpson's none whatsoever.
Share
Willa Paskin
20:02
Black
Bart
t shirts which now sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay were so popular that Simpsons
creator Matt Groening
commented on the phenomenon. "You have to have mixed feelings when you're getting ripped off, he said, but Bart
is like santa claus, no one really knows what color he is."Share
20:16
What is it about Bart that was appealing?
Share
Philip Cunningham
20:18
For example, the flat top hairstyle for example, I mean I don't want to overstate that, you know that the hairstyle's importance, but I had a very high flat top at that time and so reading him as you know white at that time was somewhat difficult because he wasn't right, he was literally yellow.
Share
20:38
And so that was endearing, but I think also just the general sense of rebelliousness, He's involved in skateboard culture, there's no affinity towards
Hip Hop
at that time certainly, but he was into Punk
, you sort of get that again, vibe of rebelliousness and that coalescence of course with the rise of really rebellious Hip Hop
.Share
Willa Paskin
20:56
At the time, there was a huge deficit in TV representations of people of color. Black, male teens had to make do with the guys from a different world,
Theo Huxtable
and Steve Urkel.
Share
21:05
So
Black
Bart
was to some extent about scarcity, about making the best of very paltry options. But Bart
and The
Simpsons
did really seem to understand that authority could be corrupt, stupid punitive. That the system could be merciless and narrow-minded enough to label a 4th grader an underachiever, that talking back to all of that more than just being cool could be truth telling.Share
21:29
All of this. Which is why
Bart
was so threatening to the status quo in the first place, is also why Bart
looking like flava flav on a T-shirt made some sense. He also knew what time it was.Share
Philip Cunningham
21:40
And this is the one time I got suspended from school, I drew sort of
Bart Simpson
on my jeans and the Public Enemy
symbol. And so yeah, that was being rebellious at that time and he seemed to fit perfectlyShare
Willa Paskin
21:52
So you got suspended because of
Bart
and Public Enemy
?Share
Philip Cunningham
21:57
My only, my only, my only suspension ever.
Share
Willa Paskin
22:01
So you're like exactly what everyone's worried about.
Share
Philip Cunningham
22:04
Exactly. Exactly. A little social panic actually paid off. A corrupted, a poor
Ohio
industrial town boy.Share
Willa Paskin
22:12
As with
Bart
himself, there was some hand wringing about Black Bart
from within the black community. Articles about the phenomenon. All quote someone who's worried that Black Bart
like Bart
is setting a bad example, and some of the shirts it should be said look pretty offensive.Share
22:25
One of the variations of the
Bart
Marley shirts, for example, looks like a racist caricature. That wasn't true of most of the bootleg stuff, though. And Black Bart
shirts just like the official merchandise kept selling nothing ever got less cool for offending or alarming, concerned grownups, after all.Share
22:42
Fox
was of two minds about the whole thing, unofficial merchandise lost them money, but it did keep the show on the cutting edge.Share
Nancy Overfield
22:49
So it was good, and it was bad, really kept it relevant and an edgy when we couldn't be edgy.
Share
Willa Paskin
22:57
That's Nancy over the Field again. Who through her work on
The
Simpsons
with JC Penney
ended up going to Fox very early in The
Simpsons
run, where she oversaw the show's licensing.Share
Nancy Overfield
23:08
It did help add to the phenomenon.
Share
Willa Paskin
23:11
In fact,
Fox
, which was very canny about monetizing its black audience over the coming years, would program towards black audiences even more directly incorporated elements of bootleg bar into the official Bart
merch.Share
Nancy Overfield
23:23
And actually we used that very, very thing to determine what some of our big sellers were going to be, and we actually use that information. It influenced some of our design, our graphics and our markets.
Share
Willa Paskin
23:36
Black
Bart
proved that Bart
was so popular. He had slipped the bounds of TV of ownership of officially licensed merchandise, and he could belong to anyone, and that included the members of America's
Armed Forces.Share
23:50
Another popular subset of bootleg
Bart
merch was Persian Gulf Bart
.Share
23:54
The Persian Gulf War
, which started in August of 1990 and ended six months later, overlapped exactly with Bart
Mania. Bart
showed up on tanks. There were t shirts with him throttling Saddam Hussein
of him peeing on a map of Iraq of him, standing in a green gas mask saying, "go ahead Hussein, have a cow"Share
24:13
Bart's rebellious streak, His distrust of authority or tyranny was here interpreted as patriotic, jingoistic pluck, a devil may care attitude and violent streak that could be put into the service of the Usfa.
Share
24:26
Matt Groening
disliked all of this. He told reporters that Bart
was, quote, "very opposed to the war," but Persian Gulf Bart
went all the way to the top. Anyway, in february of 1991 President Bush
posed with a patriotic Bart Simpson
figurine while sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. The Bart
doll dressed in camouflage and holding an American flag had been sent to a staff sergeant working on a base in Saudi Arabia by his grandmother, who wanted to cheer him up.Share
24:52
He had passed it on to then Defense Secretary
Dick Cheney,
who had promised to bring it to the president when I came across this picture. I thought, huh, 18 months before Bush
insulted The
Simpsons
at the R. N. C.Share
25:04
He was holding in his very hands proof that
Bart
had become so popular. He could be used towards almost any political end, including the president's own. Another kind of politician would have leaned into that. Bush
did not. So why didn't Bush
make Bart
into his political ally? Why do you make him into an enemy? The answer in part is the religious right.Share
Break
Ross Haenfler
27:13
When I think of my youth as a child of the 80s, I got the sense that everything was dangerous.
Share
Willa Paskin
27:20
Ross Haenfler is a professor of sociology at Grinnell College.
Share
Ross Haenfler
27:23
Heavy Metal
was going to turn us into Satanists.
Dungeons and Dragons
was going to have us join a cult, rap music was going to spark violence, video games, we're either going to rot our brains or turn us into violent thugs.Share
27:37
And so the whole Simpson show is coming in out of this context where there's all these fears about youth and this sense that
Pop Culture
can somehow be dangerous for youth.Share
Willa Paskin
27:52
The 1980s was an anxious time. The overt chaos of the 1960s and 70s, the
Civil Rights Movement
, the Feminist Movement
, the Vietnam War
, The Anti-War Movement
, Watergate
had outwardly quieted down, and Ronald Reagan
had been elected president by promising a kind of retrenchment, a return to order, to old-fashioned American values.Share
28:11
But despite it being morning in
America
, there was still so much darkness. The AIDS crisis, the continued threat of nuclear annihilation, the Crack Epidemic
, a stagnant economy and the large scale changes happening to the structure of the American family. With the rise of no fault, divorce, working mothers and single parent households.Share
Ross Haenfler
28:30
And so there are these kind of shifts going on in the society, both culturally and economically, that just make this feel like kind of a dangerous time for kids. And so what happens then is rather than really account for these changes and somehow enact new policy and somehow Pop Culture is to blame for all the social problems that people perceive.
Share
Willa Paskin
28:56
Panicking about Pop Culture's influence on children is not new. In the 1950s, for example, a widespread fear that comic books, full of horror noir and violence, were making kids antisocial resulted in congressional hearings and the comic book industry regulating itself with a comic book code.
Share
29:14
But if stressing about Pop Culture's impact on kids happened before the 1980s, it also happened a lot in the 1980s and 90s. It was an anxiety about what was happening to our children when we weren't watching them, but they were watching or listening or playing with something else.
Share
29:29
Heavy Metal,
Prince
lyrics, Iced Tea songs, 2 Live Crew
, Married With Children
Marilyn Manson
, First-Person Shooter Games.
In the 1980s, fears about parenting were commonly expressed in terms of Latchkey Kids
. Kids who are coming home after school, letting themselves into the house and being raised by the television. The problem was uninvolved parents.Share
29:50
This is in stark contrast to know where the concern is the opposite.
Helicopter parents,
who don't give their kids any space at all. But ironically it was still easier for latchkey parents to see and comprehend whether kids were watching even if they caught it only in glimpses because it was, for one, a network TV show and, for the other, playing on a big TV that, you know, everybody could see.Share
30:10
Media habits have changed so completely. The kids can now watch screens anywhere and are often doing so alone. Whatever they're watching is probably pretty incomprehensible to the adults in their lives anyway. And however popular it is compared to network days, it's totally niche.
Share
30:25
Not all of the bouts of parental anxiety in the 1980s rose to the level of full-blown moral panics, as the
Satanic Panic
did. Some, like the one woman crusade against Married With Children
, seems sillier than others, like the congressional threat to defund the national endowment for the arts.Share
30:41
Some of these concerns were
bipartisan
, it was tipper gore, the wife of then Democratic senator Al Gore, who led the charge to get a parental advisory sticker put on albums with explicit lyrics, after she listened to Prince's
Darling Nikki
with her daughter.Share
31:03
Reinforcing a lot of this anxiety, directly motivating it in some instances or just passively aligning with it in others, was a heightened alarm about mainstream popular culture that was particular to
Evangelical Christians
who Ronald Reagan
had recently brought into the Republican fold.Share
31:19
Reagan had won the presidency in 1980 by broadening the conservative coalition to include evangelicals, aligning himself with groups like
Jerry Falwell's
moral majority and James Dobson's
Focus On The Family
. Throughout the 1980s, Focused On The Family
, which was founded by Dobson
in 1977 became, among other things, a trusted watchdog organization for Evangelical families looking for guidance about mainstream popular culture, of which the organization was extremely skeptical.Share
Alissa Wilkinson
31:48
Hollywood was this place where people were actively trying to like indoctrinate your children with all of these terrible values of like disrespect for parents and wanting to like to swear, and, you know, smoke or something like that.
Share
Willa Paskin
32:05
Alissa Wilkinson is a film critic at Vox, and she had an Evangelical
Focus On The Family
kind of upbringing.Share
Alissa Wilkinson
32:10
It would have never occurred to me to ask to watch it because I just knew instinctively that wasn't a thing we were going to do. People were worried that their kids were going to want to be like
Bart
and I think another big one, was that like Homer
is depicted as kind of slobby, you know, loser guy.Share
32:32
And I remember personally, as a child, hearing a lot about how all dads on TV were depicted as stupid and as worthless. You know, isn't that discounting all the great dads who are out there. You know don't we wish this world was more likely that beaver uh and less like
Homer
Simpson.Share
Willa Paskin
32:54
The concerns that Alyssa is describing assume that TV is both very powerful and very malignant. Instead of influencing a person in unpredictable, harmless ways, forget about positive ones. A very concrete bad outcome is assumed. Men will be disheartened by what they see on screen, kids will do what they see on screen.
Share
33:15
To go back to something I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, this is a deeply prescriptivist idea about how popular culture works. Forget whether a show is realistic, funny, clever, whether it describes the world as it is, what matters is that it can make the world over in its image.
Share
33:33
The
Simpsons
being The Simpsons
has actually addressed this exact thing. In fact, the show sometimes has a kind of jaded prescriptivist perspective itself. One of the running jokes of the series, after all is just how bad TV is for The
Simpsons
, not that anyone should do anything about it.Share
33:49
In an episode from the second season,
Marge Simpson
is inspired to protest the ultraviolent kids cartoon, Itchy And Scratchy
after a pacifier sucking Maggie
attacks Homer
with a mallet because she saw it on Itchy And Scratchy
.Share
34:01
So television is responsible. Well you won't be watching these cartoons any more ever.
Share
34:10
But mom, if you take our cartoons away, will grow up without a sense of humor and be robots.
Share
34:15
Really. What kind of robots?
Share
Willa Paskin
34:18
The fear that
Pop Culture
might inspire us to be our worst selves, in other words, is not solely a belief of evangelicals. Everyone who banned or fretted about the Bart Simpson
underachiever shirt was thinking along similar lines, but evangelicals specifically were more preoccupied with mass cultures, dangerous impact and also were of more paramount concern to the Republican Party
.Share
34:39
When
George H. W. Bush
insulted The
Simpsons
, is these voters in particular that he's trying to signal. In fact, the first time that he ever tried out The
Simpsons
line wasn't at the RNC
, it was six months earlier at the Convention Of National Religious broadcasters, a professional organization that's members included Jerry Falwell
and James Dobson's
Focus On The Family
.Share
George H. W. Bush
34:59
We need a nation closer to
The Waltons
than The
Simpsons
in America
.Share
Willa Paskin
35:06
It's totally unclear from this line. Either time he delivered it, if
Bush
has ever actually seen The
Simpsons
or The Waltons
for that matter, but it's irrelevant. The actuality of The
Simpsons
is besides the point, they were just a symbol.Share
35:19
Bush
was using to demonstrate that he also prioritized old-fashioned, father-knows-best family values. That he too understood mass culture to be reflexively perverting unless it was actively uplifting, and he was willing to take on mainstream popular culture's immoral influence because he also knew to put it in the language of the famous speech Pat Buchanan
would give at the same 1992 RNC
, that America
was engaged in a great culture war.Share
Pat Buchanan
35:45
There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of
America
.Share
Willa Paskin
35:59
Or that was the intention. Anyway. The Republican strategy of attacking symbolic
Pop Culture
targets in order to motivate the conservative Christian base didn't work. As with Bush's
vice president Dan Quayle's
near simultaneous attack on the TV character, Murphy Brown
. It made the candidates trying to signal how much they disdained popular culture look totally out of it when it came to popular culture.Share
36:22
Meanwhile,
Bush's
much younger opponent was playing the sax on Arsenio and answering questions about his undies on MTV
. A part of Pop Culture
, not someone running against it. In the battle between Bush
and The
Simpsons
. The
Simpsons
one. Bush
lost the presidential election and the argument. The Simpsons
became such a part of mainstream American culture that it was eventually embraced by everyone. Even the cultural conservatives who had once despised it.Share
36:50
The week after the
RNC
, The
Simpsons
reworked the opening of the show to respond directly to Bush's
remarks, we'll drift on the fact that The Waltons
was set during the 1930s.Share
36:59
"A lot more like
The Waltons,
and a lot less like The
Simpsons
."
Share
37:03
Hey, we're just like
The Waltons,
we're praying for an end to The Depression
too.Share
Al Jean
37:07
I actually felt he had never seen it. And it was a stupid analogy to say
Waltons
and Simpsons
because The Waltons
weren't that happy, you knowShare
Willa Paskin
37:15
Al Jean
was a member of The
Simpsons
original writing staff, he was the co-showrunner of seasons three and four and has been the showrunner since season 13. They're on season 31 now.Share
Al Jean
37:26
They were trying to score cultural points then, and now, I mean we were being called out. You know it's something that addresses us in a form that big, and you're a satirist, you're kind of cowardly if you don't at least say something funny
Share
Willa Paskin
37:41
Bush's
line, instead of opening up a new front in The
Simpsons
controversy, ended it. The show got the last word and really started to settle into establishment status. Homer and not Bart became the serious focus and the show got better, weirder and more adult. As the kids centered, Bart mania died down, so did concerns about Bart as a role modelShare
Al Jean
38:02
And I had a school my daughter attended handbook said students are not permitted to wear t shirts, E. G.
Bart Simpson
in specific. And too many years later, they were asking me for Simpson cells to raise money at the school auction. So it was a pretty quick transform where the society perceived this as a versa. But we were so popular, thank goodness that we went from the counterculture to the culture.Share
Willa Paskin
38:27
Helping matters, was a string of provocative cartoon degenerates who inadvertently buffed
Bart's
reputation starting in 1993 with a pair of mouth breathing masturbaters.Share
38:37
Well, there's something we could do. Yes, banker monkeys, no dumbass.
Share
Willa Paskin
38:43
Compared to
MTV's
Beavis And Butthead,
two team dimwits who waste their whole lives hanging at the TV. Bart
and The
Simpsons
critique of American culture was positively tame. Soon there was American family, King Of The Hill
and South Park
, especially South Park
, that further recalibrated our tolerance for provocation and that lends some credibility to the original concerns about Bart
.Share
39:04
These shows and characters wouldn't have been possible or conceivable without
Bartholomew J. Simpson
, he might not have been that bad, but what has come since has been coarser wilder, more violent. A slippery slope that hasn't reached its bottom yet.Share
39:20
Yeah, right, you better get back to school little boy.
Share
Willa Paskin
39:25
In the fullness of time though, it turns out it probably wasn't
Bart
who was The
Simpsons
most original character anyway, it took decades for everyone to catch on. But Bart
sister Lisa
was the new, challenging archetype, a smart moral feminist, a social justice warrior in a good way.Share
39:40
While
Bart
was just another variation on the bad boy.Share
39:43
Aren't the police a protective force that maintains the status quo for the wealthy elites. Don't you think we ought to attack the roots of social problems instead of jamming people into overcrowded prisons.
Share
Willa Paskin
39:53
Though,
Lisa
is the show's conscience, it was the initial Republican reaction to the show more than anything that helped frame it as specifically liberal, left wing. As the show stopped being politicized, its willingness to make fun of everything, and it's more traditional setup could shine through. Eventually, even evangelicals came around on it.Share
40:12
By 2001, there was a book called
The Gospel
According to Bart Simpson
that same year, Homer's
neighbor Ned Flanders
landed on the cover of Christianity today, with the cover line "Saint Flanders, The
Simpsons
Ned Flanders
is the most visible Evangelical too many Americans, and that's just oh golly Doakmaiklee."Share
40:31
And though it's true that in 2018,
James Dobson
could still start a parenting lectures like this.Share
James Dobson
40:37
Have you ever seen those
Bart Simpson
t shirts around the one that says "underachiever and proud of it"? in real life...Share
Willa Paskin
40:44
Focus On The Family's
Pop Culture
assessment site, plugged in, reviews the show positively. Describing it as being in some ways counter culturally old-fashioned as all of this suggests The
Simpsons
political signification has changed a lot since it first started, Over the last 30 years.Share
41:02
The
Simpsons
has stayed more or less the same, but we've moved around it. And the distance we've covered, basically describes the transformation of the Republican Party
30 years ago. The
Simpsons
was a conservative, better noir derided as a show about immoral, degenerate trashy people today.Share
41:18
That same show is embraced by conservative politicians as being about a politically incorrect yet traditional white working class family a tweet from Texas, Republican senator
Ted Cruz,
proudly claimed that all of The
Simpsons
except for Lisa
would have voted for trump.Share
41:34
This tweet was roundly mocked by
The
Simpsons
writers, who tend to be liberal leaning themselves. But as silly as it is to assign political affiliations to cartoon characters. It's true that in recent years the most sustained critique of The
Simpsons
has come not from the right, but from the left.Share
41:50
The comedian
Hari Kondabolu
, 40 minute documentary. The Problem With Apu
critiqued The
Simpsons
characterization and commitment to apu, the Indian immigrant quickie mart owner, who has been used to tease and stereotype South Asian American kids for decades. And is voiced by Hank Azaria,
a white man doing a bad Indian accent.Share
42:09
Thank you. Come again.
Share
Hari Kondabolu
42:11
I absolutely think they haven't really aged with the times, that there's one thing to be said about the characters never aging. But as a show that's supposed to be relevant, you know, that aspect of it I think is certainly lacking. I mean they used these stereotypes kind of, you know, as props for these early characters and at the time it was kind of the only place where you had a diverse world, that was the irony of it. What other place can you imagine, what other TV show had a world that diverse with so many different types of people? I think now we can talk for ourselves, people of color, women, gay people, we can talk for ourselves.
Share
Willa Paskin
42:47
The
Simpsons
writers have essentially stonewalled about apu not wanting to change anything about him and defending his presence in a meta episode about the controversy,Share
42:55
Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?
Share
Hari Kondabolu
43:03
I think it is kind of lazy, and it's stubborn, and you know, it's really kind of status quo.
Share
Willa Paskin
43:11
The
Simpsons
is the status quo. That's what happens if you stay on the air for 30 years, even as the world changes around you.Share
43:21
So when I started looking into the
Bart Simpson
panic, I was coming from a place of let's investigate a moment from not so long ago, chronologically speaking, that somehow feels like it could be from a bygone era. How can people have been truly concerned about Bart Simpson
in my lifetime? That is crazy.Share
43:40
I was thinking about it as a story about how much we've changed and it is that story, but that's not all that it is yes, getting upset about
Bart
and The
Simpsons
seems like a ludicrous overreaction now.Share
43:52
And yes,
the Republican Party
that saw the show as an enemy of family values and decorum has itself transformed so completely on questions of family values and decorum as to make hating Bart
specifically a politically illegible position. And yet so many of the anxieties and tensions and ideas animating the original upset are still with us. Just you know, 30 years more complicated.Share
44:16
30 years further down the slippery slope. So no one is getting upset about hell anymore. But debates about what kind of language conveys authenticity, and is it appropriate to use in public on television and in places where polite language was once the norm. Yeah, we're still having those fights.
Share
44:38
We aren't likely to get anxious about our kid's well-being when they watch a yellow cartoon character, we're just really anxious about what's happening to our kids when they're watching any screen at all.
Share
44:49
And the idea of prescriptive as television has more adherents than ever before because it's been fully embraced by liberals who instead of fearing that TV might change the world, hope that it will, we're positive prescriptive list instead of doomsday ones.
Share
45:02
We want TV shows to be descriptive to represent the world as it actually is in all of its diversity. But then we're committed to the idea that diversity can make the world over in its image as a less bigoted, less racist, less homophobic, more open-minded place.
Share
45:19
But if the
Bart
panic tells us anything, it's that it's very difficult to know what any cultural product is doing to any of us in the moment. 30 years later, it's pretty hard to credit the fears about The
Simpsons
. The idea that what a kid would take from something so funny and complicated was only a monkey see, monkey do kind of bad behavior.Share
45:38
It seems so much more likely that instead of making kids rebellious
Bart
was an outlet for expressing their feelings of rebellion which doesn't mean he didn't personally popularize the phrase eat my shorts or make it a little cooler to be rude to your parents as The
Simpsons,
a show that has chronicled the hundreds of ways that TV can mess people up knows as well as anyone. If Pop Culture
can do good things to us, it can do bad things to us, too. So I like to think not exactly an equal measure what she got against me.Share
46:10
She says you're a bad influence, bad influence my butt.
Share
Willa Paskin
46:17
This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin, you can find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin and if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode. You can email us at decoder ring at slate dot com If you haven't yet subscribed and radar feed in apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts and even better tell your friends.
Share
46:35
This podcast was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch who also does illustrations for every episode. Cleo Levin is our research assistant. Thanks to James Poniewozik Isaac Butler Rebecca Onion ruth graham Stephanie mankind. Derek Johnson crystal zouk Matthew D flem Bill Wyman John or William Larue Nicholas, you pains. And everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.
Share
46:58
Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.
Share
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Nancy Overfield
Willa Paskin
George H. W. Bush
Jonathan Gray
Hari Kondabolu
Bill Oakley
Mark Anthony Neal
Philip Cunningham
Ross Haenfler
Alissa Wilkinson