Bart Simpson Mania

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 JCPenney.

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 sit in one elevator at one time.

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

Bart and his family were still relatively unknown.

They had only appeared in short segments on The Tracy 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 primetime, and the spiky-haired, smart-mouthed Bart was suddenly everywhere.

Hey, Mr.

Burrs, did you get that letter I sent?

Letter, I don't recall any letters.

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, like, how, how much was the Simpson stuff selling?

Oh my gosh.

During its heyday, I mean, millions and millions, 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.

Things are going along fine.

Then they come out with an underachiever t-shirt.

And it was amazing.

I really hadn't fully experienced the wrath of customers.

Were you getting letters?

Like, what was that?

Oh, yes, letters.

Oh, my gosh.

People tore up credit cards.

JC Bunny 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's an 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 will overdose and they will die.

Wow.

And I'm like,

okay.

They

were outraged that we would

bring in something

that sent a negative message to kids.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willip Haskin.

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.

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 Sitcom's past, Bart won 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, but because he was just that cool.

But not everybody liked Bart or The Simpsons' provocative attitude quite so much.

It wasn't just JCPenney that was getting phone calls from aggrieved grandmothers.

The Simpsons, Bart, and his t-shirts briefly became a chit in the culture wars, banned in some schools and department stores and held up by the most powerful people in the country as an example of America gone wrong.

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 HE 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.

So today, I'm decodering a surprisingly complicated history.

Who was afraid of Bart Simpson?

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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.

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, it was Fox's first top 10 show, its first top 30 show even.

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 shirts, but toothpaste, pinball machines, snow boots, butterfingers, and talking Bart dolls.

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.

Though The Simpsons was boundary-pushing and irreverent.

Bard,

would you like to say grace?

Dear God, we pay for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.

It was also a show about an intact, church-going, nuclear family where the father works, the mom stays at home, and everyone eats dinner together.

I mean, they are trying to get their kid to say grace.

But here was a president of the United States attacking it anyway, as an example of a degraded and degrading American family.

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, though her stance had softened after Marge Simpson had written her a letter in response.

Principals all over the country had banned Bart Simpson shirts for containing the word hell and potentially making underachieverness aspirational.

This time, it is Bart's wise cracking 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.

It's just a cartoon and we won't act like Short Simpson.

If you're an underachiever you shouldn't be proud of it.

And there were plenty of parents, not conservative ones even, who were 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 Bart 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.

Bush, in Insulting The Simpsons, was drawing on all of this.

The way the show had become, in certain circles, a shorthand 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 going to first look at the network it was airing on.

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 primetime series on Sunday nights in April of 1987.

At the time, ABC, CBS, and NBC dominated television, and previous attempts to create a fourth 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.

Fox, when they launch, have a pretty bold, interesting strategy of thinking that they're not going to be a big umbrella or they're going to go after a very specific demographic.

Jonathan Gray is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he wrote a book about The Simpsons.

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.

And what demographic is that?

Like, what do you...

Oh, older, boring people.

I mean, that's who they're excluding.

And who they're going after is sort of younger folk who get it, who are sick and tired of the big tint, gentle humor, who want 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.

Disdain for the parental group was very much on display in Fox's first two primetime series, one of which was the raunchy comedy Married with Children, which thumbed its nose like crazy at the uplifting family sitcom.

The other was the Tracy Allman Show, which featured short interstitial videos of a googly-eyed, jerkily-drawn family called The Simpsons.

Well, good night, son.

Um, Dad?

Yeah?

What is the mind?

Is it just a system of impulses, or is it something tangible?

Relax.

Given how famous the characters are and how widely its 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 in primetime had been The Flintstones from 1960 to 1966, which needless to say had a very different vibe.

The Simpsons, in contrast, was edgy, adult, referential, satirical, anti-earnest, and it assumed the people watching at home could keep up.

Hari Kondabolu is a comedian, and he grew up loving The Simpsons.

There was one thing where, uh, episode where I remember like Lisa was talking about Pablo Naruto.

Pablo Naruto said laughter is the language of the soul.

I am familiar with the works of Pablo Naruto.

And it's just stuff like that.

Like it was just so you felt cool kind of being on the inside.

And 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.

The show was also uniquely disrespectful.

On The Simpsons, the powers that be could be stupid or worse.

It was skeptical of everything.

Dads, principles, bosses, religion, and the TV sitcom itself.

But I've stumbled upon the most delicious British sitcom.

Do shut up.

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.

There was nothing like that on primetime TV or late-night TV.

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.

This is what is very hard to remember.

Most sitcoms were extremely corny and formulaic.

Television was not daring at all.

And it was all about really formulaic things about like

respecting your father and the family and not using profanity.

And there were an immense number of rules.

The 1980s, generally speaking, was a time of cute, tame, middle-class family shows full of sage grown-ups, adorably quipping kids, and neat moral lessons.

There were dozens of series like this: Full House, Growing Pains, Family Matters, but the best example was the dominant sitcom of the 1980s, The Cosby Show, starring the affluent, genteel, loving African-American family, the Huxtables.

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.

The Simpsons, along with Married with Children and Roseanne, which began in 1988 on ABC, was a direct challenge to the idealized family show.

I think you'll find that this will win you the respect of your family and friends.

Respect?

No!

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.

Excuse me, dear.

Shouldn't we be heading down to the pawn shop to get our TV back?

That piece of junk?

Forget it.

We're going to get a new TV.

21-inch screen.

Realistic flesh tones.

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 that it would air at exactly the same time as Cosby, where it bested it in the overnight ratings.

This 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.

And when The Simpsons finally take down the Cosby show,

it was a moment.

Folks were like, it was almost like a social panic.

Mark Anthony Neal is a professor of African and African-American studies at Duke.

We gave you this wholesome version of American family, and it was multicultural and diverse.

And instead, you know, we get Bart Simpson.

In the face-off between The Simpsons and the Cosbys, neither was understood entirely as a fiction.

They 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.

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.

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.

But Bush was attributing to it a sunnier 1950s-ish sensibility, a vibe you do get from the most lasting thing about this series, the sequence in which the Waltons say goodnight to one another.

Good night, Mama.

Good night, Ben.

Good night, everyone.

Good night, Mama.

Good night, Daddy.

Good night, children.

Good night, Daddy.

Professor Jonathan Gray again.

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.

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.

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 not just that families don't look like this, but that they never looked like this.

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The Simpsons was a rebellious show on a rebellious network, challenging the way things have been done.

Oddly, so was its merchandise.

The Simpsons merchandising situation was not just robust, it was unheard of.

There had been some kids' TV shows, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, that had sold a lot of merchandise, but The Simpsons sold more to 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.

I am a child of the, you know, late 80s, early 90s.

That's when I'm in high school, actually.

Philip Cunningham is an assistant professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University.

And I am the owner of, at that time, of several several bootleg Bart Simpson t-shirts.

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, of Bart and Maggie in front of an outline of Africa under the heading, It's Cool Being Black.

The ones I can definitely recall is I had one that had Bart Simpson sort of dressed like Flavor Flava Public Enemy.

So, you know, he had the gold chain with the clock on it.

I know

I had the sort of Rosta Bart one that was fairly popular.

And

that's about the ones I can remember.

I'm sure I had more.

Did you have any legit, like, did you have any non- Well, I had no, absolutely, have absolutely no legit Simpsons gear whatsoever.

None whatsoever.

Black Bart t-shirts, which now sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, were so popular that Simpson 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.

What is it about Bart that was appealing?

For example, the flat top hairstyle, for example.

I mean, I don't want to overstate that, you know, that the hairstyle is important, 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.

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 coalesces, of course, with the rise of really rebellious hip-hop.

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.

So Black Bart was to some extent about scarcity, about making the best 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 fourth grader an underachiever.

That talking back to all of that, more than just being cool, could be truth-telling.

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.

This is the one time time I got suspended from school.

I drew sort of Bart Simpson on my jeans and the public enemy symbol.

And so, yeah, I was being rebellious at that time.

And he seemed to fit perfectly.

So you got suspended because of Bart and

Public Enemy corruption.

My only suspicion ever.

So you're like exactly what everyone's worried about.

Bart Simpson's making you a bad exactly.

Exactly.

A little social panic actually paid off.

He corrupted a poor Ohio industrial townboy.

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 is worried that Black Bart, like Bart, is setting a bad example.

And some of the shirts, it should be said, look pretty offensive.

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 grown-ups after all.

Fox was of two minds about the whole thing.

Unofficial merchandise lost them money, but it did keep the show on the cutting edge.

So it was good and it was bad.

It really kept it relevant and

edgy when we couldn't be edgy.

That's Nancy Overfield again, who through her work on The Simpsons with JCPenney ended up going to Fox very early in The Simpsons run, where she oversaw the show's licensing.

It did help add to the phenomenon.

In fact, Fox, which was very canny about monetizing its black audience, over the coming years, it would program towards black audiences even more directly, incorporated elements of bootleg BART into the official BART merch.

And actually, we used that very

thing to determine what some of our big sellers were going to be.

And we actually used that information.

It influenced some of our design, our graphics, and our market.

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.

Another popular subset of bootleg Bart merch was Persian Gulf Bart.

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, ahead, Hussein, have a cow.

Bart's rebellious streak, his distrust of authority, of 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 US of A.

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 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.

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 RNC, 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 did he make him into an enemy?

The answer, in part, is the religious right.

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When I think of my youth as a child of the 80s, I got the sense that everything was dangerous.

Ross Handler is a professor of sociology at Grinnell College.

You know, 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 were either going to rot our brains or turn us into violent thugs.

And so the whole Simpson show is coming out of this context where there's all these fears about youth and this sense that pop culture can somehow be dangerous for youth.

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.

But despite it being mourning 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 a rise of no-fault divorced, working mothers, and single-parent households.

And so there are these kind of shifts going on in the society, both culturally and economically, that just make this feel like a 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.

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.

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.

Heavy metal, Prince lyrics, iced tea songs, Two 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.

This is in stark contrast to now, 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 what their 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.

Media habits have changed so completely that 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.

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, seemed sillier than others, like the congressional threat to defund the National Endowment for the Arts.

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.

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.

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, Focus 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.

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 swear and you know smoke or something like that.

Alyssa Wilkinson is a film critic at Vox and she had an evangelical focus on the family kind of upbringing.

It would have never occurred to me to ask to watch it because I just knew instinctively that wasn't a thing we were gonna 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 a slobby,

you know, loser of a guy.

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 like Leave It's Beaver and less like Homer Simpson?

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.

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.

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.

In an episode from the second season, Marge Simpson is inspired to protest the ultra-violent kids cartoon Itchy and Scratchy after pacifier-sucking Maggie attacks Homer with a mallet because she saw it on Itchy and Scratchy.

So television's responsible!

Hey, we won't watch what are you doing?

Well, you won't be watching these cartoons anymore, ever.

But, Mom, if you take our cartoons away, we'll grow up without a sense of humor and be robots.

Really?

What kind of robots?

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 under a cheever shirt was thinking along similar lines.

But evangelicals, specifically, were more preoccupied with mass culture's dangerous impact and also were of more paramount concern to the Republican Party.

When George H.W.

Bush insulted The Simpsons, it's 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.

We need a nation closer to the Waltons than The Simpsons.

An America.

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 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 that 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.

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.

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.

Meanwhile, Bush's much younger opponent was playing the sacks on Arsinio 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 won.

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.

The week after the RNC, The Simpsons reworked the opening of the show to respond directly to Bush's remarks, which rift on the fact that the Waltons was set during the 1950s.

Hey, we're just like the Waltons.

We're praying for an end to the Depression, too.

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 know.

Al Gene was a member of The Simpsons' original writing staff.

He was a co-showrunner of seasons three and four, and has been the showrunner since season 13.

They're on season 31 now.

They were trying to score cultural points then and now.

I mean, we were being called out and,

you know, if something 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.

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 series' 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 model.

And I had a school my daughter attended.

The handbook said, students are not permitted to wear t-shirts, e.g., Bart Simpson in specific.

And not too many years later, they were asking me for Simpson sales to raise money at the school auction.

So

it was a pretty quick transform where the society

perceived this as subversive, but we were so popular, thank goodness that we went from the counterculture to the culture.

Helping Matters was a string of provocative cartoon degenerates who inadvertently buffed Bart's reputation, starting in 1993 with a pair of mouth-breathing masturbators.

Well, there's something we could do.

Yeah, spank our monkeys.

No, dumbass.

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.

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.

And you will respect my authority!

Yeah, right.

You better get back to school, little boy.

Oh, get your ass in jail!

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's sister Lisa was the new challenging archetype, a smart moral feminist, a social justice warrior, in a good way, while Bart was just another variation on the bad boy.

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?

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 its more traditional setup could shine through.

Eventually, even evangelicals came around on it.

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 to many Americans.

And that's just oakly-dokily.

And though it's true that in 2018, James Dobson could still start a parenting lecture like this.

Have you ever seen those Bart Simpson t-shirts around?

The one that says underachiever and proud of it?

In real life, most focus on the family's pop culture assessment site, plugged in, reviews the show positively, describing it as being, in some ways, counterculturally old-fashioned.

As all of this suggests, The Simpsons' political signification has changed a lot since it first started.

Over the last 30 years, 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 betinoir, derided as a show about immoral, degenerate, trashy people.

Today, that same show is embraced by conservative politicians as being about a politically incorrect yet traditional white working-class family.

A tweet from Texas's Republican senator Ted Cruz proudly claimed that all of The Simpsons, except for Lisa, would have voted for Trump.

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.

The comedian Hari Kondabolu's 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.

Thank you.

Come again.

I absolutely think they haven't really aged with the times.

Like, 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 use 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.

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.

Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect.

What can you do?

I think it is kind of lazy and it's stubborn.

And,

you know,

it's really kind of status quo.

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.

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.

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.

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, 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 appropriate to use in in public, on television, and in places where polite language was once the norm, yeah, we're still having those fights.

We aren't likely to get anxious about our kids' 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.

And the idea of prescriptivist 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 prescriptivists instead of doomsday ones.

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.

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.

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 in equal measure.

What's she got against me?

She says you're a bad influence.

Bad influence, my butt.

This is Decodering.

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 decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our Feed and Apple podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

And even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willoughb Haskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch, who also does illustrations for every episode.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

Thanks to James Pony Wozick, Isaac Butler, Rebecca Onion, Ruth Graham, Stephanie Mannhein, Derek Johnson, Crystal Zuk, Matthew DeFlem, Bill Wyman, John Ortved, William LaRue, Nicholas Yaines, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback along the way.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you soon.

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