Synopsis
Homer, Lenny, Carl, and Barney celebrate a rare victory of the Springfield Isotopes baseball team and end up going on a drunken rampage through town. During this rampage, they vandalize Springfield Elementary School. The next morning, Chief Wiggum suspects that students committed the crime and places all of Springfield’s youth under curfew. The children respond by setting up a pirate radio show in which they reveal the embarrassing secrets of Springfield’s adults. The location from which the children send out the broadcast is soon tracked down and an argument between the children and the adults ensues. As each side is stating their case in a song, the senior citizens turn up to complain about the children and the adults and agree to raise a curfew for everyone less than seventy years old.
Review
I had fond memories of this episode from having seen it over 20 years ago, but I’ve learned that doesn’t count for much. Some of the season 10 episodes I liked back then have aged horribly, or just aren’t as funny as I thought when I was young, dumb, and ugly. Thankfully, this one might be even better than I remembered, and was an absolute delight to watch – not only on its own merits, but for the way I kept thinking to myself “I’m actually going to enjoy writing about this one.”
Like many other chapters from the book of season 101look, there just aren’t all that many good synonyms for ‘episode’ out there the first act serves mostly to introduce the A plot. But there’s more meat on the bones here than usual, and so I’m going to do a deep dive into the sports-related elements, which give us satirical shots at
- Baseball running in the family, except when it doesn’t. There’s a rich history of brothers and father/son pairings both finding success in the majors: Hank and Lloyd Waner (both in the Hall of Fame), Bobby and Barry Bonds, the Ken Griffeys, and so on. In 1963, the entire outfield for the San Francisco Giants was fielded by brothers Felipe, Matty, and Jesús Alou; three starters for last year’s Toronto/Buffalo Blue Jays are sons of ballplayers (Craig Biggio, Dante Bichette, Vlad Guerrero) with those three dads combining for 20 All Star games and two entries in the Hall of Fame.
But for each of these examples, there are hundreds more where the kid either didn’t follow his dad’s footsteps2perhaps the most notable instance: Mickey Mantle’s niece Kelly – actor, drag queen, and first contestant eliminated from season 6 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. (Wikipedia uses feminine pronouns referring to Kelly; IMDB uses masculine ones. I wasn’t sure if niece or nephew is appropriate, so I guessed.) or tried like heck but never lived up to the old man. Here we get Babe Ruth IV, a pale imitation of even Babe Ruth III, whose failed bunt in the ninth inning brings deep shame upon both his team and his name. Consider this a precursor to Futurama’s Hank Aaron XXIV.
- The meat grinder nature of modern pitching. The average batter is bigger, stronger, and faster than those of previous generations, with pitchers trying desperately to keep up. Unfortunately, while swinging a club is relatively simple, there’s nothing natural about training yourself to throw a small sphere upwards of 100mph. The arms race is literal: hundreds of young men overusing their shoulders and elbows in order to pursue their profession. The result? Every year, every MLB team has a young pitcher show promise, only to succumb to one of a dozen horrific injuries. Inevitably, if also depressingly, these players and their lengthy rehabs are instantly forgotten. Anyway, this is all a long way of explaining why the following five-second gag cuts so deep for baseball fans: the suffering, and the near total indifference to it once he leaves the field.
- Bandwagon fans. There are many kinds of bandwagoning, of course. For some people it means picking the most popular teams and riding their coattails. It’s one thing for a Masshole to root for the Patriots, as it can be excused by geography. But if that person also cheers for Alabama football, they’re a bandwagon fan.3Hi Allison!
But that’s not the kind of bandwagon fan Homer is. He’s the kind that loathes his team when they’re down – can’t get enough of badmouthing them, can’t be bothered to pay attention to them – but loves them when they’re successful. They’re the kind of fans that serious sports fans hate the most, because that’s not how you’re supposed to do it. You’re supposed to support your team even when they obviously stink.4My football team has lost 46 of its 64 games over the last four seasons, but I’m still on board. Even my brother has been like “damn, you’re really good at rationalizing how bad they are, and at writing fantastic scenarios in which they become successful again soon despite all the evidence indicating they won’t.” That’s a direct quote, by the way. For Homer to disown them, only to pretend to be a die-hard supporter when he finds out they’re in the title game, is about as despicable as it gets.
- Last but not least, the time-honored tradition of celebrating your home town team’s success by completely trashing your home town. The practice goes back at least as far as 1984, when overjoyed Detroit Tigers fans destroyed property, flipped cabs, and set a Detroit police car on fire. The aftermath: one death and 80 reported injuries.
Six years later, a riot inspired by a Detroit Pistons title led to eight deaths, 124 injuries, and 170 arrests, in what is perhaps the pinnacle in sports joy crime sprees. It’s not uniquely an American pastime either – Parisians battled the police in the hours following Les Bleus’ 2018 World Cup win, and Vancouver has seen civil unrest following the Canucks’ Stanley Cup appearances in 1994 and 2011.5Of course, the Canucks actually lost both those Cups, so the fans weren’t celebrating. Maybe they were just really mad about the officiating? Leave it to our northern neighbors to have a perfectly good hockey riot for the wrong reasons. By comparison, trashing an elementary school seems pretty tame.
In short, Homer is a jerkass here. What makes it work is that it’s not about Homer – it’s a portrait of the worst kinds of sports fans, the ones that make the headlines and make other, more reasonable and cool-headed fans look bad. Homer leaving his father for dead didn’t tell us anything about ourselves or our society; this does, so it works in a way that much of season 10 hasn’t.
I could write up a little more about the rest of the episode – the way the town assumes all vandalism is perpetrated by those darn kids, the Village of the Damned parody, the blockbuster musical number at the end as borrowed lovingly from Bye Bye Birdie …
But I’ve written too much already, and my books and video games aren’t going to consume themselves. And anyway, I have to leave something for you to discuss in the comments. So let’s jump straight to the quotes:
- Marge: “They didn’t resort to stealing bases like the other team, so it’s kind of a moral victory.”
- Homer: “We did it, baby! Woo! Woo!”
Kent: “The inspiring words of a fan who’ll always root, root, root for the home team. Even if they lose this game.”
Homer: “They lost? Those losers!”
Kent: “No, no, no. The game’s not over.”
Homer: “Woo! Not over! Woo!”
Kent: “There you have it – ‘Woo.'”
- Kent: “Any suspects, Chief?”
Wiggum: “None. That’s why we’re jumping to the conclusion that this was the work of no-good punk kids.”
- Homer: “If kids are so innocent, why is everything bad named after them? Acting childish, kidnapping, child abuse …”
Bart: “What about adultery?”
Homer: “Not until you’re older, son.”
- Millhouse: “We gotta spread this stuff around. Let’s put it on the lnternet!
Bart: “No, we have to reach people whose opinions actually matter.”
- Frink: “I have captured the signal and am presently triangulating the vectors and compressing the data down in order to express it as a function of my hand.”
Frink points
Frink: “They’re over there!”
Iconic Moments
Next Week
We get another sports episode, kind of, in Sunday, Cruddy Sunday. If memory serves … ehh.