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Who the hell are you?
The whole writing team were Lisas who wanted to be Bart, show writer Mike Reiss tells me.
We knew this was our breakout character.
None of us were cool kids like him, but we could all relate to the iconoclasm.
(I do have a name that people would recognize, he said.
At the time, it did indeed seem that modern life had been taken over byThe Bart Simpson Show.
A decade beforeThe Sopranos, more than one publication dubbed Bart Simpson an antihero.
Ive never gotten so much angry mail, executive producer Sam Simontold the Los AngelesTimesin 1990.
Speaking to me more recently, Reiss recalled a chastening encounter with an old classmate.
He comes up to me and says, How can you put that garbage on TV?
Ive got kids to raise, man.
And that really shocked me.
I was really mortified.
The boy was originally named after himself, but I thought that was too egotistical.
At first, Bart was unrecognizable as his future self, sporting an ill-defined cumulus cloud of hair.
kindly dont be Bart!)
Groening suggests another word to describe Bart: bored.
I think he was like a lot of kids.
Hes bored by school and, as a result, he acts out.
On the first day of first grade, he took up doodling surreptitiously in the classroom.
He was often found out anyway, with teachers confiscating, even ripping up, piles of his drawings.
The adult world looked joyless and brutish.
Groening felt anticipatory nostalgia for childhood even as he was living it.
As a kid I decided I was never going to give up being a kid.
The other kids were going to go on to become professional adults with briefcases.
Meanwhile, Groening had a love-hate relationship with television, watching it obsessively while always wishing it were better.
But the character, in Groenings view, turned out to be a wimp.
Groening yearned to someday see a show where the tornado didnt stop.
In 1990, the show made $750 million through sales of merchandise and other products.
At the height of Bartmania, as many as 1 million Bart Simpson shirts were selling a day.
Groening wasnt the only one for whom the overwhelming demand forSimpsonsmerchandise presented an attractive and lucrative opportunity.
), Air Simpson (You cant touch this!
), Rasta Bart (Dont have a cow, mon!
), Bart Simpson Public Enemy (“Fight the power!
), Punk Bart (“Anarchy in the USA!
), Skater Bart (“Eat my shorts!
), Bart Simpson Terminator (“Hasta la vista, man!
), Hip-Hop Bart (“Yo, homeboy!
), Gangsta Bart (“Dont snitch, man!
), and more.
He took me down to the Venice boardwalk to buy Simpsons go kinky reggae T-shirts.
They were five dollars.
My goal was to find a crossover Nelson Mandela, Bart Simpson T-shirt, says Groening.
(Mandela was released from prison earlier that year.)
And sure enough, it happened.
And yet, the most controversial Bart-related clothing turned out to be officially licensed.
Seemingly overnight, the underachiever shirt became the locus for the media-stoked controversy then swirling around the show.
More school bans followed across the country; JCPenney stopped stocking the shirt in kids sizes.
While his fellow producers winced at the furor, Groening was pleased to have touched a nerve.
Its always fun to tweak authority.
And yeah, the fact that those T-shirts were banned at schools made me laugh.
To Groening, the slogan was about education.
No child calls him or herself an underachiever.
Perhaps I was called an underachiever myself, says Groening.
And so the proper response is to say, I am proud of it, then.
Barbara Bush called it the dumbest thing I [have] ever seen.
Two Catholic nuns put out their own T-shirts featuring saints in the hopes they would balance out Bart.
Thats not going to help you any.
But why should we be entertained by that?
Instead, viewers were treated to the most bighearted and affecting episode yet.
In Bart Gets an F, Bart faces the prospect of repeating the fourth grade.
The little tiger tries so hard.
Why does he keep failing?
In short, hes an underachiever but doing his best.
And yet he seems to be how should I put this?
Showrunner Al Jean agreed: We never do anything for a reason.
Still, people would go on being offended or pretending to be offended.
I told them I honestly didnt mind that they had their own opinions.
I also asked if they ever watched the show all the way through.
None of them had.
I think people can relate to that.
Bartmania burned on, for a time.
But by then, the shows center of gravity had shifted from Bart to Homer.
We did all the stories we could think of with Bart in season one and two, said Reiss.
Whatever he is, hes just a 10-year-old boy.
He doesnt live that full and rich a life.
The thing about Homer is there are more consequences to him messing up, admits Groening.
Bart flunking a class is not quite as consequential as Homer causing a nuclear meltdown at work.
Reiss realized that Bartmania was receding during one of his annual visits to the L.A. County Fair.
For a couple of years, every carnival attraction, the prize was a stuffed Bart Simpson.
Then, around year three or four of the show, suddenly that was not the go-to prize.
Then a few years after that, I suddenly see, oh, its Stewie and Brian fromFamily Guy.
It was one of our best episodes.
But there was no bringing back Bartmania.
The culture got so much more coarse, says Groening.
