First off, make a note of that title. This short is called "Bart and Dad Eat Dinner", not "Bart and Homer Eat Dinner". You might recall a moment in the episode "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" where Troy McClure quips that the Simpsons children "were no match for Captain Wacky...later renamed Homer" and, well, there is a small kernel of truth in that bizarre statement. Homer was, sorry to report, never officially named Captain Wacky. But he wasn't always officially Homer. While creator Matt Groening had always envisioned the character as being named as such (Homer was named in honour of Groening's own father), Homer's name was not officially revealed to the viewer until quite late on in the Ullman shorts' run, when he was reprimanded by his own father, Abe Simpson (then just officially "Grampa Simpson"), in the 30th short, "Shut Up, Simpsons". Prior to that, he was just plain old "Dad" or, on more formal occasions, "Mr Simpson". According to Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, authors of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, (who aren't always the most reliable source when it comes to Simpsons information, mind), Marge was never actually addressed as "Marge" at any point throughout the Ullman shorts. I haven't gone through the shorts with a fine enough comb to say for sure if that's true, but for now I'm happy to take their word for it.
That neither Homer or Marge were afforded proper names for the better part of the Ullman shorts' run is indicative of just how heavily focused they were on the younger Simpsons' perspective. In fact, reviewing the full list of Ullman shorts, it stands out to me that there are no shorts focusing exclusively on Marge and Homer. The closest we got were shorts such as "Dinnertime", which centred on the relationship dynamics between the adult Simpsons, but always within the context of the precedents they were setting for their offspring. A good chuck of the shorts thrived on the disconnect between the Simpsons generations, with Bart, Lisa and Maggie routinely challenging and questioning Homer and Marge's adult authority. In particular, there were numerous shorts examining the relationship Bart and Homer, as no other pairing illustrated this generational tension more adroitly (partly because Lisa's character was still something of a blank slate at this point, so there wasn't quite so much to be milked from her own individual regard for her elders, and Maggie's muteness made her rather more limited). In the Ullman shorts, Homer was constantly striving to be a strong male role model to his son, while Bart, smart enough to see through his father's buffoonery, responded with a yearning for rebellion but also unease, as if aware that he was staring at his potential future self and where he might be headed if he were to emulate Homer's shaky example. "Bart and Dad Make Dinner" explores this unease, using the relatively simple scenario of Bart being made to spend an entire evening at the mercy of his father's lack of sophistication.
Here, we see what happens when Marge isn't around and care giving responsibilities fall exclusively to Homer. With Marge and the girls having disappeared to the ballet for the evening, it's up to Homer to prepare dinner for Bart and himself. Alas, he clearly does not have the skills to recreate the full dining experience seen in "Dinnertime", so dinner a la Homer consists of setting up the TV tables and selecting from two varieties of pre-prepared meals - fish nuggets and pork-aroni - which Homer has the bright idea to combine into a single unpalatable mess (in fairness, it doesn't look any less unappetising than the unidentified purple mush prepared by Marge in "Dinnertime", but I could buy that that was at least halfway nutritious). His dubious culinary practices aside, Homer does do a fairly competent job in Marge's absence, telling us that, when it came to upholding basic household routines, he wasn't a complete lost cause at this stage in his character's lifetime - compare this to the Season 8 episode "Bart After Dark" from the series proper, in which Bart and Homer had the house to themselves and, in lieu of brushing his teeth, Homer had Bart rinse his mouth out with soda, and you'll see just how drastically he had degenerated over the course of nine years.
"Bart and Dad Eat Dinner" might also contain one of our earliest hints of Lisa's intellectual mettle, given that she's chosen to attend the ballet with Marge over roughhousing it with the boys. Then again, maybe this a simple gender divide, with ballet being touted as the kind of stereotypically feminine activity that only the Simpson women would be likely to vacate the house for (as Patty Bouvier once said of ballet, "That's girls' stuff!"). All the same, there's a definite tension in this short between high and low culture, aptly illustrated by the prospect of an evening spent either watching ballet or downing unappealing TV dinners. Bart, reluctant to follow his father down the rabbit hole of junk culture, realises too late that he made the wrong decision in passing up an evening of ballet and is left to ponder the degenerative effects of a ready meal diet, observing that Homer's brutish behaviours appear more canine than human.
Of course, one of the greatest strengths of The Simpsons was in how it deftly revealed the underlying unity that kept this rowdy pack of feral suburbanites afloat, and the short does end on a moment of connection between Bart and Homer. Marge returns home after a divine evening of ballet to find both Simpsons males zoned out on the couch. While their comatose murmurings betray vastly different perspectives on the overall pleasurableness of an evening spent in one another's company, our final image is one of affinity, with the mutually exhausted Bart and Homer lying and snoring in perfect harmony, each as artlessly oblivious as the other. Bart is truly his father's son, whether he's universally thankful for that fact or not.
Finally, eagle-eyed viewers might have picked up on a surreal background gag involving the boat painting hanging above the Simpsons' couch. Pay close attention at the start of the short and you'll notice that depicts not the serenely drifting vessel familiar to viewers of the series proper, but a scene of impending disaster, with an iceberg lying directly in the boat's path. In the third act, we can see that the boat has struck the iceberg and is now going down in a terrible smoking wreck with god knows how many souls on board. Finally, in the fourth act, the painting shows a bleak image, with the ship completely submerged and only a few isolated pieces of debris remaining atop the ocean. This is exactly the kind of outlandish japery that The Simpsons would shift away from as it developed and cemented its identity as a more realism-orientated cartoon, but here it taps in perfectly to the stranger, more perverse vein evident in the earlier Ullman shorts. Perhaps the morbid visual motif of a boat slowly succumbing to the savagery of the ocean was the shorts' way of underscoring the off-kilter nature of the Simpsons' first outings, back when their freakishness was still an integral component of the family's aesthetic. In the series proper, any surreal tinkering with the background boat would be a tactic reserved strictly for Halloween episodes.
(Note: A similar gag actually occurred in "Dinner Time" too, with a completely different scenario of death and destruction - there, an ostensibly picturesque mountain was transformed into an erupting volcano over the course of the short. Despite the roughness of the animation, it blatantly paid to have an eye for detail with these shorts).
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