(Not to be confused with the licensed video game Bart's Nightmare that was released for SNES and Sega Genesis in 1992.)
I get the impression, from watching these Ullman shorts, that Groening pilfered an awful lot of cookies in his youth and developed something of a guilt complex, for it's a theme to which they seem to keep returning time and time again. (In that piece he wrote on Dennis The Menace and the failure of the 1959 series to live up to his childhood expectations for an issue of the Simpsons comics - sorry, I forget which issue precisely - I seem to recall Groening specifically stating that he wanted a show about "a kid who stole cookies. A kid I could relate to.") "Bart's Nightmare" was the last in a trilogy of shorts examining Bart's compulsion to illicitly pocket and devour any cookies he came across, following on from "The Perfect Crime" and "Shell Game", both of which concluded with Bart's nefarious antics being foiled by super sleuth Maggie. "Bart's Nightmare" provides our epic finale, in which Bart's lust for sugar rebounds on him by dragging him into the deepest, darkest pits of despair and self-loathing. I do not recall cookie-stealing being a behaviour that Bart exhibited much in the series proper, so I can only assume that Bart (or, more accurately, Groening) had it all out of his system from here.
In "Bart's Nightmare" we join our intrepid anti-hero in the aftermath of a particularly bountiful cookie raid. Bart has already gorged himself into a bloated stupor, and his sugar-addled brain is about to take him on a twisted journey down a strangely familiar rabbit hole. This is one of the more interesting Ullman shorts, visually speaking - there's a sequence where Bart is transported through a Twilight Zone-esque vortex and chastised by each member of his family in turn (as with "The Money Jar", it is the withering, accusatory gaze of Maggie that proves the most damning rebuke of all), but more resonant still is the following sequence in which Bart finds himself shrunken down and dropped into his family's kitchen, gazing up at a cookie jar that's several times larger than him. The metaphor is obvious - Bart's cookie cravings have swollen to the extent that they now threaten to overwhelm and consume him. The scenario takes a particularly terrifying turn when Bart breaks the jar and Homer is summoned into view as a dark, hulking figure advancing slowly on Bart, who has no recourse but to cower and scream, "I didn't do it!" over and over in desperation ("I didn't do it" is, of course, a phrase that would gain added significance for Bart later in life). Those with a more comprehensive knowledge of Groening's cartooning career might recognise this The Simpsons' tip of the hat to his comic strip Life in Hell, more specifically the recurring "Shadow Rabbit" running gag, in which the silhouette of adult rabbit Binky looms threateningly over his one-eared son Bongo, who has been caught in the immediate aftermath of some kind of misdemeanor, incriminatory evidence fresh at hand, and makes a feeble attempt to bluff his way out of what is blatantly an inescapable situation.
The "Shadow Rabbit" comics are a riot, but they might also be the most authentically nightmarish concept ever to have sprung from any of Groening's creations (not being a Netflix subscriber I haven't seen Disenchantment, but absolutely no one I've heard discussing the series has been talking about how scary/disturbing it is). Ordinarily, Binky is not a particularly threatening character, but here he becomes an absolute leviathan, his blackened, imposing form encapsulating everything that young children instinctively fear about adult authority. Periodically, Groening would use the gag to lampoon the ineffectual attempts of contemporary politicians to cover their hides following some humiliating fumble (the most famous example being a panel in which Bongo is squeaking out, "Mistakes were made"), but at its most effective it functions as a painful window into the raw childhood terror of being caught out and having nowhere to run - the chilling split-second between exposure and the moment when the axe comes crashing down - the high walls in the backdrop emphasising Binky's magnitude but also Bongo's immense sense of entrapment and desperation. The "Shadow Rabbit" panels are so diabolically concocted as to make one feel physical discomfort just glancing at them, and that, of course, what makes them so weirdly alluring.
The real horror of "Bart's Nightmare", for Bart, lies in the discovery that he is effectively his own worst enemy; when he finds himself in the oversized kitchen and spies the giant cookie jar above him, his visceral reaction clearly goes against everything he understands to be smart and sensible. We saw in "The Money Jar" that Bart is bad at making moral decisions because his id and super ego operate on exactly the same page, but here he's already learned by bitter experience just what a detrimental effect his cravings are having upon him. It becomes a battle of common sense versus force of habit, with the result that Bart winds up screaming at his own body as it betrays him and makes a beeline for the sugar-laden treats. He finds himself entrapped twice over, not merely by Homer's monstrous shadow but by his own insatiable compulsions as they take a hold and pull the strings on his every movement. The short ends in full Wizard of Oz fashion, with Bart awakening to find his family gathered around him, alerted by his fuddled murmurs for clemency. "I didn't do it!", of course, becomes Bart's analogue for Dorothy's "No place like home", as the mantra that enables him to reject his troubled fantasy life and find his way back to reality. Unlike Dorothy, however, Bart finds no refuge in the staid embrace of reality. His family have apparently not twigged that Bart was responsible for their supply of cookies disappearing (this presents a mild continuity problem, as Bart fell asleep with cookie crumbs all around him), for Homer makes a sincere attempt to pacify Bart by offering him the last remaining cookie. Confronted with this symbol of his own gluttony, and his of subjugation to his own biological stirrings, Bart realises, to his wide-eyed distress, that the nightmare has not dissipated, but could potentially haunt him for many impulse-driven cookie jar raids and binges to come. And he's sworn off the damned things ever since (or at least, seems less prone to swiping them).
The Simpsons would pay homage to the "Shadow Rabbit" series once again in the music video to "Do The Bartman" in 1991, during the portion of the song where Bart speaks of putting mothballs in the beef stew (yeah, well, who does that? There's a whimsical jape and there's just plain stupidity, Bart). Here, both Homer and Marge get to play the role of Binky.
Oh, and one more random observation - at the start of the short, as we find Bart stretched out in his bedroom with a severely stuffed gut, we pan past a signed photo of Krusty The Clown (Krusty having made his debut earlier in this season of The Tracey Ullman Show), in which his name is actually misspelled as "Crusty". Oh well, we'd be finding out that he's illiterate shortly enough, I suppose. Then again, we all know that Krusty delegates menial tasks like signing autographs to some unfortunate personal assistant. What's their excuse, I wonder?
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