"Bart The General" (episode 7G05), which premiered on February 4th 1990 as part of The Simpsons' first season, marked a significant milestone in the then-fledgling series' lifespan - the first script penned by John Swartzwelder, who would go on to make more contributions to the Simpsons canon than any other member of the show's writing team. Renowned for his particularly subversive sense of humor, the proudly riotous "Bart The General" was in many respects the perfect launching pad for his Simpsons-writing career. The episode follows Bart's battle to reclaim his confidence and self-esteem when he becomes the favourite target of local bully Nelson Muntz (making his debut appearance), who takes to routinely pulverising our hero's face and stuffing him into a garbage can. Homer urges Bart to fight back using underhanded tactics, specifically by throwing mud in Nelson's eyes and pounding him square in the crotch, but this doesn't work out, as Nelson is still too great a match for Bart physically. Lisa suggests he take his consultation up a generation and visit Abe, so-called "toughest Simpson alive". Help then arrives from an unexpected source, when Abe takes Bart to meet a friend of his, a shady one-armed antique dealer named Herman, who instructs Bart to stand up to Nelson by way of a full-blown military attack, and to set about training the neighbourhood children to handle the stresses of battle, and water balloons. Bart is perturbed by the fact that Herman is blatantly mentally ill, but Abe assures him that under the circumstances that is to be seen as a tactical advantage: "General George S. Patton was a little nuts. And this guy is completely out of his mind. We can't fail!"
I get the impression that "Bart The General" is one of the more fondly-remembered installments in the show's terribly undervalued first season. This would be in spite of the fact that, of the germinal thirteen, it may well be the lightest on plot. The central problem remains an intrinsically relatable one...to a point. We all know what a thoroughly
rotten experience it is to get on the wrong side of a bully, but at the
same time, Nelson's approach to schoolyard tyranny is all about
fisticuffs and physical intimidation, which I suspect might actually
seem quite quaint to children of the digital age who've been reared with
the bugbear of cyberbullying. Nelson is depicted here as a straight-up villain, and while it's interesting seeing him played as a legitimate threat (compared to subsequent appearances, where he's still fundamentally a bully but on somewhat chummier terms with Bart), if not for the sheer gusto of Nancy Cartwright's performance I fear he'd be rather a one-dimensional antagonist. His two cronies, known formally as "the Weasels", frankly do more of the heavy-lifting on the quirkiness front (their noting that Nelson has four other beatings scheduled besides Bart and their final invoking of the Nuremberg Defense - which, in their case, pays off). Enter Abe and Herman, and the whole thing suddenly takes off in an a deliriously anarchic direction, but the build-up to that point is fairly slow, and something that really stuck out to me on my most recent viewing is how dependent this episode is on padding. The first act has not one, but two dream sequences emphasising just how terrified Bart is of Nelson, and the Patton-inspired training montage, while easily the episode's highlight, runs on for a whisker too long. And yet that concluding act really is a top notch example of The Simpsons coming into its own and finding its voice this early on in the series' lifespan, the training sequences and the climactic showdown with Nelson being particularly neat exemplars of the zesty undercurrent of youthful rebellion that characterised those nascent days when Bart, and not Homer, was seen as the show's representative. Unhurried though the build-up may be, it goes to places I'll wager no other cartoon of the time would have dared to tread.
Despite its vibrant displays of audacity, I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide authors Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood accuse the episode of being "a bit unsure of itself, particularly towards the end". Really, I think it's more that "Bart The General" comes off as being a particularly rough example of primal Simpsons due to the high number of formatting kinks that are inevitably going to seem jarring to anyone who joined the show in subsequent seasons. You can tell that the series formula was not yet set in stone and that the crew were still fiddling around with various ideas - right from the opening titles, when, in lieu of the familiar introductory sequence with chalkboard variant and couch gag, we pan directly to the Simpsons' house. This in itself isn't massively unusual, for a Season 1 episode - "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire" lacks a full opening credits sequence, as does "Life on The Fast Lane". "Bart The General", though, goes the extra mile in also yielding the most singularly strange ending of all the season - a disclaimer where Bart breaks the fourth wall to assure his viewership that, contrary to what they have just seen, war is not the answer to all of life's problems, but does not make his point with total coherence (he insists that war is "neither glamorous or fun" but also recommends that you check out the "cool gory pictures" in the books about war at your local library). It's an odd, odd note to close on as, watching it, it's not altogether clear if this entire sequence was intended as a parody of the tag-on PSAs that were endemic to cartoons in the 1980s, in which the protagonists spoke directly to their viewers in an effort to make the moral intentions of the preceding twenty minutes crystal clear ("And knowing is half the battle!"), or if it represents a sincere statement on the part of the production team with a few jokes sprinkled in - although the DVD commentary would appear to imply the latter. There, the team have a good laugh about how this disclaimer enabled them both to have their (cup)cake and eat it, but they also acknowledge that, eleven years on, they probably wouldn't make this episode at all, for fear of being misunderstood. (Irrespective, a gag I'm fairly certain they wouldn't include today is the one
recreating the "V-J Day in Times Square" photograph - even with Lisa
getting the last word and forcefully rebuking the offender, having this
kid visibly hold Lisa in a headlock while he kisses her, however
accurate to the original image, is maybe too gross and disturbing a
detail to get past.) It's also noted that they had, at one point, considered making these post-episode discussions with a library-bound Bart a regular feature, but obviously that didn't happen - possibly because, like the Happy Little Elves, their relevance dried up almost immediately, with "And knowing is half the battle!" type epilogues becoming less common among cartoons of the 1990s (although Animaniacs still had a lot of fun lampooning them with their Wheel of Morality), but then we also know that creator Matt Groening wasn't wild about instances of characters openly acknowledging their own fictionality.
Immediately after, the episode bows out with another, more subtle experiment, this time regarding the end credits - in place of the usual black void, we see a still of the Simpsons' house lit up at night. Of all the alternate presentation ideas kicked around in "Bart The General", this is the one that I most regret not becoming a fixture of the series going forward. There's something about the warm ambience of that nocturnal backdrop that I really dig; the diurnal cycles being used as a cozy signifier for narrative closure, instead of dragging us head-first into oblivion. But alas, you can't have it all.
Eight years before The Simpsons provided a more elaborate spoof by way of Season 9's "Das Bus", "Bart The General" strikes me as being a loose sort of variation on the themes of William Golding's Lord of The Flies; it too deals with the savagery children inflict on one another when prompted to take matters into their own hands - with the insinuation, implicit in the final line of Golding's novel, that what these children have done to one another here is nothing more than an extension of what adults have been doing to one another for all of human history. Bart is reluctant to take his case to Principal Skinner, the proper authority on all matters within school walls, on the grounds that it would "violate The Code of The Schoolyard" - and, to be fair, we've already seen first-hand evidence that Skinner probably isn't going to be of much help to him anyway, since he straight-up heard Nelson threatening Bart and dismissed it (note: I don't think that Skinner is being malicious, he's just too much of a square to grasp the significance of Nelson's words). We later hear a more thorough description of what The Code of The Schoolyard actually entails from Homer, who seems to feel even more strongly about it than does Bart - one of the episode's big revelatory gags being that the gap between the mentality of your average schoolchild and your average adult looking to blend their way into conformist society is practically non-existent. According to Homer, the rules that teach a boy to be a man involve not tattling, a total intolerance toward any and all differences and never saying anything unless you're absolutely positive that popular opinion is on your side (I don't know about you, but to me this all sounds highly reminiscent of the kind of 1980s-era cartoon moralising that Mark Evanier warned us about). The rules that supposedly maintain order and build character instead seem structured to engender hostility, distrust and division. Meanwhile, Marge's more pacifistic approach, which theorises that kids might not feel so inclined to wail on one another if they talked things out and established common ground, goes untested. Is she vindicated by the end of the episode? Possibly - after Herman has negotiated a peace treaty that both Bart and Nelson are willing to sign, Marge enters the room to ask them if they are "through playing war". Is this joke at Marge's expense, for interpreting the procedure (which involves tying Nelson up and basically kidnapping him) as more innocuous than it really is? Or do her words ultimately put their posturing antics into perspective, as an elaborate series of games and rituals designed to settle what is essentially nothing more than an elevated playground squabble? With the hostilities dropped, the characters mark peacetime by acknowledging the one thing they all assuredly have in common, which is to say a mutual weakness for Marge's cupcakes. It rounds the narrative off on a neatly cyclic note, given that this whole ordeal started with a dispute over the food item in question. Moral implications: perhaps we would all be better inclined toward one another if we each received an equal bite of the cupcake.
One of the internal conflicts that seems to best encapsulate the spirit of "Bart The General" (in what it suggests about the messiness and hypocrisies of the adult world) is the one that's only vaguely alluded to, and exists exclusively at the back of the story, this being the first real hint we're given of the ongoing animosity between Homer and Abe. For viewers who had followed the series over from its roots on The Tracey Ullman Show,
Abe was already something of a veteran face, being one of the few
supporting characters to have featured alongside the family in the
original crudely drawn filler. Had Season 1 followed its intended
narrative path, this would have been his first appearance in the series
proper - and, like a handful of characters casually dropped into the
action of "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", he was robbed of a far
more elaborate introductory sequence, which as a bonus enabled Abe to
act as a derisory mouthpiece for the moral guardians who decried the
enthusiastic welcome afforded the series by zeitgeist as indicative of
some kind of broader social failing. We catch Abe typing a letter to an
advertising agency, complaining about how the elderly are represented in the
media and lamenting the passing of the "good old days when television
was bland and inoffensive". It's a hilarious sequence, if somewhat contrary to Abe's
role in the story, which is to usher Bart down the path of utter anarchy. Like everyone else, Abe's personality was not set in stone at this point, and
"Bart The General" finds him in intermediate mode, with shades of both who he once was and the embittered, nonsensical coot he would shortly become. Carried over from the Ullman shorts was his tendency to
ramble on ad nauseam about his bygone years, which remained a staple of
his appearances going forward, but the Ullman shorts also depicted him
as rather a wily character who was not above his share of pranks and
mischief - as we see here, when he seizes the opportunity to launch his own personal war against Homer, pelting him with water balloons when he steps outside to complain about the children running amuck beside his front lawn. It's played as a simple role reversal gag, with Homer, who does not appear to recognise his father, berating "the tall grey-haired kid" for his misbehaviour, but embedded in this seemingly insignificant moment is a telling snapshot of the kinds of cruelties, intolerance and resentment that fuel the more "civilised" conflicts buried beneath the surface of everyday adult interaction. The Ullman short "Shut Up, Simpsons" had hinted that Homer's own shaky parenting techniques were passed down to him from Abe; "Bart The General" puts the boot on the other foot, incorporating the first explicit acknowledgement that Abe was offloaded by the family into a retirement home, with Lisa's line, "Remember the fight he put up when we put him in the home?", being discomforting for the manner in which, just for a moment, it seems to cast the Simpsons themselves in a subjugating light. As noted, Nelson is an archetypal school bully, and the episode's exploration of bullying as a subject, in consisting only of physical beatings, is fairly reductive, yet it does, ever so subtly, tip its hat to the understanding that bullying is something broader and more omnipresent, taking on many different forms, as illustrated through the sorry plight of the grizzled Simpsons patriarch. Abe advises Bart to stand up for himself, lest he have bullies picking on him his entire life, immediately before becoming a cautionary example, when Jasper (debuting as a foe, and not a friend, to Abe) steals his newspaper for dibs on the crossword puzzle. Deeper than his scuffle with Jasper, I wonder to what degree we're meant to be mindful of Abe's status as a victim of bullying as extending to his forced resignation to second floor, third dank room on the left, at the hands of a family (and a society at large) who've exercised their intolerance with abandonment? To that end, Abe's assault of Homer with the water balloons gives him a moment of triumph against the man he recognises as his own oppressor. (Homer, it's true, also has legitimate reason to see himself as the victim of this particular equation, but for now let's let Abe enjoy the moment.)
I also think of "Bart The General" as an important transitional episode for Lisa, despite her getting little to do past the first act. Coming right before "Moaning Lisa", the first proper attempt to get to grips with her middle child psyche, this was effectively the last hurrah for the bratty Lisa from the show's Ullman beginnings ("Some Enchanted Evening"'s displaced air date notwithstanding). Compared to those Ullman shorts, where she was seldom more than Bart's female echo, Lisa was by now becoming more of her own character - it's established here that, unlike Bart, she has a positive outlook on school, and likes pleasing the very authority figures that Bart strives to undermine - but her mutually rambunctious sibling rivalry with Bart had yet to fully peter out, hence their back-and-forth at the start of the episode, in which Lisa pettily refuses to share her cupcakes with her brother until she's milked her share of flattery from him. I find it hard to imagine the bluesy girl of "Moaning Lisa" - who explicitly refuses to get into disagreements over baked goods on the grounds that "a simple cupcake will bring me no pleasure" - being as flagrantly immature as she is here. Even so, "Bart The General" does a nice job of cementing the fact that Bart and Lisa, though they may not always see eye-to-eye, fundamentally do care about one another. Bart gets into his jam in the first place by defending Lisa when one of the Weasels steals and destroys the cupcakes she'd made for Miss Hoover (or Mrs Hoover, as she's referred to here). Lisa, for her part, hails Bart as a hero for standing up to Nelson and the Weasels...which doesn't prevent Bart from later airing a few passive-aggressive grievances at Lisa, by way a fantasy sequence in which he imagines her standing over his embalmed corpse at a hypothetical funeral, filled with remorse for the fact that, "If I had just given [a cupcake] to you in the first place, this whole horrible tragedy could have been avoided" (not exactly the case, as I'm sure the Weasel would have targetted her box of cupcakes anyway, but survivor's guilt and all that).
Of the duplet of dream sequences added in to fill out the first act, the second, set at Bart's funeral, is easily the juicier of the two, in part because it's so fantastically morbid. The crosses substituting for the dead Bart's eyes are a wonderfully absurd but grisly visual touch, but the sequence is even more compelling for what it potentially reveals about Bart's psyche, and his perception of his personal standing with each of the attendees (I note that these are restricted to characters who'd already appeared in this episode, which is why Skinner and Otto are the only school staff we see - I guess that this early into the series the writers were still very conscious about making sure that viewers were able to keep track of who each of the supporting cast were). Despite his overwhelming terror at what lies in store this afternoon, he still finds room to vent a few petty ill feelings, including his aforementioned potshot at Lisa, and in getting Skinner to admit that, "I guess you were right...all that homework was a waste of your time." More telling still is that Nelson does not actually appear to be the real overarching threat that's plaguing Bart throughout most of the fantasy - rather, he looks to be more troubled by the question of how many of his family and peers would actually care if he died, which seems a surprisingly weighty and existential concern for a ten-year-old. Apparently Bart feels insecure enough to suspect that his classmates would be happy simply to have the day off of school, and that Homer would be equally buoyant at the excuse to skip a day's work. In spite of Bart's doubts about how little he matters in the scheme of things, "Bart The General" contains some nice character-building moments with both parents responding to his vulnerabilities and doing their utmost to be supportive - although Swartzwelder is always careful to balance out the sentiment with a little wry subversion. The scene where Bart, having endured an emotional bruising along with his physical beating, retreats to the bathroom, to be found in the midst of a private crying session by Homer, is genuinely affecting, but the tenderness is immediately mitigated with a particularly gruesome example of Homer's parenting, when he attempts to dry Bart's tears by blasting his face with a blow dryer (and he would do the same to Lisa in a later episode). Meanwhile, those displays of vulnerability go a long way in making the t-shirt-ready pop icon Bart seem as fleshed out and human as the rest of us. I've no doubt that part of the thinking behind "Bart The General" as a story was to show
that, while Bart may be a gleeful little hell-raiser, he is at heart a good kid who'll
stick his neck out to protect those who need it. His earlier starring episode, "Bart
The Genius", had introduced Martin Prince as a possible long-term rival,
him being something of an anti-Bart (studious, respectful of
authority and impeccably groomed and presented); Nelson, by contrast, is less the anti-Bart than he is the dark extension of the kind of unruly childhood bracket into which Bart himself is frequently pigeonholed (a parallel reinforced in having them share the same voice actor). Nelson also struggles in school and is drawn to bending the rules as a result, but unlike Bart he channels his frustrations with the system into lashing out at those weaker than himself. For all of the hand-wringing that went on at the dawn of the 1990s about Bart providing a poor role model for children, this episode demonstrates that, next to Nelson, he's really not such a bad apple.
Finally, in addition to Nelson and Jasper, "Bart The General" introduces us to Herman, who wouldn't get a generous amount of starring roles in the series ahead, but whom I've long championed as one of Springfield's most underrated denizens. His friendship with Abe (which, alas, would not extend beyond the following season's "Old Money") provided a welcome opportunity for the latter to socialise with somebody outside of the Retirement Castle milieu, and as a character he's always been so steeped in mystery and intrigue. He's also one of the series' few disabled characters, and to that end he could arguably be seen something of a negative stereotype, in that his missing limb is clearly intended as a visual indicator that there's something off about his personality. "Bart The General" might be the single instance of his eccentricities being used for heroic purposes, with subsequent appearances tending to cast him as a criminal of increasingly dangerous stripes - for now, though, there is perhaps something gratifying in having someone so unconventional facilitate Bart's deliverance, given Homer's prior remarks about how those with differences are to be treated primarily as objects of scorn. Here, Herman explicitly comments on his lost arm, telling Bart that: "Next time your teacher tells you to keep your arm inside the bus window, you do it!" As a point of curiosity, on the DVD commentary, it's revealed that the writers had initially
intended for this to be the start of a running gag whereby Herman would be routinely
asked about his arm and give a different story every time (they cite another scenario - possibly
included in an earlier draft of "Life on The Fast Lane" - in which
Herman insinuates that he lost his arm by inserting it into the ball return system at a bowling alley). I'll admit that I was actually a little disappointed to hear that, as I'd always liked how this line functioned (whether by design or not) as a call-back to the third episode of the series, "Homer's Odyssey", where Edna Krabappel cites a tragic bit of lore about a boy who stuck his arm out of a bus window and had it ripped off by a truck travelling in the opposite direction. From what we have to go on, you are perfectly free to conclude that the child from Edna's story grew up to be Herman. Coming off of Bart's assumptions that Herman's missing arm is indicative of an old war injury, the joke is, presumably, supposed to be that Herman lost his arm through extremely dumb and arbitrary means - although, if the implication is that Herman was only a child at the time, it would still have been one heck of a traumatic thing for him to have experienced at such a young age. Incidentally, I'm also aware that a flashback in a Season 24 episode, "To Cur, With Love" depicted Herman getting his arm ripped off as an adult whilst hitch-hiking, but I don't see that as anything more than a throwaway gag. The schoolbus maiming is still canon to me!
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