Talking Simpsons - Bart Gets An "F" (Revisited) With KC Green

You might be entertained to know that someone made a 8bit esque video game of the "Steamed Hams" scene

vaporstack

Growing up in Central California we had to read all of the Steinbeck... Ive probably read of mice and men on assignment like three times

Kris

As a person with learning disabilities I relate to Bart so much in this episode. I can’t help but cry every time I see Bart break down at the end... it’s a situation I’ve been in so many times where no matter how hard I try to study I can’t get it right, and the blame would always be put on me. The amount of stress put on children with learning difficulties still gives me anxiety nightmares. I had to deal with many faculty members exactly like James Loren Pryor. The way he talks down about Bart directly in front of him.... it’s like he is ripped straight from my life. It feels like he had to come from Matt’s personal experience. Not a great character for comedy, but a type of jerk I recognized right away. This is an episode taught me that just because I have a different way of learning doesn’t mean I’m “stupid”. Thank you both for revisiting this episode.

I was only doing a bit, I'm sure proofs are very important (but not for English majors)

Bob Mackey

As a research mathematician I feel obligated to push back slightly on Bob's comment that proofs are useless - they're very useful as a form of argument when mathematical ideas aren't obvious and we need to convince ourselves and our colleagues that they're sound. The version presented in high school geometry totally loses this context, probably because it's a streamlined version of material that is thousands of years old and serious objections these days are to the rules themselves rather than the arguments. Admittedly, I'm a little biased, because I hated high school geometry - which just goes to show how much any of that matters in the long run.

SomeBloke

Man, I missed so much school as a result of the Blizzard of 93.

Tyler M.

I think it was the double-whammy of 93 and 94 that got my school district to start earlier. It used to be we'd go back in September after Labor Day, but going forward we started in late August. As far as I can recall, that's how it remained for the rest of my grade-school education.

Joe Hodgson

The Blizzard of 93 is what finally got our school district to do "snow day spacing" during the year. They marked certain days on the calendar in the spring/summer as "scheduled snow days." If you took a snow day in the winter, you'd go to school normally during those later days. We did have one year with unusually little snow and had some days off in the spring/summertime that were quite nice.

Dan Vincent

It was you!

Bob Mackey

That Bart crying scene was so real! Sounds just like my kid when he gets super frustrated at not being able to do something. But eventually we did get those can of beans open.

Paul

This was really good - it's always really great when KC is on. Looking forward to the rest of the season 2 rewatch!

crystalhearts

totally resonate with Henry's "I can slack and get a B so why bother". I think that attitude has made me a lot less high strung about work than I could have been.

Dan Z

Oh! And similar to Henry's Tales of the Tape, I have my own experience in that growing up I had a little 13 inch tv with a built in VCR mono sound, so when I got a DVD player to hook up to it It only had one audio input Jack so whenever's I would watch DVD's I would only get one audio channel and because of this there were a lot of audio jokes in my Simpsons DVD's I completely missed, I'd be watching an episode and there would be many times I was confused why some scenes had long awkward silence. I didn't realize until many years later when I upgraded my tv what I was missing out on.

Kiefer Fulsom

I love this episode to death, it's my number one favorite episode of all time for 2 reasons, the first is while I never saw this episode on in syndication, I did get the season 2 dvd set for my birthday summer of 2003. That summer is one I still remember and love for Nostalgic reasons. The second being that I relate to Bart SO FUCKING HARD in this episode. Growing up I was never a child to start a fight, talk balk, etc, so when I kept getting in trouble at school, our counselor recommended sending me to a child psychologist and I was diagnosed with ADHD while also having my IQ determined. ( I was a "gifted" child. And put into the Gifted And Talented Students program which, because our school was literally in small town nowhere Oklahoma, usually meant field trips to places). And while I enjoyed going to school all throughout middle & high school, I always struggled with my grades usually teetering on B- D average, including repeating one math class, also those field trips would take with the gifted program? You could go if your grades were above failing, so naturally I missed out on half of them. The scene of Bart crying and just barely squeezing happened to me SO OFTEN, in fact my senior year my final grade is my math class was a 59.98 and he rounded up. So yeah, that's why I love this episode and why it mean so much to me.

Kiefer Fulsom

Marge and Homer treated Bart for a seemingly serious diagnosis received from the school nurse without any apparent follow up with Hibbert.

Scott Scallion

Growing up in New Jersey, the Blizzard of '94 was the one for me too - we ended up going until I think June 28 or 29 because we missed so much school in February. I have a distinction recollection of a week where we had an early dismissal on Tuesday because so much snow had started falling, then a snow day on Wednesday, then a delayed opening on Thursday, and then another snow day on Friday because of another round of snow.

Robert Flaxman

I always wonder what the show could’ve been had it gone down that gentler path of episodes like this. I suppose Futurama’s more gut-wrenching episodes are the closest to what that could’ve looked like.

Harry Thornton

I probably would have if my 93 wasn't weird. My family moved from NH to VA in the summer of 92 and then back in May of 93. I had done well enough in school that I was considered to have passed for the year and didn't have to resume my education until the next school year began. Interestingly, we did have a snow day in VA that year and it was the first one that community had in a decade or something. It probably was related to that same storm. As a native New Englander, it was pretty funny to see people rush out to buy snow clothes the day before and then to see how the town ceased to function for a couple of days due to what was probably 3 inches of snow at most.

Joe Hodgson

I definitely missed a TON of school thanks to that blizzard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Storm_of_the_Century

Bob Mackey

You guys nailed it with your observation that this was the right episode for Season 2 to premiere with. I remember being really excited for this episode when it premiered, and being a kid, getting a Bart episode right off the bat was exactly what I wanted. It's a very kid-centric episode as a lot of what Bart was going through was really relatable, even for a kid like me who had an easy time with school. Faking illness, day-dreaming, procrastinating, and even snow days all made it into this one making it feel like a little slice of 90s juvenile existence. That game over screen in Bart's Nightmare drove me nuts every time I saw it because the goal should have been to get a D, but here I am as Bart with Homer mad at me for a perfectly cromulent C grade. And I don't know if it was a throw-away line by Bob, but I found it interesting he referenced a blizzard of 93 in the talk about snow days. I'm a June baby and the only year of my life where we were still in school for my birthday came a year later, 1994, as a series of snow storms pushed the last day of school back by weeks that year. Recently, there's a lot of talk from bad faith parents and adults who are dead set against remote learning in schools as it will lead to the end of snow days. It's only January, and my kid has already had one snow day this year. They're not going any where since a huge component of snow days is the power outages that can result from them, so my town doesn't make them automatic remote-learning days.

Joe Hodgson

Got to agree with Bob's earlier reasoning that a deeper revisit to these gentler James L. Brooksy days is much needed in today's climate. This was a welcome change of pace to the madness going on in Washington D.C. BUT. I will say that having re-listened to the earlier Talking Simpsons recently, I hope you don't revisit anything third season onward – they are solid podcasts and should stand on their own. As for this episode, I always felt like I was watching something like Growing Pains when it would turn up in syndication. Very awkward middle ground in the writing and tone, sincerity that gets totally undercut with that final scene at the fridge. Dan's sincere, stupid "WE'RE PROUD OF YA, BOY" is one of my favorite reads of his ever, and thanking God for Bart's pathetic underachievement smells like they're making fun of the religious-minded pathos of "sincere" TV families. And man, does that commentary sure show Matt Groening's pure bad taste and lack of respect for Dave Silverman's achievements or what?

Thad Komorowski

*nerd voice* Martin Prince says forecastle phonetically but it’s actually pronounced folk-sull. I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.

Justen Brown