When Bart visits him, he is visited by the actor of one of the characters in an action movie, Airshot. It's perfectly balanced, as all Simpsons episodes should be." Bart the Bad Guy" is the fourteenth episode of Season 31.Įvery body was watching the end of Vindicators Crystal Wars, and they would have to wait a year for the next one to come out.Įleven months later, Principal Skinner told the kids about a YouTuber named Reaction Guy, who was doing the Flagpole challenge.īart tried to imitate stunt, but ended up injuring Millhouse. Luckily, "Bart the Bad Guy" finds other, better avenues to explore, lampooning spoiler culture and making a familiar formula feel fresh and exciting again. Other animated sitcoms have already ventured down this path, and apart from Kevin Feige's eerily accurate Thanos spoof, this episode doesn't bring a lot new to the table in that regard. If you watch "Bart the Bad Guy" solely to see the MCU taken down a peg, you may come away a little disappointed. And if that weren't enough, we even get an unexpected Joe Mantegna appearance as Fit-Fat Tony butts heads with Spoiler Boy. Taran Killam is also a hoot as Airshot, a character who seems more Hugh Jackman parody than Jeremy Renner. The Russos are plenty entertaining in their brief roles as the Disney executives (kudos for the use of "When You Wish Upon a Star" when their bomb is deactivated). I actually had to double-check and make sure Brolin himself wasn't part of the cast. Kevin Feige delivers a disturbingly dead-on impression of Josh Brolin's Thanos as he plays the evil tyrant Chinnos. Again, Bart being tempted by evil and redeeming himself the end is something we've seen countless times over the past 30 years, but this episode manages to find a novel way of retelling that story.Īnd even if this episode is fairly light on MCU humor, the impressive voice cast is worth the price of admission alone. That's followed up by a pitch-perfect parody of the ending to A Christmas Carol, as the pop culture nonsequiturs continue all the way to the finish line.
It may be silly and more than a little over the top, but Bart being given his hero's test and passing it is a genuinely touching moment. We get another reminder that Lisa's high-minded ideals sometimes take a backseat to her more selfish desires, while Homer's utter indifference to superhero movies makes him both an amusing foil and a fitting ally to Bart.īart's arc veers in a surprisingly heartfelt direction over the course of this episode, as two ruthless Disney execs (voiced by Joe and Anthony Russo) trick him into thinking his actions have doomed an entire universe. The rest of the family are used sparingly but effectively. Watching him torment Vindicators fanboys like Principal Skinner and Comic Book Guy is very entertaining, particularly with the Comic Book Guy scene drawing on Fellowship of the Ring's big Galadriel scene. This is actually one of the better Bart-driven episodes in recent memory. That allows the show to dust off one of the oldest tropes in the Simpsons playbook - Bart being torn between torn between good and evil as he pranks the town - and make it feel fresh again. Instead, "Bart the Bad Guy" focuses less on superhero movies themselves than the spoiler culture that surrounds them. The fact this episode spoofs Avengers: Infinity War more so than Endgame shows how long the lead time for these episodes is and how futile it would be to try and be as timely as something like South Park. Heck, The Simpsons isn't even the first animated sitcom to introduce an Avengers ripoff team dubbed The Vindicators ( Rick and Morty says hello). The writers seem to realize that they're hardly the first to lampoon the MCU and the current superhero monoculture. But that clearly wasn't the goal in this case. This episode doesn't really serve as the scathing takedown of the MCU and superhero genre fans might be expecting.
"Bart the Bad Guy" doesn't necessarily stand out in that regard.
It's one of the rare areas where you don't immediately get hit with a feeling of "been there, done that." The first 10 minutes of "Husbands and Knives" is among the best Simpsons content of the 21st Century exactly for this reason, giving us classic gags like "Watchmen Babies in. I always get a kick out of seeing The Simpsons make fun of superheroes and comic books, mostly because it's not a path the show treads all too often.
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