S2E7: Bart vs. Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving Day, Bart gets the entire family outraged at him and runs away from home. However, when he sees what life is like on the seedy side of town (and ends up on the evening news), he realizes how good matters are for him and returns home.

On this episode, we discuss:

• The early Simpsons' family dynamic, and why Thanksgiving is the most passive-aggressive holiday of the year
• The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and every injury that's occurred as a result of the helium balloons
• How much blood an 8-year old would be able to donate before passing out or dying

A deep-dive research podcast hosted by Perrie Kap examines the most fantastic TV show of our time: The Simpsons

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#hellomrburns

#bartvsthanksgiving

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Howdidly doodily! How are we all doing? Hi, hello. Hi, welcome back. This is another fantastic episode of Hello Mr. Burns, a research podcast where we dive deep in The Simpsons, learn a little bit about the show, and hopefully give you some information that will help you win pub trivia. Don't you know anything? Today's episode that we're going to be examining is season two episode seven called bought versus Thanksgiving on this fun little episode. But in Regis the entire family runs away from home, sees what life is like on the seedier side of the tracks, realizes how good life is for him and returns home. This episode is a goodie. It's not really one that resonates too much, I guess because there's not that many like iconic catchphrases, but it is like a little fun one to rewatch, especially as an adult because you can relate to the Thanksgiving Day drama a lot more when you're growing up. So I do apologize for any noise in the background because I'm recording a little bit closer to the road. I'll try and reduce the sound. Yeah, should we do it? Let's do it. Let's get into it. All right, this is season two, Episode Seven, but versus Thanksgiving. Let's start with like a little episode synopsis. The episode begins on Thanksgiving Day. We have grandpa mother gouvia, Patty and Selma and the rest of the Simpsons sitting around and enjoying each other's company. Just before the turkeys brought in. Lisa shows off a meticulously crafted Cornucopia which is like paying respects to women in history.

Unknown Speaker  1:50  
My goodness, that's very impressive.

Unknown Speaker  1:55  
Oh, holy moly. That's the biggest one of those I ever saw. She said she was gifted definitely from our side of the family. Right mom? Believe me.

Unknown Speaker  2:07  
When Bob brings in the turkey and begins to set it on the table. He starts complaining that Lisa's centerpieces in the way the to begin arguing and fighting, and all of a sudden the centerpiece flies off the table and lands in the fireplace, where it quickly burns up. Lisa runs to her room in tears and Bart is ordered to go to his room and not come out until he apologizes when Bart continues to refuse to apologize. He makes a decision to run away. He grabs Sanders little helper and hits the streets after running with a pack of killer dogs that Mr. Burns has mentioned, which is where we hear Mr. Burns say released to hound for the very first time, but is looking for some way to make money or get some food because he's so hungry. He ends up seeing a sign to donate some blood for $12

Unknown Speaker  2:54  
Hey, you've got to be 18 to sell your blood. Let's see some ID Hey Girl doll face. Okay, I'm gonna just relax

Unknown Speaker  3:02  
out of donating blood he comes out and passes out on the street. He wakes up to a couple of homeless guys kind of slapping his face and saying hey, let's go to the homeless shelter for Thanksgiving dinner. It turns out that at the same time, Ken Brockman is there doing news report purpose blow dried college boy. His girlfriend is the weather lady don't say Ken ends up interviewing Bart and Bart is on TV saying that fun your family may be watching. Is there anything you'd like to say to them?

Unknown Speaker  3:34  
Yes, there is can I didn't apologize? No, my sweet little bar.

Unknown Speaker  3:40  
After leaving the homeless shelter board has a moment where he realizes that you know he should be thankful for everything he has. And he decides to give his $12 to the two homeless guys and trudge home. He has these wonderful visions of walking through the front door and everyone welcoming him and being really happy. But then that vision turns into like this nightmare where everyone starts blaming him for everything but at home continues to sort out his feelings when he overhears Lisa crying and just sobbing from her room conceding defeat eventually bought apologizes to Lisa. She accepts his apology and the family gets to enjoy Thanksgiving together the end all right so some little quotables of notables in this episode are

Unknown Speaker  4:24  
on fire. Where's your kindling? Things gonna be going anytime now? Okay, man could start a fire don't

Unknown Speaker  4:30  
love that. Oh my god. Okay, also this which is a really underrated moment. Can I help him on?

Unknown Speaker  4:36  
Wow, okay. Let's see. Can you do the cranberry sauce? Yeah. Where is it? The Canada in the cupboard on the bottom shelf here? No, no,

Unknown Speaker  4:45  
no, the other shelf got it. Now what? Open the can No problemo. What is the can opener? It's in

Unknown Speaker  4:52  
the second drawer from the right. No, no, no, no, the other one. Oh,

Unknown Speaker  4:57  
I got you It's broken Mom. Mom. It's broken. Mom misspoke and mom is broken mom. It's both

Unknown Speaker  5:07  
broken honey. Got one me truck. Just stick it in the refrigerator when you're done Bart, Bart,

Unknown Speaker  5:15  
I love this bit with Bart. It's such perfect. Like, I think it's called weaponized incompetence. And I used to do the very same thing when it came to cooking dinner because I just I just disliked dinner unless it's cooking like instant noodles or toast. I don't know, I don't, I'm not really there for it. It's not my job. So I would purposefully make mistakes all the time. So then I would never never be asked to make dinner ever again. Of course, after a while I realized that if I don't cook dinner, then I'm probably going to starve to death or go broke trying to buy takeout. So yeah, learn how to cook. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. How dare you come for me in this way. So with this episode, it is the first of only two Thanksgiving episodes that the Simpsons will ever do. As I am not American, I don't really have the same emotions towards Thanksgiving. So everything I know about it is things that I've seen through TV, or, of course, the Simpsons, which I use as my point of reference for everything on this planet. So about this episode, Paper Magazine noted that Thanksgiving is a more fundamentally passive aggressive holiday than Christmas. And that's what they've perfectly been able to show in this episode, because you've got this wonderful tension between Marge, Patty and Selma. And of course, their aging parents. It's just such a quintessential family holiday. Oh my goodness, I love that the only thing really that martyrs mother contributes to the entire day, these kinds of comments,

Unknown Speaker  6:39  
the risk of losing my voice, let me just say one more thing. I'm sorry IK

Unknown Speaker  6:46  
and also these wonderful moments like with Homer trying to start the fire in a watching him. And then you know, after Lisa's Cornucopia gets pushed into the fire, you have a saying that wonderful quote,

Unknown Speaker  6:56  
you don't get her going watching.

Unknown Speaker  6:59  
I think if we take a step back and have a look at the characters and how they displayed in this episode, this is where I think the characters are at their most purest form. This is kind of like what I would call foundational character development. You know, for example, like we see the most basic relationships between the family so we have Bart and he you know, he's being cheeky and he's got like this weaponized incompetence being a little bit of a scallywag. And then you have Lisa being very creative, very progressive, very self aware character. You know, it's very black and white, we have Lisa helping Maggie and we have but being a pest towards Marge, I have to say, though, what really bothered me about this episode is Bart and Lisa fighting over space on the Thanksgiving table. Parents should have stepped in like, I don't know, I know, we know that Simpsons is bad parenting. But personally, if I got into a fight like that, with my brother or my sister when I was little, we would have been like it would not have escalated that quickly. Or who No, no, no, we would have had time out in the corner. It wouldn't even have gotten to the point of arguing. You know, I feel like my parents can just anticipate that kind of thing and just work that out of us. Maybe it is because I'm older and crankier? Or maybe because I understand a more complex side of these characters but watching button Lisa argue really irritated me I guess. I have to say though, it was a really beautiful apology at the end. I really liked the end of this episode and just their relationship and dynamic towards each other. Oh. I'm sorry, Lisa. Speaking of parental control, though, I think you know, there's a lot of emphasis in this episode placed on Homer and Marge going too far in punishing Bart and saying that he ruined Thanksgiving.

Unknown Speaker  8:48  
This is a terrible thing that's happened, but we can't blame ourselves. We can

Unknown Speaker  8:53  
and will. I think that while it obviously was one of those things where we say things out of anger, we don't really mean them. You got to remember the Bob kind of threw his sister's centerpiece into the fire and had zero remorse for that. You know, so there's that there's obviously some real behavioral issues there. But along with a really cheeky child, you've also got Marge and Homer trying to deal with their parents with Marja sisters, trying to make the feast a nice day, you know, it's like, it's like, we're going to enjoy ourselves. gun to the head, you know, there's going to be nice Thanksgiving we're going to get along. So I think all of that combined, kind of just like it's understandable why they were so stressed. So at the start of the episode we see home are watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And during the parade, we see one of the helium balloons burst and it's a big chaotic thing. And it's kind of funny, not knowing anything about the Thanksgiving Day Parade or Macy's for that matter. I decided to look up the one thing that we can all agree on. That is interesting. I decided to look up Thanksgiving Day Parade accidents. So what I thought was really interesting is that while this episode shows one of the balloons bursting, and there being drama during the parade, up until 1993, there had been zero reported injuries at the Thanksgiving Day Parade. So the first accident was in 1993, where strong gust of wind pushed Sonic the Hedgehog into a lamppost at Columbus Circle, the lamppost ended up tearing a hole in the balloon, and the top of the post broke off inside of Sonic the Hedgehog, which kind of drags it down. And that is reported to have injured a child and an off duty police officer. Again in 1997. Some really high winds pushed the cat and a hat balloon into another lamppost. The falling debris stuck a parade go up fracturing her skull and leaving her in a coma for a month. Isn't that insane? Balloon size regulations were implemented the next year, which was supposed to eliminate larger balloon accidents like with the Cat in the Hat. And the last recorded accident to have happened was in 2005, which was the m&ms balloon. So that collided with a streetlight in Times Square, which I found was interesting. They didn't call it a lamppost. It's now a streetlight. Hmm. Reportedly parts of the light fell on these two sisters who suffered minor injuries. It is noted that after this accident, the m&ms balloon was officially retired. So as we saw in this episode, when Bob gets desperate for money and food, he ends up donating blood.

Unknown Speaker  11:34  
Well, but hey, I can bleed.

Unknown Speaker  11:38  
It is of course, like the funny part that he has homers ID and he's supposed to be over 18. So this got me curious. And as someone who's terrible at maths, this took me a very long time to figure it out. And forgive me if I've got something wrong. But so during the regular blood donation, you give about 470 mil of blood. This is about 8% of the average adult's blood volume. And it said that the body replaces this volume within 24 to 48 hours. Interestingly, as well, the body replenishes red blood cells in 10 to 12 weeks. So I've only given blood how many times I think I've only given blood two times. And the first time I made the horrible mistake of asking for the anesthetics. So in case you didn't know you can actually get anesthetic around the blood donation spot. And I was like, Yeah, okay, we'll give it a red hot go see what happens. And the nurse pulled out the biggest frickin needle I've ever seen in my life. And it hurts so much. Later, when I donated blood without the anesthetic, I realized that is so much less painful. So guys, don't get the anesthetic. Trust me. You don't want to get to needles when you can only get one. And also not to humble brag, but the nurse said that I had the darkest blood she's ever seen in her life. I don't know what that means. But she Yeah, she was impressed. Yeah. Anyway, so back to blood donation. So the rules for blood donation, at least in Australia are that you have to weigh at least 50 kilograms, and you need to be above the age of 18, if not under with parental consent. So according to Springfield bound, Bart's weight is 85 pounds, or 38 and a half kilograms, according to healthline.com, the average 80 pound child will have about 2650 mil of blood in their body. So that means that but had more or less 2650 mil if BOD had donated 470 mil of blood as his tradition with grownups, that means that he donated 18% of his body's blood total. So that's about 10% more than what a grown up should be doing. One of those gross scientific facts about the human body is that you can actually lose a lot of blood without anything happening to you. The exact amount depends on your size, age and general health of course. So it said that, when you lose around 15 to 30% of your blood, you only get mild side effects such as nausea, or like a headache and that kind of thing. When blood loss knee is around like 30 to 40% your body has a traumatic reaction so your blood pressure drops even further, your heart rate increases. Without treatment, your body loses its ability to pump blood and maintain oxygen around 50% is where we get into real trouble. This is when your heart is likely to stop pumping and all your organs shut down and you'll likely be in a coma. This is because your body can compensate for a good deal of blood loss. However, because of how the body is designed, once you start running out of blood, it shuts down unnecessary components in order to protect your heart. So the official word for death caused by loss of blood is exsanguination. If you're a Harry Potter fan, you might recognize that word because there was a vampire at the slug club Christmas party called sang weenie

Unknown Speaker  15:07  
And on that note, we come to the end of another fantastic episode. Again, I'm very sorry if you can hear the traffic in the background. Don't try and listen closely for it, because you'll go crazy as I did in post edits, trying to remove the sound of traffic. So the next episode we've got up next is probably one of the better known episodes by people who are unfamiliar with like most of the Simpsons, it's kind of like, it's canon, really. So it's very exciting. So for this one, it's like it's a real fun one. I feel like I've seen it so many times. I could recite it to you now, but I won't bore you with that. I'll recite it to you next week. So the next up on the chopping block is season two, Episode Eight, but the Daredevil so this has been a fun little episode guys. And as always, thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next week with Bob the Daredevil. And with that

Unknown Speaker  15:57  
concludes our tale. Good night and keep watching the skis.

Unknown Speaker  16:02  
Oh skies.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai