"Radio Bart" is a great episode that sees Bart's prank on the town backfire against him. Aside from the "boy who cried wolf" trope, this is a very well-written episode with great gags and some solid character moments, in my opinion. "We're Sending Our Love Down the Well" is a terrific spoof of "We Are the World" and is perhaps the best song the show has done so far.
Overall, a high-quality morality tale.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2017-08-26T15:00:08Z
[8.3/10] I was a little young to remember the hoopla over Baby Jessica firsthand, but I knew it through reference and parody, so it still has some zing when The Simpsons ably parodies the media circus that emerges when the plight of a small child captures the imaginations of the country. Round-the-clock updates on the local use, celebrity musical collaborations with a tiny portion of the profits going to benefit the kid, and wild speculation over the child’s mental state are all ripe for the picking of the writer’s rooms satirical specialists.
But what I like is that the episode is just as much a character story about Bart. What continually impresses me going back and watching these old episodes is how well-structured there are. The first act is Bart loathing the weak haul from his birthday and then realizing how much fun he can have with the “celebrity microphone.” The second act is him perpetrating the Timmy O’Toole prank. And the third act is him falling down there himself and dealing with karmic consequences of his actions. While there’s definite asides for what amounts to mini-comedy sketches, the developments all flow nicely from one another.
Heck, even the lame gift of a label maker comes back to have plot relevance down the line. It’s easy to praise the big laughs and comic wit The Simpsons brought to the table at this point, but a big part of what made the show work was how good it was at nuts and bolts storytelling to keep you invested in what was happening and not just waiting for the next gag.
In that spirit, “Radio Bart” delivers a little morality tale about Bart deceiving the town and then getting some poetic justice by falling in the well himself. The show’s cynicism is on display, with the town’s utter disinterest in rescuing Bart once they realize they’ve been duped, and closing bits like Homer’s reassurance that they’re making sure no one will ever fall down again and then cutting to a poorly located “Caution: Well” sign. There’s the show’s usual observations about how poorly Springfield, and by extension the USA, respond to these media-incubated cause celebres, but there’s also Bart driving the action by causing the problem and then becoming the problem.
That’s mixed in with great gags about everything from the inanity of Chuck-E-Cheese (embodied here in the form of Wall-E-Weasel) to Homer declaring Timmy a hero for falling down a well, to absurd jokes about a coal mine canary dying of natural causes. There’s no doubt; this is a good one.