721. Bart the Cool Kid

Original airdate: March 20, 2022

The premise: Bart is humiliated when he finds the new trendy Slipreme sneakers Homer bought him are knock-offs. This leads to him meeting Orion Hughes, the rich kid of a movie star who owns the company, and the two develop their own new shoe. Meanwhile, Homer, feeling the sting of his son calling him “un-cool,” teams up with the other middle-aged men in Springfield to wear Slipreme clothing themselves.

The reaction: As Bart stormed into the not-Supreme shoe store to livestream on his smartphone his outrage to the cashier, only for the rest of the store to pull out their smartphones to film the debacle… it all just feels so wrong. I know this is borderline “Old Man Yells at Cloud,” but seeing Simpsons characters utilizing modern technology in a modern way always feels wrong to me. I feel like there could be stories written where it would feel more palatable, but between this and the last episode featuring similar scenes of mobs live-streaming a scene, these ain’t it, chief. So, I’m not entirely sure what this episode is really aiming for, but I guess it boils down to a very thin Bart-Homer story. Homer fucks up by accidentally buying knock-off shoes, causing Bart to erupt at him how much he sucks and how lame he is. Then the kid owner of the brand shows up, Orion Hughes (voiced by The Weeknd), playing damage control by getting Bart a ton of free stuff to make up for the bad press. The two bond when Bart teaches him how to skateboard, and then they’re developing their own shoe. The commentary about “Slipreme” is extremely surface level (“A sneaker that all my friends will buy?” “No, a sneaker that all your friends wanna buy, but can’t, because we won’t make enough of them,”) and Orion isn’t really much of a character. But a lot of the second half involves Homer co-opting the Slipreme look with him and his fellow middle-aged schlubs, which ultimately threatens the big launch party for Bart’s sneaker. Said event is being held in Springfield, with an appearance by Orion’s big movie star dad. Why is such a huge event for a big brand being held in some nowhere town? Ah, who cares. Then we get Marge giving a speech to Homer embracing his true self instead of trying to be cool, and then Bart and Homer make amends because the episode is ending and I don’t care. It felt like a couple different premise ideas strung together (making fun of shoe culture, Bart befriends a rich kid, Homer laments he’s “un-cool,” middle-aged dads try to be trendy) until they realized they had officially hit the 21-minute mark. It also feels weirdly cross-promotion-y given the new line of Simpsons shoes by Adidas, but that may have just been a coincidence. …maybe.

Three items of note:
– Who manages to fuck Homer over selling him counterfeit shoes? Why, none other than Mike Wegman, the character voiced by Michael Rappaport from a few seasons ago. This seems to confirm that the writing staff must just love Rappaport that they invited him back for more. I really don’t understand it, that episode was fucking awful, and his character was a big part of that. He even makes a reference to his first appearance, insulting Bart by calling him a “bed-wetting nobody,” as a call-back to his verbal abuse of a ten-year-old that made him a fan-favorite character. It’s not like I expect him to be punished or anything, but he came off as really emotionally unbalanced in “Go Big or Go Homer,” which went completely unaddressed through the whole story. Here, Mike just shows up without much introduction as if he were a Springfield regular like Cletus or Comic Book Guy, with an incredibly rushed mention that his food truck was apparently pushed off a bridge. Remember his brilliant concept of just selling one slice of pizza at a time? What a classic episode! Can this character please never come back?
– The Weeknd voices both Orion and his movie star father Darius. His voice for Orion is alright, though weirdly, his first couple lines it almost felt like he was doing a Michael Jackson impression? Was that just me? But his voice for Darius is really bizarre. It’s hard to explain, but it almost sounds like someone doing an impression of another voice. It’s just… off. Also the tag before the credits has this incredibly bizarre sequence where Darius reveals that Orion is a clone of him? It starts off with Orion bemoaning that “he’ll never be like” his dad, to which his dad replies, “I know exactly how you feel, because you’re me.” I thought this was a cheeky reference to them being voiced by the same guy, but then it turns out, no, he’s actually a clone, inspired by Darius’ “Clone Cop” movies. Did someone find an old script page from an American Dad episode on the floor and accidentally mixed it into this script?
– There’s an odd scene in the middle of the episode where Homer, Marge and Lisa attempt to eat hard shell tacos at dinner, only for them to exaggeratingly explode all over their faces (with Marge and Lisa being especially incensed, “Why do I keep buying hard shells?!“) I guess it served as the impetus for Homer needing to put on a clean shirt to leave the house, and him putting on the Slipreme hoodie, but I dunno, it felt like a weirdly specific attack, like they found “hard shell tacos are hard to eat” written on a note card under someone’s desk and decided to work it into an episode. Y’know what though, sometimes a nice hard shell taco can be pretty good. It’s like a loaded nacho folded in on itself!