802. ¡The Fall Guy-Yi-Yi!

Original airdate: December 28, 2025

The premise: Homer’s latest pratfall catches the attention of Bumblebee Man. Years of doing his show has taken a toll on him physically, so he hires Homer to be his stuntman.

The reaction: Do we need a Bumblebee Man episode? Why not, I guess. I feel like every single review I’ve done this season I ask the same damn question as to what secondary/tertiary cast members warrant their own stories and which ones don’t, which of course is a very subjective question. Is anyone out there holding a candle for Bumblebee Man? His character was born out of a bunch of white writers being bemused by a man in a cricket outfit they would always see on Univision, so this was their tribute to that. But do Mexicans hold Bumblebee Man in high esteem in a similar fashion to Speedy Gonzales, a slightly questionable caricature created by white people that is nonetheless embraced by their community? I’m really not sure. I know one guy is super stoked on him, but that’s not the greatest sample size. But whatever, Bumblebee Man is in the spotlight at last, this time recast with the voice of Humberto Vélez, who has been the Latin Amercian voice of Homer for some time now, in an honestly lovely bit of casting. We learn how a young Pedro wanted to make it big as an actor, but one comedic mishap on his first day landed him the role of Bumblebee Man, a character who ended up being a relatable salve to the downtrodden, a man who would always get back up, no matter what life threw at him. But after decades of painful mishaps have ravaged Pedro’s aging body, so he turns to the seemingly Teflon Homer to be his stuntman. This episode kind of made me think of the same question I have about Krusty’s show: does this make sense at all in 2026? The Mexican show from the 1970s that inspired the character, El Chapulín Colorado, was a superhero parody, but the Bumblebee Man show has always been a series of sketches that all have the same physical comedy punchline. I guess you could call it a long-running foreign language version of SNL crossed with Mr. Bean, since it all gravitates around one central character with almost no recurring side characters. But larger than that, this episode can kind of be read as a meta narrative about The Simpsons itself, as Bumblebee Man explicitly makes a winking joke about (“I suppose time catches up to us all. Now my tired soul limps on in the shadow of its former glory. Simpsons, have you any idea what this is like?”) Bumblebee Man knows he can’t do this forever, but feels an obligation to his fans who take comfort in his work, so he just can’t turn his back on it. Using Homer as his substitute gives him a new lifeline, but he eventually becomes too guilt-ridden by the charade. Surrounding this is a very classic-era plot motivator of Homer wanting Bart to feel proud of his father, which working for Bumblebee Man provides, but Bart is bummed out that he can’t brag about it since it’s been sworn to secrecy. As per usual with this show, the dialogue in these sections is annoyingly on the nose for any of it to feel real. This also applies to the ending, where Bumblebee Man and Homer both fall down the steps of an enormous Mexican pyramid (following a cute, extended reference to “Bart the Daredevil” where Homer tries to talk him from taking the fall.) Bumblebee Man had previously talked about how he takes pride that his on-screen suffering distracts the common man from their troubles. As the crowd watches and laughs at these two idiots, one of the bystanders (Humberto Vélez himself) directly comments, “This man’s suffering takes away from my troubles!” As tricky as it might be to make a plot about Bumblebee Man feel meaningful, stuff like this always takes me out of it. It’s enough of a pill to swallow to make me care about whether this guy continues making his human bee show in its 40th season or whatever, but then we get a copout non-ending of Homer and Bumblebee Man stuck in a land of the dead purgatory since they both fell into comas after their accident. We have this premise where Bumblebee Man can’t keep doing this shtick forever due to his failing physical health, so there’s no real resolution of him staying Bumblebee Man that would feel appropriate, so they don’t bother writing one. It’s very similar to The Simpsons in that way; eventually, one of the main voice actors will leave this mortal coil, and there’s no clean, happy version of what happens following that. I dunno. Whatever. This episode’s not bad, I just didn’t care for it that much.

Three items of note:
– The episode opens with the Springfield kids playing baseball, and in a scene with the seven of them talking back and forth to each other, it was just so weird to listen how over half of them have different voices now. Sherri and Terri, Lewis, and Martin all talking in quick succession with their new voice actors. Milhouse, while present, did not speak, but I was expecting him to jump in onto the pile. Bart and Nelson are the only of the seven characters voiced by their original performer. It felt similar the subplot from the White Lotus “parody” featuring Dr. Hibbert and his wife, these two characters we recognize with completely different voices. It just goes to drive an extremely fine point on the fact of just how long this show has gone on for that we’ve had actors both retire and pass away (ie: the ultimate retirement) from it.
– In the montage of Homer helping Bumblebee Man’s show flourish, we get a shot of the ratings skyrocketing surrounded by all of this almost forty-year-old shows major Latino characters laughing. This includes Dr. Nick (while being “yellow-skinned,” his last name is Riveria, and Hank Azaria is doing his bad Ricky Ricardo voice, so fair enough), Julio the gay stereotype/direct lift from The Birdcage, little orphan Pepi, Senor Ding Dong, that Republican little girl voiced by Eva Longoria from one episode over ten years ago… and the elderly gang that Abe got in a street race with from season 13’s “The Old Man and the Key,” an episode over twenty years old. What a robust line-up! It’s sort of like how there were very few black major recurring roles to recast once that whole shakeup happened, this is a show trapped in its 1989 bedrock of being almost exclusively steered by white people, which is not inherently a criticism, but is one of many things that make it feel anachronistic in our modern age. Also present is a man dressed in Raiders paraphernalia who I am almost certain is a crew member who recently passed away, but I sadly do not remember his name.
– Lisa acts like a good little ally by delivering this very meta line to Homer (“Dad, isn’t it problematic for a white man to double for a Mexican actor?”) Where were you for over thirty years when Bumblebee Man was voiced by a gringo, Lisa? To this, Homer gives a surprising reply (“With all the ICE going around these days, isn’t it better having a white guy suffer instead of a Mexican guy?”) I had to rewind and put on subtitles because I thought I misheard, but yes, Homer specifically name drops ICE. I would have thought of this as a pretty glib punchline if I had watched this the night it aired, but given recent events, I’m not the quickest to chortle about the unrestrained, gleeful brutality being enacted by ICE right now. In a similar vein (although a much, much, much less serious example), I found it funny that in his cameo, Johnny Knoxville said he’s done making Jackass movies due to the toll they’ve taken on his body, but just yesterday, he announced a new Jackass movie. That man is dead set to dying on film, it seems.