Episode title: Marge Be Not Proud
Series: The Simpsons
Season: 7
Written by: Mike Scully
First transmitted: December 17 1995
Bart really wants the new must-have video game “Bonestorm”, but Marge says it’s too expensive and promotes violence, so he decides to steal one, shoplifting at the Try-n-Save, but he is caught by the dick ooer store detective, who phones his parents to tell them what has happened, and tells Bart he is banned from the store. Luckily for Bart, his parents are not home and he has time to get back and change the tape before they can get to hear the message the store detective has left for them. When the family go to get their annual Christmas picture taken Bart is horrified when he realises where it’s to be taken, and of course the store detective sees him, despite many attempts to hide himself, and the whole sordid story comes out.
Marge is disappointed; Bart is surprised she isn’t angry, but he can’t see her heart is broken, and she starts to realise that he’s not the little boy she thought he was. He’s growing up, and that brings with it its own set of problems. In an attempt to address this, she starts pulling back, being less motherly to him. Well, she says this is what she’s doing but in reality she’s probably subconsciously punishing him by withdrawing her affection and attention from him. In an attempt to redeem himself, Bart goes back to Try’n’Save and gets a photograph of himself for his mother, who had been bemoaning the fact that of all the Christmas pictures they have had taken over the years, none of them have Bart in them smiling or not pulling a face. She is delighted and they reconcile.
Notes
You’d have to say that again this is a fairly poor Christmas episode, which does not make it a poor episode, but Christmas is almost an afterthought to the plot, which concerns a kind of heavy-handed moral on the sin of stealing. It’s presented well: I particularly like the woman with the pushy, bratty, nasty kid who demands, when she buys “Bonestorm” for him, “Get two: I’m not sharing with Caitlin!” Bart’s wondering belief that this must be the happiest kid in the world is sharply offset when she, seeing Bart benig taken back into the store by Brodka, shakes her head and opines that that boy’s parents must have gone very wrong, blissfully unaware that a spoiled, arrogant child will grow up to be just as bad, unable to see her own failures as a mother. The declaration “four finger discount” by Jimbo to describe their shoplifting is a reminder that all Simpsons characters have, for some reason, only four fingers.
As Bart is marched up to Brodka’s office, the store Santa offers him a candy cane but the detective shakes his head and growls “not for him”, and Santa nods, frowning. There’s a cameo from the late Phil Hartman as Troy McClure (you may remember him from such information films as “Lead: Delicious but Deadly!” and “Phoney Tornado Warnings Waste Resources”) as he stars in a video about the history of shoplifting and then it’s funny when Brodka says “capische?” to Bart and then follows this up with “well? Do you understand?” to which Bart replies “Everything but capische.” Again this episode, like many Christmas episodes across all three series, suffers - or benefits I guess, depending on your point of view - from concentrating on one character more or less to the exclusion of everyone else. Here of course it’s Bart, and while Homer and Marge have things to say, and Lisa gets in a line or two, it’s the bad boy who carries the show. Bart can of course do this, and has, effortlessly in the past, but it does place something of a burden on the viewer, I believe, when there’s not even a sideplot to concentrate on and give you a break from the adventures of Bart Simpson at Christmas.
Millhouse is, sadly, in the episode but thankfully not for long - Bart sees he has “Bonestorm” and pays his friend a visit, but Millhouse won’t share and so he gets thrown out. However on the second attempt it seems Millhouse has lost interest in the game and is now into cup-and-ball (no, smartarse, it isn’t: it’s a very old form of entertainment you could make yourself, where a small ball on a string hangs from a kind of chalice-like cup, and you try to flip the ball into the cup). It’s quite a clever comment on how kids often go for the simplest things to play with, despite all the expensive technology around them: kind of like playing with the box of the Playstation or whatever. The second time Millhouse is very willing to let Bart play with the game, but as with children everywhere and all times, it’s whatever the other kid has that they want, and so he tries to take the cup-and-ball from Millhouse. This time though, on the point of being ejected from the Van Houten home, he asks Millhouse’s mother if he can hang with her and do “mom stuff”. This is fun for a while, but soon creeps Lou-Ann out, and Bart is sent home.
I do however want to know a) how Bart made it all the way to Try’n’Save on his own (they had to drive there originally) and how he also managed to avoid Brodka long enough to get a proper picture taken. Maybe the store detective was on a break. Still, it seems unlikely, although this is possibly a day or so, or more, later, as it doesn’t make that clear.