Word: barts
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...That Bart is a cartoon character--a sheaf of drawings animated by smart writing and the unique vocal stylings of Nancy Cartwright--makes him both "real" and surreally supple. Cartoon figures can do more things, endure more knocks on the noggin, get away with more cool, naughty stuff than the rest of us who are animated only by a telltale heart. The face-offs of Bugs and Daffy in Chuck Jones' cartoons of the '50s involved many shotgun blasts and rearranged duckbills, but the humor and humiliation, the understanding of failure and resilience were instantly translatable to kids and adults...
...filler material for the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, then went weekly in 1990. A Honeymooners with kids, the series features a man in a deadening blue-collar job (Homer, the nuclear-plant safety inspector), his epochally exasperated wife (Marge of the mountainous blue hair) and three conflicted kids. Bart, 10, is clever and cunning but addled in class; Lisa, 8, is a near genius whose intelligence deprives her of friends; year-old Maggie expresses frazzled wisdom beyond her years with the merest suck on her pacifier...
...North Evergreen Terrace, is where the show's heart is, where everyone's despair is muted by familial love. Homer (whom the writers hold in a sort of amazed contempt) bumbles into some egregious fix. Marge fusses and copes. Lisa sublimates her rancor by playing her sax. And Bart is...Bart...
Lisa, when not condemning Bart and all his works (she once called him "the devil's cabana boy"), tries to explain him. "That little hell-raiser," she recently ranted, "is the spawn of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda pop, every teacher who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat paychecks. No, Bart is not to blame. You can't create a monster and then whine when he stomps on a few buildings." Nice try, Lisa, but not quite. He's not Bartzilla. The kid knows right from wrong; he just likes wrong better...
...rude streak is indeed stoked by cartoons. After savoring some impossible TV torture that Itchy the mouse has wreaked on Scratchy the cat, Bart says, "Lisa, if I ever stop loving violence, I want you to shoot me." (Lisa: "Will do.") Maybe the Simpson home carries its own germ of carnage. In the episode where evil old Mr. Burns adopts Bart as his heir and whisks him away, sweet Lisa is seen ripping off strips of wallpaper. Confronted by Marge, Lisa explains that she is "just trying to fill the void of random, meaningless destruction that Bart's absence...