Episode no. 192 Written by David S. Cohen Production code 5F11 | Showrunner(s) Mike Scully Original air date February 15, 1998 | |
"Das Bus" is the fourteenth episode of The Simpsons' ninth season. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 15, 1998. In an extended parody of Lord of the Flies, Bart, Lisa and other children from Springfield Elementary School are stranded on an island and are forced to work together. Meanwhile, Homer founds his own Internet company. It was written by David S. Cohen and directed by Pete Michels. Guest star James Earl Jones narrates the final scene of the episode.
Contents
Plot
The Springfield Elementary School Model United Nations club is going on a field trip. On the bus, Bart, Nelson, Ralph, and Milhouse are playing a game by racing fruit down the aisle. Milhouse rolls a grapefruit that gets stuck under the brakes. When bus driver Otto attempts to press down on the pedal, it squirts juice into his eyes, causing him to lose control and drive the bus off a bridge.
Otto attempts to swim for help but ends up being swept away by the current and picked up by Chinese fishermen. The students swim to a nearby tropical island, where Bart tries to tell the children that being stranded on an island is fun. Reality soon sets in when the island is found to be largely barren and the children lack survival skills. With no food found on the island and no adult supervision, the children rely on snack food retrieved from the sunken bus by Bart. They awaken the next morning to find the snacks all gone. Suspecting Milhouse because of his pot-belly and nacho cheese breath, the students put him on trial and he blames the loss on a mysterious island "monster".
Back at home, Homer discovers that Ned Flanders has his own home-based Internet business, and decides he wants to start his own company. His business is later dismantled by Bill Gates and his goons.
As there is insufficient evidence to prove Milhouse ate all the food, he is acquitted. The other students are not happy with this verdict and attempt to kill Milhouse, along with Bart and Lisa, who tried to intervene. The other students end up chasing them into a cave, where it is revealed that Milhouse's "monster" is actually a wild boar. On one of the boar's tusks is an empty bag of chips, revealing that it was the actual culprit for eating the snacks. Lisa notices that the boar has survived by licking slime from the sides of rocks, and she proclaims that they can likewise live off the slime now that their supplies are gone. The other kids instead kill the boar and eat it, while Lisa adheres to her vegetarianism by stubbornly licking slime from rocks. The episode concludes with a comically obvious deus ex machina ending, narrated by James Earl Jones:
Production
The couch gag was suggested by Dan Castellaneta's niece. The film True Lies was the inspiration for the bus crashing against the bridge. To get the fisherman's Chinese correct, Cohen called his friend. When the Chinese actors came, the actors felt Cantonese would be more appropriate for the fisherman than Mandarin, so it was changed. Moe was picked to rescue the children, because the writers thought it was funny.
Reception
In its original broadcast, "Das Bus" finished 17th in ratings for the week of February 9–15, 1998, with a Nielsen rating of 9.9, equivalent to approximately 9.6 million viewing households. It was the third highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, following The X-Files and King of the Hill.
In a 2006 article in USA Today, "Das Bus" was highlighted among the six best episodes of The Simpsons season 9, along with "Trash of the Titans", "The Last Temptation of Krust", "The Cartridge Family", "Dumbbell Indemnity", and "The Joy of Sect". The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, called it a "fantastic episode", adding: "Ignore the Internet business side, and wallow in the cleverness of the children trapped on the island. Bart has never been cleverer, Nelson more menacing, and Milhouse more geekish. Great stuff with a delightful ending that is so witty and obvious, that it's annoying you never imagined they'd get away with it."
The episode has become study material for sociology courses at University of California, Berkeley, where it is used to "examine issues of the production and reception of cultural objects, in this case, a satirical cartoon show", and to figure out what it is "trying to tell audiences about aspects primarily of American society, and, to a lesser extent, about other societies". Some questions asked in the courses include: "What aspects of American society are being addressed in the episode? What aspects of them are used to make the points? How is the satire conveyed: through language? Drawing? Music? Is the behavior of each character consistent with his/her character as developed over the years? Can we identify elements of the historical/political context that the writers are satirizing? What is the difference between satire and parody?"