The Simpsons Failed Barney (By Copying His Own Tragic Masterpiece)

The Simpsons Failed Barney (By Copying His Own Tragic Masterpiece)

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The Simpsons always played fast and loose with continuity, but the show failed Barney Gumble by copying the sad story of his short film, “Pukahontas”.

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The Simpsons Failed Barney (By Copying His Own Tragic Masterpiece)

The Simpsons always played fast and loose with continuity, but the show failed loveable town drunk Barney Gumble by copying the sad story of his short film, “Pukahontas”. After decades on the air, The Simpsons has made it clear that the anarchic animated family sitcom has no regard for conventional continuity.

Often characters in The Simpsons will return from the dead with seemingly no explanation, and the series is as likely to rewrite its canon as it is likely to reference an earlier storyline. Like a lot of its comedic imitators, The Simpsons usually uses this loose approach to continuity for goofy humor. However, in the case of tragic barfly Barney, the show’s disregard for its canon has sadder consequences.

Barney Gumble may seem as if he was always destined to be a barfly and nothing more, but there’s quite a story behind Barney’s eventual sobriety and subsequent relapse. Appearing as early as the very first episode of The Simpsons – a Christmas special entitled “Simpsons Roasting On An Open Fire” – Barney was initially established as a town drunk and a figure of fun, but the show deepened this character by creating a recurring joke surrounding his recovery. In many classic outings, Barney would temporarily sober up, succeed personally and professionally, and then return to his status as a barfly by the episode’s close. Eventually, The Simpsons even had Barney make a moving film about his alcoholism, only for the show to replay the film’s tragic ending for laughs years later.

Barney’s Early Character

The Simpsons Failed Barney (By Copying His Own Tragic Masterpiece)

Although the very earliest, more crude outings of The Simpsons established Barney as a shiftless barfly, in its more high-energy Golden Age, the series had bigger plans for the character. It was during this critically adored halcyon period of The Simpsons (the “Lemon of Troy”/”Cape Feare” inclusive seasons 3-9) that a lot of Barney’s funniest exploits came about, and they usually relied on a darkly comic formula. Barney’s brief tenure as Homer’s business rival, the Plow King, and his almost-successful attempt to become an astronaut both saw him sober up for part of a classic episode, only to backslide into alcoholism by its close for the sake of maintaining the show’s status quo. This tendency could be seen as a dark parody of sitcom formula from The Simpsons’ writing room, which took the TV convention where the status quo is returned to normal at the end of each episode and used it to give Barney numerous fleeting, thwarted moments of successful sobriety.

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“Pukahontas”

The Simpsons Failed Barney (By Copying His Own Tragic Masterpiece)

This formula reached its peak both dramatically and comedically with Barney’s winning entry into the Springfield Film Festival during The Simpsons’ crossover with the short-lived Jon Lovitz vehicle The Critic, “A Star Is Burns”. In this episode, Barney won the inaugural Springfield Film Festival with his moody black and white masterpiece “Pukahontas”, a portrait of his lonely life of alcoholism and futile attempts at recovery. Although “Pukahontas” is first and foremost a pitch-perfect parody of self-serious arthouse cinema, despite a string of strong punchlines the short is genuinely moving and sincerely sad, and it adds a layer of poignancy to Barney’s many failed attempts at maintaining sobriety. All this makes it even more bleakly funny when the episode’s ending sees Barney win a lifetime supply of Duff Beer from the festival organizers, thus ensuring he remains the tragic figure seen in “Pukahontas”.

Barney’s Attempts at Sobriety

The Simpsons Failed Barney (By Copying His Own Tragic Masterpiece)

Even when The Simpsons was playing Barney’s drinking for laughs, as early as season 4 voice actor Dan Castellaneta had pitched an episode wherein Barney would sober up for good. The first time that the episode was pitched, the story never made it to the screen as The Simpsons’ then-showrunner felt it hewed too close to an episode the writers were already workshopping, the classic “Duffless.” Understandably, the writers wanted to focus more on the Simpson family themselves, but after this setback, Barney’s sobriety episode ended up being held off until season 11 in the standout installment “Days of Wine and D’Oh’ses”. This memorable outing saw Barney finally sober up thanks to an embarrassing incident at a party, with the episode tracking his recovery and ending with a caffeine-loving but sober Barney heading into a bright future (the caffeine addiction being an element added by one Simpsons writer who witnessed the same thing happen to friends of his in recovery).

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Despite some funny moments, “Days of Wine and D’Oh’ses” split critics as some thought Barney’s character was deepened by his sobriety, whereas many critics (and some Simpsons writers) weren’t convinced Barney could be funny sober. Nonetheless, the change stayed in place for a while despite The Simpsons’ famously loose continuity. However, in the years since, the writer’s room tired of writing a sober Barney, and so the closing moments of “Pukahontas” became sadly prescient for the character.

Barney’s Relapse

By season 14’s “I’m Spelling As Fast As I Can”, a mere 3 seasons after his initial sobriety, Barney can be seen to have relapsed, and since then the most recent edit of The Simpsons’ opening credits include Barney passed out drunk in a pile of leaves. Since backtracking on Barney’s sobriety, The Simpsons has done little with the character and nowadays doesn’t even make much use of him, bringing the end of “Pukahontas” into poignant relief. Upon a rewatch, the last moments of “Pukahontas”, initially intended as a spoof pretentious, heavy-handed cinema, now seem to be an accurate depiction of Barney’s eventual fate, trapped in a cycle of addiction that The Simpsons rarely even addresses, whether for laughs or drama. The end of “Pukahontas” essentially confirms that, despite Castellanata’s high hopes for the character’s evolution, Barney was always going to end up stuck in the eventually lethal cycle epitomized in the legendary “Pukahontas” line, “Don’t cry for me… I’m already dead.”

It’s disappointing to see that the writers’ room of The Simpsons doesn’t seem up for the challenge of keeping a sober Barney character interesting and engaging, but also it’s indicative of the less inventive, more formulaic storytelling and weaker writing The Simpsons has often been accused of in later seasons. Like many of the long-running series beloved characters, Barney seems destined to stay trapped in a feedback loop of drunkenness much like Sideshow Bob will always be attempting to kill Bart, Moleman will always be subject to some unlikely misfortune, and Gil Gunderson will forever be striving and falling short of a big win. It’s a shame that The Simpsons’ stalwart seems stuck in arrested development, but it’s also a fate that his own film predicted decades before the series began settling into what many critics have called a predictable, repetitive routine.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/simpsons-barney-pukahontas-alcoholism-fail-explained/

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