THE SIMPSONS Greatest Hits: “Radioactive Man”

Welcome to The Simpsons Greatest Hits, my never-ending quest to find the greatest episode of The Simpsons. Please come find me on twitter @FirsttoLastpod and let me know what is the best episode, and keep a look out for it on this weekly column.

Radioactive Man

Season 7/Episode 130 overall

First aired: 24 September 1995

Written by John Swartzwelder

“I can’t hear you, son. I’m wearing a jacuzzi suit.”

Radioactive Man is a weird relic of a Simpsons episode in that it is a commentary on making superheroes made long before the superhero movie genre took over cinema.

When the creators of the movie in the episode talk about 30 million dollar budgets and stunts costing a million dollars it seems almost quaint to a modern audience who are used to seeing 300 million dollar movies that earn a billion in box office.

However, this episode isn’t solely about making a movie, it’s really about poor Milhouse, The Simpsons’ most downtrodden character who, even when he gets every boy’s dream, is miserable and treated badly.

“My eyes! The goggles do nothing!”

Watching this episode for this article, I will admit I didn’t find a lot of the jokes landing as well as in other episodes. The episode doesn’t take the obvious route of satirising the Hollywood types who arrive in Springfield to make their blockbuster, and instead, it focuses on how the town jacks up its prices and tries to gouge the production out of money. It’s an interesting way for the show to do something new with a plot we’ve seen before, but unfortunately, there isn’t much humour in it. The town makes everything expensive, and Mayor Quimby keeps making up taxes, and that’s pretty much the whole joke repeated throughout.

The episode would have been better focused on more Milhouse and Bart. Their story could have been predictable with Bart resenting Milhouse for getting the part as Fallout Boy that Bart wanted so badly, but instead, they make Bart supportive of his friend. This works a lot better, especially considering that Milhouse didn’t want the part in the first place.

The only problem is that the show keeps moving away from this plot to make way for some quite weak gags when really the best place for gags and drama is in the plot between the two friends.

“I can suck up to him, like the religious suck up to God.”

I would have to say that this is the first episode that I’ve covered here, that I don’t think warrants a place in the pantheon of great Simpsons episodes. The jokes are mostly good with some great, and others quite tired. The plot is fantastic, but the show can’t keep its focus straight, and the parody hasn’t aged well as we’ve moved away from Adam West style super-heroics, and superhero movies have become such a huge cultural behemoth that we see satire of them all the time, and the joke mine was never that productive.

However, as a showcase for Milhouse and Bart’s friendship, this is a great episode in that we get a good idea of their relationship straight from the opening scene, in which they discuss the differences between Radioactive Man and Radiation Dude. It feels like a lived-in friendship between two ten-year-olds and the kind of conversation that kids would have.

It’s also nice that even with Milhouse’s success coming at the cost of his own, Bart is able to (in his own way) offer support and kindness to his friend, when it would have been very easy to fall into anger and jealousy.

In conclusion, this one is not the best Simpsons episode ever made, but it is still pretty good.

Overall Score: 4 Up and At Them’s out of 5