THE SIMPSONS Greatest Hits: “Rosebud”

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.

Rosebud

Season 5/Episode 4 overall

First aired: 21 October 1993

Written by John Swartzwelder

“Have the Rolling Stones killed.”

Charles Montgomery Burns has long been my favourite character on The Simpsons. In the early episodes, he was the main antagonist of the family and the rest of the town. The writers would occasionally inject some humility and pathos into his storylines, and as time went on he became a more sympathetic character as these characters tend to do on long-running shows (e.g. Dwight and Michael in The Office, Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, most of the baddies in Game of Thrones, Sawyer in Lost, etc.).

In these earlier seasons, though, as we saw in “Last Exit to Springfield,” he’s still a cold, unfeeling villain who wants nothing more than to destroy those around him, horde his wealth, and live a quiet life. This will always be my favourite version of the character, as the writers seem to love making the details around him so ridiculous and his action veer into cartoonish super-villainy that you can’t help but enjoy seeing what he’s going to do next.

“Chock full of heady goodness.”

“Rosebud” is a fantastic Mr Burns episode that gives us an insight into the man’s past and shows us a softer side of him…and also how far he’ll go to get what he wants.

The episode centres around Mr Burns’ search for his childhood teddy, Bobo, a stand-in for Charles Foster Kane’s sled in Citizen Kane. While Rosebud the sled was a metaphor for Kane’s lost youth (spoiler?), Bobo isn’t a metaphor for anything. Burns misses his bear and wants it back. If the whole thing is supposed to be a subtext for Burns yearning for his lost youth and humble upbringing, the show doesn’t get into it, and nothing about Burns suggests that he laments leaving his poor parents to be raised by a heartless millionaire.

Maybe the bear simply represents cuddliness and companionship, or, to misquote Freud, sometimes a bear is just a bear. Either way, the bear falls into the hands of Maggie Simpson, and Burns wants it back.

“It’s an ending, that’s enough.”

This is also a fantastic Homer episode as it gives him a wonderful fatherly storyline and also one of the funniest sequences The Simpsons has ever produced.

Burns’ offer of a million dollars and three Hawaiian islands for the bear can’t be accepted because Homer can’t bear to make Maggie sad, which is a gorgeous portrayal of the crass, idiotic Homer as, at the end of the day, a good man and a good father. Maggie would get over losing the bear, surely, but at that moment, the idea of wrenching the bear from the tiny hands of his youngest daughter is too much for Homer to bear (pun unintended).

In contrast to Homer’s sweet, gooey centre, is that at one point in this episode he wakes up in the middle of the night, goes downstairs and precedes to eat 64 separate slices of American cheese. It is an incredibly simple gag: he sits down and eats the slices, counting down as he does. But it is so intensely ridiculous, especially as Smithers and Burns are suction cupped to the ceiling during the whole thing. Homer’s groan of “I think I’m blind” is the perfect punchline, and that sequence is still one of the greatest things The Simpsons has ever given to us.

In conclusion, Rosebud is a great episode of The Simpsons that gives us some juicy Burns villainy and some sweet, lovable Homer.

Overall Score 64 Slices of American Cheese out of 64.