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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: January 9, 1992
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Simpsons, “Radio Bart” (season 3, episode 13). [Stream on Simpsons World.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: One of the hallmarks of Classic Simpsons — especially as compared to later, lesser seasons of The Simpsons — was the timelessness of its stories. Very rarely would they borrow their plots from current events or respond to hot trends. “Radio Bart” bucks that trend, albeit in an oddball way. The saga of toddlers falling down wells feels very late-’80s — in particular “Baby Jessica,” who fell down a well and captivated a pre-internet nation in 1987 — but clearly the inspiration carried over to the early ’90s Simpsons writers, who followed the what-if down the rabbit hole (so to speak) and ended up with a crying-wolf Bart stuck down at the bottom of a well. Or at least eventually he was.
Bart’s prank, leaving a walkie-talkie down the well in order to fool people, works like gangbusters. It even let The Simpsons play around with another bit of ’80s cultural ephemera: the fund-raising massive group sing-a-long charity record. In this case, Sting teamed up with a bunch of Springfield luminaries (in this case, Krusty the Clown, Sideshow Mel, Rainier Wolfcastle, Troy McClure, Princess Kashmir, and the Capital City Goofball, among others) to record “We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well.”
Of course, Bart got found out, and then his boy-who-cried-wolf status turned on him when he actually DID end up down the well, but the important part is that we never cared about another child down a well ever again.
Of course, then there was Balloon Boy.
