Premiered March 16, 1997.
"Oooh, it's been St. Patrick's Day for hours and I'm still not drunk yet!"
-Homer Simpson
It's St. Patrick's Day in Springfield.
Marge Simpson takes her kids Bart, Lisa and Maggie to the annual St. Patrick's Day parade. Bart sees a man selling plastic horns and asks for one. Marge is reluctant, reminding that Bart that he's gotten similar horns in the past and thrown them away before he got home. She buys him a horn anyway.
At the same time, parade devolves into a drunken brawl. The Duff Beer float shoots beer into the crowd with cannons. Bart just happens to to be blowing his new horn near the Duff float so beer goes directly into the horn (turning it into a beer bong!) and Bart swallows enough to get quite intoxicated.
Bart's drunkenness is captured on camera and airs on the local evening newscast. The citizens of Springfield are enraged and some even call for banning alcohol. At City Hall, a clerk discovers that Springfield passed a prohibition law a century earlier and the law is still on the books! Alcohol becomes contraband in Springfield!
In order to enforce this law, the city brings in a lawman named Rex Banner. He arrives and takes over, dismissing the ineffective police Chief Wiggum. The chief is crushed.
The prohibition law gives Homer Simpson an idea. He visits the dump and collects Duff's discarded barrels of beer, which still contain alcohol. He takes the beer and conceals it in bowling balls as part of an elaborate alcohol distribution scheme.
Homer sells beers to Moe and others and makes lots of money in the process. The press learns of this, but Homer's identity remains a mystery. He is branded "The Beer Baron." Rex Banner is aware of his existence and is determined to bring the Beer Baron to justice.
J.A. Morris says:
As we've said here before, there aren't many St. Patrick's Day specials, episodes or movies, so this Simpsons episode is an nice addition.
Like most episodes of The Simpsons, "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment" begins with a story that is dropped by the end of the first act. The St. Patrick's Day portion of the episode ends at the 6-minute mark. But the holiday serves as the fulcrum that sets the prohibition storyline in motion.
In addition to the St. Paddy's parade and the prohibition plot, "Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment" opens with Lisa and Bart going to school on St. Patrick's Day, with Bart failing to wear green.
Bart suffers the way kids did in my elementary school when they didn't participate in "the wearin' o' the green."
"Homer vs. The Eighteenth Amendment" is a great episodes of one of the best series of all time and is highly recommended for St. Patrick's Day viewing.
J.A. Morris' rating:
4 shamrocks!
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| The Simpsons meets Edward Hopper! |
RigbyMel says:
I am a big fan of The Simpsons and this is a great episode. As J.A. Morris mentions, the homages to gangster movies are pretty brilliant. I particularly liked that Moe's Tavern masquerades as a pet shop to shake off the cops and various Springfieldians reaction to the return of Prohibition (collapse seems to be a popular response).
The St. Patrick's Day portion of the episode is also pretty darned funny and really plays with the notion that this is really a holiday for amateur drunkeness with a veneer of Irish heritage. It's well worth pausing during bits of the parade to see what is going on with each float and in the crowd.
That being said, I am going to deduct a bit from my rating since the St. Patrick's Day portion really only lasts for the first couple of minutes of the episode!
RigbyMel's rating:
3 shamrocks
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