Bart the General is a series of animated short films made by the group known as "Famicon", and is based very, very loosely upon The Simpsons. It is also a complete and utter Mind Screw, the sort of stuff that would make David Lynch piss his pants. With an animation style that looks like it was drawn in Kid - Pix or MS Paint, partly because it basically was, as it was animated in Multimedia Fusion 2, and a narrative that cannot remain on one subject for any amount of time, the series is extremely surreal and frightening. The series comes in four parts with an apparent fifth, as the fourth ends with a TBC screen.
Although the series is extremely hard to follow, the plot can best be summed up as this: Homer/Omarn Simpson is living a peaceful life in the quiet suburb of Duckburg, when one day a usurper named Jarrod "Toadfish" Rebecchi, who wears an orange bowling shirt and speaks with a New Zealand accent, arrives and kicks Omarn out on the street, taking Marge as his bride. Omarn is inconsolable, and spends most of his time either drinking away his sadness or hiding out at a safehouse owned by Ned Flanders. Meanwhile, the everyday events of Duckburg go on, with hilarious hijinks going on all the while, like Bart/Burton deciding to buy a Formula One racer, or a spiky haired guy falling down a well and getting trapped there with House.
The narrative, at times, seems as though it is attempting to tell a straightforward story, but just when you think it's finally going to stick to one idea, some new strange event comes along and everyone's forgotten about the previous occurrences. Overall, the series is a strange one that definitely deserves a look.
If you want to risk killing some brain cells, the videos are available here, on Famicon member GHXYK2's website: https://listography.com/ghxyk2
Some time in 2011, the "Famicon" group released another Simpsons-related cartoon that may or may not be in canon with this series, called "The Blue Family."
Not to be confused with The Simpsons season one episode of the same name.
This series provides examples of:
- Adaptational Sexuality: Marge is mentioned to be a lesbian (or at least bisexual) in this story.
- Affably Evil: Toadfish, as long as you don't hit his bad side.
- Always a Bigger Fish: Stonefish is, according to himself, this for Toadfish.Stonefish: I'm you're worst fucking nightmare if you don't like Toadfish!
- Anger Born of Worry: Burton tells Omarn not to “ever scare (him) like that again” in episode 4 after getting home and hearing what sounds like Omarn planning a murder-suicide for his family.
- Animation Bump: The fourth episode is noticeably better animated than the others, in addition to actually bordering on making some sense.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Bart's Formula One racer apparently rusts if left in the rain.
- Bittersweet Ending: Seeing as no Episode 5 was ever made, the ending of Episode 4 effectively ends with Marge, Omarn, and Burton finally making up after Stonefish gets chased off by Toadfish, finally leaving the family's residence, but it takes a hell of a lot of psychological and occasionally physical torture out of them to get to that point across the whole series; not to mention, despite this, Lisa and a few others are still dead.
- The Cameo: R. Kelly appears once while having sex with Marge.
- Couldn't Find a Pen: The purple jaguars chop a woman's head off and write "SEX TAPE" on the wall in her blood, using her head's bloody stump as a marker.
- Crossover: With House MD, and Toadfish and Stonefish.
- Crapsack World: Duckburg seems to be a pretty dilapidated place, and the 4th part makes it seem almost totally abandoned.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Toadfish seeks to ruin Omarn’s life just for rubbing him the wrong way by asking who he is.
- Dropped A Bridge On Her: Lisa is killed off at the beginning of the first episode and is barely ever mentioned again.
- Easily Forgiven: Marge, by Omarn, although he asks her whether she knows what it's like to be alone.
- Evil Is Petty: The purple jaguar leader wants to kill Barton for having a Formula One racer while they have no hot water for showers, and one threatens to kill Barton to avoid paying for “In The Shower”.
- Game Show / Show Within a Show. Part 3 has a scratching competition that Barton and Omarn watch.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: Every time we see a character up close.
- Heroic BSoD: Omarn for most of the series.
- In Name Only: This is barely a The Simpsons fan film series. The first episode does have a lot of resemblance to one, but after that it isn't even in name, as Homer and Bart get random name changes. First off, they removed almost everyone in the original Simpsons cast, killed off some of the characters that were in, derailed Bart into an Emo Teen, added strange OCs and crossovers, had the third episode be a total Mind Screw, and changed the remaining characters' designs. They don't even call it a Simpsons fan fic; they just say it's
Bart based cartoons on their original site. - Lighter and Softer: "The Blue Family". In spades.
- Machine Monotone: Bart's voice in the 3rd episode. It's virtually impossible to tell the gender of the voice actor.
- No Ending: Of a sort. Episode 4 ends with a "TBC", but there was never an episode 5, and it's unclear if one was ever actually planned.
- No Name Given: Quite a few original characters.
- Oh, Crap!: Stonefish in Part IV when Toadfish chases him down for an unspecified reason.
- Parental Incest: In part 3, Burton gives Omarn a blowjob in order to win the heart of a mysterious woman. It doesn't work out for him, however and neither Berton or Omarn acknowledge what he did afterwards. After everything he's done beforehand, it acts as a very karmatic cherry on top of the Humiliation Conga he was going through during the episode.
- Potty Failure: Moments before the purple jaguars chop off a woman's head, she is shown defecating through her pants and leaving a stain on the ground. The leader of the jaguars flatly calls this disgusting.
- Punny Name: The van guy's story: a woman's brother names her children "Denise" and "De'nephew".
- Really Gets Around: Marge has sex with Toadfish, R. Kelly and an unnamed woman, and ultimately gets back together with Omarn.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Stonefish.
- Spiritual Successor: Snospis Eht and Hommer Simpson.
- Spotlight-Stealing Squad: The focus is largely on Barton through most of Episode 3. It would count as a A Day in the Limelight, but it's longer than all the others combined.
- Stylistic Suck: The entire series is animated shoddily using Multimedia Fusion 2, a game development tool, and was edited in none other than Windows Movie Maker and a lot of the visuals were drawn in none other than MS paint.
- Surreal Humour: As is tradition for Famicon's creations, this thing makes very little sense in favor of what seems to be a very dark form of comedy. Maybe.
- There Was a Door: The purple jaguars in robes blow a hole in Barton's house with a rocket-propelled grenade.
- Time Skip: This fan fic seems to take place after the time of The Simpsons. Bart/Berton appears to be older, and this is somewhat pointed out from a comment by Mr. Burns: "Berton is more like a man now!"
- The Unintelligible:
- "House." The guy doing his voice has a terrible microphone, and so it's pretty much impossible to figure out what he's saying.
- Same with the unnamed kid he's with, the only thing he says clearly is his apparent Verbal Tic, "Well, well, well".
- Vocal Evolution:
- Sort of. Barton's voice goes from somebody doing a poor imitation of Bart Simpson's voice to a borderline Machine Monotone. And by the fourth episode, his voice has reverted to being a poor imitation of Bart Simpson's voice.
- Omarn's voice goes from sounding like an unintelligible, blubbering idiot to a decent impersonation of early-Simpsons Homer's voice by episode 4.
- Voice Clip Song: The opening is set to Omarn repeatedly yelling "D'OH!"
