It’s been 35 years since The Simpsons aired “Stark Raving Dad,” the season 3 opener for the hit record-breaking animated show. Yet if you ask any younger fans of the show may have never seen the episode. That’s because it’s been pulled from circulation on Disney+ completely. Here’s the story of why and also why you may want to build your own Plex instance on a home lab.
Plot of Stark Raving Dad
As with many of the early seasons of The Simpsons, “Dark Raving Dad” was one of the show’s best episodes. The whole premise of the episode centers on Lisa reminding Bart about her birthday and the fact that he forgets her birthday every year, Bart promises not to forget this year.
Bart also accidentally “gifts” Homer a gift too. He chucks his lucky red hat into the wash with Homer’s white shirts, dyeing all of them pink. Maybe showing that not everything dates so well these days because I like to wear pink, but Homer ends up seeing a psychiatrist because of his pink shirt. He ends up getting committed to an institution after he sees an ink blot that resembles Bart and triggers him.
In the institution Homer ends up meeting a man who identifies as Michael Jackson but Homer is unaware of who this famous person would have been. The character in the show doesn’t resemble the Michael Jackson that we know at all. However he actually was voiced by Jackson.
Ultimately Homer brags about his new friend. Everybody gets excited, thinking it is Michael Jackson, but instead this guy from the institution appears, leaving everybody disappointed. Bart misses Lisa’s birthday and ultimately the show closes with us getting one of the greatest songs of all time: “Happy Birthday Lisa”, much to the delight of Lisa.
But why would such a wholesome comedic storyline be stripped from the Disney+ back catalog of Simpsons episodes?
Stark Raving Dad removed from The Simpsons back catalogue
Michael Jackson died in 2009 and Fox immediately reran “Stark Raving Dad” in tribute. Ten years later in March 2019, the documentary “Leaving Neverland” emerged. In the documentary sexual assault allegations were made against Michael Jackson. While Jackson had been tried and cleared in 2005 and maintained his innocence along with his estate, Stark Raving Dad was pulled from Fox and no longer shown on TV. I do find it interesting that nothing happened following the 2005 accusations; however I also find it interesting that Michael Jackson’s movie has been bussed around Ireland for the last 12 months with little to no backlash whatsoever.
The Simpsons episode ban would roll over to Disney+ when they inherited the Simpsons back catalog of episodes. Interestingly if you search for episode 1 in season 3, you’ll see the season actually starts at episode 2.
Now on the one hand, I don’t want many people to have a Disney Plus membership because they’re on the BDS list. However I do believe in the protection of art and Disney has a bad history of deleting digital-only content that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, thus erasing a piece of art that once existed. A bit rich from a streaming platform that’s all too happy to shove advertising down our throats.
This is yet another reason why society has a responsibility to protect the content that we create as art, because no piece of art should be deleted just because it’s a modern form. Nobody would have let the Mona Lisa get deleted for whatever reason or just because it was too costly to maintain or somebody had a disagreement with a new discovery about it. I appreciate this is just “an episode of The Simpsons” that we’re talking about here but it stands for so much more.
So if you care about the protection of completely legally acquired content, of course, again it’s another reason to build your own Plex server or home lab.
