Thread by @Longshanks1307

So I just re-watched the classic Simpsons episode ‘Bart Gets An Elephant’. It is 25 years old, but a parable for our times. [thread]

Bart wins a radio station phone-in and is given a binary choice: $10,000 in cash or a full grown African elephant.

Bart chooses the elephant.

The radio people are shocked. No one was supposed to pick the elephant. There is no elephant.

So they try to negotiate (‘We think we know how your mind works, Bart’) and offer other alternatives which are equally stupid, but less costly and destructive.

These include paying the $10,000 dollars to Bart’s school principal, who agrees to pull his trousers down for a whole term, or using the money to surgically transform the principal into ‘some kind of lobster-like creature’.

But Bart refuses all compromise, and just keeps shouting ‘Where’s my elephant?’ His voice is so loud it can be heard over the top of the record played by the station to drown him out.

The people listening to the radio in the old folks’ home are delighted with misplaced nostalgia: ‘Hey, they’re playing the elephant song!’ says one. ‘I love that one – reminds me of elephants’ says another.

Bart’s chant soon gets taken up by the media. “Isn’t that what we’re all asking in our own lives?” says TV anchorman Kent Brockman. “Where’s my elephant?”

Eventually, to keep their jobs, the radio people crumple and get Bart a fully grown African elephant.

Despite Bart’s continued enthusiasm, it is a disaster. It immediately smashes into the side of the Simpsons’ house, causing massive structural damage. It smells ‘worse than anything’. But the biggest problem is the elephant – now named Stampy – is economically unviable.

He costs $1,000 dollars a week to feed and maintain, and efforts to make him pay for himself raise only tiny sums.

“$58 and all of it profit!” declares a delighted Homer, “I’m the smartest businessman in the world!”

“Stampy’s food bill today was $300” replies Marge.

And so the Simpsons are forced to give up the elephant. Homer wants to sell him to an ivory dealer, Mr Blackheart. A former President of the Fox Network, he is the only character in the story who stands to make money. Bart runs away with Stampy, leaving a trail of destruction.

Eventually, Homer agrees to do the morally right thing and gives Stampy to an animal refuge.

So the Simpsons end up with no elephant, just bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars, having alienated their neighbours and trashed the entire neighbourhood.