Plot
Following a Health convention held in Springfield, the children of Springfield are deemed to be overweight. To help them stay in shape, the parents enroll their children in pee-wee football. The coach, Ned Flanders, helps keep the team undefeated, but quits and gives the job to Homer after Homer heckles him from the stands.
Homer initially acts tough towards Bart, but when he is reminded of how his father was hard on him as a child, he decides to be nicer to Bart (and meaner to Grandpa). The next day, he decides to cut many players from the team, and replaces star quarterback Nelson with Bart, causing an uproar from the team. Bart is unable to play the position well, and causes the team to lose a game; the rest of the team threatens to beat Bart up unless he quits. While training at night Bart meets Joe Namath, who promises to help him, but soon after Joe's wife fixes the car, which had broken down due to vapor lock, Joe leaves without helping Bart.
Lisa suggests that Bart pretend he is injured to get out of quarterbacking, which he eagerly does, but Homer claims that without Bart the team must forfeit. This causes Bart to become angry and quit the team. Nelson is made quarterback again and the team wins, but Homer has nobody to celebrate with and becomes lonely. Afterwards, Homer finds Bart and persuades him to rejoin the team. The next day, during the championship game, the score is tied when Chief Wiggum comes to arrest Nelson. Bart decides to pretend he is Nelson, assuming the charges are minor (they are actually burglary and arson). The team finally wins the championship, and unsuccessfully tries to carry Homer off the field. Joe Namath reappears to give his final thoughts on the episode and on vapor lock, the third most common cause of engine stalling.
The credits show Homer cutting all the people who worked on the episode (except for Joe Namath), including the woman who shushes in the Gracie Films logo.
Read more about this topic: Bart Star
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)