"Brother from the Same Planet" is the fourteenth episode of the fourth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 4, 1993. In the episode, after Homer is late to pick him up from soccer practice, Bart turns to the program the Bigger Brothers, and is assigned a man named Tom. Out of jealousy, Homer gets a Little Brother, Pepi. Meanwhile, Lisa becomes addicted to the Corey hotline, a phone service where television fans can listen to the voice of a fictional actor based on Corey Feldman and Corey Haim.
The episode was written by Jon Vitti and directed by Jeffrey Lynch. The producers tried to cast Tom Cruise for the role of Tom, but Cruise refused and they chose Phil Hartman instead. "Brother from the Same Planet" received favorable reception in books and in the media; a contemporary review in Entertainment Weekly said it "may be the best Simpsons show ever"[3] and it was named one of the five best episodes of the series by the writers of King of the Hill.
Plot
Bart, angry at Homer for not picking him up at soccer practice, When his own father was spending too time to himself and forgeting about all day long in the rain. So, Bart goes to the Bigger Brothers Agency, a mentor program which pairs up fatherless boys with positive male role models. He claims his father was a drunken gambler who abandoned him. The receptionist pairs him up with their best Bigger Brother, Tom, a handsome military test pilot. The two spend time together doing a variety of activities, though Bart feels guilty over taking up Tom's time despite not actually being fatherless. Homer finds out about Tom and confronts Bart. Homer decides to go to the Bigger Brothers Agency to get revenge; when asked why he wants a Little Brother, he says, "Uh, revenge?", which the worker duly notes. He is assigned a Little Brother, a poor young boy named Pepi.
Later on, it is Bigger Brothers Day in Marine World, where the Bigger Brothers and their boys attend to celebrate (including Homer, Tom, Bart, and Pepi). Homer tells Tom he's Bart's father. Tom asks, "His father? The drunken gambler?" to which Homer responds, "That's right, and who might you be?" The two brawl. The fight rages across Springfield and ends with Homer's defeat, his back draped painfully over a fire hydrant. Homer is sent to a hospital on a stretcher, with Bart blaming himself. Tom laments how he will miss being a Bigger Brother, while Pepi is sad over losing his Bigger Brother. Bart suggests Tom become Pepi's big brother; they happily agree and walk into the sunset holding hands. After Homer recovers, Bart asks Homer how to brawl like he does.
Meanwhile, Marge finds an anomalously high phone bill for calls made by Lisa to the Corey hotline — a premium rate phone service where fans can listen to the voice of a teen heartthrob. Lisa promises to stop increasing the family's phone bill, but continues to make calls to the hotline from Dr. Hibbert's office, Grandpa’s room and a telephone at Springfield Elementary. After Principal Skinner catches her, Marge suggests that Lisa try to go until midnight without calling the hotline; if she can do so, she will have conquered her addiction. Although tempted throughout the rest of the day, Lisa beats her addiction.
Production
The character Tom was originally written for Tom Cruise.
The episode was written by Jon Vitti and directed by Jeffrey Lynch.[2] It originally aired in the United States on February 4, 1993, on Fox.[4] The role of Tom was written for Tom Cruise.[5] However, when offered the part, Cruise repeatedly turned it down, so the producers used Phil Hartman.[5] Corey is a composite of Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, known as The Two Coreys.[6] Pepi was based on the title character of the daily comic strip Dondi.[6]
Bart and Tom watch The Ren & Stimpy Show. The producers contacted Nickelodeon to get authorization to use the two characters for that sequence.[6] Nickelodeon was strict about what The Simpsons was allowed to do, and the producers were not allowed to have the savageness that they wanted.[6]The Ren & Stimpy Show's animators offered to do the layouts of Ren and Stimpy for the episode.[7] The show Bart watches, Tuesday Night Live, is a parody of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Krusty appears in a sketch called "The Big Ear Family", and says that the sketch goes on for twelve more minutes, even though the joke's punchline has already been established.[7] That was Vitti's way of criticizing Saturday Night Live for having overlong sketches with thin joke premises.[7] The sequence originally had a longer version of the Tuesday Night Live band playing into the commercial break, but it was cut because Vitti, who was a writer on Saturday Night Live during the 1985–86 season along with fellow Simpsons writers George Meyer and John Swartzwelder, did not want to come off as being bitter.[7]
The writers were looking for an ending, and executive producer Sam Simon suggested they watch The Quiet Man. The writers came in on a Saturday to watch it, and were inspired by the fight scene between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen to do a fight scene between Homer and Tom.[7] The scene was difficult for the producers to sound-mix because they wanted it to be funny but not horrifying. They discovered that the more realistic the effects used sounded, the funnier the scene became.[8] The producers tried all sorts of different sounds for when Homer cracks his back on the fire hydrant and chose the tiniest realistic sound, because they believed that it was the most painful and "hilarious".[8]
Marge tells Lisa that, as a girl, she had a crush on Bobby Sherman, to Lisa's amusement. The scene where Homer accuses Bart of seeing his big brother is a reference to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), where Richard Burton accuses Elizabeth Taylor of adultery.[2] In the story Homer tells Pepi, Bart tells Homer to shut up and shoves half a grapefruit in his face, a reference to James Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931).[6] Bart watches Tuesday Night Live, a parody of NBC's Saturday Night Live.[7] During the fight scene between Homer and Tom, the background music is a parody of the music used in the fight scene in The Quiet Man,[5] and the fighting pose Tom makes is a parody of the Street Fighter II introduction sequence. Skinner's disturbing monologue about his mother watching him is a parody of Norman Bates' similar dialogue from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).[12]
Reception
In its original broadcast, "Brother from the Same Planet" finished 18th in ratings for the week of February 1–7, 1993, with a Nielsen rating of 14.9, equivalent to approximately 13.9 million viewing households. It was the highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, beating Martin.[13]
In their section on the episode in the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood comment: "We love Homer sitting at home trying to remember to pick up Bart—he's watching a TV show about a football star called Bart, with pictures of Bart on all sides, and even Maggie seems to be calling her brother's name."[2] Writing in the compilation work The Psychology of The Simpsons, Robert M. Arkin and Philip J. Mazzocco reference a scene from the episode where Homer "argues with his own brain about a desired course of action" to illustrate self-discrepancy theory, the idea that "humans will go to great lengths to attain and preserve self-esteem".[14]
The writers of King of the Hill named "Brother from the Same Planet" as one the five best episodes of The Simpsons, along with "Homer the Heretic", "Lisa's Wedding", "Lisa's Substitute", and "Behind the Laughter".[4] Mikey Cahill of the Herald Sun highlighted the quote "PickupBart? What the hell is PickupBart?" by Homer in his list of "Fab Fives" related to The Simpsons.[15] When asked to pick his favorite season out of The Simpsons seasons one through twenty, Paul Lane of the Niagara Gazette picked season four and highlighted "Brother from the Same Planet" and "Mr. Plow" which he called "excellent", along with "the sweetly funny" "Lisa's First Word", and "Homer the Heretic".[16] In a review of The Simpsons season four, Lyndsey Shinoda of Video Store cited "Brother from the Same Planet" and "I Love Lisa" among her "personal favorites" from the season.[17]
Reviewing season four in Entertainment Weekly, Ken Tucker called the episode "a masterpiece of tiny, throwaway details that accumulate into a worldview. When Bart and his Bigger Brother, Tom, go to a baseball game, for example, it’s Tomato Day at the stadium; the pregame festivities include a speech by 'the recruiter for the Springfield Communist Party,' a grizzled old man who gets booed and pelted with red, rotting fruit before he opens his mouth.
A subplot involves Lisa’s crush on a vapid teen idol named Corey, and her uncontrollable urge to call a 900 number (only '$4.95 a minute') that features taped messages of Corey reciting things like 'words that rhyme with Corey' ('Um, story… allegory… Montessori'). How did Lisa learn about Corey and his money-leeching phone service? We notice that her bedroom contains a copy of Non-Threatening Boys magazine.
Groening’s writers tend to make their sharpest points quickly, matter-of-factly... Earlier, Bart’s schoolteacher Mrs. Krabappel (her nicely sour voice supplied by Marcia Wallace of the ’70s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show) thanked our little antihero for bringing in a deadly looking, U.S. Navy-made 'neural-disrupter' gun for show-and-tell. 'Don’t thank me,' says Bart briskly, 'thank an unprecedented eight-year military buildup.'” [3]
