The Simpsons/The Crepes of Wrath

The Crepes of Wrath
Season 1, Episode 11
Airdate	April 15, 1990
Production Number	7G13
Written by	George Meyer, Sam Simon, John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti
Directed by	Wesley Archer, Milton Gray
← 1x10 Homer's Night Out	1x12 → Krusty Gets Busted
The Simpsons — Season One

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The Crepes of Wrath is the eleventh episode of the first season of The Simpsons, and the eleventh episode overall.

Bart causes trouble at school again, this time, when he uses a cherry bomb in the boys' restroom. An frustrated Principal Skinner decides to send Bart into a student exchange program, in exchange for an Albanian student, Adil Hoxha.

The plot, then, is what happens when the two youths are in different countries and their host families. Bart is enslaved by two French winemakers, while Adil takes interest, maybe too much, in Homer's work at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant.

Guest Stars:

Notes

Title Sequence

• Blackboard: "Garlic gum is not funny."
• Couch Gag: The family fits on the couch ... except for Homer, who is forced to sit on the floor.

Arc Advancement

Characters

• Adil Hoxha: The foreign exchange student from Albaina who is actually a spy for his country's government, looking to gain the Americans' nuclear secrets for the Soviet Union (which still existed in 1990, when this episode originally aired).
• Agnes Skinner: Skinner's mother makes her first appearance. It is in this episode viewers learn her son's name is Seymour, although she addresses him (much to his embarrassment) "Spanky." Agnes is seemingly congenial in early episodes, including this one, but later episodes find her controlling and treating her son as a child.
• César and Ugolin: The two French winemakers who sell illegally adulterated wine on the black market, using an toxic ingredient in antifreeze in their wines. Both treat Bart very cruelly, and have less than zero concern about his health and well-being when they force him to taste-test the laced anti-freeze. Bart is able to summon help and both are eventually arrested and sent to prison.

Trivia

Allusions and References

• 1985 Austrian diethylene glycol wine scandal: A real-life incident involving Austrian wineries making illegally adulterated wine using an toxic ingredient in antifreeze forms the basis of the plot (two unethical winemakers selling wine with illegal ingredients for profit).
• French painters: Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Rousseau and Édouard Manet all have their works seen as Bart is taken to the winery.
• "The Grapes Of Wrath": The episode title is an obvious pun on the John Steinbeck novel.
• Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources: The winemakers, César and Ugolin, are named after the peasants in the 1986 French films.
• Newsweek: A French news weekly, Newsweeque, has Bart on the cover, hailed as a national hero after the arrests of César and Ugolin.
• "The Red Balloon": Bart buys a red balloon for Maggie while in France, where the children's story is based. As in the story, the balloon has a mind of its own. In its native France, the name of the story is, Le Ballon Rouge.

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