In episode 14 of season 13 of The Simpsons, entitled “Tales from the Public Domain”, Homer plays Odysseus in the short story called “D’oh Brother Where Art Thou?”. Homer, along with his normal gang of friends now named after other characters from The Odyssey, start at the Battle of Troy, and eventually make their way to Circe’s island and then back home to Ithaca, where Homer fights all the suitors for his wife Penelope (Marge) and eventually wins his wife, son, and home back. This episode does a good job in the scene with Circe in running parallel but still different to how the books go in the Odyssey. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’s crew eats a fruit that causes them to never want to do anything but eat the fruit and makes them forget about home. Odysseus is forced to drag them back to the ships to make them come back along with him. In The Simpsons version however, instead of eating a fruit, all the men are turned into pigs. Furthermore, instead of dragging his men back to the boat, Homer just gets hungry and eats all his men for a snack.
Send by email from Kaitlin on March 5, 9:58 PM.
We haven't yet read book 10 of the "Odyssey", which features Circe, "the bewitching queen of Aeaea", and so you have no way of knowing that the Simpson's episode actually follows pretty closely the Homeric original, except for the ending, which fits, of course, the character of Homer Simpson much better.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, though, your post reveals that the Circe episode is partly a doublet of the adventure with the Lotus Eaters. Each time, Odysseus' men can't control their appetites and thus almost, were it not for Odysseus' invention, gamble away their chance of a return home. Both episodes foreshadow, of course, the crew's final folly, their butchering and eating of the cattle of the Sun God, Helios, which, as we know from the Odyssey's prologue already, cost all of them their lives.
I just wanted to say I really liked this episode, and never really realized what it was all about. Reading the Odyssey really makes it all that much better when you can truly make all the connections in my mind.
ReplyDeleteWhen I had initially read the assignment for this blog post, I first thought of this exact episode but was slow to claim it. My favorite part of this adaptation is the character juxtaposition of the protagonists, Odysseus and Homer. Odysseus is the wisest of the Archeans, and in the Odyssey the greatest fighting with the passing of Achilles and Great Ajax, therefore he is the pinnacle of awesomeness (minus the hubris part I guess). Homer however is the exact opposite being known across the world as a clumsy, comically stupid middle aged bald guy with a gluttonous appetite for Duff beer and donuts (which in its own fashion for some is a pinnacle of awesomeness.)
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