QUICK SYNOPSIS

While the kids become stranded on a desert island, Homer attempts to cash in on the Internet.

POINTLESS GUEST STAR(S)

James Earl Jones shows up as a voiceover to wrap up the episode with the worst ending any Simpsons episode has ever had. ALTHOUGH, I’ve never actually read Lord of the Flies and I read that this episode’s ending falls in line with how the book ended. Still though, it made me really mad when I was a puny little punk 10-year-old.

WHY THIS EPISODE SUCKS

I like “Das Bus”, but it’s a really stupid name for the episode. I would have named it something like “Blord of the Flies”, which is a dumb name but it’s a much better name than “Das Bus”. After all, it’s only marginally about a bus. Mostly, it’s about almost all of the named students at Springfield Elementary stuck in a grim Lord of the Flies scenario.

The A-plot of the children, as elementary school Model U.N. representatives going on a field trip, getting stuck on an island is so out-there as a concept in the first place that I can readily excuse any zaniness associated with it. Especially since the jokes were decent. Hey, as long as the out-there concepts are packed with actual good humor (think “Deep Space Homer”), anything can and should be excused! And to me, the ridiculousness of Otto getting swept out to sea (“Zeppelin ruuuuuuuuules…”) and caught by a foreign slaver ship is hilarious in the context of an episode grounded in its own reality rules. Therefore, I can excuse the fact that a remote, tropical island is less than a mile away from the Springfield Bridge. Wait a minute. Can I?

I could have done without most of the B-plot. Homer starting his own Internet company was definitely a fresh story in early 1998, but we really don’t see anything come of this. Homer’s interaction with Comic Book Guy is the best part (“Can I have some money now?”), but the whole story otherwise seems like a vehicle for the Bill Gates gag. In short, very forgettable! But it least it gave me two things: 1) Homer was savvy enough to design and purchase ad space on… er, Star Trek: Voyager-themed pronographic websites, and 2) the phase “Maude, eh?” which my sister and I still say to each other all these years later.

The deus ex machina ending is terrible, but since the ending of Lord of the Flies is reportedly equally terrible, I can excuse it if it’s meant to be a self-aware stab at the source material. In fact, I’ll give it even more points for that! Eat shit, William Golding.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

To make the fishermen’s speech as accurate as possible, David X. Cohen called a friend who spoke Mandarin. When the Chinese actors came, the actors did not feel Mandarin was geographically appropriate, and it was changed to Cantonese, which is spoken more in China’s coastal regions and would be more appropriate for sailors and fishermen.
To put this in even more context, David X. Cohen is an enormous nerd who stuffs Futurama episodes with jokes about linear algebra and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. He’ll spend hours agonizing over the realism of a throwaway joke in an episode of a show about kids wanting to kill each other with spears on a deserted island.

The title is deliberate incorrect German; “bus” is a masculine noun in German.
Yeah. “Deliberate”. Okay.

According to the audio commentary, the episode originally just showed Otto being carried away by the current. The writers admitted that that would have actually been less cruel than the final version.
I think I’m gonna like it on this boat!

FINAL GRADE
B+