‘The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob Is a Street Art Icon
The creatives behind The Simpsons are certainly no strangers to the world of street art, as evidenced by the time they handed over the couch gag reins to Banksy and received a harrowingly bleak sequence depicting the tortuous lives of the show’s South Korean animators. The slave laborers are seen toiling away in a dystopian sweatshop full of animation cells, DVDs and Bart Simpson dolls. It was a pretty intense opening for an episode about Bart’s Little League baseball team.
Incidentally, Banksy’s interpretation pissed off the real-life animators, who were actually based out of “high-tech workshops in downtown Seoul” that presumably contained no open vats of toxic waste and/or malnourished unicorns.
The Simpsons, it turns out, has also inspired a fair bit of street art, not by Banksy, but by other, less famous street artists. And a not insignificant number of public artworks have focused on a character who isn’t even related to the Simpson family: Sideshow Bob Terwilliger.
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Why is Bart’s mortal enemy the star of so many guerilla murals in various countries across the globe? Well because so many forms of plantlife are the perfect substitutes for his voluminous hair. One fan on the Simpsons subreddit recently shared a collection of street art that includes a painting of Bob attempting to kill Bart with a butcher knife, and a lush tree sprouting out of his head.
“Every morning that passed I saw that beautiful bougainvillea tree and I always imagined Bob Patiño (Sideshow Bob), my favorite character (from) The Simpsons,” the artist, Murdoc, said of his painting, which can be found in Durango, Mexico.
Similarly an artist in Brighton, England made use of a giant shrub by painting a cackling Bob shouting, “Die Bart!”
Which, as we all know, is simply German for “The Bart.”
Meanwhile French street artist OakOak is known for his “creatively placed” pieces, in which actual objects, such as cracks and manhole covers, are incorporated into the artwork. He created a small Sideshow Bob illustration that is perfectly situated behind a purple flower in Saint-Etienne, France.
OakOak also made use of some existing bars to create an incarcerated Bob for everyone to enjoy.
Of course, there’s a lot of Simpsons-themed street art in the world that in no way involves Sideshow Bob, like this one of Lisa playing her saxophone/drain pipe:
Or this one of… whatever the hell this is:
But sadly, as Simpsons writer Mike Reiss discovered in 2018, Buenos Aires’ mural featuring a doobie-smoking Homer Simpson is now gone.
At least it was replaced with a brand new, soul-crushing beige wall.