Judge Uses ‘The Simpsons’ to Explain Deceptive Marketing Practices
Despite the show’s occasionally unflattering portrayal of the justice system, a real-life judge recently cited The Simpsons during a case involving “fraudulent misrepresentation.” And no, it didn’t involve any claims made by 1984 film The NeverEnding Story.
A proposed class-action lawsuit against a Canadian paint thinner manufacturer made it all the way to British Columbia’s Supreme Court. As CTV News reported, the case was eventually dismissed, but in the introduction to the decision, Justice Joel R. Groves raised eyebrows by comparing the defendant to Springfield’s biggest/sketchiest brewery: Duff Beer.
“It is sometimes said that life imitates art,” Groves wrote. “In terms of the art, and I am perhaps using this term in the broadest sense possible, there is a somewhat notorious episode of the television show called The Simpsons, in which the fatherly character, Homer Simpson, is on a tour of a local brewery of the Duff Beer company, the apparent producer of his drink of choice."
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The judge wasn’t having some kind of cartoon-inspired breakdown, the allegations against the company, Recochem Inc., involved allegedly marketing the same paint thinner under different product names. And, as Justice Groves recalled, when Homer is touring the Duff brewery in the Season Four episode “Duffless,” there are three vats featuring different Duff beer lines (Duff, Duff Lite and Duff Dry), but they’re all being filled by the same pipe.
“The clear implication from this background scene is that the same beer is being used to create the three differently labeled beer products,” the judge explained. Of course, that implication isn’t so clear if you watch the widescreen version on Disney+.
The Simpsons example was a good one, because the defendant’s paint thinners each “contained the exact same product” yet featured distinct labels such as “professional grade” and “premium quality.”
Justice Groves went on to suggest that “a decision was made to simply do the legal equivalent to what the ‘Duff’ beer company did in the noted episode of The Simpsons, market three products as having different attributes, when in fact all the products had all the same attributes."
While the case was dismissed, he did call this corporate strategy “morally concerning.” And it would be even more morally concerning if this paint thinner company had also opened a theme park with children’s rides containing hallucinogenic chemicals.
Business in Vancouver pointed out that this somehow wasn’t the first time that a B.C. Supreme Court justice has made a surprising pop-culture reference. In 2021, Justice Ward Branch randomly mentioned Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch in a ruling concerning “glucosamine sulfate products that allegedly don't contain glucosamine sulfate.”
But hours after the case made headlines, all Python references were removed from the judgment. In other words, it ceased to be and became an ex-reference.
