A Controversial ‘Simpsons’ Deleted Scene Was Turned into a Comic Book Decades Later

One of the very best early episodes of The Simpsons, Season Two’s “Bart the Daredevil,” featured a touching storyline in which Homer risks his own life in order to protect his son from danger, plus the debut of Dr. Hibbert and absolutely no references to Adolf Hitler whatsoever. 

But that wasn’t always the case.

In Springfield Confidential by Mike Reiss, the longtime Simpsons writer admitted that a number of early gags were only included to pad out episodes that were running short, including the Sideshow Bob rake scene and Bart’s prank phone calls to Moe. More conspicuously, in Season Four’s “The Front,” the writers tacked an “Adventures of Ned Flanders” short onto the end of an episode. 

Years earlier, a similar idea was floated for “Bart the Daredevil,” but ultimately discarded. “One legendary attempt at show padding has been lost to the ages,” Reiss wrote. “Back in 1990, a second-season episode came in much too short, so we banged out a filler piece: ‘Nazis on Tap.’”

The segment would have been a fake “Simpsons cartoon short from the 1940s,” in which “Mr. Burns owns an aircraft plant making planes for the war effort,” and “Bart’s spiky hair is replaced by a pointy Jughead cap.” Oh, and Moe was a talking dog. According to Reiss, creator Matt Groening “nixed the piece because it was too weird and too early in the series to just throw at people.”

While the full animated short never made it to the air, an audio recording of the actors performing it eventually surfaced online. And in 2016, Simpsons designer Phil Ortiz handed out a four-page comic version of “Nazis on Tap” at the Wizard World Philadelphia convention. Although, judging from this eBay listing, he gave away the same comic, along with an audio cassette of the recording, at earlier conventions, too.

Fans have subsequently synced up the images from the comic with the audio of the actors, which does give us a sense of what the lost short would have looked like. The storyline finds an old-timey Homer visiting Moe’s (where Moe is still human, but is serving a talking dog) and inadvertently revealing the details of the Normandy invasion to a fellow bar patron, who happens to be Hitler.

Thankfully Bart recognizes “the Fuhrer” and takes him out with a scooter. Then FDR shows up to thank Bart and reprimand Homer.

When the audio recording first leaked, storyboard artist John Mathot supposedly revealed that the segment began as an argument between producer Sam Simon and Groening about “whether or not Nazis were funny.” To prove Groening wrong (he was firmly in the “no” camp), Simon allegedly “went behind his back” and spearheaded the short, which also included some of the cartoonist’s “least favorite things about animation,” such as talking dogs. 

Perhaps Groening was right, as it is kind of shocking to see Homer sharing a beer with Hitler. I mean, it’s bad enough that he eventually palled around with Mel Gibson.