"Brother from the Same Planet" is the fourteenth episode of The Simpsons' fourth season. After Homer is late to pick up Bart from soccer practice, Bart turns to the program The Bigger Brothers, and is assigned a man named Tom. Homer gets himself a little brother named Pepe. Homer and Tom fight, and Homer reconciles with Bart, and Tom becomes Pepe's bigger brother. Meanwhile, Lisa becomes addicted to the Corey hotline — a phone service where television fans can listen to the voice of a fictional actor based on Corey Haim and Corey Feldman.
The episode originally aired in the United States on FOX on February 4, 1993 and was written by Jon Vitti and directed by Jeffrey Lynch. The producers tried to cast Tom Cruise for the role of Tom, but Cruise refused, and they used Phil Hartman instead. "Brother from the Same Planet" received favorable reception in books and in the media, and was highlighted among the five best episodes of the series by the writers of the FOX program King of the Hill.
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After soccer practice, Bart waits for Homer to pick him up, though his father has forgotten. When Homer finally remembers he reasons to an angered Bart that they should just both admit they are wrong and try to put the issue behind them. Later, Bart views a commercial for a mentor program called The Bigger Brothers, which pairs up boys without fathers with positive male role models. Bart goes to the agency pretending to be a young boy whose father left him six years ago and is assigned a big brother called Tom. The two spend time together doing a variety of activities. Eventually, Homer finds out about Bart's Bigger Brother and decides to go to the Bigger Brothers Agency to get revenge by being assigned a replacement son; a young boy named Pepe.
Later, Homer takes Pepe to Marine World on Bigger Brothers Day, while Tom takes Bart. After running into Homer, Tom (who has been told by Bart that Homer is a terrible father who gambles and drinks) begins to brawl with him, in a fight which rages across Springfield. In the end, Homer winds up in a stretcher but reconciles with Bart. Meanwhile, through Bart's intervention, Tom becomes Pepe's big brother.
In the subplot, Marge finds a $378.53 phone bill for calls made to the Corey hotline by Lisa - a phone service where television fans can listen to the voice of a fictional actor based on The Two Coreys. Lisa promises to stop but continues to make calls to the hotline from such places as Doctor Hibbert's office and a phone at Springfield Elementary. After Principal Skinner catches her, Marge suggests that Lisa try to go until 12 o'clock that evening without calling the hotline; if she can do so, she will have conquered her addiction. Although tempted for the rest of the day, Lisa beats her addiction.
"Brother from the Same Planet" was written by Jon Vitti and directed by Jeffrey Lynch.[2] It originally aired in the United States on February 4, 1993, on FOX.[1] The writers wrote the role of Tom for actor Tom Cruise.[4] However, when offered the part, Cruise repeatedly turned it down, so the producers used Phil Hartman instead.[4] The writers based the Corey character on the actors Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, known as The Two Coreys.[5] Pepe was based on the fictional character Dondi from the daily comic strip of the same name.[5]
In the episode, Bart and Tom watch The Ren & Stimpy Show. The producers contacted Nickelodeon to get authorization to use the two characters for that sequence.[5] Nickelodeon was strict about what The Simpsons was allowed to do, and the producers were not allowed to have the savageness that they wanted.[5] The Ren & Stimpy Show's animators offered to do the layouts of Ren and Stimpy for the episode.[6]
The television show Bart watches, Tuesday Night Live, is a parody of NBC's Saturday Night Live. Krusty appears in a sketch called "The Big Ear Family", and says that the sketch goes on for twelve more minutes, even though the joke's punchline has already been established.[6] That was Jon Vitti's way of criticizing Saturday Night Live for having overlong sketches with thin joke premises.[6] The sequence originally had a longer version of the Tuesday Night Live band playing into the commercial break, but it was cut because Vitti, who was a writer on Saturday Night Live during the 1985–1986 season along with fellow Simpson writers, George Meyer and John Swartzwelder, did not want to come off as being bitter.[6]
The writing staff was looking for a way to end the episode and executive producer Sam Simon suggested that they watch the film The Quiet Man. The writers came in on a Saturday to watch the film together. They were inspired by the film's fight scene between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen's characters to do a fight scene between Homer and Tom in the episode.[6] The scene was difficult for the producers to sound-mix because they wanted it to be funny but not horrifying. They discovered that the more realistic the effects used sounded, the funnier the scene became.[7] The producers tried all sorts of different sounds for when Homer cracks his back on the fire hydrant and chose the tiniest realistic sound, because they believed that it was the most painful and "hilarious".[7]
The scene in which Milhouse writes "Trab pu kcip! "Trab pu kcip!" on the wall is a reference to "red rum" from Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining.[8][9] The woman Bart mistakes for Homer is singing Helen Reddy song "I Am Woman".[2] While Bart is stuck in the storm waiting for Homer, a nun is lifted up by the wind, a reference to the TV series The Flying Nun.[2] Bart and Tom watch The Ren & Stimpy Show.[5] Homer watches an NFL Films production about Bart Starr, the quarterback on the Green Bay Packers who led the team to victory in the first two Super Bowls.[5] The scene where Homer accuses Bart of seeing his big brother is a reference to the 1966 film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where Richard Burton accuses Elizabeth Taylor of adultery.[2] In a made-up story Homer tells Pepe, Bart tells Homer to shut up and shoves half a grapefruit in his face, a reference to the 1931 film The Public Enemy.[5] Bart watches Tuesday Night Live, a parody of NBC's Saturday Night Live.[6] The background music used for the fight scene is a knockoff of the music used in the fight scene in The Quiet Man.[4]
In its original broadcast, "Brother from the Same Planet" finished 18th in ratings for the week of February 1-7, 1993, with a Nielsen rating of 14.9, equivalent to approximately 13.9 million viewing households. It was the highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, beating Martin.[10]
In their section on the episode in the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood comment: "We love Homer sitting at home trying to remember to pick up Bart — he's watching a TV show about a baseball star called Bart, with pictures of Bart on all sides, and even Maggie seems to be calling her brother's name."[2] Writing in the compilation work The Psychology of The Simpsons, Robert M. Arkin and Philip J. Mazzocco reference a scene from the episode where Homer "argues with his own brain about a desired course of action" to illustrate self-discrepancy theory, the idea that "humans will go to great lengths to attain and preserve self-esteem".[11]
The writers of the FOX program King of the Hill put "Brother from the Same Planet" among the five best episodes of The Simpsons, including "Homer the Heretic", "Lisa's Wedding", "Lisa's Substitute", and "Behind the Laughter".[1] Mikey Cahill of the Herald Sun highlighted the quote "PickupBart? What the hell is PickupBart?" by Homer in his list of "Fab Fives" related to The Simpsons.[12] When asked to pick his favorite season out of The Simpsons seasons one through twenty, Paul Lane of the Niagara Gazette picked season four and highlighted "Brother from the Same Planet" and "Mr. Plow" which he called "excellent", along with "the sweetly funny" "Lisa's First Word", and "Homer the Heretic".[13] In a review of The Simpsons season four, Lyndsey Shinoda of Video Store cited "Brother from the Same Planet" and "I Love Lisa" among her "personal favorites" from the season.[14]