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Bob’s Burgers, a beloved FOX cartoon that will soon return for it’s eleventh season, is a fan favorite for a reason: though the show, which follows the kooky yet adorable Belcher family as they work at their local restaurant and go on various odd adventures, is on the one hand light and amusing, it also touches on topics like puberty, bullying, family drama, and queerness with a rare honesty and a lot of heart. One theme that is consistently addressed throughout the show’s tenure is class: the Belchers’ are a working class family whose restaurant is constantly on the brink of collapse, and many episodes center around the family’s financial stress, their inability to make rent on time, or their overall fear towards their formidable landlord, Mr. Fischoeder. One episode in particular ties all these themes together quite nicely: “The Oeder Games.”
“The Oeder Games,” the 21st episode of the show’s fifth season, begins with all the town’s tenants gathered in the Belcher’s restaurant, scared and frustrated that Mr. Fischoeder has raised the rent to something that almost nobody can afford. Bob, the patriarch of the Belcher family and founder of Bob’s Burgers, is giving a rousing speech, proclaiming that they all must go to Mr. Fischoeder’s house and let him know that if he doesn’t lower the rent, the tenants will all go on a “rent strike” and refuse to pay it. The tenants agree, but when they storm Mr. Fischoeder’s mansion, they find that he had a different scheme in mind: he tells the tenants that they must all compete in a water balloon fight, and the last person standing will get their rent cut in half. Bob begs everyone to stick to the original plan, insisting that they are stronger together, but the tenants, tempted by the thought of lowered expenses, succumb to pressure and begin attacking each other with water balloons while their landlord watches smugly.
Already Bob’s Burgers has given it’s audience an excellent rundown on the intricacies of rent, the function of a strike, and the power of unions. Though the episode aired in 2015, the themes present in “The Oeder Games” remain deeply relevant today. In the aftermath of the pandemic-induced depression, rent strikes became a reality in cities across the country including New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, as financially struggling tenants were no longer willing or able to pay their wealthy landlords every month. As the recession continued, strikes became common practice in other sectors as well: workers at Amazon, Walmart, and McDonalds, for example, refused to go to work until they received better pay, and public school teachers across the country have threatened to strike in protest of unsafe working conditions. According to Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly, a strike is defined as a “planned work stoppage that occurs when the members of a union collectively agree to refuse to work until their demands are met.” By that definition, when Bob gathered the town’s tenants in his restaurant at the beginning of the episode, he had effectively created a tenant’s union, or a “neighborhood organization made up of and led by renters to fight for collective interests and rights.”
Though his efforts were valiant, Bob initially fails to convince the other tenants that a union is the best way to reason with their landlord. When Mr. Fishoeder suggests that the last person standing at the end of the water balloon fight will be the only one to pay a lower rent, chaos unsurprisingly ensues: people take sides, form alliances, develop strategies, and otherwise devolve into madness in the hopes that they can get their expenses reduced. Here Bob’s Burgers is teaching it’s audience about the dangers of individualism, a core tenet of capitalism. Capitalism, or an economic system in which a country’s trade, industry, and profits are controlled by private companies instead of by the people whose time and labor powers those companies, teaches us to place central importance on an individual’s needs or desires rather than focusing on the collective good. Mr. Fischoeder, for example, is a bonafide capitalist: not only is he a landlord, collecting regular funds from his tenants despite his massive wealth, but when faced with the dilemma of a tenant’s revolt, his solution is to pit the town’s population against each other and select just one person as a victor, demonstrating his commitment to individualistic capitalist ideals. Through each character’s response, the episode further illustrates how the tenants, conditioned by capitalism, are unaccustomed to making decisions for the collective good: Edith, an old woman who owns an arts & crafts store, bemoans that if she has to raise the price of yarn again to cover her rent it will cause “another riot,” while Jimmy Pesto, who owns a pizza shop on the same block as Bob’s Burgers that gets significantly more traffic, is unbothered by the rent hike, insisting that he can afford it. Mr. Fischoeder manipulates the tenant’s individualistic tendencies by giving them a new common enemy: halfway through the water balloon fight, he announces that anyone who successfully hits Bob, who first suggested the strike, would get $50 off their next month’s rent.
Mr. Fischoeder’s water balloon battle, though kooky in it’s own right, is also a real representation of how people and institutions in power often urge citizens to fight each other over resources as a distraction from the institutional hoarding taking place by the government and large corporations. We have seen this play out often over the course of the pandemic: in March, for example, as panic set in across America, people cleared grocery stores of their shelves, stocking up on more frozen food or hand sanitizer than one realistically needs. Notably, The New York Times reported that at the start of the pandemic in the US, one man bought 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer from different gas stations across the country hoping he could resell them at a higher rate, but when he learned of a law stating it is illegal for vendors to charge excessively for essential goods in direct response to a disaster, he was unable to unload any of the bottles. Though hoarding is clearly immoral, the public’s frustration with hoarders ignores the root of the problem: nobody would need to hoard resources if the state were taking care of our basic needs. In contrast to the United States, which paid some citizens a one-time $1200 coronavirus relief package and then was never heard from again, governments in other countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Australia supplied its citizens with food packages, extra cash, and other measures that eased the economic burden of the pandemic and ensuing global recession. Notably, each of these countries now has significantly lower numbers of positive covid cases than the United States, demonstrating how socialist policies could have curbed the spread of the virus. While the United States government, big US corporations, and even the American media has encouraged the idea that individual action such as hoarding, looting, or striking is to blame for the current state of our country, the truth is these entities have created the very environment that has caused the public to engage in these methods of resistance. Similarly, in Bob’s Burgers, Mr. Fischoeder uses Bob as a scapegoat for the tenant’s anger, when in reality, he has caused all of his own problems by charging people for property or housing, which should be a basic human right.
It is impressive that Bob’s Burgers has managed to pull off such a thorough and nuanced anticapitalist allegory via a water balloon fight, particularly because cartoons are normally viewed by younger audiences and therefore generally considered childish. This was not always the case, however: around the time of the Civil War in America, artist Thomas Nast popularized what we now refer to as the “political cartoon,” creating notable imagery like Uncle Sam, the Republican elephant, and the Democratic donkey so that Americans could have an easy and accessible way to understand basic national politics. Today, many contemporary cartoons similarly use their animated status to sneak political messaging which is more often than not left-leaning: Bojack Horseman, for example, is a meditation on mental illness and celebrity culture, Daria follows a bunch of anarchist teens, and even Spongebob Squarepants, whose main audience is in grade school, has had episodes centering on xenophobia and the perils of labor. Though Bob’s Burgers is by no means a political show, episodes such as “The Oeder Games” carry on the political tradition of animation. And since topics like strikes or unions are often either ignored or demonized in the US education system, “The Oeder Games” functions as political education for young people, who can watch the episode and come to better understand the benefits of collectivism.
The episode’s execution was mostly masterful, but I’ll admit I was a little disappointed in the ending. Ultimately, the tenants decide that in-fighting is not worth it and once again band together to demand their rent not be raised. Mr. Fischoeder reluctantly agrees. As everyone begins to celebrate, Bob joins a forlorn Mr. Fishoeder sitting alone in his golf cart. Mr. Fischoeder tells Bob that he’s always thought of himself as “the type of landlord who could also be your friend,” and Bob replies that he should have realized Mr. Fischoeder “had feelings too” and he wished he had come to talk to him before organizing the rent strike. The overall tone of the scene didn’t sit right with me, and, in my opinion, took away from the earlier points hit in the episode. In recent months, we’ve seen increased outrage at television and Hollywood’s insistence on “copaganda” or depictions of police officers as kindhearted or noble in popular media. In a similar vein, Mr. Fischoeder’s proclamation that he wants to be both a landlord and a friend to his tenants is capitalist propaganda. Landlording is parasitic; the occupation only exists to put up barriers between human beings and affordable housing. Someone who decides to make this their life’s work can certainly not be a “friend” to most, least of all those whose livelihoods he holds in his hands. Throughout it’s ten year run, Bob’s Burgers has portrayed Mr. Fischoeder, who practically owns the entire town, as harmless and quirky a number of times: between his eye patch, overly formal manner of speech, and the “money fights” that he and his brother sometimes get into in which they hurl literal cash at each other, the program tends to downplay the extent of Mr. Fischoeder’s abuses of power. I do not think this ending takes away from the merits of the episode, but rather serves as a reminder that even the most progressive media can fall into the trappings of centrist Hollywood propaganda.
Like many viewers, Bob’s Burgers means a lot to me: it’s my TV therapy, my insight into the mechanics of a functional family, my distraction from the shit show that this year has been. Episodes like “The Oeder Games” offer a cherry on top of an already sweet cake, a reminder that the cartoon can be a way to imagine a better future, too.
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