Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and the blockchain made a special appearance on The Simpsons, Sunday night US time.
During Treehouse of Horror 34, the special Halloween episode of the iconic animated series, the show made numerous references to the overvaluation of on-chain NFTs in the first chapter of the episode titled “Wild Barts Can’t Be Token.”
NFTs are a special type of crypto asset that allows holders to prove their ownership of real or digital items.
Read more: What are NFTs and how do they work?
In the episode, Marge fights through the blockchain to save Bart, now a living NFT, while the town’s mayor declares that Springfield’s art gallery will be digitized. There are also plenty of appearances by blue chip NFTs, such as the Beeple, the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and second-tier PFPs that are portrayed as almost worthless.
On X, Noah Bolanowski, an NFT collector and advisor to Crypt Gallery, an IRL NFT gallery, analyzed how the show portrayed NFTs.
“I loved how the episode had an incredible art emphasis: the PFPs were largely painted as the bottom of the barrel, while art was positioned at a prestige level. They even made BAYC holders clean their feet,” he posted on the social networking platform.
The episode, which features many references to last year’s NFT crash, isn’t the first time crypto – or NFTs – has appeared on the show.
In 2020, the episode “Frinkcoin” features Jim Parsons educating viewers about cryptocurrency, complete with a singing ledger book and teasing Satoshi’s identity.
“For cryptocurrencies to work, we need a record of every transaction that takes place. These are recorded on what’s called a distributed ledger,” Parsons explained during the episode, which aired just before the Covid crypto crash in March 2020. “When you use the currency, the transaction is recorded on the ledger, and if there one ledger book is filled up, we add it to a series of previous books – that is the blockchain.”
Last year’s “The King of Nice” had a gag where Krusty the clown was forced to rent the celebrity app Cameo because he had wasted all his money on NFTs. ‘Not funny TV shows’ is how the clown describes it.
This is not the first time that Simpsons creator Matt Groening has rejected crypto and blockchain. Earlier this year, Futurama, another popular animated series from Groening, mocked crypto miners in an episode titled “How the West Was 101001.”
The latest episode seemed to have a small impact on the bottom prices of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which rose 0.3% in the last 24 hours according to CoinGecko data, and on the Mutant Ape Yacht Club, which rose by the bottom prices by 2.9%. By comparison, the cost of ether fell by 0.14%.