After Apu, ‘The Simpsons’ Quietly Revived a Banned-Episode Character 35 Years Later
Andrew McGowan studied at Bowdoin College and the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Hs has served on programming and judicial teams for several film festivals, and has written about cinema and media for various publications.
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Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror Presents: The Revengening."After 35 years, The Simpsons has quietly brought back a character tied to one of its most controversial episodes. In Sunday night's Season 38 Halloween special, "Treehouse of Horror Presents: The Revengening," where Apu Nahasapeemapetilon's return was officially announced, Leon Kompowsky makes a brief appearance on the Island of Forgotten Garbage, where Springfield's discarded people and possessions wind up. The cameo is easy to miss, but the character has a complicated history: Leon was originally voiced by Michael Jackson in 1991's "Stark Raving Dad," an episode removed from circulation in 2019.
The appearance doesn't mean that "Stark Raving Dad" is returning to Disney+, and Leon doesn't receive a new speaking role. Still, seeing him in a new episode is a surprising acknowledgment of a character whose original story has remained unavailable on the streaming service. To understand why that matters, it helps to look back at how one of The Simpsons' most memorable guest appearances became an episode the series chose to leave behind.
'The Simpsons' Just Brought Back Michael Jackson's Long-Lost Character
In "The Revengening," Apu's journey takes him to the Island of Forgotten Garbage, a place filled with Springfield's abandoned characters and objects. Dr. Nick, who also returns, points out Leon Kompowsky among the island's inhabitants, briefly bringing back the character first introduced in the Season 3 premiere. Leon appears as a visual cameo, rather than returning with new dialogue or a new storyline.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Fandom Should You Join? Harry Potter · Lord of the Rings · Star Wars · Star Trek
Eight honest questions about how you actually are: what you put on when you need cheering up, how deep you go into the things you love, what you argue about, what you keep on your shelf. Answer them and we will tell you where you belong. Four of the biggest fandoms on earth are taking new members, and they could not be more different from one another.
⚡Harry Potter(Wizarding World)
💍Lord of the Rings(Middle-earth)
⚔️Star Wars(A Galaxy Far Away)
🖖Star Trek(The Final Frontier)
01
What do you put on when you need cheering up? Nobody is brave about this one.
02
How deep do you go into something you love? There is no shallow end here, only different deep ends.
03
What do you and your friends actually argue about? Every fandom has one argument it has been having for years.
04
How do you feel about a room full of strangers? Every one of these comes with a very big room.
05
Where would you rather spend a week? Pick on instinct rather than on budget.
06
What do you believe about people, mostly? All four of these stories have an answer, and they disagree.
07
What is actually on your shelf? Look over at it before you answer.
08
What do you actually want from a story? Eight questions in, this is the one that picks your fandom.
Membership Confirmed Your Fandom Is…
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.
Harry Potter
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting you.
- You are drawn to belonging, which is why this fandom sorted itself into houses within about five minutes and has never stopped.
- This is the most social of the four, and the one most likely to know which type every single person in your life would be.
- The books are built to be reread rather than analysed, and rereading is exactly what you do with things you love.
- The new HBO series is bringing the whole thing back one book at a time, which means the arguments are about to start all over again.
Lord of the Rings
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
- You like the sense that the story you are reading is only the visible part of something enormous, which is precisely how Tolkien built it.
- This fandom takes adaptation seriously to a degree that other fandoms find slightly alarming, and it has good reasons for that.
- Your favourite thing about the books is probably the bit that is not action at all, which is the walking, the songs and the long goodbyes.
- Nobody here thinks heroism belongs to the powerful, and the whole story exists to make that argument.
Star Wars
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
- You want something you can share with absolutely everybody, from a six year old to a grandparent, and this is the only one on the list that really does that.
- Nobody argues like Star Wars fans argue, and the argument has been running since roughly 1980 with no sign of resolution.
- The pull here is sensory before it is narrative, since it is the sound design, the score and the look of a used and dented galaxy.
- You would be first in the queue, in costume, with strong opinions and a genuinely good time.
Star Trek
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
- You are an optimist in a way that is currently unfashionable, and this is the only major franchise still willing to say the future might be better.
- The best episodes are the ones where nobody fires anything, which is a sentence that makes perfect sense to this fandom and to nobody else.
- Starfleet Academy brought the franchise back to a classroom in 2026, which is appropriate, because Trek has always been a bit of a seminar.
- You would want the conversation afterwards more than the episode itself, and here you will always find somebody willing to have it.
The detail is particularly striking because Leon's debut, "Stark Raving Dad," was pulled from circulation in 2019 following renewed allegations against Jackson and the release of the documentary Leaving Neverland. The series can apparently acknowledge Leon's existence, even as his best-known appearance remains missing from Disney+. It is a small gag in an episode filled with callbacks, but it also draws attention to the unusual history of the character and the episode that introduced him.
'The Simpsons' Season 3, Episode 1 Is Missing From Disney+
"Stark Raving Dad" is the first episode of The Simpsons' third season. Kicking off the season on September 19, 1991, it is a widely cherished entry from the show's early years, an episode that fans will recognize, reference, and quote without mistake. Likewise, they will recognize when the episode is missing, as it isn't on Disney's streaming site for a very specific reason.
In the episode, Homer (Dan Castellaneta) finds his white shirt turned pink after it's gone through the wash with Bart's (Nancy Cartwright) red hat. To his own chagrin, Homer wears the pink shirt to work, where Mr. Burns (Harry Shearer) immediately labels him as a "free-thinking anarchist" and demands he take a psychiatric exam. Too lazy to fill out the exam himself, Homer has Bart do it for him. Bart, however, paints an inaccurately poor image of his father, so when the results come back, Homer is sent to a mental institution.
While the gendered stereotypes and exaggerated portrayals of mental health are executed with the expected levels of winking humor for The Simpsons, it is neither of these elements that make "Stark Raving Dad" taboo. Instead, it is the guest star who plays Homer's roommate in the mental hospital that has rendered the episode so controversial.
This Celebrity Cameo Made "Stark Raving Dad" a Controversial 'Simpsons' Episode
When Homer arrives at the asylum, he is thrown in a room with a man who introduces himself as Jackson. However, the character is not a famous singer, but a large white man who believes himself to be the King of Pop. His only real resemblance to Jackson comes in the form of his falsetto voice, which the real Michael Jackson provided in an uncredited cameo.
When the episode debuted in 1991, Jackson was an esteemed celebrity. This makes it all the funnier when Homer doesn't recognize the name and takes his roommate's assumed identity for granted. Come 2019, however, Jackson's posthumous reputation had shifted drastically, taking a stark turn for the worse just a few months before Disney+'s launch.
A 2019 Documentary Made Michael Jackson's Already Ruined Reputation Even Worse
Michael Jackson faced numerous allegations of pedophilia during his lifetime, mostly throughout the mid-nineties and early-2000s. All of these cases were settled out of court, though Jackson's reputation was forever tarnished due to the controversy. In January 2019, HBO released the documentary Leaving Neverland, where the main subjects, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, once more accused Jackson of sexually abusing them when they were child actors. Although the allegations had already caused his general demise in the public eye decades prior, Leaving Neverland was the cherry on top of Jackson's already ruined reputation.
The documentary met immense acclaim, winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary among other accolades. At the same time, the film also reintroduced the world to the dark side of Jackson's life. While the Jackson estate condemned the doc for supposed inaccuracies, as well as incongruities with the subjects' original testimonies under oath, many others became even more adverse to the singer's music and celebrity status after seeing the film.
Among Jackson's new adversaries was Simpsons showrunner Al Jean, who told The Daily Beast that Jackson could have used his "Stark Raving Dad" cameo to capture a younger generation and "groom boys." Shortly thereafter, Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks announced that the episode would be pulled from syndicated television, FXX's "Simpsons World" on-demand site, and future DVD sales of Season 3. Evidently, the programmers at Disney followed suit, and when the show found its new streaming home on Disney+, "Stark Raving Dad" was nowhere to be found.
Is 'The Simpsons' "Stark Raving Dad" Really Worse Than Other Programs on Disney+?
Disney's rationale for excluding "Stark Raving Dad" from the streaming service is sound. After all, Disney+ is primarily targeted at children, and The Simpsons already presses a few boundaries when it comes to age appropriateness. That being noted, it does seem like somewhat of a timely P.R. move to leave out "Stark Raving Dad" when one considers some of the other episodes still available on the site. As aforementioned, much of the early Simpsons has aged dubiously, and yet, all of the Apu episodes are featured on Disney+, as is "Homer's Phobia." Meanwhile, Jackson is far from the only Simpsons celebrity guest star to have garnered a controversial reputation since appearing on the show. Other episodes feature voices of Mel Gibson, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch, all portraying their now-contentious selves.
This is not even to mention the hoards of problematic content in Disney+'s library as a whole. Going all the way back to the 1920s, the Walt Disney Company has produced numerous shows, films, and shorts depicting racist stereotypes. Disney+ at least has the decency to leave out the worst of these, like Song of the South and Donald Duck's anti-Japanese World War II propaganda reels.
However, the site still includes classics like Dumbo, Peter Pan, The Three Caballeros, and The Lady and the Tramp, despite them containing offensive representations of Black, Native American, Latinx, and Asian people, respectively. Even more contemporary movies like Pocahontas and Aladdin have aged dubiously through a lens of diversity and representation, and one could fill a book with the outdated gender roles depicted in practically every Disney princess movie from Snow White to The Little Mermaid. These are all available to stream, albeit with disclaimers noting that they were products of their time and may contain offensive content.
All of this is not to suggest that "Stark Raving Dad" should be put on Disney+, but rather to explain that the decision to exclude it could be multifold, and perhaps born of publicity just as well as morality. The episode remains a memorable piece of early Simpsons history, not least because of its original birthday song for Lisa. Whether the episode itself should return is a separate question from whether its fictional characters can ever be seen again.
That distinction makes Leon Kompowsky's appearance in "The Revengening" so unusual. Thirty-five years after his debut, he is visible again, even though the episode that introduced him is still missing from Disney+. The Halloween special doesn't revisit the allegations surrounding Jackson, restore "Stark Raving Dad," or announce any larger plans for Leon. Instead, it places him among Springfield's discarded figures, offering a brief, self-aware nod to a character the show had seemingly left in the past. For viewers familiar with the controversy, it's one of the episode's most unexpected callbacks.
The Simpsons is available to stream on Disney+ in the U.S.
The Simpsons
- Release Date
- December 17, 1989
- Network
- FOX
- Showrunner
- Al Jean
- Directors
- Steven Dean Moore, Mark Kirkland, Rob Oliver, Michael Polcino, Mike B. Anderson, Chris Clements, Wes Archer, Timothy Bailey, Lance Kramer, Nancy Kruse, Matthew Faughnan, Chuck Sheetz, Rich Moore, Jeffrey Lynch, Pete Michels, Susie Dietter, Raymond S. Persi, Carlos Baeza, Dominic Polcino, Lauren MacMullan, Michael Marcantel, Neil Affleck, Swinton O. Scott III, Jennifer Moeller
-
Homer Simpson / Abe Simpson / Barney Gumble / Krusty (voice)
-
Julie Kavner
Marge Simpson / Patty Bouvier / Selma Bouvier (voice)
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.