Remember Black Bart Simpson??

Like so many classic cartoon characters throughout the years, The Simpsons created a world wide Mega fan base and popularity. And with the fan base and popularity comes the bootlegging.

Back in the early 90s, you couldn't go to a weekend swap meet without finding bootleg cartoon characters sprawled on an XXXL t-shirts. Most of the dressed in urban attire and colored in to be turned into a minority. There is Latino Micky and Minnie Mouse, Asian Bugs Bunny and the most popular by far, The Black Simpsons, and the leader of the ethnic alternative is 'Black Bart Simpson' himself.

I suddenly remembered the counter fitted character this morning after watching an early episode from 1990, I flashed back to the days where a chocolate Bart in a jersey with a basketball and tracks shaved on the sides of his head graced my p.j. shirt. Call it ghetto if you must but the swapmeet was the hot spot to be on weekends in Las Vegas in the 1980s.

When The Simpsons first hit the airwaves, the star of the show was Bart (before Homer became the shows mascot), and everybody and their mama was doing the 'Bartman'.
Thanks to the ginormous commerical success of hip-hop in the early 90s, Bart Simpson began rapping himself in the Simpson's album, The Simpsons Sing The Blues. Thus the yellow Dennis the Menece found himself spitting lines from popular rap songs and calling people 'Homeboy'.

The Streets of New York were suddenly selling black Bart shirts: decked in gangsta apparel, slamming dunks on the court and wearing African fezes. We had taken him as our own...and ripped off Groening.

Click here to read an article all about the Black Bart franchise in The Washington Post by David Mills and why the black communitiy wanted to related to this famopus cartoon character. It was published on June 28, 1990. This was the only article or useful piece of information I could find about Black Bart, seriously.

And, just for fun, here is Bart Simpson's "Deep, Deep Trouble", produced by DJ Jazzy Jeff, from their 1990 album The Simpsons Sing The Blues. And if your asking, yes, I did have it-still do.