Bart Simpson Becomes an NFT: How The Simpsons Satirized Crypto's Latest Obsession

In a timely episode of animated television, The Simpsons delivered a scathing critique of non-fungible tokens and blockchain technology, turning one of its most iconic characters into the centerpiece of the comedy. During the November 2023 airing of Treehouse of Horror 34, the show’s Halloween special, the first segment titled “Wild Barts Can’t Be Token” presented a world where Bart Simpson transforms into a living NFT—a premise that allowed creators to lampoon virtually every facet of the overheated digital collectibles market.

The Episode That Turned Bart Simpson into a Digital Asset

The plot unfolds as a nightmarish vision of blockchain adoption. After Bart becomes digitized into NFT form, Marge must navigate the blockchain itself—rendered as a labyrinthine digital landscape—to rescue her son. Meanwhile, Springfield’s mayor announces an ambitious digitization project: converting the entire city art gallery into blockchain-based digital assets. What follows is a visual feast of satirical imagery, featuring everything from Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars to more obscure profile pictures portrayed as virtually worthless digital garbage.

The episode’s approach to lampooning NFTs reveals a sharp understanding of market dynamics. While prestigious digital artworks like those created by Beeple are shown commanding respect within the show’s fictional hierarchy, the lower-tier profile pictures—the PFPs that dominated social media hype cycles—are deliberately positioned as worthless. In one particularly cutting scene, even BAYC holders appear engaged in menial labor, cleaning feet to illustrate their diminished status in this imagined future.

Industry Reactions and the Art of Satire

NFT collectors and industry observers quickly took to social media to dissect the episode’s artistic choices. Noah Bolanowski, an NFT adviser and collector, analyzed how The Simpsons had masterfully positioned art itself at the pinnacle of prestige while relegating speculative profile pictures to the bottom tier. “I loved how the episode had an incredible art emphasis—the PFPs were painted largely as the bottom of the barrel, whereas art was positioned at a level of prestige,” Bolanowski observed, highlighting how the show’s creators demonstrated sophisticated understanding of the market’s internal contradictions.

The episode also incorporated visual references to the broader crypto landscape. Imagery included a satirical “Fomo-Meter” and a statue of Satoshi Nakamoto rendered in stone, nodding to Bitcoin’s mysterious origins and the speculative fervor that drives cryptocurrency adoption.

A Tradition of Crypto Critique: The Simpsons’ Ongoing Engagement with Digital Assets

This is hardly the first time The Simpsons has tackled the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain. In 2020, the episode “Frinkcoin” featured actor Jim Parsons delivering an unexpected educational moment, explaining blockchain technology and distributed ledgers to viewers through song and narrative. That segment aired just before the cryptocurrency market’s significant downturn in March 2020, making it an inadvertent piece of prescient entertainment.

More recently, in the 2023 episode “The King of Nice,” the show presented Krusty the Clown’s financial downfall as directly linked to his excessive spending on NFTs. Stripped of his wealth by digital collectibles, Krusty is forced to resort to Cameo, the celebrity-for-hire platform, to generate income. His contemptuous description of the platform—“Non-funny TV shows”—adds an extra layer of meta-commentary.

The pattern continues beyond The Simpsons. Futurama, another animated series created by Matt Groening, released an episode earlier in 2023 titled “How the West Was 101001” that mocked cryptocurrency miners with characteristic irreverence, suggesting that Groening’s creative empire has identified a rich vein of satire within the digital asset economy.

Market Reactions and Real-World Impact

The Treehouse of Horror episode’s broadcast proved not entirely without measurable impact on the cryptocurrency market. According to CoinGecko data from that period, the Bored Ape Yacht Club saw its floor price rise modestly by 0.3% within 24 hours of the episode’s airing. The Mutant Ape Yacht Club experienced a more substantial bump, with floor prices climbing 2.9% during the same window. In contrast, Ether’s price declined 0.14%, suggesting that the satirical attention briefly benefited certain NFT collections despite—or perhaps because of—their mockery on screen.

The Broader Context: Animation as Cultural Commentary

What makes The Simpsons’ engagement with crypto particularly noteworthy is the show’s demonstrated ability to synthesize complex technological and economic concepts into accessible, humorous commentary. Rather than presenting blockchain as an abstract technology, the show grounds NFT speculation in recognizable human anxieties: the fear of missing out, the desire to own unique digital prestige symbols, and the volatility of speculative asset markets.

The Bart Simpson NFT storyline exemplifies how mainstream entertainment increasingly serves as a barometer for cultural attitudes toward emerging technologies. By centering Bart Simpson—perhaps America’s most famous fictional troublemaker—as the unwilling subject of NFT conversion, the show suggests that even beloved cultural icons are not exempt from blockchain’s reach. The episode’s humor derives not from dismissing the technology itself, but from recognizing the genuine economic desires and market inefficiencies that drive NFT adoption and speculation.

As the cryptocurrency and digital asset sectors continue evolving, The Simpsons’ satirical intervention offers cultural validation for skepticism toward NFT valuations while maintaining the show’s characteristic blend of irreverence, visual sophistication, and surprisingly current industry knowledge.