0064 - Otto Mann (Patreon)

You know Otto, you love Otto. When doing Simpsons character sketch requests, Otto was one of the more common ones, which I found surprising (and annoying, as using that much ink for his hair always made my hand messy.)

I always wanted to crack Otto for one of my depressing existential Simpsons sketches as, perhaps moreso than any other character, he is a man out of time. He was designed as a low-achieving high-school dropout of the time, a fan of 80s metal culture aging into adulthood in the early 90s. His walkman, now a retro throwback, was modern technology.

The times changed, and Otto didn't. He still looks like he listens to Van Halen and Def Leppard, thirty years later. It's easy not to question his lifestyle, as his appearance and voice could place him anywhere between 21 and in his 50s (canonically, he's 29, but what is canon in Springfield?)

Perhaps this weird, frozen-in-time status is why the writers fell out of love with Otto as the show went on. In season three there is a whole episode centred around Otto ("The Otto Show", funnily enough,) but soon Otto is used less and less. I think he was partially designed as a warning of Bart's potential future, but as Bart himself became more established, and the need to define him solely by his relationship to his slacker attitude lessened, so too did the need for Otto as an aspirational model.

So now Otto is used primarily as a way to tell drug jokes. Early on his pot use is alluded to but never confirmed, but as the writers get bolder, Otto slides more into a hardcore drug user whose urine contains "crack, smack, uppers, downers, outers, inners, horse tranquilizers, cow paralyzers, blue bombers, green goofers, yellow submarines" and "LSD Mach 3". Marijuana is legal in a lot of places these days, so Otto's habits have to up the ante over time, just to give the audience the impression that he is the same as he has always been. Attitudes towards recreational drug use have changed over thirty years, but Otto conceptually remains the same, as a figure who gets high more than the average American.

Hey, has anyone done the "fan theory" that the whole show is like, Otto's hallucination while he's stoned or something? If not, I call dibs, I'm sure Buzzfeed will give me £25 to write it.

This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.