25 Years Since ‘Radioactive Man’ – The Simpsons Episode That Cemented Fallout Boy

Besides fostering the namesake for a 21st-century rock music success story, this episode previewed the show’s own future.

Short of venerating Fall Out Boy, one must be a Simpsons buff to appreciate hearing that band in promos for a superhero movie. Such was the case in 2014 when “My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)” pounded through Big Hero 6 trailers.

And to think Disney had not absorbed 20th Century Fox yet. When it did, though, that joined the well-documented list of events The Simpsons satirically and unwittingly foresaw.

Among the phenomena it gets less credit for forecasting is superheroes and the name Fall Out Boy converging in cinema. Granted, there are crucial differences between what went down in Springfield, USA, 25 years ago and what Disney pulled off.

In “Radioactive Man” — Season 7’s second episode, which premiered September 24, 1995 — a major movie of the teleplay’s title goes unfinished. All because the kid portraying Fallout Boy — a sidekick character of a two-word name rather than a soundtrack contributor of a three-word moniker — goes AWOL.

Those discrepancies notwithstanding, “Radioactive Man” had an underrated impact on The Simpsons’ real-world chronicles. Besides fostering the unlikely namesake for a 21st-century rock music success story, it previewed the show’s own future.

Attributing the factoid to DVD commentary by series animator and director David Silverman, the Wikipedia article for “Radioactive Man” notes that it was The Simpsons’ first stab at digital coloring.

It was the show’s only ’90s episode produced in that fashion. Loyal followers and re-visitors can tell by how the preceding “Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part 2)” and following “Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily” have an older look. Even most of Season 8 seems faded and crude compared to “Radioactive Man,” though a glimpse of the primitive first and second seasons can restore some perspective.

The Simpsons animators took another crack at the modern method for “Tennis the Menace,” which premiered February 11, 2001. Guitarist Joe Trohman and bassist Pete Wentz got a band together the subsequent summer.

Meanwhile, The Simpsons brought back digital paint once more midway through Season 14, and has not looked back. As such, the episode most prominently featuring Fallout Boy may not share a common decade with Fall Out Boy’s existence. But it does share a common style with the band’s own appearance in the series, which fell on “Lisa the Drama Queen” January 28, 2009.

The Simpsons took a second crack at digital coloring for a February 2001 episode. Guitarist Joe Trohman and bassist Pete Wentz got a band together the subsequent summer.

Fall Out Boy performed Danny Elfman’s celebrated theme song their own way for that episode. It was their second grand punctuation mark on their collective infatuation with the show.

Leading up to their appearance, Trohman and lead singer Patrick Stump spoke about that fanaticism in a Fox featurette.

“My eyes! The goggles do nothing!” Stump says in an impression of Harry Shearer’s impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the form of Radioactive Man actor Rainier Wolfcastle. (In so doing, he also quotes a crucial scene pertaining to the movie within the show’s Fallout Boy, well, fallout.)

As the Fall Out Boy representatives were apt to note in their 2009 Fox segment, Fallout Boy first appears in fictitious archival footage, and is played by the equally fictitious ’50s child actor Buddy Hodges, late in the second season. The footage and Hodges show up in a tone-setting scene before the plot of “Three Men and a Comic Book” launches in earnest.

That storyline most notably introduces Comic Book Guy, the acerbic storekeeper who typifies his name and becomes a regular among The Simpsons’ supporting Springfielders. But in his 2009 Fox interview, Stump chides anyone who forgets that “Three Men and a Comic Book” was Fallout Boy’s debut too.

Effortlessly bookmarking such milestones is no surprise coming from Stump. Per the Fox sitdown, he grew up a self-described “nerd” about the show, then “graduated to a pretty serious nerd.” He was the type to put Simpsons episode guides on his Christmas wish list and learn the trivia fans are quizzed on in Season 7’s “The Simpsons’ 138th Episode Spectacular.”

Sitting to Stump’s right for the featurette, Trohmann said he owned the complete collection of series creator Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comics. Referencing his and Stump’s fervor for Groening’s major sitcom, he said, “We used to be veritable textbooks of quotery.”

The details on how the band arrived at their name vary by source. Based on the segment’s revelations, though, an alternate reality could have had Gil Gunderson giving us “Dance, Dance” or Disco Stu thanking us “…fr th Mmrs.”

Speaking with Fox while recording the Elfman cover, Stump cited the hapless Gil — introduced December 7, 1997, in “Realty Bites” — as his favorite character. He went on to admire the traction Disco Stu gained after a throwaway-gag debut in another Season 7 gem, “Two Bad Neighbors.”

Just like Fallout Boy on the small screen, Fall Out Boy ingrained their place on the music scene with their second go-round.

But Stump’s stern reminder about Fallout Boy’s complete history aside, “Radioactive Man” was doubtlessly the most instrumental episode in making the winning pick an option for the band name. Wentz was 16 years old during Season 7, Trohman and Stump both 11, the perfect age range to start appreciating The Simpsons.

Moreover, “Radioactive Man” is the first and still only Fallout Boy-centered episode. It establishes the character’s catchphrase and has the plot hinge on his actor’s cooperation.

Bart loses an audition for the part in the movie to best friend Milhouse, then shadows the reluctant celebrity. When Milhouse flees the set (still in costume), a typically Springfield full-scale manhunt (or boyhunt) ensues.

As one should expect, Radioactive Man has been depicted and mentioned more frequently than his sidekick. “Radioactive Man” was Fallout Boy’s last ’90s episode, whereas the adult superhero packed 10 appearances in the decade.

The perpetual protégé has since gotten up to six in the enveloping show’s 31 seasons and counting. Milhouse has donned a Fallout Boy outfit twice more, and the other two depictions were relegated to the background.

Fallout Boy’s third appearance overall fell late in Season 15 — eight-and-a-half years after “Radioactive Man,” a year-plus after The Simpsons took on digital ink full-time, and three years after Fall Out Boy came together in Chicagoland.

The group released its first album, Take This to Your Grave, less than a year before that episode (“My Big Fat Geek Wedding”), and had three singles to speak of.

A year afterward, 2005’s From Under the Cork Tree cemented their A-list status. Its signature singles — “Sugar, We’re Goin’ Down” and “Dance, Dance” — practically and appropriately coincided with the 10th anniversary of “Radioactive Man.”

Just like Fallout Boy on the small screen, Fall Out Boy ingrained their place on the music scene with their second go-round. Despite a four-year breakup that began shortly after their Simpsons gig, the band is now up to seven records, one more than the character’s episode tally.

And unlike Milhouse — who outruns the spotlight the same way he will a malicious ultraviolet beam in the final Simpsons episode of the ’90s — Stump, Trohmann, and company have embraced their lot.

Then again, only the original Fallout Boy can claim to have existed in multiple centuries. Time will tell who is remembered better and longer.