Riotur, the official tourism bureau of Rio de Janeiro, has asked its attorneys to file a civil lawsuit against Fox in a U.S. court over the recent depiction of its city by The Simpsons.

   In the episode 'Blame it on Lisa', originally aired March 31, 2002, the Simpsons visitited Rio to seek out a missing orphan whom Lisa had been sponsoring. During their stay, the family members were robbed by street

urchins, kidnapped and held for $50,000 ransom, eaten by a boa constrictor, subjected to sexually-provocative children's television programming, and attacked by vicious monkeys.

     "He understands it is a satire", the agency's Sergio Cavalcanti told Reuters. "What really hurt was the idea of the monkeys -- the image that Rio de Janeiro was a jungle."

     According to Riotur, more than 220,000 US citizens visited Rio in 2001. This year, the tourist industry has suffered from an outbreak of dengue fever.

Riotur president José Eduardo Guinle feels that the episode overstepped practical boundaries in satirizing the city, and that his bureau's $18 million advertising campaign has accordingly been thwarted.

     The Simpsons has previously taken-on a multitude of national stereotypes, including an episode-length satire of Australia during its sixth season. While no lawsuits resulted from the broadcast, the ensuing turmoil ultimately prompted series-creator Matt Groening to apologize to the Australian people.

“We didn't know anything about Australia. We knew we were going to get it wrong, so we decided we'd get it wrong in every single way,” he confessed. >>>

   Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoco has chosen not to comment on the recent Brazilian episode which his spokesman, Alexandre Parola, said contains “distorted views of the Brazilian reality”.

     Additional complaints about the episode centered around the portrayal of Rio's police as lazy and unhelpful, and of its slums as dirty and dangerous.

     Riotur suggested that donating profits from the episode to the city's orphans would be an approriate way to express the producers' concern.

TV SHOW --- 'The Simpsons'

Bart might argue for the animated brutality of "Itchy & Scratchy," but he is, remember, an underachiever. He would be wrong. The Great American TV show is, so obvious that completing this sentence feels unnecessary, "The Simpsons." Just ask Lisa.

That characters spawned, more or less, by an alternative-weekly comic strip could reach this exalted, wrapped-in-the-flag status is part of what wins "The Simpsons" this title. Ditto for the assumption that the average newspaper reader (to say nothing of the really smart ones, like you) knows, by this point, precisely who Bart and Lisa are.

Through an astonishing 13 seasons, "The Simpsons" has taken something entirely typical of U.S. television -- the family sitcom -- and magically combined it with something entirely typical of enduring writing through the ages -- pointed satire. The result is a subversive and often dark vision of American family and civic life that has itself -- in part because the characters are cartoons and thus more broadly palatable -- become part of that life.

Once the writers realized that cheerfully inept dad Homer was the star, not sloganeering young Bart, the show was destined for great American-ness. And anybody who disagrees can eat my shorts.

--- Steve Johnson, The Chicago Tribune

To put this into perspective, here are the newspaper's choices for other "Great American" works & ideas:

Great American Idea: Space (the vastness of America)

Song: Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land'

Play: Guys and Dolls

Movie: Citizen Kane

Filmmaker: John Ford

Dance: Martha Graham's 'Appalachian Spring,' 1944

Novel: 'An American Tragedy'

Jazz Musician: Louis Armstrong

House: Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater

Jazz Tune: Jelly Roll Morton's 'King Porter Stomp'

Opera: Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess'

Symphony: Roy Harris: Symphony No. 3

Painting: Thomas Eakins: 'Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (The Champion Single Sculls),' 1871

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