0402 - Drederick Tatum (Patreon)

Drederick Tatum looks very different in his first appearance from what we are used to:

For comparison's sake, here's how he looks "normally", although this design doesn't appear until season 8's "The Homer We Fall":

After his redesign (and a major appearance in "The Homer We Fall"), Tatum becomes the sort of Springfieldian that fans will recognise on sight, and as a result he appears too many times to mention. We'll revisit his main design when we encounter it in the show but for now let's focus on original flavour Tatum, who we next see in season 3's "Flaming Moe's":

He appears in an "Eye on Springfield" segment, where he states that if he ever ends up back in Springfield again "you'll know he bleep'd up bad." Bad news, Drederick: you're gonna show up a lot there.

In "A Streetcar Named Marge" (season 4), he is seen as a judge on the "Miss American Girl Pageant":

In "Lisa's First Word" (also season 4), we see that original flavour Tatum won a medal in the 1984 Olympics, and did a triumphant turkey trot:

At this point the consistency of this extremely minor character is surprising, considering how unestablished he is, but they're laying the seeds for him to flourish later, even if they don't know it! "The Homer We Fall" firmly cements him in the canon, and as far as I can tell we never see original flavour Tatum again.

Tatum is of course a thinly veiled approximation of Mike Tyson, who was the undisputed heavyweight champion from 1987 to 1990. In "Homer vs Lisa and the 8th Commandment" we learn that Tatum has already been in prison for five years, but Tyson himself did not go to prison until a year after this episode aired - mark that in your "Simpsons predicted it??!?" clickbait articles. (It's worth noting that Tyson was already a controversial public figure by the time this episode aired, but seemingly had faced no charges.)

Tyson's release from prison in 1995 mirror's Tatum's release in "The Homer They Fall" in 1996, but by that point that's not a prediction, that's just...a thing that happened.

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