Sunday School & The Recontextualization of Animation

On February 29th, 2016, a YouTube user by the name of Lucien Hughes uploaded a video titled Sunday School (stylized asＳＵＮＤＡＹ ＳＣＨＯＯＬ) that featured moments from several episodes of The Simpsons recut and edited to the song Teen Pregnancy by Blank Banshee. The clips are predominantly taken from the episodes "Bart's Girlfriend" (S6E07) and "Lisa's First Word" (S4E10) but are heavily edited with effects such as VHS tearing to retrofit them into a visual style that better fits into the Vaporwave genre, from where the background music hails. The content of the video itself seems to tell a story similar to that of the original episode of "Bart's Girlfriend", but does so through a highly reductionist style, focusing more on the visuals' interaction with its own formal elements and the music rather than through character interaction and linear storytelling. The 'plot' of the video is fragmented and scattered, switching back and forth from Bart as a toddler to Bart as a child in a way that is both equally random and meticulous, as the jumps are unwarranted visually but fit the music as it goes. The pairing of the animation and the music is fascinating, as it achieves an interesting tonal balance by being deeply serene while being somewhat unsettling. While Sunday School is not the first video made in this style, even by Lucien Hughes, it is by far the most popular as it currently rests at around 13.4 million views. Here is where the question lies, why exactly does this video have as big of an audience as it does? Vaporwave as a genre and visual aesthetic is still fairly nonexistent when it comes representation to popular culture, but perhaps having a character as iconic and recognizable as Bart Simpson is what has kept viewers grounded. Teen Pregnancy, the song primarily used, has an official music video. However, its popularity is nowhere near that of Sunday School, as it currently sits at 133,864 views. Sunday School differs greatly from the official Teen Pregnancy music video in several ways, the biggest of which being that Sunday School is animated while the official video is live action. But the reuse of older animation from the early 1990s gives Sunday School a familiar yet uncanny feeling. The generation of internet users who would be more likely watch Sunday School were either children or not even born when the original episodes first aired, but since a character like Bart Simpson is so deeply rooted in popular culture it makes the video almost immediately accessible. There is no immediate familiarity with the clips themselves, but rather the character. The animation itself has been recontextualized to fit the music but at the same time, the music is recontextualized by the animation, making the song and its themes more personal, relatable, and intimate. The interesting thing to note is that Teen Pregnancy on its own recontextualizes old music through its sampling (Blank Banshee sampled two other songs and audio from a tv show). So Sunday School recontextualizes original animation from The Simpsons while recontextualizing music that recontextualizes OTHER music. If the video itself doesn't make your head spin, that concept alone should be confusing enough. Does the use of a character such as Bart Simpson make the video more accessible, or does it make it less effective in spreading its message? Does the sampling and editing of someone else's work allow for this video to count as a legitimate work of art? Where do we draw the line between stealing work and recontextualizing it? I can't say for sure, but the popularity of Sunday School and other videos like it mean that Simpsonwave isn't going away anytime soon.