On the cartoon series, The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror IV, Episode no. 86, the skit subtitled Terror at 5½ Feet (original air date October 28, 1993) all FYI, Milhouse makes a reference to something I don’t understand.
Bart tells him to look out the window, to see the green gremlin that is attacking the school bus. But Milhouse complains if he bends over, he leaves himself open to wedgies, wet willies, and even “the dreaded Rear Admiral”.
What on earth is the “rear admiral”?
I know from my childhood experiences what a wedgie is. And “New Kid on the Block” episode no. 67 introduces us to the wet willy. But rear admiral? Is there really such a thing? And how would you define it?
BTW, as you can probably guess, I am a Simpsons’ fan (although I haven’t been following some of the more recent shows).
And also, BTW, I have noticed in the past that some of you complain the Halloween specials aren’t “canonical”. But actually, if you follow the series, there is a good reason for this. Since the kids never age, it is always the same year. Therefore, every following Halloween episode is still in that same tree house, where Bart and Lisa are spinning yarns for each other (hence, we call then "Tree House of Horror I, II, etc.). (Of course for this to be true, you would have to omit the following year when they all had nightmares. But bear with me on this one.)
It’s just funny because it sounds like something a kid leaning over would be exposing himself to, but it leaves it to your imagination to fill in what the actual prank would be.
Well, for the record, “Rear Admiral” is a very real naval rank.
Not a Navy man (at all) so I’m sure someone else can expand but in general: In the US Navy it is the equivalent of a one or two-star naval general rank (i.e. equal to Brigadier and Major General in the other services). One star is referred to as ‘Rear Admiral (Lower Half)’ and two star ‘Rear Admiral (Upper Half)’ or more often just ‘Rear Admiral’. In the early 80s the one star rank of Rear Admiral (Lower Half) was replaced with the new rank of ‘Commodore Admiral’ but this soon proved confusing and unpopular and was discontinued less than a year later.
But yes, it was used in The Simpsons because of the term ‘rear’ being childishly funny.
Rear Admiral started with the Royal Navy. The idea was that a fleet of ships would operate in three parts in a line. The leading third was commanded by a vice admiral, the middle third by the admiral and the last/rearmost third by the rear admiral.
As for admirals versus generals, there isn’t a proper admiral grade for brigadier general - one could argue commodore, but generally speaking commodore is more a billet filled by a very senior captain supervising other captains.
The US Navy O-7 Commodore/Rear Admiral came about when the need arose to have clear paygrade equivalencies across services. The army O-7 brigadiers didn’t like being automatically under the rear admirals. So the powers that be split the difference, taking the lower half seniority wise of the rear admirals and linking their status to the brigadier generals, and the upper half seniority wise of the rear admirals to major generals.
Reminds me of an episode of Extreme Elimination Challenge where they reference something called a “Lumpy Rutherford”. If that’s a real thing, I don’t want to know about it.
And once I read something about a guy with the last name Johnson who was nicknamed “Frosty”, so “Frosty Johnson”, which sounds like a kid getting a cup of ice dumped down his pants.
