Just For Fun / The Itchy & Scratchy Show

"They fight! They bite!
They bite and fight and bite!
Fight, fight, fight! Bite, bite, bite!
The Itchy & Scratchy Show!"

Homer: Which one's the mouse?

Bart: Itchy.

Homer: Itchy's a jerk.

Bart: (Chuckles) Yeah...

— Comment on Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie

The Itchy & Scratchy Show is a Show Within a Show on The Simpsons. It passes itself off as a typical cat and mouse chase, based on the old cartoon shorts of Tom and Jerry and Herman and Katnip (mostly the latter). The cartoons are usually aired during The Krusty the Klown Show.

The show was part of The Simpsons since the first season, and since Season 2 there have been episodes directly involving the company that makes the cartoons, establishing a rich history/backstory that starts in The Silent Age of Animation and hits many of the medium's high and low points in the West. They even got their own Video Game or two as well as a short comic book series (which crossed over with BartMan in the When Bongos Collide story).

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This Show in a Show provides examples of:

• Achievements in Ignorance: In "My Bloody Valentine", Itchy rips Scratchy's heart out but the latter remains alive until he reads a newspaper headline saying he needs a heart to live.
• Alien Animals: Poochie, apparently.
• Amusing Injuries: Especially to the people in "The Simpsons" universe. For us as viewers, the violence is horribly over-the-top and especially unfit for a children's audience.
• And I Must Scream: If Scratchy isn't killed by Itchy, then he'll wish he had been. For example, in "The Glass Moan-agery," Scratchy is turned into a neon sign that moans in pain every time it lights up.
• And Show It to You: "My Bloody Valentine" has Itchy rip out Scratchy's heart and give it back to Scratchy as a Valentine. Scratchy is touched by the gift and puts it on his shelf — until he realizes that he needs a heart and drops dead.
• Animals Fear Neutering:
  • "Spay Anything" has Scratchy visit a hospital where Itchy is a doctor. Itchy then decides that Scratchy needs to get neutered, and Scratchy is understandably terrified (to the point where he has to be strapped to the table so Itchy can begin the procedure).
  • Meanwhile, when the pair came to life in the eighth Halloween special, Scratchy falls in love with the Simpsons' cat Snowball II. Marge announces that he'll have to be neutered first, causing him to scream in terror.
• Animated Actors: Except for "It's a Wonderful Knife", all stories in the short-lived comic book series portray Itchy and Scratchy as these.
• Art Shift:
  • The Itchy and Scratchy cartoon "Spherical on 34th Street" is animated differently.
  • The "Marge-approved" shorts aired during "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" had a subtle art shift. Itchy and Scratchy's eyes are drawn with a noticeably "softer" feel.
  • A World War II-era Wartime Cartoon is animated in a style reminiscent of 1940s cartoons. (It also has the closest visual resemblance to classic Tom and Jerry in the show's history.)
  • Itchy & Scratchy Meet Fritz the Cat has an R Crumb-inspired look.
  • Scratchy's debut cartoon "That Happy Cat" and Itchy's debut "Manhattan Madness" have an art style reminiscent of Disney's early work, especially since the first cartoon in which they're paired together, "Steamboat Itchy", is an obvious parody of "Steamboat Willie".
• Asians Eat Pets: "Moo Goo Gai Pain" has Itchy as the head chef of a Chinese restaurant, cutting up Scratchy (a cat) and serving him as a dish.
• Ass Pull: Played for Laughs. Poochie is sloppily killed off in one cartoon, with a crude movement of cels and stuck on note saying he died on the way to his home planet. Everyone hated Poochie so much they didn't care, erupting into applause. invoked
• Asteroids Monster: In "Scratchtasia", every time Scratchy kills Itchy, he splits into many smaller Itchies. Determined to actually finish him off, Scratchy keeps hitting the Itchies with an axe over and over again until he ends up with a bunch of microscopic Itchies, which get into Scratchy's body when he breathes in and eat away at him from the inside.
• Author Tract: Quentin Tarantino shows up in the episode he guest directed to go on a tirade about how Humans Are Bastards and society's complacency with violence. Itchy and Scratchy promptly kill him to shut him up.
• Autocannibalism: In one short, Itchy (disguised as a restaurant employee) serves Scratchy his own belly. The unknowing Scratchy's attempt at eating it only results in the bits of it he swallows popping back out of a hole cut in it.
• Ax-Crazy: Itchy takes sadistic pleasure in killing Scratchy in various creative ways.
• Barbershop Episode: In "Little Barbershop of Horrors", Itchy runs a barbershop, where Scratchy is his customer. Itchy pours barbecue sauce on Scratchy's head instead of shampoo, then opens a box of flesh-eating ants, which reduce Scratchy's head to a skull.
• Baseball Episode: One episode has Itchy and Scratchy as baseball players hitting each other with bats. A very annoying squirrel then comes in and tells them to stop hitting each other — and Itchy responds by knocking her head off with a swing from his bat.
• Big "NO!": In The '50s-themed "Bleeder of the Pack," Scratchy (sans his skin) is loaded onto an airplane. But once it takes off, Scratchy is greeted by The Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly. Among realizing who they are, Scratchy cries out "NOOOOOOOOOO!" not because of what happened to the three musicians, but because they are actually vampires that attack him. And then their plane crashes anyways.
• Birthday Episode: "Bang the Cat Slowly" takes place on Scratchy's birthday. He's summarily killed when Itchy gives him a birthday present.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Compared to Tom and Jerry.
• Bloody Hilarious: Practically runs on this. That cat sure can bleed.
• Body Horror: "Ain't I a Stinger?" has Scratchy being filled with honeybees to the point where he swells and oozes honey from his mouth, eyes and ears, as the bees colonize his entrails and turn them into a hive. Later on a bear tears him in half and his insides are all honey.
• Bowling for Ratings: "Kitty-Kitty Bang-Bang" involves Itchy and Scratchy at the bowling alley. Itchy jams Scratchy's tongue in the ball return, then lights a bomb and bowls with it, making a strike. Scratchy tries desperately to saw off his tongue before the bomb can get to him, but the bomb makes it to him and explodes, leaving only his internal organs, which Itchy sells to hungry dogs at the snack bar.
• Bullet Hole Spelling: Shown in "The Sound of Silencers", where policeman Itchy guns down several cats with a Tommy gun^note a reference to the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, when several members of a gang were tricked into coming to a warehouse and then gunned down by rival gansters, some of whom were disguised as police officers, and after the fact, he writes "THE END" in bullets, with the "D" being bloodied due to said blood coming from a cat shot in the chest several times.
• Buffoonish Tom Cat: The titular Scratchy, whether he is unlucky in his Butt-Monkey status, goofy-looking, gullible or lacking a ton of common sense in some of his losses.
• Butt-Monkey: Scratchy just can't catch a break, with him dying nearly every episode.
• Cargo Ship: In-Universe in "Four Funerals and a Wedding". As Scratchy is getting married, Itchy switches out his bride with a dummy made out of bombs dressed up to look like a woman. Scratchy marries the dummy anyways, somehow manages to have children with it, and lives contentedly to a ripe old age before the dummy even manages to explode.
• Cat Stereotype: Scratchy plays the unlucky part of the black cat stereotype.
• The Chew Toy: Scratchy lives through this, sometimes surviving his kills while harmed.
• Coincidental Broadcast: A lot of the time, the subject of the "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon will be related to the plot of the accompanying Simpsons episode. Examples include Itchy tricking Scratchy into eating himself in "Lisa the Vegetarian," or the duo engaging in some violent hi-jinks in outer space in "Deep Space Homer."
• Camping Episode: "Aaahhh! Wilderness!", in which Itchy and Scratchy are camping in the woods. When it starts raining, Itchy decides to build a shelter by turning Scratchy into a makeshift tent.
• Comedic Sociopathy: In every episode, Itchy murders Scratchy in some horrible manner just for fun. Viewers in-story invariably find it hilarious.
• Complexity Addiction: Some of the plots used by Itchy to kill Scratchy are hilariously complex and elaborated. For instance, one short takes place in feudal China and it is about a mouse lord killing Scratchy's father and Scratchy going to train with an Old Master cat to avenge him. After years of preparation, Scratchy goes to the lord's castle, now aged, with the intention of slaying him. However, he is stopped in the last moment by the old master cat... who turns out to be Itchy in disguise, who holds Scratchy so the lord can cut the cat into ribbons. So, basically, Itchy, disguised as the cat master, spends years training Scratchy before disposing of him when he could have just done it at the beginning.
• Constantly Lactating Cow: In the episode "Butter Off Dead", Itchy shoves Scratchy into a cow's mouth, and after Scratchy is digested, Itchy is somehow able to milk him out through the cow as butter. Not only does the cow not appear to be nursing, but cows don't milk out what they digest in real life.
• Courtroom Episode: "Dogday Hellody of 1933", in which a dog is on trial for many crimes, Itchy is the judge and Scratchy is on the jury, and when the dog ends up getting executed, they cheer.
• Corrupted Character Copy: Itchy is basically Jerry if he were a violent sociopath.
• Cosmic Plaything: Scratchy. Even the show's incarnation of God himself sides with Itchy killing him (and even sends him to Hell for the icing on the cake).
• Creator's Pet: Poochie, In-Universe. After mountains of hype, his premiere episode is little more than a giant shill of why kids should like him. This sentiment completely died out at the Itchy & Scratchy studios after the character received heavy backlash, with the sole exception of his voice actor Homer Simpson, who attempted to ask the audience and Roger Meyers Jr. to give the pup another chance while recording his death episode, only to learn that his speech was cut, his voice was suddenly replaced and the dog was killed for good.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In-Universe, both Itchy & Scratchy are voiced by a woman named June Bellamy. In real life, they're voiced by Dan Castellaneta and Harry Shearer, respectively, which makes this an odd double example.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Scratchy suffers one Once per Episode. If he's not being chopped up into pieces, ran over or decapitated. Heck in one short he's made into sushi.
• Damned by Faint Praise: Itchy's real creator Chester J. Lampwick wrote to Scratchy's creator Roger Meyers Sr. that he should "keep drawing. Your moxie more than makes up for your lack of talent." This is one possible reason why Meyers decided to steal Itchy...
• Darker and Edgier: In The Dark Age of Animation, I&S appeared in the adults-only animated feature Itchy & Scratchy Meet Fritz the Cat.
• Deader than Dead: After Poochie is unceremoniously killed off, Krusty gleefully presents a legal affidavit that absolutely prohibits the character from ever appearing on The Itchy & Scratchy Show again.
  Blue-Haired Lawyer: This document conforms to all applicable laws and statutes.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: In Scratchtasia, after breathing in the powdered remains of Itchies, thousands of microscopic copies of the axe-wielding mouse take form in Scratchy's arteries and hack up his insides en masse. The cat disintegrates in seconds.
• Died on Their Birthday: In "Bang The Cat Slowly", Scratchy is violently murdered at his birthday party when Itchy gift-wraps a lit bomb and shoves it down Scratchy's throat.
• The Dog Bites Back: In this case, The Cat Bites Back, since at least once Scratchy finally gets his revenge on Itchy.
• Doorstop Baby: In "Foster Pussycat. Kill! Kill!", Itchy is left at Scratchy's door. Scratchy adopts Itchy, who kills and robs Scratchy.
  • Similarly, in "Cat's In The Cradle" Scratchy is left on Itchy's doorstep. Itchy raises Scratchy until he graduates college. Then blows him up.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Poochie is literally yanked out of the frame under the flimsy pretext that his planet needs him. This is immediately followed by a crudely thrown together screen of text:
  Note: Poochie died on the way to his home planet.
• Dub Name Change: In Brazil, Itchy and Scratchy are known as Comichão e Coçadinha. The translators weren't always consistent on who is who.
• Dude, Not Funny!: Often from Marge, though there are episodes that touch a nerve with even Bart, Lisa, and Homer, albeit usually connected with some dilemma they are undergoing at the time. An example is the episode "Lisa the Vegetarian" where Lisa doesn't laugh along with Bart (as she usually does) because "violence against animals is not funny".
• Ear Ache: One short (Reservoir Cats) parodies the scene of Reservoir Dogs in which Mr. Blonde (Itchy) tortures the cop (Scratchy) at the rhythm of Stuck in the Middle with You, including to soak Scratchy with gasoline and the Gory Discretion Shot when the former cuts one of the ears off the latter; after cutting Scratchy's ear, Quentin Tarantino appears complaining about violence being in everything and gets his head cut off by Itchy. The short ends with Itchy and Scratchy parodying one scene of Pulp Fiction, dancing as the protagonists of that movie while one song of its OST plays.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the show's history, early cartoons were fairly routine. In their first appearance -– in a Tracey Ullman-era short called "The Bart Simpson Show" -– Itchy places a firecracker in Scratchy's mouth; in their first series' appearance (Season 1's "There's No Disgrace Like Home"), the show is simply another "place a bomb in Scratchy's mouth and watch the explosion" cartoon. Future cartoons would be more detailed.
  • Add to that in both cartoons, Scratchy actually started the feud chasing Itchy like a traditional cat and mouse cartoon. Episodes afterwards skipped the formalities and just started with Itchy brutalizing Scratchy for kicks.
  • Earlier episodes were surprisingly bloodless, with Scratchy's usual fate being cleanly reduced to a skeleton. It would take a few installments for things to get Bloody Hilarious.
  • In-Universe, "Manhattan Madness", a cartoon created entirely by Chester J. Lampwick, only features Itchy and had him visiting Manhattan to attack people. "That Happy Cat", meanwhile, is a solo Scratchy effort by Roger Meyers Sr. with no plot whatsoever. Then Meyers stole Itchy and his formula and used them in "Steamboat Itchy", and the rest is history.
• Either/Or Title: One episode where Itchy hangs up a picture of him and Scratchy in his house (with Scratchy tied to a pole) is entitled "House of Pain, or This Old Mouse".
• Enemy Mine: The duo brutalized Hitler in one Wartime Cartoon (before Itchy double crossed Scratchy and decapitated him too). Another has them team up against an annoying blue haired squirrel berating their antics (see Take That!). They also once teamed up to prosecute against a dog in "Dogday Hellody of 1933".
• Episode on a Plane: "Come Flay With Me", in which Scratchy is on a Plane Awful Flight with various versions of Itchy attacking and inconveniencing him.
• Exposed Animal Bellybutton: Another standard design for Itchy and Scratchy.
• Expy Coexistence: Itchy and Scratchy Studios is a clear expy for Disney, bearing a lot of similarities with both its founder and its theme parks. However, Disney has also been alluded to in The Simpsons, meaning both companies exist in the same universe.
• Eye Scream: Scratchy's eyeballs have been cracked open like eggs and used as ice for a drink.
• Flayed Alive: Happens frequently to Scratchy. Most notable in "Screams from a Mall," where he loses his skin after getting dragged under an escalator and has to take it back from a wealthy woman wearing it as a fur coat.
• Foe Romance Subtext: "Skinless in Seattle" has a fair amount of this. Itchy sets up a trap for Scratchy by giving Scratchy a letter from his "secret admirer", and when Scratchy goes to the Space Needle for his "date", Itchy throws miniature souvenir Space Needles at Scratchy, which miss and form a Knife Outline in the shape of a heart. Awww.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: "Pinitchio" is a parody of Pinocchio starring Itchy as Pinocchio and Scratchy as Gepetto. Itchy promises to never hurt his creator, at which point his nose grows and pokes Scratchy's eye out.
• Friendly Enemy: They seem to be friends whenever the brutality is at a brief halt. The Terror of Tiny Toon even revealed that Itchy's brutality is of the Punch-Clock Villain variety, and Scratchy not even holding it against Itchy because it's their job.
• Fur and Loathing: Parodied. Itchy steals Scratchy's skin, fur and all. When Scratchy gets it back, and tries to put it back on, fur protesters beat him up for wearing his own fur.
• Furry Female Mane: Many of the female Inexplicably Identical Individuals Itchies and Scratchies have this trait. All of the female Itchies and Scratchies in "Downton Tabby" have human-style hair, but so do some of the male ones.
• Game Show Appearance: Itchy and Scratchy appeared on an episode of The Springfield Squares.
• Gender Flip: Happens to the titular duo in the Season 30 episode "Bart Vs. Itchy & Scratchy", where they're rebooted as females.
• Ghosts Abhor a Vacuum:
  • "Remembrance of Things Slashed" has the ghost of Scratchy coming back to haunt Itchy. Itchy tries to kill him with a knife, but the knife just phases through Scratchy. So he gets out a vacuum and sucks him up. The contents of the vacuum are then frozen and crushed up by Itchy to make ice for his drink.
  • Another cartoon, parodying the beginning of Up has Itchy kill both Scratchy and his girlfriend, and as their souls float up to heaven, Itchy sucks them up in a vacuum cleaner and lights the vacuum on fire.
• A Good Way to Die: Itchy's scheme in "Four Funerals And A Wedding" has Scratchy live a full and happy romantic life up until he explodes. For an extra insult, the prank also kills Itchy for once.
• Gorn: Happens in nearly every episode.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Heavily implied when Roger Meyers Sr. stole Itchy from his real creator, Chester J. Lampwick, who said that Meyers had a lot of moxie but not much talent. Meyers was such a hack that Scratchy's only solo outing, "That Happy Cat", is still his best-remembered work from before he stole Itchy despite being an In-Universe Box Office Bomb. Besides Scratchy, the only characters Meyers could come up with were bores like "Sarcastic Horse" and "Manic Mailman". The latter was only notable for the U.S. Postal Service plagarizing it to create their "Mister Zip" mascot.
• Hollywood Acid: Often employed. Always used to reduce Scratchy to a skeleton. A glaring example of this for those who know chemicals is the one in which Itchy William Tells Scratchy, hits the apple, but the arrow punctures a hole into the large tank labeled "Carbolic Acid" that Scratchy was standing right next to, since carbolic acid is a) solid at room temperature and b) not really all that acidic (it's technically an alcohol).
• I'm a Humanitarian: Many cartoons end with Itchy cannibalizing Scratchy, by doing everything from feeding Scratchy to a cow, milking it and then churning Scratchy into butter that Itchy put on his toast, to blowing Scratchy up with a bomb and serving his remains to some hungry dogs.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Many of the cartoons do this with both Itchy and Scratchy, including "Downton Tabby".
• Inflating Body Gag: In "Spherical on 34th Street", Itchy inflates Scratchy with a tank of hydrogen. Then he shoots a flaming arrow at the ballooned cat, making him explode in a giant fireball.
• Invincible Villain: No matter what, the cartoon's physics are set so Itchy will always get the upper hand.
• Karma Houdini: Itchy, who never receives any punishment for his brutal and unprovoked attacks on Scratchy (except for in "Burning Down the Mouse" and "Four Funerals and a Wedding").
• Lighter and Softer: After Marge's crusade to tone down the show's violence succeeded, the show went through a phase invoking this trope.
• Mad Bomber: Itchy is an Ax-Crazy mouse who gleefully delights in tormenting Scratchy, and many episodes show him killing Scratchy with bombs and other explosives.
• Made of Bologna: Played with. The main characters are sometimes depicted made solely of red bologna, sometimes made of red bologna that can bleed, and sometimes actual organs are shown. This depends on how gruesome the scene was scripted.
• Mocky Mouse: Though he has more in common with Jerry or Herman than Mickey, Itchy is a bipedal cartoon mouse wearing White Gloves, some of the cartoons he starred in include "Steamboat Itchy" and "Scratchtasia", and he's the mascot of a Souvenir Land theme park.
• Moral Myopia: Itchy constantly abuses, torments, mutilates, and murders Scratchy and enjoys it all the while. But if someone else takes enjoyment out of watching Scratchy be in pain, he gets all up in arms.
• The Movie: In-story, the show had a movie released in theaters and either had a sequel or re-release at the start of The Simpsons Movie.
• Mr. Alt Disney: Itchy and Scratchy's inventor^note well, Scratchy's inventor at least, Roger Meyers Sr., is a thinly disguised spoof of Walt Disney with his theme park and the urban legends surrounding his antisemitism and being cryogenically frozen after his death.
• The Musical: In-story, the cartoon received a stage adaptation in the form of Stab-A-Lot, a parody of The Lion King.
• Mutual Kill: In "Four Funerals and a Wedding", Itchy replaces Scratchy's wife with a fake one made of bombs. However, it takes a lifetime for it to explode and by the time it finally kills Scratchy, Itchy dies of a heart attack.
• Negative Continuity: With how often Scratchy is killed, sometimes in ways that involve fast-forwarding to the future, it's clear there is no real continuity between episodes.
• Nice Mice: Averted with Itchy and in some episodes, his entire kind.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: June Bellamy, the duo's voice actress, is based on veteran voice actress June Foray.
• Noisy Duck: The short "To Kill a Talking Bird", is about turning off phones during movies and features a duck talking (read: quacking) nonstop on his phone.
• Off with His Head!: It might as well be Itchy's favorite method of taking out Scratchy. Although, he sometimes survives it.
• Oh, Crap!: Several shorts have Scratchy seeing his impending doom coming, and screaming in terror as he hopelessly tries to avoid it.
• Old Shame: An In-Universe example is heavily implied with the "Itchy And Sambo" cartoons of the late 1930s. They were apparently so racist that even hardcore Itchy And Scratchy fans like Bart and Lisa Simpson hate them.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: In "Remembrance of Things Slashed", upon learning that Scratchy died of illness, Itchy is disappointed because he never got to kill Scratchy.
• Overly-Long Tongue: Scratchy's isn't so much long as stretchy; at one point it gets tied to a rocket which reaches the moon before Scratchy even notices. Though it's also prehensile, as he was also able to intentionally stretch it far enough to unplug a laser Itchy was trying to kill him with à la Goldfinger.
• Pantsless Males, Fully-Dressed Females: In "Downton Tabby", the female Inexplicably Identical Individuals Scratchies are more fully dressed than the Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal male Scratchies. Inverted slightly with the Inexplicably Identical Individuals Itchies; both are fully dressed, but the female ones are barefoot while the male ones wear shoes.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: A vintage cartoon has Itchy "running afoul of an Irishman" and subsequently running him through a laundry wringer. (Chester J. Lampwick credits himself as the episode's "Ethnographer.")
• The Prankster: Itchy is a parody of classic prankster cartoon characters — except his pranks are usually far more violent and gory than in those classic cartoons.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The Terror of Tiny Toon revealed that Itchy's brutality towards Scratchy is limited to on-duty moments. When off-duty, they seem to be Friendly Enemies, with Scratchy not holding any grudge against Itchy for all he's done to him, thanks to Toon Physics and all that. Woe to anyone the duo has decided to team up against.
  Itchy, upon accidentally slashing Scratchy's arm with a chainsaw: Sorry!
  Scratchy: *shrugs* It happens.
• Punny Name: Itchy and Scratchy. The Latin American version of the series localizes their names to Tommy and Daley, which aside from being a more direct Shout-Out to Tom and Jerry, also showcases their pecking order ("Tome y dale" means "Take and Give" — as in "take injuries and give injuries").
• Reference Overdosed: There's often a Shout-Out to another film or cartoon series.
• Retool: Into a Lighter and Softer show. It was changed back when Marge Simpson, who started the protests against the show's violence, had a wholly different opinion on Michelangelo's David (which was on a coast-to-coast tour of the United States at the time) from the rest of the protesters.
  • The first cartoon in 1928, "That Happy Cat" only showed Scratchy walking down the street and whistling. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a success, and the series only caught on when Itchy and violence were added (read: stolen from Chester J. Lampwick).
  • At some point, the show was briefly expanded into The Itchy and Scratchy and Friends Hour, which featured additional characters Uncle Ant, Disgruntled Goat and Ku Klux Klam. The characters were dropped after the show reverted to a series of shorts, but they were featured as toys in Itchy & Scratchy Land.
• Retraux: Itchy and Scratchy in general are obvious homages to the violent cartoons from The Golden Age of Animation, like Tom and Jerry and Herman and Katnip.
  • In addition, any time an episode shows a cartoon "from the past", it's animated to convincingly look like it was from that period. For example: "Steamboat Itchy", is black and white and in the Inkblot Cartoon Style; a World War II Wartime Cartoon featuring the two of them has a Disneyesque art style and more fluid animation; and "Itchy and Scratchy meet Fritz The Cat" is designed to look like a cartoon from The '70s, right down to the music and what the characters are wearing.
• Sadist: Itchy literally can't go through life without killing Scratchy. He'll clone the cat just to kill him if he has to!
• Sadist Show: It's a show about a mouse brutally massacring a cat and it's a really popular show at that.
• Self-Made Orphan: In "Foster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!" Scratchy adopts baby Itchy as his son. Itchy stabs him, of course, and Scratchy bleeds out.
• Shoo Out the New Guy: A character named "Poochie", voiced by Homer, was introduced, gelled horribly with the show, and was dumped hastily.
• Shoot the Television: The short "Little Barbershop of Horrors", "written" by Abraham Simpson, ends with Scratchy's head (now just a skull) going through a ceiling and into Elvis Presley's television set. Elvis promptly produces a revolver and shoots Scratchy's skull through the TV.^note Referring to an incident where Elvis shot a TV set in his hotel room, supposedly when Robert Goulet appeared on-screen. Depending on the teller, Elvis was mad at Goulet dating one of his backup singers, didn't like Goulet's singing, or just plain had an Ax-Crazy moment.
  Elvis: Aww, this show ain't no good! *BANG!*
• Shout-Out: Many, to various classic cartoons. A notable one is Itchy having the subtitle of "The Lucky Mouse" in his first, lost cartoon, referring of course to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
• Sickeningly Sweet: The aforementioned Lighter and Softer retooling into a ridiculously sterile Sugar Bowl cartoon. The kids of Springfield are so put off by it that they all turn off their televisions and decide to play outside.
• The Sociopath: Itchy. He brutally tortures and murders his best friend repeatedly for no other reason than because it amuses him.
• Spin-Off: The short-lived Itchy & Scratchy and Friends Hour, which introduced a supporting cast of friends for the starring duo, such as Disgruntled Goat, Uncle Ant, and Klu Klux Clam.
• Spiritual Successor: To Squeak the Mouse and Herman and Katnip, rather than Tom and Jerry.
• Stock Sound Effects: At times during the early seasons, Scratchy's yells are very similar (if not outright exact) to Homer's.
• Strictly Formula: Almost every episode involves Itchy killing Scratchy in some elaborate gruesome manner. Parodied several times, whenever the writers are forced to change the formula in any way, their cartoons plummet in quality, unable to utilise anything else competently.
• Stripped to the Bone: Often happens to Scratchy, usually as a result of Hollywood Acid (though on one occasion his head is eaten by ants and reduced to a skull).
• Subverted Kids' Show: It's a very violent take on cartoon violence, but still made for kids.
• Suicide as Comedy: In one episode, rather than Itchy killing Scratchy, we have Scratchy attend a presentation of Cats, where Itchy is an usher. But Scratchy finds it so boring that he ends up blowing his brains out.
• Take That!: In response to Marge Simpson's protests on the show, there's an episode featuring a squirrel with Marge's blue Beehive Hairdo trying to break off Itchy and Scratchy's fighting... only to get killed by them.

  • In the same episode, the Lighter and Softer version is a pointed jab at The Tom and Jerry Show, which also removed all the violence and made the cat and mouse duo friends.

  • Also, the I&S cartoon at the beginning of The Simpsons Movie has Itchy nuking the moon with missiles; the most extreme option is listed as "accidental bombing", with "accidental" in quotation marks.
  • Roger Meyers Sr. is a very unflattering portrayal of Walt Disney. The backstory of the I&S studio is a mishmash of conspiracy theories about the Disney Company. (Disney got the last laugh when they purchased 20th Century Fox, The Simpsons' owner, in 2019.)
• Team Rocket Wins:
  • The 'lost' episode where Scratchy finally gets revenge on Itchy by running him down with a combine harvester.
  • A storyboarded episode had Itchy steal Scratchy's pie, so Scratchy threw him in a vat of acid. Unfortunately, this was during a massive censorship push, so if they went with Marge's suggestion, Itchy would have shared the pie. Which he stole.
  • "Burning Down The Mouse" (shown as part of "Homer Goes to College") is apparently the only aired episode where Scratchy wins, by blowing Itchy up with a large arsenal of explosives. Unfortunately, the viewers never get to see the end, because one of Homer's college roommates who are crashing at his house unplugs the TV and doesn't plug it back in until it's over, where the TV just turns back on in time to see a huge mushroom cloud and "The End" superimposed over the shot (followed by Krusty declaring that "They'll never let us air that again! Not in a million years!").
  • A Taste of Defeat: Another episode ("Four Funerals and a Wedding", shown as part of "A Star is Burns") still had Itchy kill Scratchy, but lost as well, having set up the prank for so long that when it's over the aged Itchy dies of a heart attack laughing too hard.
• Thanksgiving Episode: "Spherical on 34th Street" (from "Funeral for a Fiend"), complete with a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade fiasco.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Itchy tends to kill Scratchy in this fashion. One of the most outlandish, even for cartoon standards, is Scratchy getting his eye impaled with the tip of the Space Needle (yes, the restaurant tower in Seattle).
• They Killed Kenny Again: Itchy brutally kills Scratchy in most episodes, but he's always back for the next one.
  • Averted in "Tears of a Clone" when Scratchy is seemingly Killed Off for Real. Itchy decides to clone him a bunch of times, just so he can kill them.
  • Also averted with Poochie's death.
    Krusty: Well, kids, we all know that sometimes when cartoon characters die, they're back again the very next week. That's why I'm presenting this sworn affidavit that Poochie will never, ever, ever return!
• Time-Passage Beard: In "Four Funerals and a Wedding", the dummy "wife" Itchy makes for Scratchy (which is Made of Explodium) takes so unbelievably long to go off that both Itchy and Scratchy are old men by the time it explodes. Both of them have long white beards in old age.
• Totally Radical: Parodied with Poochie, who is instantly reviled by Itchy & Scratchy fans.
• Victory Is Boring: In "Tears of a Clone", Scratchy dies for good and Itchy becomes very upset, because he's no longer able to fight Scratchy. So he invents a device to clone Scratchy so he can keep torturing him. When that proves too tiresome, Itchy hooks up the cloning machine to a killing machine, which proves satisfactory.
• Villain Protagonist: Itchy is not nice if that isn't obvious enough.
• Vocal Evolution: In the "Marge Simpson approved" episodes, Itchy and Scratchy's goofy voices are converted to affable helium-pitched ones.
• Wartime Cartoon:
  • In one episode, we see a clip of an untitled World War II-era short, where a very Tom and Jerry-esque Itchy and Scratchy team up to torment and kill Adolf Hitler. Immediately afterwards, Itchy turns on Scratchy and cuts his head off, joined by Franklin D. Roosevelt to kick the bodies.
  • Roger Myers, Sr.'s other wartime contribution, "Nazi Supermen are Our Superiors", was not as well received.
• Wham Line: "I have to go now. My planet needs me." Before we heard that, nobody had any idea that Poochie came from another planet.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: An in-universe example; the show is about Itchy killing Scratchy in various gruesome ways, but it's aimed at kids and Bart and Lisa watch and laugh at it often.
• White Gloves: Itchy and Scratchy (as well as any cartoon pedestrians) always wear these.
• William Telling: Itchy does it to Scratchy once. He hits the apple, but the arrow punctures a hole into the large tank of acid that Scratchy was standing right next to.
• With Friends Like These...: Scratchy seems to consider Itchy to be his friend, even though all Itchy ever does is torture, mutilate, and outright murder the cat for no reason outside of sadistic amusement. Upon being described in a comic book story as Scratchy's friend, Itchy even thinks to himself that, with friends like him, Scratchy doesn't need enemies.
• Would Hit a Girl: Itchy will cheerfully slaughter any female cats unlucky enough to be involved with Scratchy.
• Would Hurt a Child: Itchy is just as willing to massacre Scratchy's children or any other child cats as he is to kill Scratchy.
• Your Size May Vary: Itchy the mouse is normally half as tall as Scratchy the cat, but in some episodes, particularly in earlier seasons, Itchy is shown to be much smaller, like a typical cartoon mouse.

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