YMMV / The Simpsons S1 E8 "The Telltale Head"

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: In this episode, Bart's minor bad deed of cutting the head off the statue is treated as a very serious crime by the townspeople, with them getting very emotional about the act and forming a lynch mob to punish Bart when the problem is very easily fixed by just putting the head back on and Bart already felt bad about it. This is shown to largely be the result of the large amount of respect people have for Jebediah Springfield, with them speaking extremely highly of him and his (apparent) actions; this includes a rather outlandish story about killing a bear with his bare hands (which a TV special even mentions probably isn't true, but seems to gloss over it.) Couple that with the Harsher in Hindsight entry and this episode can be viewed as a message against the dangers of glorifying historical figures and also of being too quick to punish others based on emotional moral judgements.
• Harsher in Hindsight: It's harder to buy into the townsfolk's reverence for Jebediah Springfield, the town's founder, after "Lisa the Iconoclast." There, Lisa would accidentally uncover his true identity, that of an unscrupulous pirate who lied about every good deed he'd be known for in the present.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The bullies (Dolph, Jimbo, and Kearney) state that they were only imagining cutting off the statue's head and are shocked when it happens for real, but the show's HD opening actually has Jimbo and Kearney cutting Jebediah Springfield's head (and it landing on Ralph Wiggum).
  • This episode features Sideshow Bob's first appearance. It's also the first in which he tries to kill Bart, long before that motivation became an integral part of his character from "Cape Feare" onward.
• Values Dissonance:
  • This is the episode of the first season, Bart's high-water-mark as a controversial figure, that focuses most heavily on Bart doing a bad thing. At the time, his actions were far outside the norm for a young boy on television, and many were calling him a bad role model. Yet if you watch the episode today, he doesn't read as a particularly bad kid at all. Messing with the Sunday school teacher just surprises you that he goes to Sunday school at all, he clearly objects to things that Jimbo's crew wants to do and gets peer-pressured into them, and his attempt to impress them by cutting the head off is framed as completely negative and has immediately bad consequences. Menace Decay and all, if this episode aired today, people would probably be praising Bart as a good role model for ultimately defying peer pressure and realizing it's a bad thing. At the time it was airing, though, frank depictions of this sort of thing were very rare.
  • There's also the beginning of the story, where Marge forces the family to go to church despite Homer and Bart's desire to to do other things instead, leading Marge to complain about their disgruntlement. Marge is meant to be the rational adult in the story, with Homer and Bart being immature and more interested in mindless things. As society has grown more secular in the 30+ years since the episode aired, an increasing number of viewers find it difficult to sympathize with Marge over the others.