YMMV / The Simpsons S3E4 "Bart the Murderer"

• Accidental Aesop: Skinner's moral about recycling is obviously a Spoof Aesop, but not hoarding to the point it threatens your life isn't a bad lesson.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did Skinner refuse Bart's bribe as a matter of principle or was it because he'd knew of the serious trouble he'd be in if discovered?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Laramie was an actual brand of cigarette, though they haven't been made since the 1950s.
• Crosses the Line Twice: After Skinner reveals what really happened to him, and how he managed to free himself from his garage, the opposing attorney for the trial tries getting this stricken from the record.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • At one point, while Skinner is missing, Richard, one of Bart's friends, assumed that Skinner was ground up into meat for hamburgers and served in the school cafeteria. Three years later, that ended up being the premise of the "Treehouse of Horror V" segment "Nightmare Cafeteria", except the ones who ended up getting ground up into meat and ending up on the school's menu are the schoolchildren themselves, being served for Skinner and other school faculty.
  • Skinner's Aesop of telling the courtroom to recycle your newspapers due to him being pinned underneath a large pile of them and being left undiscovered for a whole week becomes this in regards to the many stories about hoarders and others who ended up being killed due to their own piles toppling on them.
  • The ending has Bart vindicated but still demonized by the media within legal limits (largely because it makes for much better entertainment), not that Bart seems to mind at all being a fictional gangster. Later, "Homer Badman" would look into the media getting away with slandering the Simpsons for the sake of entertainment with much more dramatic effect.
  • A quick Continuity Nod gag shows that Bart's cellmate is Sideshow Bob. While this sounds uncomfortable under the best of circumstances, it was before later episodes established him as a homicidal maniac who Would Hurt a Child and has it in for Bart specifically; at this point in the show his only known criminal act was framing Krusty for armed robbery.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The psychic who was hired to search for Skinner's body predicted that Delta Burke and Major Dad (Gerald McRaney) would break up. More than thirty years after the episode aired, they're still happily married.
  • A broken wheel or vehicle part causes a character to meet the Mafia and do various jobs for them. Are we talking about Bart Simpson or Frank Sheeran?
• Nightmare Fuel: The various ways in which a dead Skinner appears during Bart's nightmare.
• The Woobie: It's hard not to feel sorry for Bart in this episode. NOTHING goes right for him in the first act, with even the weather being out to get him (it starts raining when the bus leaves without him, clears up when he gets to school, then starts raining again when he leaves), not to mention him being framed for a murder in the third act. Some of it is his own fault, but being framed for murder at ten years old? Even for someone like Bart, that warrants sympathy. His only solace is that he enjoys the media still conveying him as a murderous crime lord for pure entertainment value (though they still pull Loophole Abuse to avoid paying him a dime for their liberties).

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