YMMV / The Simpsons S7 E1 "Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part Two)"

• Alternative Joke Interpretation:
  • When Groundskeeper Willie mentions his arthritis came from "space invaders" and was surprised that Chief Wiggum called it a video game, was this implying Willie had an encounter with real space invaders, or something he believed were space invaders? Or was he playing Space Invaders under the impression that the aliens in the game were real? The second interpretation however does result in a slight case of Anachronism Stew, as Willie mentions the incident had occurred in 1977, while Space Invaders came out in 1978.
  • Burns is taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, before taken to a better hospital and pronounced alive. Naturally can be a mere competence joke, though given Mr Burns' 0% Approval Rating at the time, it can also be enterpeted as Burns' handers being savvy enough to get him rediagnosed by a medic professional enough to not let him die out of spite.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • As MythBusters has demonstrated, taking candy from a baby is not as easy as it sounds.
  • "Crapulence" is a real word—and not a vulgar one either; it's an archaic term referring to excess, whether by intoxication, overeating or similar. Burns is describing his condition of being Drunk on the Dark Side with his usual Antiquated Linguistics.
    Burns: Smithers had thwarted my earlier attempt to take candy from a baby, but with him out of the picture, I was free to wallow in my own crapulence.
• Harsher in Hindsight: When Mr. Burns demands that Maggie be arrested for shooting him, Wiggum tells him that no court would convict a baby for attempted murder, except perhaps Texas. Unfortunately, "Kill the Alligator and Run" shows that Florida is willing to convict an infant for something that's actually her father's fault. A future Couch Gag (the billboards that appear as the camera swings from the title to Springfield Elementary) shows that some people in Springfield demand Maggie to be put behind bars for the shooting many (vague) years later.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The difficulty Mr. Burns has in taking candy from Maggie may seem like a gag at first, but an episode of Mythbusters ended up showing that this was a surprisingly accurate outcome; babies really don't like being separated from their candy.
• I Knew It!: While very few viewers worked out that Maggie was the shooter, several did work out that the killer would turn out to be one of the show's child characters, because of its reliance on Status Quo Is God and the fact that a child would be far more likely to escape any punishment for a (presumably accidental) shooting than an adult. However, most of the people who did follow this line of reasoning tended to conclude that Bart would turn out to be the shooter, due to Lisa's status as Token Good Teammate, and Maggie being too young to seem credible as the shooter.
• It Was His Sled: By now, anyone with even a passing familiarity of the show likely knows who the shooter was. The show itself references it whenever it gets a chance, and if another show wants to reference a specific Simpsons event it's one of the more common choices.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Most of the potential shooters fall under this to some extent, but Homer Simpson being the lead suspect is the most glaring. It's pretty obvious they weren't going to send the de-facto protagonist of the show to jail, and even if they came up a Writer Cop Out to get themselves out of that, then it would still make it somewhat hard to look at his character the same way. In fact, this trope is probably the main reason why one would actually guess Maggie to begin with, as she was the most prominent character who could've shot Mr. Burns without a resultant change in the status quo.
• One-Scene Wonder: Dr. Colossus the Silver Age-style supervillain locked up in the Springfield Police HQ, with his Epic Fail attempt at getting away by himself and Wiggum showcasing one more time he's a complete imbecile of a lawman by letting him go on a very incorrect assumption. Also a Chekhov's Gunman because he'd been mentioned once all the way back in "Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy".
• Woolseyism:
  • The Italian dub has Willie play Galaga instead of Space Invaders, also his answer to Wiggum no longer implies that he thought they were actual alien invaders, just that it was a tough game.
  • The Latin American dub changes Moe's "Victoria's Secret/Sears catalog" gag to "lingerie/supermarket" because the Sears brand is too obscure for Latin audiences^note and getting even more with the brand increasingly near death. It also increases the "ha, ha, look at the deadbeat" feeling of the gag.

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