YMMV / The Simpsons S 9 E 4 Treehouse Of Horror VIII

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the fly with Bart's body actively malicious, with the genuine intelligence to try and "replace" Bart in the family and murder Lisa? Or is it still just a normal fly acting on base instinct?
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: In "The Homega Man", while Homer is checking out a bomb shelter, he looks at a The Far Side calendar, flipping through the pages and saying "I don't get it" each time. Were the writers saying that they don't think The Far Side is funny, or are they saying that Homer's too stupid to get it?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: In "Easy-Bake Coven", Wiggum's statement that Marge will "fall to an honorable Christian death" if she isn't a witch is presented as a bit of Insane Troll Logic, but this attitude actually is consistent with how real-life witch hunters reasoned on both sides of the Atlantic. As they saw it, it was safer to just kill anyone suspected of being a witch, since you'd be ridding the world of a demon if the accusation was true, and if they were innocent then they'd be sent to heaven as a martyr.
• Angst? What Angst?: Played for Laughs. It takes an absurdly short amount of time for the family to fully adjust to Bart seemingly turning into a hideous fly-headed mutant. Less than 15 minutes after finding out, they're all sitting at the table eating breakfast like everything is perfectly normal.
• Genius Bonus: 1600s Edna wears a red 'A' on her clothes, both as a reference to The Scarlet Letter and (likely) because she's an adulteress in-universe, like that book's main character. However, nothing of this is stated openly in the episode.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Bart first tests out the teleporter in "Fly vs Fly", Santa's Little Helper and Snowball II get fused together by accident. The end result is this◊ A few months later, CatDog would premiere.
  • The scene of Kang’s superiors laughing off and ignoring his reports about Earth in "The Homega Man” essentially predicts the premise of Invader Zim a few years later.
  • The FOX censor at the start of the episode says that the episode is rated TV-G before getting stabbed by the ratings symbol. Three future Simpsons episodes would actually get a TV-G rating.
  • The "Easy-Bake Coven" segment takes place in the 17th century and involves a witch hunt, during which the Springfieldians are very trigger-happy with making accusations of witchcraft (a common practice back then). A much later episode would have three wiccans falsely accused of witchcraft and arrested, with Mayor Quimby allowing this to happen because, despite this taking place in modern times, Springfield is still bound by 17th century law.
  • When Marge shows off her witch powers, Eddie is turned into a snowman, while Lou winds up wearing a blue princess dress
• Strawman Has a Point: The Sprynge-Fielders in "Easy-Bake Coven" are all too eager to blame every little bad thing on witchcraft, and Lovejoy's proclamation that there's still a witch among them after they've already accused and executed 75 just seems like zealotry. However, it turns out there very much was a witch causing problems in their village all along, and their accusation of Marge was correct.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Similar to the "Steamed Hams" skit, seeing Agnes get burned at the stake can be cathartic.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Homer watches a Chris Farley and David Spade movie at a movie theater almost two months before Farley passed away (although his last films, Almost Heroes and Dirty Work, came out several months afterward).
• Values Dissonance: Comic Book Guy saying that he’s wasted his life, given that his nerdy culture has become much more mainstream in recent years. Years later, The Simpsons Movie has a Bait-and-Switch where he winds up being proud of his life instead, and even that was the year before the Marvel Cinematic Universe began. It helps that the "Treehouse Of Horror" specials aren't canon, so it's possible that Comic Book Guy wouldn't actually think this way in the show.

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