YMMV / The Simpsons S4 E9 "Mr. Plow"

• Awesome Music:
  • "Call Mr. Plow, that's my name/That name again is Mr. Plow".
    • Moby made several remixes of the jingle, one of which, a gangster rap version, was shown in the documentary The Simpsons 20th Anniversary Special in 3-D on Ice.
  • Dan Castellaneta called Linda Ronstadt's Spanish version of the Plow King jingle the most beautiful thing he ever heard.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • The crash test demo from "Fourth Reich Motors" showing that the crash test dummies... aren't actually dummies.
  • Homer admonishing Bart for playing around in Bonnie and Clyde's (the notorious murdering bank-robbing couple from the 1930s) death car ("Bart! That car belonged to Bonnie and Clyde. Show a little respect!") Then Bart discovers some money hidden in the glove compartment and pockets it.
• Designated Villain: Homer is framed as sending Barney's life spiralling by giving him beer, yet as many people have pointed out in video comments like this one, the fact that it only took one sip for Barney to get hooked means that he had very little tolerance or self-control to begin with; with the rituals and stresses of life, he would have inevitably gotten addicted at some point.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Homer (as a teenager) accidentally ruined Barney's life by giving him beer the night before his SATs, and before Barney became a drunk, he was an honors student with his sights set for Harvard University. And if that's not depressing enough, Barney's film festival entry in "A Star is Burns" is about how his alcoholism has ruined his life.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Bart asks, "Who the hell is Robin?" when Adam West shows a picture from his Batman days. Only three years after this episode aired, Batman Forever featured Batman teaming up with Robin.
    • This joke has managed to gain a lot of mileage as more and more Batman movies came out and Robin continued to be absent from them. He makes no appearance at all throughout The Dark Knight Trilogy, and is only alluded to in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice on account of being dead, meaning that young casual viewers like Bart might still very well have no idea who he is (the media young viewers would most likely recognize him from, Teen Titans Go!, features Robin as his own character mostly independently of Batman).
  • Along with "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington", George H. W. Bush is played in a more positive light than in later seasons, as Homer's Imagine Spot shows Bush hiring Homer to clear a path through a protest after losing the election to Bill Clinton. Then comes the season seven episode, "Two Bad Neighbors" depicts them as...two bad neighbors.
• Memetic Molester: Hoo boy. Thanks to Dark Simpsons, Mr. Plow has become that, showing up exclusively to molest Bart. So, if you hear the jingle, you know what's next...
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Homer's Imagine Spot of him plowing through a protest at the White House shows George H. W. Bush as the President. This episode aired a few weeks after the 1992 election, when Bill Clinton was president-elect.
  • Adam West referring to the Tim Burton-era Batman Film Series as the "new Batman movies" and contemptuously dismissing Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman (albeit as a somewhat self-deprecating reference to Batman (1966) having three "true" Catwomen). By 2022, more time has passed between Batman Returns and the then-newest Batman movie, The Batman, than had between West's series and the Burton films, with numerous other Batman film series having released in the interim, to the point where many think of the Burton films as being just as "old" as West-era Batman.^note Ironically, had West referenced Michael Keaton by name, it would have partially averted this as Keaton is set to return as an older Bruce Wayne in The Flash. Sadly, West himself makes it a period piece even more after he died in 2017.
  • The new Mr. Plow commercial shows a New York city skyline with the Twin Towers still standing.
  • Physically going to a store to buy pornography would be rather more unusual in the present day given the prevalence of internet pornography, often for free.

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