YMMV / The Simpsons S7 E11 "Marge Be Not Proud"

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Does Marge actually believe that she's been too much of a My Beloved Smother towards Bart, that his attempt to steal the game was a way of acting out against her, and that she needs to give him his own space? Or is she so angry and ashamed at Bart that she genuinely wants nothing to do with him, and is using the claim of being less of a hands-on mother to persuade the rest of the family (and possibly even herself) that she isn't actively trying to unperson Bart, even if she was.
  • Marge getting Bart the putting game instead of Bonestorm in the end wasn't her just being an oblivious mom: while she's not angry at Bart anymore, she isn't just going to let everything go and reward him for his theft.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: There actually was a game called BloodStorm.
• Base-Breaking Character: Depending on who you ask, either Don Brodka's an entertaining parody of store security guards who have a Small Name, Big Ego complex about their jobs, or he's the first of the show's high-profile guest characters to be a serious misfire, due to his excessive Jerkass and Kick the Dog behavior towards Bart, and lack of any memorable lines or jokes (which, according to writers and crew members, was the result of Lawrence Tierney refusing to perform most of his scripted gags).
• Don't Shoot the Message: The message that shoplifting is wrong and is a slippery slope to something worse is an okay message on its own, but many find it hard to take seriously considering it was Bart who was used as an example; the Simpson who has already done things just as bad as shoplifting in the past and faced no real repercussions for it. Combined with how ham-fisted the message is, it ends up turning what would otherwise be a conventional Aesop episode into an overblown and needless Sadist Episode for many.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The joke behind Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge was that at the time kids weren't interested in golf games because they were seen as dull experiences. Just a few years later, Mario Golf 64 was released and became a massive success in terms of both sales and reviews.
  • Milhouse gets Luann to kick Bart out of the house by shouting "MOM! BART'S SMOKING!" While he wasn't doing any such thing here, Bart would later take up e-cigarettes in "Let's Go Fly a Coot".
• Jerkass Woobie: Bart commits a serious act of theft, but the suffering he goes through, fearing his mom no longer loves him, is painful to watch.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Marge! Is Lisa at Camp Grenada?" If you go to any Youtube video playing "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah," you are guaranteed to find that line in the comments section, with A LOT of "likes".
  • Millhouse's game name, "Thrillhouse!" And "THRILLHO," as it's displayed due to the game's character limit.
  • Jimbo shoplifting with his beanie.
  • "You have selected no."
  • "Juuuust TAKE IT! Take it take it take it take take it! TAKEIT!" It even went on to be an Ascended Meme in LEGO Dimensions.
  • The "now I know you love video games, and I asked the clerk which is the one every boy wants" scene is often used to depict well-meaning but oblivious parents buying their children a Shoddy Knock Off Product instead of the actual games they wanted
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Krusty's Christmas special features appearances by former Dallas Cowboys head coach Tom Landry, who died in February 2000, and a video Christmas card from Tupac Shakur, who died in September 1996 (only nine months after this episode first aired).
  • The graphics on Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge, the $70 price tag on Bonestorm, ^note New AAA video games costing $70 at launch would be seen again in the 2020s, when inflation had driven the value of a dollar to about half of what it was in 1995. and the video game characters referenced date this episode to the fourth generation of video games. The PlayStation had been released in North America only a few months before this episode aired and the Nintendo 64 would follow soon after.
  • Bonestorm in general is a pitch-perfect parody of the many clones of Mortal Kombat (1992) that were all the rage at the time. The trend died not long after, to the point that quite a few fans watching the episode nowadays seem to think the show's depiction of them was a Dead Unicorn Trope and there's no way they were actually that mindlessly violent and gory. If anything, Bonestorm is downright tamer than a lot of them.
    • Funnily enough, Mortal Kombat has outlived nearly all of its clones meaning modern viewers can still use that series as a frame of reference for Bonestorm.
  • Bart intercepting the incriminating phone message by physically swapping the cassette tape out of the family's answering machine. At the time of the episode's airing, most home answering machines did record on cassette tapes and were usually a separate machine from the phone itself. By the late 90s and early 2000s, most home phones had answering machines built in and digitally recorded messages in a solid state format and messages could be cleared by just deleting them off the phone.

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