YMMV / The Simpsons S8 E25 "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson"

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The sequence where Bart is given a grenade launcher because he's a public school student and, therefore, has experience with "small arms" will come off as in bad taste these days thanks to news reports of school shootings like Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland.
  • The episode "Simple Simpson" turns one joke of this episode a retroactive Sadistic Choice: you can either call the police and Wiggum won't care about helping you or you can try taking the law into your own hands (like Homer did by acting as Pie Man) and you'll be lucky if Wiggum doesn't decides to order his officers to Kill on Sight the "vigilante".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The general's Verbal Backspace as he's giving the graduation speech regarding the cadets' future from being proud frontline soldiers to being in charge of maintaining robots that will be waging wars in space (or maybe a very tall mountain) becomes this with the U.S. military's increasing use of drone warfare and the interest in creating a "Space Force" arm.
  • The original final test in the military school was pitting the students against each other in a two-day battle royale.
  • After Bart's latest prank, Chief Wiggum suggests putting Bart on behavior-modifying drugs, to which Marge declines, saying that he needs discipline, not drugs (resulting in him being sent to the military academy). In a later episode, Bart would be given behavior-modifying drugs, and the side effects of said drugs would cause him to go on a tank rampage that Wiggum has to arrest him for.
• Memetic Mutation: The scene where Bart lines up a bunch of megaphones and causes a massive shockwave has been subject to all sorts of edits on YouTube.
• Special Effect Failure: In-Universe with the old The Moon of Earth film, where a string is clearly visibly holding the moon in the opening scene.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The Military School where delinquent kids are sent is a trope that has largely died out after the 90's. The show does seem to anticipate this, as the decline in popularity of military schools and the fact that most of its tactics are increasingly seen as child abuse is alluded to and referenced throughout.
  • Lisa joining a boys-only military academy was based on the events around Shannon Faulkner's attempt to be the first girl to enroll in The Citadel and the hazing she received upon enrollment.
  • The general's speech to the graduating class definitely places the episode before the rise of (some would say obsession with) drone warfare in the United States military.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Lisa enrolls in the military school because she thinks it is more intellectually stimulating than Springfield Elementary, yet the episode never shows her in the inside of a classroom. It would have either been a small silver lining to a particularly grueling cloud (and/or more ammunition for being bullied by the other students) or fodder for a "Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond" joke (which would probably increase Lisa’s despair).

---