The Terrible Catsafterme

SEASON 1 – FOX

Theme song: “The Simpsons Theme” by Alf Clausen

NOTE: This series began life as a series of bumpers and short subjects as seen in the variety series “The Tracey Ullman Show” between 1987-1989

• 001. Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire – 12/17/1989
  • The Simpson family – Homer (Dan Castellaneta), Marge (Julie Kavner), Lisa (Yeardley Smith), Bart (Nancy Cartwright), and Maggie – are preparing for Christmas by attending Lisa’s school Christmas pageant and putting up decorations. Homer works at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and their boss Mr. Montgomery Burns (Harry Shear) announces that the workers will not be getting a Christmas bonus this year. Marge has saved a jar of Christmas money, but has to spend it to have a tattoo removed from Bart. Homer is crestfallen that he will not be able to provide a good Christmas for his family, so after visiting Moe’s, a bar run by Moe Szyslak (Hank Azaria), he decides to train to be a department store Santa. Bart ends up unmasking him, and Homer confides in his bonus situation. The pair take his $13 Santa money and go to the dog track and bet it all on a long-shot dog named Santa’s Little Helper. He loses, but when the dog’s owner kicks him out into the street, Homer and Bart bring him home, and the family considers it to be a great Christmas gift, despite Marge’s two sisters Patty and Selma’s (both voiced by Julie Kavner) constant bashing of Homer. The family sings Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer with the standard and not-so standard interjections from Bart and Lisa. Pamela Hayden is the voice of Todd Flanders and Milhouse Van Houten. Dan Castellaneta is Barney Gumble and Grampa Abraham Simpson. Harry Shearer voices Principal Seymour Skinner.  1/14/14

• 002. Bart the Genius – 1/14/1990
  • On the verge of being suspended for spray-painting the school, Dr. Pryor halts the meeting with his parents to announce that the intelligence test that Ms. Krabappel (Marcia Wallace) administered indicated that he was a genius. Actually, Bart has swapped the test with brainy Martin Prince (Russi Taylor) but goes along with the ruse in order to attend a much more liberal school. His new teacher Ms. Melon (Jo Ann Harris) is surprised when Bart doesn’t understand many basic concepts and ends up causing an explosion in chemistry class. Bart schemes to get back into his old school by proposing that he go there to study it, but can’t even muster the words to write out his proposal, so he changes it to a confession (spelling the word confession wrong). 1/14/14
• 003. Homer’s Odyssey – 1/21/1990
  • While Bart’s class is on a field trip to the nuclear power plant (during which they watch the film Nuclear Energy: Our Misunderstood Friend), Bart distracts his dad, who barrels his cart into a radioactive pipe and is fired from his job. Homer becomes depressed and heads out to drown himself. His family chases him and they are nearly hit by a car, which inspires Homer to become a safety crusader and set up warning signs all over town. When he sets his targets on the power plant, in order to shut him up, Mr. Burns (Christopher Collins), offers him his job back with a raise and promotion to Safety Inspector. As he addresses his crowd of disciples, he falls off the plant building into the arms of the crowd. Sam McMurray provides the voice for a Duff Beer commercial. Hank Azaria is Chief Wiggum. Harry Shearer is Jasper Beardley and Otto Mann. Russi Taylor is Sherri and Terri. Pamela Hayden is Wendell. 1/24/14
• 004. There’s No Disgrace Like Home – 1/28/1990
  • The Simpson’s go to Mr. Burns’ home for the annual company party. Homer wants his family to impress Burns but Marge ends up getting drunk, and the kids misbehave. Seeing another family act ‘normal’, Homer gets in his head that his family is dysfunctional and they scope out some neighbors to see how they act, but are taken for peeping Toms. At Moe’s, Homer sees an ad for family counselor Dr. Marvin Monroe (Harry Shearer), so he pawns their TV to raise the $250 for a session. When the family misuses the padded mallets and shock aversion therapy, Monroe kicks them out – bur Homer holds him to his guarantee that the doctor will help them or double their money back. The take the $500 and buy a brand new TV that brings the family closer than ever. Maggie Roswell provides the voice of a mother at the party. Harry Shearer is Officer Eddie. Hank Azaria is Lou. 1/25/14
• 005. Bart the General – 2/4/1990
  • Sticking up for Lisa, Bart takes on a goon that smashes the cupcakes that Lisa made for her teacher, which arouses the ire of super-bully Nelson Muntz (Nancy Cartwright). After Bart is beaten up, his parents give him opposing advice: Marge to be nice to him, Homer to fight dirty. Bart tries the latter, but is overpowered and sent home again in a rolling garbage can. Bart goes to see his grandfather for advice, and is referred to military supply store proprietor Herman (Harry Shearer), who helps Bart is assembling an arm of students to attack Nelson and his friends with water balloons. They capture Nelson, but he promises to beat up Bart again once he is untied. Herman and Grandfather help arrange an Armistice treaty, and Nelson and the family then enjoy Lisa’s cupcakes. 2/23/14
• 006. Moaning Lisa – 2/11/1990
  • Lisa is depressed about the meaning of life and world suffering, so she turns to the blues via her saxophone. Late one night she hears a saxophone player out her window and follows the sound to encounter Bleeding Gums Murphy (Ron Taylor) and the two jam together and Lisa writes a song. Marge gives Lisa the advice that she should always just smile through the pain, but then recants and tells her to be sad if that’s what she wants and she will always stand by her. This causes Lisa to finally smile. Meanwhile, Bart keeps humiliating Homer in a boxing video game, so Homer seeks tutoring from a kid at the local arcade. As Homer is finally about to defeat Bart, Marge pulls the plug on the game so that Lisa can suggest a family outing: a trip to see Bleeding Gums play live, where he performs the song that Lisa wrote. Miriam Flynn in the voice of Miss Barr. Pamela Hayden is Janey Powell. 2/23/14
• 007. The Call of the Simpsons – 2/18/1990
  • Homer is lured by the fact that his neighbor Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) has bought an RV, so he visits salesman Cowboy Bob (Albert Brooks), but ends up with a clunker camper. The Simpsons embark on a camping trip, but soon the camper falls off a cliff and they all wind up lost in the woods. Marge and Lisa fare rather well, Maggie gets captured by bears who enjoy her pacifier and befriend her, and Homer and Bart run into nothing but trouble, falling off a cliff, landing in water, and losing their clothes. Another camper spies Homer after he falls into the mud and soon news reports indicate that Homer is actually Bigfoot. Once the family is located, Homer is studied by scientists to see if he is in fact monkey or human; the results are inconclusive. 4/29/14
• 008. The Telltale Head – 2/25/1990
  • Bart and Homer, carrying the severed statue head of Jebediah Springfield, founder of the town, are being chased by an angry mob who want revenge for the stolen head. Bart addresses the crowd and recounts the events leading up to them being caught. The day starts at Sunday school where Homer makes a fool of himself by listening to a football game during the service, while Bart and Lisa and their classmates question a teach about who and what will get into heaven. Later that day Bart sneaks to the movies to see Space Mutants 4, when he runs afoul of a group of bullies, who end up taking a liking to Bart. When they mention how funny it would be to steal of the head of the statue, Bart decides to saw it off so that he will be better liked. He later realizes that the bullies were just a lot of talk, and now plan up beating up the kid who stole the head. Bart confesses his crime to his parents, and Homer accompanies him to return the head to the statue. The angry mob is ready to kill Bart, but when he tells them his story, they are more forgiving. Tress MacNeille makes her first voice appearance in this episode as Ms. Albright and Jimbo Jones. Krusty the Clown (Dan Castellaneta) and Kearney Zzyzwicz (Nancy Cartwright) makes their first appearances. Hank Azaria is Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Harry Shearer is Reverend Lovejoy. 4/29/14 
• 009. Life on the Fast Lane – 3/18/1990
  • For Marge’s birthday, Homer gets her a bowling ball with his name on it, knowing full well that she doesn’t bowl. She decides to keep it and go bowling just for spite, leaving Homer at home to struggle with taking care of the kids. Marge meets a bowling instructor named Jacques who gives her a personalized bowling glove and asks her out for brunch. She accepts but feels guilty, while Homer knows something is wrong but doesn’t know how to approach the subject. Jacques ends up asking Marge to his apartment and fantasizing about their romance, she accepts. When Homer compliments Marge’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Marge can’t decide between going to Jacques’ place or visiting Homer at the power plant. Ultimately she chooses to see Homer, and in a scene reminiscent of An Officer and a Gentleman, Homer sweeps Marge off her feet and carries her out. Harry Shearer is Lenny Leonard. Maggie Roswell is Helen Lovejoy. 7/19/14
• 010. Homer’s Night Out – 3/25/1990
  • Homer attends the stag part of co-worker Eugene Fisk (Hank Azaria), which is located next door to The Rusty Bucket, a seafood restaurant where Marge and the family are eating. Bart stumbles into the party and takes a photo of Homer with exotic dancer Princess Kashmir (Maggie Roswell). Bart makes prints of the photo at school and pretty soon the picture is in the hands of all of the kids…and parents, making its way back to Mr. Burns, who seeks advice on how to handle women. Marge is livid when she sees the picture and kicks Homer out of the house. He returns with the stipulations that he take Bart to meet Princess Kashmir and show him that she’s not just an object. Bart winds up on stage doing the can-can with a line of dancers, but then redeems himself by announcing that men should have respect for women and not treat them as mere eye candy. Sam McMurray is the voice of Gulliver Dark. 7/20/14
• 011. The Crepes of Wrath – 4/15/1990
  • After Bart causes Homer’s back injury, and then lets off a cherry bomb in the school toilet, dousing Principal Skinner’s mother (Tress MacNeille), Homer and the Principal plan to get Bart into a foreign exchange program. Bart winds up in the custody of Cesar (Harry Shearer) and his nephew Ugolin (Dan Castellaneta) at the Chateau Mason winery, where they promptly put Bart to work picking and stomping grapes, and the hard labor normally carried out by their donkey Maurice. Bart soon realizes that he has learned French and is able to communicate to an officer (Christian Coffinet) that he is being abused and his captors are putting antifreeze in the wine. They are arrested and Bart is declared a national hero. Meanwhile in Springfield, the Simpsons have taken in Adil Hoxha (Tress MacNeille) from Albania, who although incredibly polite and loving, is only trying to steal secrets from the Nuclear Power Plant. He is arrested as a spy, and the Simpsons have a heartfelt reunion when Bart returns. 9/12/14
• 012. Krusty Gets Busted – 4/29/1990
  • The Krusty the Clown Show plays on the Simpson household TV as Bart’s hero Krusty introduces Itchy & Scratchy (Harry Shearer) in Burning Love and attempts to shoot Sideshow Bob (Kelsey Grammer) out of a cannon. While Marge’s sisters are visiting and showing a slideshow of their trip to the Yucatan, Homer witnesses a robbery at the Kwik-E-Mart allegedly performed by Krusty. With video surveillance footage and Homer’s testimony, Krusty is arrested and found guilty, although Bart maintains that he is innocent. He enlists Lisa’s help in proving this, and sure enough, the video provides clues that Krusty – who was illiterate and had a pacemaker – would not have been seen reading and using a microwave as the video indicated. Bart and Lisa go to visit Sideshow Bob, who has now taken over the show and classed it up naming it Sideshow Bob’s Cavalcade of Whimsy, and quickly realizes by the size of his feet that he must have been the real culprit. Sideshow Bob is arrested and confesses to the crime, and Krusty acknowledges the boy who never gave up on him. Dan Castellaneta is newscaster Scott Christian and Judge Snyder. Harry Shearer voices news anchor Kent Brockman. 9/12/14
• 013. Some Enchanted Evening – 5/13/1990
  • Homer overhears Marge call into a radio show to seek advice of Dr. Marvin Monroe (Hank Azaria) about how unromantic her husband is. Knowing she is going to confront him when he gets home, he pre-preemptively arranges an overnight getaway. They get a babysitter named Mrs. Botz (Penny Marshall), whom Bart and Lisa find out from watching the TV show America’s Most Armed and Dangerous is actually Lucille Botzcowski, aka the Babysitting Bandit. She ties them up and begins robbing the house. Maggie unties them and they are able to subdue Mrs. Botz and tie her up. Homer and Marge return home when they can’t get an answer on the phone, and untie her, paying her trip her pay because his kids tied her up. The police and news arrive to report that Homer has aided and abetted a known criminal.  Paul Willson is the voice of the florist. June Foray is the receptionist for the Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service. Dan Castellaneta is Arnie Pie. 10/12/14

SEASON 2

• 014. Bart Gets an F – 10/11/1990
  • After Bart tries to bluff his way through a book report on Treasure Island, Mrs. Krabappel warns Bart that he’s on the verge of failing the fourth grade. He tries to study for his next exam, but he is continually distracted and only studies for seconds before falling asleep. The school calls in his parents and warns him that if he fails the next exam, he’ll be repeating the grade. Bart makes a deal with Martin to help him be more popular with the kids if he helps him pass his exam. Martin and Bart trade techniques, until Martin becomes such a mischief maker that he forgets about helping Bart. Bart prays that school will be cancelled the day of the exam, and that night it snows and school is cancelled. Lisa reminds him that instead of playing in the snow, he should be studying. Bart tries as hard as he can, but still comes up with a 59% – another failing grade. When Bart begins to cry and makes an obscure historical reference, Mrs. Krabappel awards him one additional point, giving him a D-minus and allowing him to pass. Dan Castelleneta is Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby. 10/12/14 
• 015. Simpson and Delilah – 10/18/1990
  • Homer gets excited about a hair-growth product called Dimoxinil that he sees on TV, but he finds out that it costs $1000. Based on advice from his co-workers, he falsifies an insurance claim to get it…and it works like a charm. Mr. Burns has to choose a man to offer the yearly token promotion to, and Simpson’s new hair catches his eye. Homer becomes an executive and hires an assistant named Karl (Harvey Fierstein), who becomes his guardian angel. When Bart borrows the hair tonic to grow a beard, he drops the bottle and it is all spilled. Homer goes back to work bald, but lacks the confidence to give a report, until he is spurred on by Karl. However, the report falls flat and Homer is demoted. Burns tells Homer that the only reason he didn’t fire him is because he too understands the folly of hair loss. Marge cheers him up by singing him You Are So Beautiful. 11/10/14
• 016. Treehouse of Horror (aka The Simpsons Halloween Special) – 10/25/1990
  • Marge warns the audience that these tales are not for the squeamish. While Homer sits outside and eavesdrops, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie tell three tales of horror. 1) Bad Dream House – The Simpsons move into a haunted house, where a disembodied voice (Harry Shearer) tries to scare them, possesses them, and prods them to leave. Homer finds out that there is an Indian burial ground in the basement. The Simpsons suggest that they all try to get along, but the ghost ends up obliterating the house rather than live with the Simpsons. 2) Hungry are the Damned – The Simpsons are abducted by aliens – including Kodos (Dan Castellaneta) and Kang (Harry Shearer) – who feed them well and offer to take them to their planet Rigel IV for a grand feast. Lisa finds a book called How to Cook Humans and warns the others, but when they blow off the dust it says How to Cook for Humans. More dust removed reveals How to Cook Forty Humans, and finally How to Cook for Forty Humans. The aliens return them to Earth, stating that they could have experienced joy beyond their wildest dreams…if they had only trusted them. 3) The Raven – James Earl Jones narrates the tale of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, with the raven looking like Bart terrorizing Homer. The kids all go to bed, but Homer is left outside the treehouse…too terrified to move. James Earl Jones also voices a moving man and Serak the Preparer. 11/10/14
• 017. Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish – 11/1/1990
  • When Bart catches a three-eyed fish in the presence of Springfield Shopper reporter Dave Shutton (Harry Shearer), the story causes federal inspectors to set their sights on the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. They find 342 violations, which would cost $56 million to rectify. Mr. Burns instead decides to run for Governor against incumbent Mary Bailey (Maggie Roswell). Burns addresses the fish – which the press has named Blinky – right away, and attributes its third eye to evolution, assuring the public that there is no danger at the plant. Through lies and manipulation, Burns’ staff brings his rating percentage to that of Bailey, whom Marge and Lisa support. Burns’ plan to push his popularity over the edge is to have dinner at the home of one of his employees and he chooses Homer. In front of the press, Marge serves him Blinky for dinner and when he spits it out on camera, he is accused of back-peddling and his chances go down the drain. He vows that Homer’s dreams will never come true, but Marge reminds him just how simple his dreams are and that no one man can affect them. 12/20/14
• 018. Dancin’ Homer – 11/8/1990
  • Homer relates the story of his rise and fall from fame to the customers at Moe’s Tavern. He and the family attend the family night bush league baseball game to see local losing team Springfield Isotopes. Homer abandons all hope of fun when Mr. Burns sits next to him. To his surprise, he and Burns end up drinking together, and Homer stands before the crowd and performs a dance that ends up rousing the crowd…and the Isotopes, who end up winning the game. The team then hires him to be their mascot and goes on a winning streak. Homer is then promoted to the Major League team, the Capital City Capitals. He and the family move there and Homer takes the place of the Capital City Goofball (Tom Poston). However in the big city, no one finds Homer’s antics amusing and the family ends up packing up and going home. The customers at Moe’s enjoy his story though. Tony Bennett croons the song Capital City. Daryl L. Coley takes over the role of Bleeding Gums Murphy, who sings a 26-minute version of the Star Spangled Banner. Ken Levine is the voice of Dan Horde. 12/20/14
• 019. Dead Putting Society – 11/15/1990
  • When the Simpson’s neighbor Ned Flanders invites Homer over for a beer, Homer ends up getting jealous because Flanders’ family is so much better than theirs. They end up speaking Harsh words, but Flanders feels terrible and seeks the advice of Reverend Lovejoy. Flanders writes Homer an apology note that Homer and his kids all laugh at. Homer takes Bart and Maggie to play miniature golf and they run into Ned and his son Todd (Nancy Cartwright). Homer forces Bart to take on Todd in an upcoming golf tournament. Homer and Ned wager that whichever boy’s team doesn’t win gets mow each other’s lawns wearing their wife’s Sunday dress. Lisa teaches Bart some Zen and geometry techniques that make him an adept player, but when they get into the middle of the game, the pressure causes Bart and Todd to agree to a draw.  Even though it is a tie, Homer pushes the bet since neither boy actually ‘won’. Both Homer and Ted end up cutting grass in their wives’ dresses. Homer is mortified, but Ned seems to enjoy it since it reminds him of his college days. 2/2/15
• 020. Bart vs. Thanksgiving – 11/22/1990
  • The Simpson are preparing for Thanksgiving with Marge in the kitchen, Homer in front of the TV, and Lisa working on the centerpiece dedicated to great female Americans. Homer picks up his father (Dan Castellaneta), and Marge’s sisters and complaining mother (Julie Kavner) come over as well. Bart accidentally throws Lisa’s centerpiece in the fire and is sent to his room. He runs away and tries to steal a pie from Mr. Burns, then ends up in the bad part of town where he gives blood and passes out. He is picked up by strangers and taken to the Rescue Mission where he is fed. Newsman Kent Brockman does a story on the shelter, and back at home, the Simpson family sees Bart on the news and freaks out, feeling guilty about how they treated Bart. Bart gives his blood money to the two bums that helped him and heads home. When he fears that his family will keep riding him, he goes up to the roof where Lisa finds him. Bart refuses to apologize until Lisa tells him to look within himself. He does, and ends up feeling sorry for what he did. The Simpsons enjoy a nice family meal after their other relatives have left. Greg Berg guest stars as the voice of Rory the bum and others. 2/3/15
• 021. Bart the Daredevil – 12/6/1990
  • While simultaneously watching the wrestling matches, Bart and Homer see a commercial for the Monster Truck Rally featuring the Truckasaurus. They nearly freak out when Lisa informs them that the event is the same night as her concert recital. Homer manages to get through the Shubert symphony and then snatches up Lisa and they head to the event. Not finding a place to park, they end up driving into the arena where there car is demolished by Truckasaurus. They are given a check by the Truck Rally and continue with the show. Bart is especially impressed by Captain Lance Murdock (Dan Castellaneta), and goes home and emulates his daredevil jumps on his skateboard, winding up on the hospital. He doesn’t learn his lesson though and is right back at it when he is released, announcing that he is going to jump over Springfield Gorge. His parents warn, threaten, and punish but Bart still attempts the stunt, only to be physically stopped by Homer, who then performs the jump himself… falling to the bottom of the gorge. He is lifted to the top and then falls in again, winding up in traction at the hospital… right next to Lance Murdock. Harry Shearer voices Dr. Julius Hibbert. 3/19/15
• 022. Itchy & Scratchy & Marge – 12/20/1990
  • After watching an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, Maggie pummels Homer with a mallet as he is building a spice rack. Marge determines that the violence is coming from the cartoons and starts a crusade to end the cartoon violence. The Chairman of Itchy & Scratchy International Roger Meyers (Alex Rocco) blows her off until she goes on the TV show Smartline hosted by Kent Brockman and encourages other concerned parents to write in to express their displeasure. Meyers ends up calling Marge to get her ideas on how to end the cartoons, and she suggests having the cat and mouse share rather than fight. Bart and Lisa are excited that they are allowed to watch cartoons again, but with Itchy and Scratchy not fighting, they become bored and go outside an play, as do all the children in Springfield. Everything is ideal until Michelangelo’s David statue comes to town and concerned mothers want Marge to help get it banned due to its full frontal nudity. She doesn’t agree and goes back on Smartline, but cannot justify censoring one form of expression and not the other. Violence returns to the cartoons and life returns to normal, with Maggie shooting a dart gun into a photo of Homer. 3/19/15
• 023. Bart Gets Hit by a Car – 1/10/1991
  • While skateboarding, Bart is hit by a car driven by Mr. Burns. He has a vision of ascending into heaven on an escalator, but is then sent to hell for spitting over the railing. He wakes up in the hospital with his family and lawyer Lionel Hutz (Phil Hartman), who suggest that they sue Burns. Bart’s injuries are minor but Hutz claims he can get a million dollars from Burns, who offers Homer only $100. Hutz brings Bart to Dr. Nick Riviera (Hank Azaria), who claims that there is extensive damage to Bart. When the trial starts looking favorable to the Simpsons, Burns’ invites them to his house and offers them $500,000, which Homer refuses. Marge begs him to accept the money and drop the charges, citing her disapproval of the situation and the “phony doctors,” which is overheard by Burns. Back at the trial, Burns’ lawyer calls Marge to the stand and she is forced to tell the truth, effectively losing their case. Homer is sullen at home and claims to no longer love Marge for her betrayal, but when she follows him to Moe’s to apologizes, he realizes he loves her as much as ever. Script Supervisor Doris Grau is the voice of Della. Dan Castellaneta voices Mr. Burns’ Blue-Haired Lawyer. 6/13/15
• 024. One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish – 1/24/1991
  • Homer is talked into going out for sushi at the Happy Sumo and actually finds that he loves it, ordering plate after plate. He orders the fugu blowfish, but the master chef (Sab Shimono) is too busy making out with Mrs. Krabappel and assigns his apprentice Toshiro (Joey Mayashima) to cut the dangerous fish that contains poisonous sections. The master chef returns and realizes that it’s possible that Homer has eaten the poison and he heads to the hospital. Dr. Julius Hibbert) tells him that if he has eaten the poison then he has only 24 hours to live. Homer spends his last day having a heart-to-heart talk with Bart, listening to Lisa play the saxophone, making a video tape for Maggie, making amends with his father, telling Mr. Burns to eat his shorts, getting thrown in jail, and being intimate with Marge. He goes to sleep listening to Larry King (himself) read the Bible. The next morning Marge finds Homer still alive, at which point he rejoices and says he will now live life to the fullest. He ends up sitting in front of the TV watching bowling and eating pork rinds. George Takei is the voice of Akira the waiter. Diana Tanaka is the voice of the hostess. Happy Sumo patron Richie Sakai (Dan Castellaneta) performs Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves at Karaoke, while Bart and Lisa perform Theme from Shaft. 6/13/15
• 025. The Way We Was – 1/31/1991
  • When their television goes on the fritz while watching Siskel (Dan Castellaneta) and Ebert (Harry Shearer), Homer is reduced to telling the story of how he and Marge first met in high school. Flashing back to 1974, we see Homer and his friend Barney Gumble get detention for smoking, while Marge gets detention for burning her bra as part of the women’s lib movement. Although they had never met before, Homer takes an instant liking to her in detention, joins the debate team to be near her, and tells her that he needs her to tutor him in French. They get along swimmingly and she agrees to go to the prom with him until Homer reveals that he really doesn’t take French. She gets angry and storms out, eventually accepting a date with Artie Ziff (Jon Lovitz). Homer and Artie both show up to pick her up for the prom, but Artie is the one who ends up taking her. Homer goes alone, sulking as he watches them get crowned as king and queen. Marge gets angry at Artie when he gets grabby with her and forces him to take her home, passing a moping Homer along the way. After she gets home, Marge goes and picks up Homer, who confesses that when he hugs her goodnight, he is never going to let her go. And never does… as Bart gags. Harry Shearer is the voice of actor Ranier Wolfcastle, aka action star McBain. 8/4/15
• 026. Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment – 2/7/1991
  • Homer dreams of being a thief in Mt. Sinai in 1220 B.C. when the Ten Commandments are first read by Moses (Phil Hartman). He wakes up and hears Ned Flanders rejecting an offer from a cable installer (Phil Hartman) to hook up free cable, and runs and tracks down the guy to have him install the cable in his house. The family enjoys it initially but that Sunday when they all go to church, Lisa realizes the severity of the Ten Commandment and that her soul is condemned to hell if she breaks them, and tries to get Homer to remove the cable. Homer refuses, and Lisa visits Reverend Lovejoy who advises her to protest without breaking the other commandment to honor her father. Homer arranges a gathering of friends to watch the upcoming boxing match of Drederick Tatum (Hank Azaria) vs. Watson (Harry Shearer). Several factors, including Bart collecting money from friends to watch porn, the stolen items around his house from work and Moe’s, his fear of going to prison, and Lisa’s silent protest convince him to disconnect the cable once the fight is over… which also ends up taking the power down on his street. Troy McClure (Phil Hartman) makes his first appearance. 8/5/15
• 027. Principal Charming – 2/14/1991
  • While attending a wedding, Selma realizes that the groom could have become her husband had Patty not intervened. Selma enlists the help of Marge, who insists that Homer find her a husband. He scouts his friends, co-workers, and everyone else he sees but can’t come up with anyone. Meanwhile Principal Skinner calls Homer to report that Bart has written his name on the field with Sodium Tetrasulfate. When Homer comes to meet with Skinner, Homer invites him over to his house for dinner so that he can meet Selma. Skinner ends up falling for Patty and asks her out to a rotating restaurant and to see the movie Space Mutants V: The Land Down Under. Slowly Patty starts to fall for him, while Selma gets even more depressed. Homer sets up Selma with Barney Gumble, who shows up drunk for their first date. Principal Skinner asks Patty to marry him, but she realizes her bond to her sister and turns him down. Patty rescues Selma from her date with Barney, while Skinner resumes Bart’s punishment for the damage he caused to the schoolyard. Dan Castellaneta voices Groundskeeper Willie. 11/10/15
• 028. Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? – 2/21/1991
  • When Grandpa Simpson winds up in the hospital with heart arrhythmia, he confesses that Homer has an older half brother who was given up to the Shelbyville Orphanage. Homer finds out from the orphanage that his name is Herbert Powell (Danny DeVito) and lives in Detroit. Unbeknownst to homer, Herbert is a leader in the automotive industry at Powell Motors. Herbert envies Homer’s family life, and offers Homer a high-paying job as a consultant to design cars for the every-man. Herbert spends time with Marge and the kids, while Homer designs The Homer automobile, much to the chagrin of the other company workers. The car proves to be a giant overpriced flop, and Herbert loses his home and business, telling Homer he never wants to see him again. Homer feels better when Bart tells him that he thought the car was cool. Maggie Roswell voices Mona Simpson, Homer’s mother. 11/10/15
• 029. Bart’s Dog Gets an F – 3/7/1991
  • Homer is having nothing but trouble with their dog Santa’s Little Helper (Frank Welker). First he destroys Homer’s newspaper, then eats his breakfast, and when he ties him to a tree outside, he breaks free and jumps into the pool of neighbor Sylvia Winfield (Tracy Ullman). Meanwhile Lisa stays home sick with the mumps and works on a square six-generation quilt. The dog ends up destroying that and chewing apart Homer’s brand new $125 shoes, the Assassins. Bart takes the dog to Emily Winthrop’s (Tracy Ullman) Canine College, but after the dog eats Homer’s Colossus Cookie, Homer and Marge both agree that if the dog cannot pass the obedience class, he will have to be given away. Homer puts an ad in the paper and arranges to give the dog to a farmer (Harry Shearer) who plans to use him like a mule. Bart tries to talk Winthrop into passing the dog even if he isn’t trained, but she refuses. Santa’s Little Helper is getting ready to be sent away, when it finally understands a few of the commands that Bart mentions. The dog passes the test and is able to remain with the Simpsons. 1/7/16
• 030. Old Money – 3/28/1991
  • After another uneventful family visit with his father, Homer starts to worry about how his kids will treat him when he gets older, and decides to do more fun things with his dad… like take him to Discount Lion Safari. Meanwhile Grandpa meets a woman named Beatrice Simmons (Audrey Meadows) and falls for her and they begin a romance. Later Grandpa is looking forward to spending Beatrice’s birthday with her, but Homer snatches him up and the family takes him on the safari, where they get trapped in their car while lions feast on a zebra on the hood. When Grandpa returns, he finds that Bea has passed away… but has left him $106,000. Grandpa is furious with Homer and vows not to give him any money but to find a suitable recipient. Residents of Springfield line up to plead their need with him, but Lisa suggests that he help the poor with it. Grandpa likes that idea, but wants more money to use for that purpose, so he heads to a casino. Homer catches wind of it and trails him, arriving with Grandpa actually ahead at the roulette wheel. Homer stops him from putting all his money on one number, and is able to save what he has accumulated. He decides to put the money toward a new dining hall at the retirement center which he names after Bea. Hank Azaria is Professor John Frink. 1/7/16
• 031. Brush with Greatness – 4/11/1991
  • Bart and Lisa talk Homer into taking them to Mt. Splashmore water park, where Homer is embarrassed when he gets stuck in the H2WHOA slide. He decides he needs to lose weight and while looking for his workout equipment in the attic, he stumbles across some paintings that Marge had done in high school of Beatles member Ringo Starr (himself). Lisa encourages her mother to continue with her artwork and take an art class, in which she creates a painting of Homer asleep on the couch in his underwear that wins the college art show. This comes to the attention of Mr. Burns, who commissions Marge to paint him with the insistence that she make him look beautiful. His grumpiness eventually turns her off, especially when he criticizes Homer’s weight, even after he’s lost a significant amount. Meanwhile Ringo Starr, who is drastically behind in answering fan mail, finally responds about how much he loved the painting that Marge has mailed him twenty years earlier. Marge ends up painting Mr. Burns naked and frail to showcase the fact that he is a vulnerable, mortal human being. After an initial shock, Mr. Burns and the masses embrace the painting. Jon Lovitz voices Mr. Lombardo and the donut delivery man. Maggie Roswell is Miss Hoover. 3/15/16
• 032. Lisa’s Substitute – 4/25/1991
  • With Miss Hoover out with Lyme disease, Lisa’s class gets substitute teach Mr. Bergstrom (Dustin Hoffman, using the pseudonym Sam Etic). Lisa finds him hip and likable and is drawn to his unconventional style of teaching. Meanwhile Bart runs for class president against Martin. Much to the chagrin of Miss Krabappel, Bart seems to have won over the class with his jokes and antics. Unfortunately, Bart and all of his friends forget to vote. leading to a 2-0 victory for Martin. Marge talks Homer into taking Lisa to the museum where they run into Mr. Bergstrom. Homer’s lack of refinement greatly embarrasses her. Marge tells Lisa that she can invite Mr. Bergstrom to dinner, but before she can ask him, she finds that Miss Hoover is back. She follows Mr. Bergstrom to the train station and tells her how much he meant to her. Back at home, in her misery, Lisa calls her father as a baboon. Marge sends Homer upstairs to talk to her and he is able to make her feel better by imitating a baboon. He also makes Bart feel better about losing the election by pointing out how much work it would be. On a roll, he returns a pacifier to a sleeping Maggie’s mouth. 3/16/16
• 033. The War of the Simpsons – 5/2/1991
  • Marge and Homer throw a party for their friends and neighbors, and Homer gets way too drunk and makes a fool of himself. Marge is so angry that she goes to church the next day without him. Marge signs Homer and herself up for a church marriage retreat, which Homer agrees to because it is located at Catfish Lake, and Homer assumes there will be great fishing. On the way he hears from the locals about a 500 pound legendary catfish named General Sherman. Although there are only three couples on the retreat, the Simpsons, the Flanders, and John and Gloria, Reverend Lovejoy tells Homer that there will be no time for fishing. Homer gets caught by Marge sneaking out to fish, which makes him feel guilty and go for a walk. He accidentally is pulled into a boat and ends up catching General Sherman after all. When Marge confronts him again, Homer throws the fish back into the lake, choosing Marge over taking credit for his catch. Meanwhile back home Bart and Lisa take advantage of Grampa Simpson who is babysitting for them, but insisting that they are allowed to smoke, drink coffee, and throw wild parties. Grampa ends up reduced to tears, causing Bart and Lisa to feel guilty and clean up the house, confessing once Homer and Marge are back, that he merely pretended to cry. 6/18/16
• 034. Three Men and a Comic Book – 5/9/1991
  • When Bart and Lisa visit a comic book convention Bart becomes desperate to own the $100 first issue of Radioactive Man. Homer refuses to give him the money, and Marge relates a story of her youth how she worked hard to get child-size oven by become a slave to her older sisters. Bart ends up getting an odd job doing difficult and horrible work for their neighbor Mrs. Glick (Cloris Leachman), but when he only gets 50 cents for the work, he gives on the notion of working for chumps. However he realizes that with his money along with Martin and Milhouse’s money, they can all go in on buying the comic book. However once they get it, they become so obsessed with having possession of it that they all spend the night in Bart’s treehouse with the comic book. Their mistrust of each other ultimately causes the book to be blown out of the treehouse, rained upon, picked apart by a dog, and struck by lightning. Although they all realize, they’ve ended up with nothing because they were unable to share, they admit that they haven’t learned any lesson. Daniel Stern is the narrator in a scene spoofing The Wonder Years. 6/19/16
• 035. Blood Feud – 8/11/1991
  • Mr. Burns doesn’t show up for the dedication of the power plant’s emergency warning system indicator, and it turns out that he is deathly ill and needs a blood transfusion of double-O-negative blood. Homer wants to help so that he can get a reward from Burns, and is ecstatic when he finds out that Bart has it. He donate’s blood and Burns makes a full recovery, but only sends a thank you card. Homer is livid and pens an insulting note to Burns, but his cool head prevails and he decides not to mail it. Bart however has other ideas and drops it in the mailbox. Homer makes every effort to retrieve it, but it ends up in Burns’ hands who throws Homer, fires him, and tells Smithers to hire someone to beat up Homer. Smithers consciences takes over and he refuses to hire the hit man, considering it was Homer who saved Burns’ life. He explains this to Burns, who then has a change of heart and gives Homer a copy of the book about his illness he wrote Will There Ever Be a Rainbow? and buys Homer a $32,000 gift: a giant 3000 year old Olmec Indian head named Xtapalapaquetl. Marge tries to figure out the moral of the story, but settles on it having been a memorable few days. 9/9/16

SEASON 3

• 036. Stark Raving Dad – 9/19/1991
  • Two days before her eighth birthday, Lisa makes Bart promise her that he will get her a great gift. Later Homer is forced to wear a pink shirt to work because Bart put his red hat into the wash with Homer’s white shirts. Mr. Burns thinks that the pink shirt signifies that Homer is an anarchist. Dr. Monroe gives Homer a personality test to take home, but Bart fills it out for him and consequently Homer is declared insane and hauled off to the New Bedlam Rest Home for the Emotionally Interesting. Homer is put in a room with a large white man named Leon Kompowky (Michael Jackson/singing voice Kipp Lennon) who thinks he is Michael Jackson, who befriends Homer. Leon calls Homer’s home and speaks to Bart who believes that he is the real Michael Jackson. Eventually Marge visits the asylum and retrieves Homer, who brings Leon home with him. Bart tells all his friends that Michael Jackson is coming and pretty soon their house is flooded with visitors, who all turn on the Simpsons when they see Leon instead of the real Jackson. Meanwhile Lisa turns eight and receives nothing from Bart, and she begins to sulk and tries to disown Bart. Leon helps Bart compose the song Happy Birthday Lisa, which Bart sings with him as his gift. Leon finally begins speaking is his real voice (Hank Azaria), explaining that speaking in Jackson’s voice soothed his anger. 9/12/16
• 037. Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington – 9/26/1991
  • After being faked out that he won a million dollars in a sweepstakes, Homer actually takes a liking to its sponsor Reading Digest magazine. He passes on an kids patriotic essay contest to Lisa, who takes a bike ride and rests in the woods to get inspiration to come up with The Roots of Democracy, which gets past the regional judges when they realize that Homer is too dumb to have helped her with it. Lisa advances to the finals and the family gets an all-expense-paid trip to Washington D.C. The family goes site-seeing and Bart orders massages and room service. Meanwhile Congressman Bob Arnold (Hank Azaria) accepts a bribe from lobbyist Jerry (Harry Shearer), which Lisa witnesses. She becomes so disillusioned that she re-writes her essay and names it Cesspool on the Potomac to cover the corruption in Washington. She reads the new essay pointing out the corruption of Arnold, which immediately triggers a chain reaction in Washington leading to the arrest of Arnold while he is taking a bribe from an oil man who wants to dig an oil well in Mount Rushmore. His indictment is which is approved by President George H.W. Bush (Harry Shearer). When Lisa finds out that the system has indeed worked, and quickly, her faith is restored. Her essay is beaten out by USA, A-OK by Truong Van Dinh (Lona Williams), who thanks Lisa during his speech. Dan Castellaneta is the voice of Thomas Jefferson. 12/2/16
• 038. When Flanders Failed – 10/3/1991
  • Homer reluctantly attends Ned Flanders’ cookout, where Ned announces that he’s retiring from the pharmaceutical business and plans on opening a ‘Leftorium’, which caters to left-handed people like him. When Homer and Ned break a wishbone, Homer wishes for Ned’s new venture to fail. Marge talks Bart into joining a karate class instead of watching TV all day, so while Homer takes him to class, he visits Flanders whose business is already floundering. Lisa teaches him the concept of schadenfreude. Bart quickly quits class and continues to skip every day to play video games and watch TV at the mall… but he keeps bullying Lisa claiming he knows the ‘touch of death’. However when bullies steal Lisa’s saxophone, she threatens to sic Bart and his karate on them, but they end up hanging him on a basketball hoop. Homer continues to gloat about Flanders’ failure, refusing even to tell others about the store when he overhears them lamenting about not having a left-handed devices…and then buying all of Flanders’ furniture and grill at rock bottom prices. When Homer finds out that collection agencies are after Flanders and that he is now closing his store, Homer starts to feel bad and tries to return Ned’s stuff. Ned feels as if he’s been cursed, and Homer feels it is his fault, so he tells Ned to re-open the shop while Homer gathers everyone he knows who needs left-handed devices. Homer joins Ned and his customers in singing Put on a Happy Face. Hank Azaria is Akira the karate instructor. 12/2/16
• 039. Bart the Murderer – 10/10/1991
  • Bart is having a particularly rough day when he misses a class field trip to the chocolate factory because he forgot his permission slip, and ends up spending the day licking envelopes for Principal Skinner. It gets even worse when he stumbles into the local mafia den and is held by Fat Tony (Joe Mantegna) and his men. However when Bart is able to make a Manhattan to everyone’s liking, they hire him on the spot. Bart is able to convince himself that their crimes are justified, and Homer feels that the mob is just a lot of ‘male bonding.’ When Bart is caught spray-painting the school and is detained by Skinner, he misses an important meeting with his crew and another mafia family. After Bart blames Skinner, he turns up missing and Bart starts to feel guilty. The mob sells out Bart and he is put on trail as leading the organization, but then Skinner re-appears after having been merely trapped in his basement under a stack of newspapers. Bart retires from the mob and his story is told in a TV movie where he voiced by Neil Patrick Harris (himself). 3/17/17
• 040. Homer Defined – 10/17/1991
  • The Springfield nuclear power plants nearly has a meltdown, but Homer, despite the fact that he was sleeping when it started and could not remember any of his training, is able to avert the crisis by randomly selecting a button. Mr. Burns makes Homer the employee of the month – which includes a phone call from Magic Johnson (himself) – and he becomes a local hero for saving the city from crisis. Homer feels guilty however because of his dumb luck, and is nervous about speaking at the neighboring Shelbyville power plant in order to raise their morale under their boss Aristotle Amandopoulis (Jon Lovitz). During his speech, a crisis erupts at their power plant as well, and Homer, using his random method of “Eenie Meeny Miney Moe” averts this crisis as well… but his luck, despite, his idiocy is exposed, and the dictionary now includes the world “Homer” using that very definition. Meanwhile Bart is inconsolable when Milton’s mother Luann Van Houton (Maggie Roswell) refuses to let Milhouse play with Bart. Marge has a talk with Luann and tells her that all Milton and Bart have going for them is that they have each other, which gets her to recant. Chick Hearns voices himself, the Lakers announcer. 3/18/17
• 041. Like Father, Like Clown – 10/24/1991
  • Krusty the Klown has been planning to come to dinner with Bart, the boy who never gave up on him, but cancels once again. When Bart writes Krusty a letter finally giving up on him, Krusty’s secretary Lois Pennycandy (Pamela Hayden) insists that this time he follow through. During dinner the Simpsons find out that Krusty is Jewish and named Herschel… and is estranged from his father, Rabbi Hyman Krustofski (Jackie Mason), because he had forbid his son from becoming a clown. When Bart and Lisa later see how crestfallen Krusty is on TV, they visit their Reverend Lovejoy, who helps them track down Hyman. Bart tries several ploys, including visiting him, calling in on a radio show that the rabbi is on, disguising himself as a rabbi, arranging a meeting between them at Izzy’s, and even quoting scripture to him. But it isn’t until Bart re-tells the story of the exodus of the Jews, using the words of Sammy Davis Jr., Hyman finally realizes that the entertainment industry isn’t so bad. Bart arranges for the Hyman to reunite with his son on Krusty’s TV show. Hyman gets in the spirit and hit his son with a pie. 9/2/17
• 042. Treehouse of Horror II – 10/31/1991
  • Marge warns Homer and the kids if they eat too much Halloween candy after they go trick or treating that they will have nightmares. No one listens to her, and Lisa starts off with her own nightmare: the family is in Marrakesh, Morocco, and Homer buys a monkey’s paw that gives him four wishes. Maggie uses one on a new pacifier, and Bart wishes them rich and famous… but it leads to everyone hating them. Lisa wishes for world peace, but once that is achieves, it opens up the possibility for all earthlings to be enslaved by aliens. Homer uses the final wish for a turkey sandwich. However when he gives the used paw to Ned, he makes the wish for the aliens to be run off the planet. Bart has a dream that recalls the episode of The Twilight Zone, “It’s a Good Life,” where he is the boy whom the whole city is afraid of because he ultimate powers. After he turns Homer into a jack-in-the-box, Marge forces him to see a psychiatrist, who recommends that Bart and Homer spend quality time together. Bart has a good time, and as a reward he returns Homer’s body to him. Bart wakes up screaming as Homer shows him signs of affections. Homer’s dream is that he gets fired from the plant and accepts a job as a gravedigger. Meanwhile Mr. Burns and built a robot and he and Smithers go the graveyard to find a brain, which ends up coming from a sleeping Homer. However the robot is just as lazy as Homer was, so Burns returns the brain to Homer’s body. The robot falls on Burns and to prevent him from dying, his head is sewn onto Homer’s body as well, so Homer continues life as a two-headed man. 9/2/17
• 043. Lisa’s Pony – 11/7/1991
  • Homer’s dream of being one of the ape’s in the opening segment of 2001: A Space Odyssey is interrupted by Lisa calling to have him bring her a new reed for her saxophone for the school talent show. Homer is sidetracked at Moe’s while the Music Store closes. Bart does impressions of the school faculty in the show, while Bart begs the store owner Jerry to re-open the store. He finally agrees, but Homer can’t remember what instrument she plays. By the time he arrives, Lisa has been removed from the stage because her sax sounds so terrible. Feeling guilty, he tries to make it up to Lisa by spending time with her, and ultimately decides to buy her a pony from an aristocrat named Millicent (Tress MacNeille), taking out a $5000 loan, and dealing directly with Mr. Burns and Smithers. Homer presents her with the pony, but has no plan on where to store it. Lisa is thrilled, and Homer is excited that she loves him, so he springs $530 per month to house it at the stables, and takes on a second job at the Kwik-E-Mart with Apu. Homer can’t stay awake at either job, nor on the road, until it becomes apparent he has become a walking zombie. After Marge explains this to Lisa, she decides to sell the pony to Millicent. Homer turns in his apron at the Kwik-E-Mart and is happy to still have Lisa’s love. 4/9/18
• 044. Saturdays of Thunder – 11/14/1991
  • Homer ignores Bart while he is watching an infomercial, and Bart heads to the garage to use the blowtorch, then he takes Lisa to video store and only concerns himself with renting a football video. Marge goes to the beauty parlor with her sisters and finds a fatherhood quiz in a magazine. She takes it home for Homer to take, and he realizes that he knows nothing about Bart, not even that he is building a soapbox racer in the garage. Homer feels terrible and enrolls in the National Fatherhood Institute, where the instructor Dave (Harry Shearer) advises that he help build the racer. They dub it “Lil Lightnin'” and enter the contest. Bart loses to Martin and Nelson during the neighborhood trials, but Milton injures himself during the crash. Bart volunteers to drive Martin’s car, the Honorroller, the finals instead of the racer that he and Homer built. Homer is crestfallen and refuses to go to the race, even when Marge says he is being a bad father. When Homer notices that he can now pass the test with flying colors, he heads off to the race. Inspired by seeing his father in the audience, Bart defeats Nelson. He accepts the award from former champion Ronnie Beck (Russi Taylor), thanks Homer, and taunts Nelson, all the while forgetting that it was Martin who actual built the racer. Larry McKay is the narrator of Football’s Greatest Injuries. 4/10/18
• 045. Flaming Moe’s – 11/21/1991
  • While Homer enjoys an episode of Eye on Springfield hosted by Kent Brockman, Lisa and the friends at her slumber party torture Bart and apply makeup to Maggie. Homer retreats to Moe’s where he finds that they’re out of beer. Homer suggests that he make a mixed drink called the Flaming Homer that he accidentally invented one night while watching slides with Marge’s sisters. Moe quickly takes credit for the drink and starts serving it as his own concoction Flaming Moe. Crowds pick up at the bar and Moe hires a new sexy waitress named Collette (Jo Ann Harris), and begins getting offers to sell the drink recipe to other bartenders as his fame and riches begin to grow. Moe’s becomes an exclusive establishment and Homer can’t even get in to Moe’s on the night that Aerosmith (themselves – Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Tom Hamilton, Joey Kramer) get up and play Walk This Way for the crowd. Homer sneaks in and airs his grievance to Moe and threatens to walk out, but it is so noisy in the bar that Moe can’t even hear him. Harv Barrister (Harry Shearer) representing Tipsy McStagger’s bar offers Moe one million dollars for the drink recipe, since there is one ingredient they cannot figure out: cough syrup. Marge and Homer go see lawyer Lionel Hutz, but he says that a drink cannot be copyrighted. Collette begins dating Moe, and suggests that Moe should sell the recipe and split the money with Homer, and Moe finally agrees. When Homer begins hearing and seeing Moe everywhere, he stalks the nightclub and gives away the secret recipe purposely, causing Barrister to retract his offer… returning Moe’s bar back to normal. 12/6/18
• 046. Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk – 12/5/1991
  • Mr. Burns is sad because he doesn’t feel he’s lived his dreams and decides to sell the nuclear plant. Meanwhile Homer finds out from his stockbroker (Phil Hartman) that he can get $25 for his shares of the power plant stock that he never knew he had. He sells it, just before it shoots up to $5200. While celebrating his extra $25 in cash, he runs across two German businessmen who tell Homer they’d like to buy the plant. Homer tells them that Burns wouldn’t dream of selling the plant for under a hundred million dollars…which is precisely what they offer Burns. He has no intention of selling until he hears the amount, and soon the German consortium has moved in. Homer is particularly concerned that his days are numbered since the Germans are famously efficient in their work ethic and he is anything but. One of the new bosses Horst (Phil Hartman) questions Homer on what he’s done as Safety Inspector and some of his initiatives, and he has zero answers. Homer is laid off, and the family begins looking for ways to save money. Meanwhile Burns is bored with his various hobbies, so he goes out for a blue-collar evening with Smithers to Moe’s, where he runs into Homer, who no longer has any fear of Burns. When everyone at the bar ridicules Burns, he realizes he’s not happy if no one fears him. The Germans are eager to sell the plant since it is so hard to maintain, so they return it to Burns for half of what he paid for it. Burns orders Smithers to re-hire Homer so that he can keep his ‘enemies’ close to him. 12/6/18
• 047. I Married Marge – 12/26/1991
  • With inconclusive results from a home pregnancy test, Marge heads off to Dr. Hibbert’s to get tested. While waiting at home, Homer flashes back and tells the story to his kids of how he and Marge got married. Homer was working at the fun center on the miniature golf course, and despite the hatred radiating from Marge’s family, he takes her to the movies and then they make love inside one of the windmills on the golf course. When she begins to feel sick, they go see Dr. Hibbert and find out she is pregnant. Homer does the right thing and proposes and then seeks better work to provide for his family. They get married at Shotgun Pete’s 24 Hour Wedding Chapel and decide to name the baby Bart, since that is a name that is hard to make fun of. He attempts to get a job at the Springfield nuclear power plant, but his performance and Mr. Smithers’ bias toward the other applicants ensure that he is passed over. After trying other jobs unsuccessfully, Homer steals away and vows not to return until he has a job to support his family. With Marge inconsolable, Patty and Selma find Homer working at the Gulp ‘n’ Blow taco restaurant and send him home to Marge, who reminds him that even without money, she is happy to be with him. Homer attempts to re-apply to the power plant, this time being more aggressive directly to Mr. Burns, who is impressed and hires him. With newfound courage, he snaps back at Marge’s sisters when they attempt to berate him. He delivers the news about the job to Marge, who then gives birth to baby Bart,who immediately lights Homer’s tie on fire. Back in the present, he tells Bart that he was the greatest gift he could have hoped for, but is plenty relieved when Marge returns home an announces she is not in fact pregnant. Julie Kavner is Marge’s mother Jacqueline Bouvier. 10/7/19
• 048. Radio Bart – 1/9/1992
  • Homer buys Bart a Superstar Celebrity Microphone for his tenth birthday, but when Bart opens it at his party at Wall E. Weasel’s, he couldn’t care less about the gift and is more interested in a label maker he uses to attach stickers declaring his ownership of all of his possessions. Homer eventually convinces him of the merits of the microphone, and Bart begins using it for a series of practical jokes, culminating with throwing it down a well and convincing everyone that there is a little boy named Timmy O’Toole trapped at the bottom. The whole town rallies around ‘Timmy’ and even many celebrities including Sting (himself) come together to record the song We’re Sending Our Love Down the Well. Eventually Lisa catches Bart in the act of pretending to be Timmy, and warns him that if he gets caught the town will crucify him. Bart realized that he has applied a “Property of Bart Simpson” label to the radio. In attempting to retrieve the radio, he himself ends up falling down the wall. By now the town is almost completely uninterested in his plight, and the press becomes more fascinated by a squirrel that resembles Lincoln. Still Homer and Marge stand by Bart and continue to visit him, and eventually Homer heads up an effort to dig him out. Local residents all join in, along with Sting, who actually is the one to break through the well. As a result of the whole affair, a sign is put up cautioning that there is a well nearby. 10/16/19
• 049. Lisa the Greek – 1/23/1992
  • Lisa is upset when her father is more interested in watching football then checking out her shoebox dollhouse that she made. Homer is more concerned with finding reliable advice on who is going to win the games so that he can place a bet with Moe. Marge suggests that Lisa try to find something that Homer is interested in, so she decides to watch football with him while Marge takes Bart clothes shopping. Soon she gets interested in the game, and starts successfully picking the winners, which means Homer is continuously winning money. When he begins buying gifts for Lisa and the others in the family, he is forced to admit to Marge where he is getting the money, and she quickly states her irritation with him. She is even more angry when Homer casts his Father-Daughter Day with Lisa aside when the season ends. Homer tries to lure her back to watching football when the Super Bowl rolls around and asks her to predict the winner of the game. Lisa tells him that the Washington Redskins will win, but admits she might be sabotaging his chance to win because she is so angry at him, and that if  suspects that her subconscious mind is doing that then he should place his bet on Buffalo. Homer tries to bet with Moe on Buffalo, but since Moe is not taking bets from him any longer, he just decides to enjoy the game. This time he roots for the Redskins as this will mean that Lisa loves him. The Redskins do in fact win, much to the relief of both Homer and Lisa. The next Father-Daughter day, they go hiking on Mount Springfield. Phil Hartman guests as Smooth Jimmy Apollo. Harry Shearer is Brett Gunsilman. 3/27/20
• 050. Homer Alone – 2/6/1992
  • After a particularly stressful morning with Homer and the kids, and dragging Homer’s bowling ball all over town to get a bottle cap removed from its finger hole, Marge has a mental breakdown and stops her car in the middle of the Springfield Memorial Bridge and refuses to come out. Homer shows up to help diffuse the situation and finally talks her out of the car, and she is arrested. Her jail stay is not long, as Mayor Quimby fears losing the female vote and orders Chief Wiggum to release her. When Marge gets home, she is still stressed out, so tells Homer that she is going to spend some time alone at Rancho Relaxo. After he is reassured that she is not divorcing him, Homer gives his blessing. Marge’s sisters Selma and Patty agree to take the kids, but Maggie holds onto the door jamb so tightly that Homer decides to just let her stay with him. As Marge pampers herself with activities, baths, hot fudge sundaes, cheesecake, and tequila, Bart and Lisa are disgusted by everything their aunts say and do including forcing them to sleep in their beds. Back home, Homer eats, takes care of Maggie, and has Barney Gumble over for the night. Maggie starts missing her mother so much that she sneaks out in the middle of the night and goes on a search for her. Homer realizes she is gone the next morning and the race to find her becomes even more desperate when Marge calls him and says she is coming home. The police pick up Maggie napping on an ice cream store rooftop, and bring her home to Homer. When Marge arrives, everyone in the family is ecstatic to see her. They all sleep in the same bed that night, and Marge asks them all to try and contribute to the household more to which they all wholeheartedly agree. 3/27/20
• 051. Bart the Lover – 2/13/1992
  • After watching a classroom film about life without zinc, Miss Krabappel goes home alone and laments her loneliness and decides to take out a personal ad. The next day at school the kids are entertained by a troupe of yo-yo performers Ted Carpenter (Harry Shearer) and the Twirl King Yo-Yo Company. From that point on, the kids can do nothing but play with and talk about yo-yos. Miss Krabappel gets so irritated that she forbids the class from mentioning them. Bart gets caught with his yo-yo when he breaks the class fish take with it. She puts it in her desk, and when Bart retrieves it, he sees the personal ad that Miss Krabappel took out. He answers the ad via letter (read in the romantic voice of Harry Shearer) pretending to be a man named Woodrow. She not only answers the letter, but sends along a sexy photo as well. Bart continues to keep up the charade by consulting an old drunken romantic postcard that Homer wrote to Marge, and the dialogue from romance movies. He sends along a picture of hockey player Gordie Howe to satisfy her request to see Woodrow. However, when he arranges a meeting with her for dinner at The Gilded Truffle then goes to see the movie Ernest Needs a Kidney, he begins to feel bad after he finishes the movie and finds Miss Krabappel still alone at the restaurant crying. He tries to console her and hook her up with other men at the school, but this doesn’t make her feel better. Finally, he turns to his family for guidance, and they help him compose a breakup letter that keeps her feeling loved. The next day at school, she is in such a good mood that she offers to have her detention with Bart outside in the sun. Meanwhile Homer attempts to build a doghouse, and his constant swearing seeps into the mouth of neighbor boy Rod Flanders (Pamela Hayden). Ned turns to Reverend Lovejoy, and he advises Ned to find the source of Rod’s profanity and steer him toward the Bible. When he realizes it is Homer, they strike a deal where Homer will stop swearing if Ned will shave his mustache. This leads to a television commercial for Ned, and a swear jar full of money for Homer. Marge uses the money to buy a new doghouse so Homer can stop laboring over it, and even having enough left over to get Homer a six-pack of Duff’s Beer. Maggie Roswell is the voice of Maude Flanders. 7/8/20
• 052. Homer at the Bat – 2/20/1992
  • After nearly choking to death on a doughnut, Homer signs up for the Springfield Power Plant softball team, telling his co-workers that he has a ringer in the form of a bat that he carved out of a tree limb. This bat does in fact seem to do the trick as he gets multiple hits and home runs, leading his team to victory that takes them to the championship against the Shelbyville Power Plant. Ari Amandopoulis (now voiced by Dan Castellaneta), the president of Shelbyville makes a bet with Mr. Burns for a million dollars that his team will win. Burns immediately begins looking for a way to cheat, and sends Smithers across the country to recruit Major League baseball players Wade Boggs, Jose Canseco, Roger Clemens, Ken Griffey Jr., Don Mattingly, Steve Sax, Mike Scioscia, Ozzie Smith, and Darryl Strawberry (themselves) to join the team. This means that there will be no room for Homer or any of the other players on the team to play. Mr. Burns strictly rules their everyday activities up until the game, forcing them to drink Brain & Nerve Tonic, and puts the actual employees of the power plant under hypnotherapy. Mike Scioscia insists on actually working on the power plant, but this winds up making him ill. An arrest, bar fight, fire rescue, shaved sideburns, overdose on tonic, and accidental hypnotism all contribute to eliminating eight of the nine players on the team. All of the original players are brought back in, except for Homer since Darryl Strawberry is still present and plays Homer’s position at right field. At the last minute, Burns brings in the right-handed hitter Homer to bat against the left-handed pitcher, substituting him for Strawberry who has hit a home run at every bat. Ultimately Homer is hit in the head with the ball which advances a runner into home, and wins the game Springfield. Terry Cashman sings the closing song. 7/8/20
• 053. Separate Vocations – 2/27/1992
  • The kids in school are given a Career Aptitude Normalizing Tests, and after the teacher reads off the questions and the kids fill them out, the tests are sent to Proctorville, Iowa, home of the National Testing Center where they are run through machinery to analyzed. Bart and Lisa’s come back with surprising results: Lisa’s predicted career path is to be a housewife, and Bart’s is to be a police officer. Lisa tries to buck her results and claims she wants to be a professional saxophonist, she goes to see a professional instructor and is told that she’ll never make it because her fingers are too stubby. Bart goes on a ride-along with a pair of policemen, and he assists with stopping a criminal. Bart starts to do better in school, and is awarded a Hall Monitor position by Principal Skinner, and he starts to lay down the law. Lisa on the other hand is depressed and starts to act out in school, culminating with her stealing all of the Teacher’s editions of the textbooks, so they’ll be lost in class. Bart suggests that they perform a locker search, and he discovers that they are in Lisa’s locker. Bart takes the rap and says that he stole the books. Lisa plays the sax for Bart outside the school window as he writes sentences on the board. Steve Allen provides Bart’s electronically altered voice. 10/24/20 
• 054. Dog of Death – 3/12/1992
  • When Homer gets wind that the lottery jackpot is up to 130 million dollars, he quickly scrapes together as much as he can, but is disappointed when he doesn’t win…and newscaster Kent Brockman does. To the night even worse, Grandpa announces that the Simpsons’ family dog Santa’s Little Helper has died. Actually he isn’t dead, but very sick, so they take him to a veterinarian (Hank Azaria) who tells them that it will cost them $750 for the dog’s needed operation for his twisted stomach. Homer naturally balks at putting up that much money and pitches the idea of sending him to doggy heaven, but everyone in the family agrees to give up some of their comforts in order to pitch in. Homer turns to Mr. Burns for some money, but he has security escort Homer out. Homer gives up beer, Marge gives up buying lottery tickets, Bart gives up paying for haircuts, and Lisa gives up buying new encyclopedias. The dog nearly dies during the surgery, but ultimately recovers and goes home with the family. However a couple of nights later, the family starts to grow resentful of everything they’ve given up. Santa’s Little Helper wants to play ball with everyone, but they all send him away. This causes the dog to run away from home. The family realizes they haven’t treated him well, and set out looking for him. Santa’s Little Helper goes on an adventure up the Springfield River, attacks and bear, saves a child from a burning house, chases a cat, and then gets a ride back home from the Springfield Dog Pound. Meanwhile Mr. Burns releases his hounds on Ned Flanders, and then seeks to replace a sickly dog, so he sends Smithers to pick up a new attack dog, which turns out to be Santa’s Little Helper. They train him in Clockwork Orange fashion to become a killer, as the family laments not be able to track him down. When Bart stops by Mr. Burns’ house looking for the dog, it initially attacks Bart, but then remembers all of the times with him and staves off the other attack dogs, having established dominance. 10/24/20 
• 055. Colonel Homer – 3/26/1992
  • The Simpson family go to the movies, and when Marge yells at Homer for giving away the plot of the movie The Stockholm Affair, Homer gets upset and goes driving after he drops the family at home. He winds up at the redneck bar Beer ‘n’ Brawl, where he enjoys the musical stylings of Yodelin’ Zeke (Dan Castellaneta), and then Lurleen Lumpkin (Beverly D’Angelo) singing No One Understands You, But I Do. Homer is smitten and stays all night talking to her while Lurleen waits tables. He heads home and makes up with Marge, but can’t get Lurleen’s song out of his head. He returns to Spittle County and convinces Lurleen to record her song, and soon it gets picked up by the radio station and the song starts taking off as it calms people out of their anger. As Marge starts to get jealous of Homer hanging out with a cocktail waitress, Lurleen invites him over and asks him to be her manager. Homer gets outfitted for a country suit, as Marge’s rage intensifies. Marge attends Lurleen’s next recording session for his song I’ve Finally Bagged Me a Homer, during which Homer hands over their life savings to the engineers. Homer gets Lurleen a TV gig on Ya Hoo and tells her that she should write a new song, so she comes up with one called Will You Bunk With Me Tonight? – as a nudge to Homer, who finally catches on that she’s propositioning him. Marge is at her wit’s end as Homer heads out for the TV gig, but Homer obliviously leaves her and the kids at home. As Lureen performs, Homer is approached by a record producer (Hank Azaria) who wants to buy Lurleen’s contract. After the show, Lurleen makes another pass at Homer in her dressing room, where all of Homer’s failed romances pass before his eyes, culminating with his only successful one with Marge. Homer sells Lurleen’s contract to the producer for just $50, and heads back home to Marge. They listen to the rest of the show and her performance of Stand by Your Manager, whose lyrics reveal how she felt about Homer, and how he rebuffed her for Marge. 2/11/21
• 056. Black Widower – 4/9/1992
  • Marge announces that her sister Selma is engaged to an ex-con, but Bart is aghast to find out that it is Sideshow Bob, whom he had put into prison for framing Krusty the Clown. While he was in prison, he missed out on receiving his Emmy Award, and had been plotting the demise of Bart ever since. However when he received a letter from Selma through the prisoners pen pal program, he reformed his ways. He has since forgiven Bart, and while having dinner at the Simpson house, he proposes marriage to Selma. Bart is the only one skeptical as everyone seems to have forgiven and forgotten. Sideshow Bob even surprise Krusty the Clown on TV during a telethon and the two make amends. When Selma tells Bob that she has quite a bit of money, Bart starts to think he’s just after her money. The relationship is nearly broken off when Bob lets Selma known how much he hates her favorite show MacGyver. Homer helps reconcile them, and two are married. At the reception, Selma, who has lost her sense of taste and smell, announces that she is giving up smoking… except after meals and MacGyver. As they head out on their honeymoon to Shelbyville, it becomes clear that Bob does in fact intend to murder her. Selma sends the Simpson family a VHS of footage she took on her honeymoon, which shows some erratic behavior from Bob assaulting a bellboy for not giving him a room with a fireplace. At the end of the video, Selma sits down to watch MacGyver, and Sideshow Bob put her cigarettes next to her and leaves the room. Bart begs his parents to listen, and says that she only has one hour to live. At the motel, as Bob waits in the bar, his room explodes. However when he returns to the room, he finds Bart and the police. Bart has figured out that Bob used the gas in the fireplace to fill the room, knowing she couldn’t smell it and would light a cigarette after MacGyver. Sideshow is once again hauled off to jail, and his parents give him credit for remaining skeptical. 2/12/21 
• 057. The Otto Show – 4/23/1992
  • Homer drops off Bart and Millhouse at the Spinal Tap (themselves, Harry Shearer as Derek Smalls, Christopher Guest as Nigel Tufnel, Michael McKean as David St. Hubbins) concert, where after performing Break Like the Wind, the suffer a series of technical gaffes that prompt them to end the show after twenty minutes. The crowd riots, and while Homer waits out in the car, the S.W.A.T. team has to intervene. Homer and Bart arrive home safely, despite forgetting about Millhouse. Nevertheless, Bart declares he’d like to be a rock star and begs them to get him a guitar. Although he is terrible at it, he brings it to school, where it catches the attention of Otto (Harry Shearer) the bus driver. It turns out Otto is a terrific player and puts on a show for the students, until Milton reminds him that they are late for school. Otto recklessly hightails it across town, causing havoc along the way, sending the Spinal Tap tour bus over a cliff, and bringing the bus in on its side. The police and principal then find out that Otto doesn’t have a license, so he is promptly fired. He is also kicked out of his apartment, and is forced to move into a garbage dumpster. When Bart finds him, he invites him to move into their garage. Although Homer is against, Marge’s sense of charity kicks in and allows it. However he soon becomes a hindrance to everyone, so she suggests that he go look for a job. Having once failed the drivers test – by Marge’s sister no less – he refuses to try again. Finally Homer has had enough and kicks him out, so Otto tries once again. This time the sisters are glad to stick it to Homer, as well as listen to Otto’s stories about Homer, so they give him his license despite the fact that he did not better on either examination. He returns to work as the school’s bus driver. 6/8/21
• 058. Bart’s Friend Falls in Love – 5/7/1992
  • Bart goes through Indiana Jones-like moves to steal his father’s jar of change, then catches the bus where Millhouse shows him his new Magic Eight Ball… which predicts that he and Millhouse’s friendship will end. At school, a new transfer student named Samantha Stanky (Kimmy Robertson) is introduced to the class. The class watches a sex education video called Buzzy Bunny’s Guide to You-Know-What, and then later that day, Millhouse asks Samantha if he can walk her home, leaving Bart without a seat partner on the bus. Then later Millhouse brings Samantha to Bart’s treehouse. When they start kissing in front of Bart, his jealousy starts to well over. Meanwhile, Lisa sees a special on TV about obesity, and becomes worried about her father’s extra pounds. She talks her mother into ordering an overnight subliminal tape about weight loss, but the manufacturer sends the tape about building your vocabulary. Homer eats more than ever and continues to gain weight, but his vocabulary becomes better – and more obtuse – than ever. When Bart gets on the bus and doesn’t have a seat since Millhouse is sitting with Samantha, he sinks to asking Martin to being his new friend. The friendship is quickly cut short when Martin plays Bart his lute. He finally reaches his limit when Millhouse makes it clear that he’s spending too much time with them. Bart agrees to let the couple use his treehouse, but reports it to Samantha’s father (Harry Shearer), so he catches them and demands that she never see Millhouse again. Bart feels guilty about it, and turns to Lisa for advice who tells him that he should confess. He goes to see a depressed Millhouse and tells him what he did, leading to a brutal fight during which Bart smashes the Magic Eight Ball over Millhouse’s head. They make up, and Bart takes Millhouse to see Samantha at her girls school. She kisses him, even though it will cost her 50 rosaries. Homer gains thirteen pounds, and after he gives up the tape, he can’t think of the world for ‘spoon’. 6/9/21
• 059. Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes – 8/27/1992
  • After the annual physical exam at the plant, Mr. Burns finds out that Homer is now sterile due to his exposure. Burns decides to offer Homer $2000 for him to sign a waver exonerating the plant from any legal action. Homer is suspicious, so Burns tells him he is being awarded the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, where they bring in boxer Joe Frazier (himself) to present the award. Meanwhile, Homer’s long-lost half-brother Herb is living below the poverty line in the park, since he had given Homer the opportunity to design a car for his company and it was a major flop. Now that Bart has broken Homer’s living room couch, Homer wants to spin the money on a new vibrating chair, but Marge would like a new washer and dryer combo, Bart wants a machine gun, and Lisa wants new encyclopedias. Herb plans to scheme the money out of Homer in order to help him invent his new idea of creating a baby interpreter machine. Marge talks Homer into helping Herb, so he goes to work designing the machine using Maggie to create it. Homer thinks it is a failure for sure, but they take it to the Baby Expo, where it is a hit and helps restore Herb’s fortune. Herb repays Homer, buys Marge the new washer and dryer combo, buys Bart a membership to the N.R.A, gets Lisa the set of encyclopedias, and after telling Homer that he forgives him, has his dream chair delivered. 10/6/21

SEASON 4

• 060. Kamp Krusty – 9/24/1992
  • It’s the last day of school and Bart has a dream that Mrs. Krabappel changes all of Bart’s grades before Mr. Skinner announces that the kids are now free to trash the school. Bart wakes up, and hopes that he does get a C average so Homer will let him and Lisa go to Kamp Krusty for the Summer. Lisa is disappointed that she gets all A’s and one B+. Bart winds up with all D minuses. On the way home, Bart changes all of his grades to A+’s. No one falls for it, but Homer doesn’t stick the punishment because he doesn’t want him around all Summer anyway. The kids prepare and pack for their trip, before heading off to camp, at which points all of the parents cheery. They arrive to the ‘Krustiest Place on Earth’, and watch a video of Krusty’s introduction on video before turning the Summer’s leader over to Mr. Black (Harry Shearer), who then in turn introduces the three counselors Dolph (Tress MacNeille), Jimbo Jones (Pamela Hayden), and Kearney. Meanwhile back home, Homer is very romantic with Marge, and even starts working out and dropping weight. The kids quickly find that nothing at the camp is safe or well-maintained, the food is disgusting, and the nurse is unfit. Across the woods Millhouse suffers through fat camp. Krusty himself, who is supposed to make an appearance at the camp, is busy enjoying Wimbledon with the Queen (Maggie Roswell) in England. At camp, Lisa reports to her parents of the miseries of the camp, and the fact that the camp uses Arts & Crafts time forcing the kids to make Krusty billfolds for them to sell, but Bart and Marge think she is exaggerating. When Krusty sends a drunken wino is his stead, and this time Bart has had enough, so he leads a mutiny in the camp and the kids begin destroying the camp, and erects a Camp Bart flag. When the word gets back to Krusty in England, he heads back to Kamp Krusty. He announces he is going to make it up to the kids, so he personally drives them all to Tijuana for a Summer of fun. Homer instantly re-gains all of his weight when he hears that they are coming home. 10/7/21
• 061. A Streetcar Named Marge – 10/1/1992
  • Bart and the kids are watching the Miss American Girl pageant on TV, when Marge tells them all that she won’t be home that night due to her auditioning for a play called Oh! Streetcar! A Musical based on A Streetcar Named Desire. Homer acts as if he’s listening until she starts to leave, then he reveals he has no idea what she is talking about. The director of the play is Llewelyn Sinclair (Jon Lovitz) and Ned Flanders is auditioning for the role of Stanley. Marge tries out for Blanche Dubois, but Sinclair rejects all of the women trying out. Marge calls home to tell Homer that she didn’t get the role, but when Sinclair overhears the conversation, he gives Marge the role. He also demands that Marge find a babysitter for Maggie, when Maggie roams in during a passionate scene with Marge and Ned. The day care center, the Ayn Rand School for Tots, is run by Sinclair’s sister (Jon Lovitz), and after Marge leaves, Ms. Sinclair takes the pacifier from Maggie and stores it in a locker with the rest of the kids’ pacifiers. Back home, Marge asks Homer to run lines with her, but Homer is too busy with his electronic bowling game. Maggie tries to find substitutes for her fooler, but when she can’t find one, she recruits other babies and they try to build a stack of toys high enough to retrieve the pacifiers from the locker. Sinclair directs Marge on how to channel her anger into her role and tells her that every minute she spends with Stanley is crushing his spirit. She then realizes that Stanley is much like Homer, and the anger comes spewing forth. The more Homer criticizes her joining the play, the more she is able to keep the anger flowing. Maggie finally is able to steal the keys to the locker and get it open. When Homer arrives to pick her up for the play, all of the kids are sucking on pacifiers in unison. Maggie’s performance in the play is so effective that the character of Blanche makes Homer sad. Marge mistakes this for him not paying attention, but he tells her how much the play and her role touched him. Before leaving for home, he tells her that the character of Stanley is kind of like him. Lona Williams is Debra Jo Smallwood. 4/3/22
• 062. Homer the Heretic – 10/8/1992
  • Homer has a dream that he is back in the womb, but Marge plucks him from it when she wakes him up to attend church. Homer looks for an excuse not to go, and when he rips his pants, he seemingly has a good one. He spends a cozy moment in bed, while Reverend Lovejoy and the congregation suffers through a particularly cold morning without the furnace working. Homer makes his space-age waffles, cranks up the heat, and turns up the music. The door at the church freezes shot, and once they get out Marge and the kids are stuck in the car for a while until they can finally get their car going. Homer watches the Three Stooges on TV, then watches football and finds a penny on the floor. He considers it the best day of his life and deduces that skipping church leads to having a great day. He vows that he will never go to church again. Marge tries to talk him into coming back to church, and Homer has a dream that he receives a visit from God (Harry Shearer). To his surprise, God tells him that his decision is the right one. Marge invites Reverend Lovejoy over for dinner, but Homer decides to follow his dream. The Flanders family starts following him around singing The Arky Arky Song, even chasing him in their car, but Homer escapes by jumping his car onto a garbage barge headed toward Garbage Island. Marge starts to reach her boiling point when Bart questions why they have to go to church while Homer stays home and watches cartoons. Marge warns Homer that when it comes to choosing Homer or her faith, it will be not contest. Homer still won’t budge, and stays at home reading Playdude magazine. After insulting the religions of Krusty the Clown and Apu, Homer buys some cigars to smoke at home, which end up causing a fire in the house. As it burns around him, Ned comes over and manages to rescue him, even though forces keep pushing Homer back in the house. Krusty and Apu are part of the volunteer fire department and save Homer. This serves as a wake-up call to him finally, and he returns to church the next Sunday… only to fall asleep immediately. He dreams that he takes a walk with God, and since Homer only has six months to live, God tells him the meaning of life. 4/3/22
• 063. Lisa the Beauty Queen – 10/15/1992
  • While attending the Springfield Elementary School Carnival, Homer wins a contest to ride in the Duff Beer blimp, but Lisa has a sad experience when a cartoonist draws a caricature of her that everyone laughs at, leading her to believe that she is horribly ugly. When Homer finds her crying that night, he doesn’t know how to help her, so he heads down to Moe’s. While there, he sees a commercial on TV for the Little Miss Springfield Pageant sponsored by Laramie cigarettes. He decides to enter her into the contest, but it costs $250, so he has to sell his ride in the blimp. so he sells his ticket to Barney Gumble. Lisa had no interest in entering the contest, until her mother tells her how her father got the money to enter her. At the first rehearsal for the pageant, Lisa meets Amber Dempsey (Lona Williams), the obvious shoe-in to be winner. Lisa goes home thinking there is no way she can win, so Marge takes her to the beauty parlor to try on various hair styles and such. When they get home, Homer and Bart both make fuss over her, giving her confidence at last. Bart helps teach her how to walk properly in the contest, and Bart tells her that she’s not ugly, which boosts her even more. On the night of the contest, the girls are all put through the motions, and in the end Lisa is crowned as runner-up, while Amber wins the contest. Later, Barney causes the Duff Beer blimp to hit radio tower and explode, while Amber helps dedicate a new store, her scepter causes her to get struck by lightning. As runner-up, Lisa is then named as the new Little Miss Springfield. She is given several events to attend, including the deportation of refugees, a stint at Fort Springfield with comedian Bob Hope (himself), and a gig on a parade float for Laramie Junior Cigarettes. However, when she sees many of the kids smoking along the path, including Maggie, she demands that the float be stopped and she speaks out against smoking. In fact, she begins a new career of standing up for social issues, and even speaking out against Mayor Quimby. Eventually the mayor and his men are able to get Lisa disqualified from her role as Little Miss Springfield due to a technicality breach on her application: where they were instructed to not write in an area of the application, Homer wrote ‘ok’. Homer feels terrible, but Lisa reminds him that the reason she had entered the contest was to give her confidence, which she now has. 8/1/22
• 064. Treehouse of Horror III – 10/29/1992
  • Homer walks into an Alfred Hitchcock-style silhouette and announces to the audience that tonight’s episode might be too scary for children, and the calls the audience members chickens…just before the audience collectively turns off the TV. The Simpson family are hosting a Halloween party for the kids, and when Marge’s attempt at passing around edible fake body parts fails – because Homer eats them – Lisa jumps in with her first scary story, Clown Without Pity: Homer forgets that it is Bart’s birthday, so he rushes off to a the House of Evil and purchases a toy Krusty the Clown doll, despite warnings from the shop owner that it is cursed. Grandpa also delivers a similar warning, but only because he wants attention and has been saying the same thing about every gift. The doll starts saying that it is going to kill Homer and soon starts making good on his promise by trying to stab him with a knife and attack him in the bathtub. Homer captures the doll and traps it in a suitcase, then takes it out and drops it into a pit, but somehow when he arrives back home, the doll has attached itself to the bottom of Homer’s car. Marge witnesses the doll trying to drown Homer in the dog bowl, and she calls the Krusty service hotline. They send out a repairmen, who discovers that the doll has been switched to Evil mode, so he changes it to Good mode. The doll now becomes Homer’s friend – and slave – before returning to Lisa’s dollhouse and his girlfriend doll. Back at the party, Grandpa is requested to tell a story, so he relates the tale of King Homer: In a black and white tale, Mr. Burns and Smithers are on an expedition to Ape Island, where Marge reports to them after answering a want ad for her services. It isn’t long before she realizes that she was brought along to be a sacrifice to the natives on the island for the legendary giant ape King Homer. Marge sees the gentle side of Homer when he responds to her smell. Mr. Burns uses a gas bomb to knock King Homer unconscious. He is brought back to New York to be displayed at a theater on Broadway. As photographers takes his photo, the bright lights cause him to get angry and break free, grabbing Marge and climbing the Empire State Building. However, he is too fat and exhausted to go any higher than the second floor, and he passes out. Later he is shown marrying Marge at a wedding. The final story at the party comes from Bart, who tells the tale Dial “Z” for Zombies: After presenting a book report based on a pre-school book, Mrs. Krabappel assigns Bart to do another book, so he heads to the library and winds up in the occult section. One of the books he finds, Book of Magick and Spelles Vol. II, gives directions to raise the dead, so he goes to the cemetery with Lisa to try and raise their cat Snowball I. He does the spell incorrectly, and winds up raising the dead humans in this and other cemeteries. The zombie roam all over Springfield looking for brains, and converting many of the townsfolk to zombies as well. The get to Ned Flanders and turn him. Principal Skinner gets turned and goes after Martin’s big beautiful brain. Krusty is converted by Sideshow Bob on television. The zombies however are not interested in Homer after examining his brain. Homer goes zombie hunting and kills Ned, as well as numerous historical figures like Washington, Einstein, and Shakespeare. Kodos and Kang watch the planet from afar waiting for the zombies to destroy everything so they can swoop in. Bart is able to make it back to the cemetery where he reads another spell to send the zombies all scrambling back to their original grave… or to just collapse in the street. Back home, Marge is thankful they didn’t turn into mindless zombies, although everyone appears to be just that as they watch mindless TV. 8/1/22
• 065. Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie – 11/3/1992
  • Homer and Marge leave the kids with Grandpa Simpson while they head to Bart and Lisa’s parent/teacher conference. Homer begs Marge to let him sit in on Lisa’s review, so that Marge can sit with Mrs. Krabappel and listen to her grievances of the many atrocities Bart has committed in class, whereas Lisa gets glowing reviews and Homer receives the praise from Miss Hoover. Mrs. Krabappel insists that the only they’ll ever get Bart to behave is to punish him when he does something wrong and follow through with it. Back at home, Bart has stolen Grandpa’s false teeth from his mouth and is wearing them himself and then hanging from the fan with them and biting records in half. Convinced that Bart can become a Supreme Court Justice if he is properly punished, and that he will become a second-rate stripper if they fail him, they decide to send Bart to bed without supper. They stick to the punishment into the late evening, but then Homer thinks he has learned his lesson and sneaks him some pizza. This totally interrupts Bart’s second thoughts about being bad and makes him realize his father is a sucker… just like he thought. While Bart is melting his James Bond plastic figure in the microwave, Lisa sees a commercial for The Itchy & Scratchy Movie on TV. When Bart forgets to take out the garbage, causing goats to come in the house, Bart distracts Homer from his punishment. Bart is then caught hitting mustard packets with a hammer, but Homer is distracted by an ice cream truck before he can punish Bart. While Bart is watching a documentary segment on Itchy & Scratchy including their first joint appearance in a cartoon called Steamboat Itchy, he takes his eye of Maggie, whom he is supposed to be watching, and she takes the car and drives it into a penitentiary, opening the wall for prisoners to escape. This time Homer punishes Bart by telling him that he can never watch The Itchy & Scratchy Movie. Bart begs to be let off the hook, but Homer won’t budge. Even when the line to the movie stretches all the way to their front door, Homer won’t acquiesce. After Lisa sees the movie, she tells Bart how wonderful it is, and tries to convince Homer to let Bart go see it, but he won’t budge. Two months later, even Marge is asking Homer to retract the punishment, but he is determined to make Bart a Supreme Court Justice. The movie closes without Bart ever seeing it. Forty years later, Bart, who is now the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and an elderly Homer walk by the theater where they are holding a revival of the Itchy & Scratchy Movie… and the two sit down together to watch it for the first time. 11/28/22 
• 066. Marge Gets a Job – 11/5/1992
  • The Simpson house suddenly starts to go sideways as its left side starts to sink into the ground. Homer attempts to fix-it by watching an instructional video hosted by Troy McClure. When that fails, he consults Surly Joe’s (Harry Shearer) Foundation repair, but since it will cost $8500, Homer declines. The house winds up on the news, and Bart starts charging people to see it. Marge announces she is going to try and find a job to help contribute. Meanwhile, Homer and Marge attend the retirement party of Jack Barley (Dan Castellaneta), where Ned Flanders tries to make it all about Mr. Burns. They also announce that they’re going to replace Barley, although he’d rather stay with the nuclear plant. Lisa helps spice up Marge’s meager resume, and she is hired by Flanders and starts work. Maggie is babysat by Grandpa Simpson while she works. Bart feigns illness at school so he can skip taking a test and his sent home to Grandpa who tries various remedies including leaches. Bart is warned multiple times that he is acting like the boy who cried wolf. Mr. Burns sees Marge on the video monitors and takes an instant liking to her. When she comes up with some ideas to improve morale, Burns moves her to the office next to his, and assigned Flanders to bathroom cleaning duty. He also wants to take her out on a date, so Flanders kidnaps Tom Jones (himself) to play for them. Bart returns to school, but then immediately plays sick again when Mrs. Krabappel tells him he needs to take a makeup test. Homer gets depressed that Marge has advanced so quickly by him at work already. Mr. Burns tries to take Marge on a date, but when he tells her that she’s married, he fires her. The Simpson house gets repaired. Bart continues to come up with illnesses to get out of the test. Over at Krusty’s studio, a guest brings on a Timberwolf that gets spooked and escapes and makes its way to the Springfield Elementary School. When Bart cries ‘wolf!’ in the hallway, Mrs. Krabappel doesn’t believe him. Marge and Homer go see lawyer Lionel Hutz to file a sexual harassment suit. Hutz thinks he has a great case but is scared off by Burns’ high-powered lawyers. Homer wants Burns to apologize to Marge, but instead he sends them on a date with Tom Jones singing for them. 11/30/22
• 067. New Kid on the Block – 11/12/1992
  • As Homer is watching Hunks on TV, his neighbor Sylvia Winfield (Maggie Roswell) comes over to tell Homer she’s selling her home. Homer is thrilled when he finds coat hangers, old newspapers, and old medication out by the Winfields’ garbage cans. Bart and Lisa go over to the house to sneak in the basement to look around, and Bart tells Lisa ghost stories that scare her. Then a girl named Laura Powers (Sara Gilbert), who has just moved into the house with her divorced mother Ruth (Pamela Reed), and scares Bart. She’s a prankster like Bart and the two become fast friends. In fact, Bart has a big crush on her, and suggest her to be their babysitter as Homer and Marge plan a dinner at the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet The Frying Dutchman. Bart takes a bath before she arrives and then dresses in pajamas like Hugh Hefner. They order food from the restaurant Two Guys from Kabul, learn to dance together, play video games, and have a generally great evening. Meanwhile, Homer won’t stop eating shrimp at the restaurant, and he is eventually thrown out by the owner Captain McAllister (Hank Azaria) before he is done eating. Homer goes to see his lawyer Lionel Hutz to inquire about suing the restaurant. Bart goes to see his Grandpa, and then his father, to ask about how to handle his crush. Neither is any help, and Homer compares a woman to beer and then gets drunk. That night Laura comes to Bart’s window and asks him to meet her at the treehouse. When he gets there, she is excited to tell him that she has a boyfriend named Jimbo Jones (Pamela Hayden), who happens to be one of Bart’s bullies. This rips out Bart’s heart, and he can’t stand watching her ride away on Jimbo’s motorcycle. On the day of Homer’s day in court, Laura returns to babysit the kids, but this time she puts them to bed early so Jimbo can come over and they can make out on the couch. Bart has had enough of him, so he calls Moe’s and asks for “Amanda Huggenkiss”, the identifies himself as Jimbo and gives Moe his phone number. Moe comes over to Bart’s house with a knife and threatens Jimbo, leading him to break down and weep and beg for mercy. This turns off Laura, and she breaks it off with him. She also tells Bart that if her were old enough to grow a small mustache, she would go out with him. Bart then has Laura call Moe’s and ask for “Ivana Tinkle”, much to the amusement of Ruth, Homer, and Captain McAllister. Homer and McAllister have solved the dispute by McAllister allowing Homer to return to eat, while McAllister invites people in the see the bottomless pit freak and then ordering their own food. 11/30/22
• 068. Mr. Plow – 11/19/1992
  • During a Winter storm, Homer gets wrapped up watching Carnival of the Stars at Moe’s Tavern, until Marge calls him to tell him that there’s a blizzard blowing in and he needs to come home. As he drives home, visibility gets worse and worse, and he winds up crashing his car… into his other car in the driveway of his house. He later hitches a ride on a watermelon truck to Crazy Vaclav’s (Harry Shearer) Place of Automobiles but can only find a car from an unknown country that runs on kerosene. He and the family then attend the Springfield Auto Show, where Adam West (himself) is there making a personal appearance, and where Homer is talked into purchasing a snowplow. He thinks he can make enough money plowing driveways to make the payments on the car, but when he tries to hang flyers for his services, they all blow away. He tries other methods of advertising, including announcing his business number in church. He also buys time on Channel 92 at 3:17am that he made with his family. Sure enough, the calls do start coming in, and he does enough work around town that he becomes a hero to businesses and the school, eventually earning the key to the city from Mayor Quimby. Marge even finds Homer sexy in his Mr. Plow jacket. Homer’s friend Barney laments never having this kind of success, and Homer tells him he can make things like this happen if he puts in the effort. Before he knows what hit him, Homer finds that Barney – aka the Snow King – has stolen most of Homer’s business with own bigger plow and a commercial co-starring Linda Ronstadt (herself). Homer even loses Adam West as a customer, who used Barney to plow his driveway so he could get his Batmobile out of the driveway. Homer then visits the McMahon and Tate Advertising Agency, and they help him make an avant garde commercial that makes no sense. The Mayor takes the key from Homer and gives it to Barney. When a serious blizzard comes to Springfield, Homer calls Barney and pretends he’s a guy who lives on Widow’s Peak, offering to pay him ten thousand dollars if he can shovel his driveway. While Barney is busy with that, Homer visits his old customers to reclaim them and shovel their driveways. He then gets word that Barney is partially buried in an avalanche on Widow’s Peak. Homer takes his plow over a swinging bridge and along a skinny ldege in order to save Barney. Homer and Barney team up and decide that not even God can stop their success. Then God (Harry Shearer) melts all of the snow in town as the temperatures reach all-time highs. One night, the Repo Depot repossesses Homer’s plow. Harry Shearer is George H.W. Bush. 11/30/22
• 069. Lisa’s Frist Word – 12/3/1992
  • The family is trying to get Maggie to speak her first word, but thus far without success. This gets the family talking about Bart and Lisa’s first words. Bart’s first words were “Aye Carumba” when he saw his parents in bed together. Marge then tells the story of Lisa’s first word. They flashback to the Spring of 1983 on the lower east side of Springfield, where Bart is a mischievous baby boy who refuses to say ‘Dad’ and keeps calling his father ‘Homer’. As Homer is dealing with Bart flushing his wallet and keys down the toilet, Marge announces that she is pregnant. Bart visualizing using her to blame all of his acts of destruction. Homer and Marge decide they need to find a bigger house for their family. They look at various houses in an area called “The Rat’s Nest.” They then find their current home in Springfield, so they borrow $15,000 from Homer’s father, which he earns by selling his own home. He moves into the house with them, and then three weeks later ships him off to the retirement home. On the day them move in, they meet Ned Flanders and his sons Todd and Rod. Homer borrows Ned’s TV tray that he just bought… which is still in their living room. Bart is reluctant to leave his crib for the new baby, so Homer builds him a bed that looks like a creepy clown. Meanwhile, Homer watches the Olympics, and also the plight of Krusty the Clown that is tied to a promotion where he will give out a free Krusty Burger when America wins events that customers receive on a scratch-off card. The promotion was rigged to include only events typically won by Soviets, but then they boycott the Olympics, costing Krusty nearly 44 million dollars. Homer wins a free burger on the night that Marge goes into labor. Bart stays with the Flanders boys, who fill Bart up on religious games and songs. Lisa is born, and Marge reads an article indicating that Bart may be jealous of her. Bart meets her for the first time… and tells her that he hates her. Marge’s sisters start fawning over Lisa and ignoring Bart. Dr. Hibbert gives Lisa a lollipop, and then gives Bart a Rubella inoculation. Bart has finally had enough and cuts off all of Lisa’s hair. He then covers her with stamps and trying to mail her away. Finally, he tries to stick her into the Flanders’ mail slot. Since sitting in the corner is all he seems to do, Bart decides to run away. As he heads for the door, Lisa calls out his first name. Bart is so excited, he returns and takes her to his parents and shows them how she says ‘Bart’. Marge says she isn’t surprised since Lisa loves him so much. Lisa also says “Mommy” and “David Hasselhoff”, but when she is asked to say “Daddy,” she instead says “Homer.” Back in the current day, Homer takes Maggie to her crib and tells her that the sooner kids talk, the sooner they talk back, and that he hopes she never says a word. As soon as he leaves the room, Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) says “Daddy.” Yeardley Smith is Grandma Flanders. Harry Shearer is Johnny Carson. 11/15/22
• 070. Homer’s Triple Bypass – 12/17/1992
  • As Homer is watching Cops: In Springfield and chowing down in bed, Marge warns him about his eating. The next morning, he feels chest pains on his way to breakfast. Marge tries to give him oatmeal, but he scarfs down bacon and eggs instead. On the way to work, after running the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe off the road, Homer starts to hear his own heart beating. When he gets to work, he sits at his desk eating a box of donuts while Mr. Burns watches him on the monitor. He calls Homer into the office to tell him he’s fired, which causes his heart to speed up. slow down, and then stop. He nearly dies until he hears Burns order Smithers to send a ham to his widow. An ambulance takes him to the hospital, and Marge is called to come. After running a battery of test, Dr. Hibbert tells Homer that he had a heart attack and that he advises a coronary bypass surgery, which will cost $30,000. When this too gives Homer a heart attack, the price goes up to $40,000. Homer makes the rounds to the local religious leaders, but they won’t help him. With no work health insurance, Homer goes looking for how own insurance from Merry Widow insurance. Homer lies on his application to get his policy, but as he is signing it, he has another heart attack. Back at the hospital, Homer reports of seeing hell before being awakened. His last resort is to turn to Dr. Nick Riviera who will perform any surgery for $129.95. Homer breaks the news to the kids and then heads to the hospital, where he runs into Ned Flanders, who is donating his kidney and his lung to no one in particular. Homer gets visits from random friends including Krusty, his father, fellow plant workers, and Barney and Moe from the bar. Lisa starts reading up on everything they are doing to Homer. Selma and Patty introduce Marge to a guy named Andre (Dan Castellaneta) in case Homer doesn’t pull through. As Homer’s surgery begins, folks around the town pray for him. Dr. Riviera seems like he has no idea what he is doing. Lisa watches the surgery from seats in the surgery arena and gives Dr. Riviera advice throughout the procedure, and soon Riviera announces that the surgery is a success. Homer’s heart appears to be back to normal, but still takes a break every once in a while. Hank Azaria is the host of People Who Look Like Things. 12/16/22
• 071. Marge vs. the Monorail – 1/14/1993
  • Homer jollily leaves work singing about his life to the tune of Meet the Flintstones, then crashes his car into a tree. Meanwhile, Mr. Burns and Smithers are caught red-handed hiding the plant’s toxic waste inside trees in the park. As a result, he is forced to pay the city three million dollars…which he does with ease. The town arranges a meeting to determine what they are going to do with the money. Lisa suggests that they buy virtual reality headsets for the school to bring their education to life. Bart would like to buy giant mechanical ants that he can use to threaten the teachers and snip them in half. On the night of the meeting, Marge suggests that the fix all of the potholes on Main Street, and it looks like the whole town agrees. Then arrives Lyle Lanley (Phil Hartman), who makes his pitch to music to build a monorail around the town, which he has done in several other cities around the country. The town falls for it completely, much to Marge’s chagrin. Lanley comes to Lisa’s class to answer questions about the monorail, but won’t answer Lisa’s question about why their centralized town needs a monorail. Homer sees a commercial on TV for attending training classes to be a monorail conductor. Lanley kicks out all investigative reporters and then teaches the class. Bart helps Homer study for the test, which Homer passes with flying colors. Now that Lanley has received his money, he randomly appoints Homer to be the head conductor and heads to Tahiti. Marge starts to become suspicious of the entire enterprise and heads to North Haverbrook where Lanley had previously put in a monorail. There she finds the town abandoned and the monorail collapsed. There she meets a man named Sebastian Cobb (Harry Shearer), the builder of the monorail in North Haverbrook, who warns Marge that Springfield better have a damn good conductor because Lanley cut corners everywhere on its construction. On the day of the maiden voyage of the monorail in Springfield, several famous folks appear at the event including Leonard Nimoy (himself) acting as the Grand Marshall. From the time Homer starts the monorail, the gears start to fall apart and soon it is moving at 180mph and can’t be stopped. Since the monorail is solar powered, the train finally stops during a solar eclipse, but seconds later it starts up again. Lanley’s flight to Tahiti has a layover in North Haverbrook, where he is attacked by their citizens. Cobb tells Homer to find an anchor, so he pulls the M off the side of the monorail and ties it to a lasso, and although it destroys several monuments in town and separates a pair of Siamese Twins, it eventually hooks in a giant donut sign and stops the monorail. Bart considers Homer a hero, but Leonard Nimoy takes the credit and then disappears. 5/16/23
• 072. Selma’s Choice – 1/21/1993
  • While Homer is watching Lance Murdock (Dan Castellaneta) jump sixteen blazing school buses, he hears Murdock say that next he’s going to Duff Gardens. This puts it in his head that he wants to go to  Duff Gardens as well, so he gathers up the kids and gets ready to head out. However, Marge delivers them some bad news that her Aunt Gladys (Julie Kavner) has passed away and they will have to go to Little Neck Falls for the funeral. On the way there, they pick up Marge’s sisters Selma and Patty. They attend the funeral, where Patty takes over the eulogy and says how Aunt Gladys inspired them to grow old alone. During the reading of the will, Gladys’s lawyer Lionel Hutz plays a video of Gladys reading her will. Marge gets her celebrity-shaped potato chip collection, which Homer starts eating. Her sister Jackie gets her pet iguana Jub-Jub. To her nieces Selma and Patty she leaves her grandfather clock and the advice to not live and die alone like she did, but rather to get started on a family right away. Selma takes this advice to heart and decides she wants a baby. She first tries a dating service, the potions from Princess Opal (Pamela Hayden), but after striking out with the bag boy (Dan Castellaneta) at the grocery store and a little old man named Hans Moleman (Dan Castellaneta), she decides to get artificially inseminated as it seems to be her only option. Meanwhile, the family makes another plan to go to Duff Gardens, but Homer is feeling sick from eating a rotten sandwich that he brought home from a picnic weeks earlier. Selma agrees to take the kids to the theme park so Marge can tend to Homer. When they get there, Selma has to tend to Bart destroying the animatronics on the Duff’s Hall of Presidents, Lisa drinking water out of the dark boat ride and then having hallucinations, and Bart boarding a roller coaster that he’s too small for and nearly falling off. Back home, Homer and Marge watch Yentl and then an adult video version of The Erotic Adventures of Hercules. By the time Selma brings them home, Selma realizes that she doesn’t have what it takes to raise a child. Instead, she adopts the iguana Jub-Jub. Dan Castellaneta is the voice of the Washington animatronic, and Harry Shearer is the voice of Lincoln’s. Doris Grau is the complaints booth clerk. 12/16/22
• 073. Brother from the Same Planet – 2/4/1993
  • Bart misses the chance to sneak into a rated R movie with some of his friends after soccer practice because he’d promised his father that he’d wait for him to pick him up. Homer is engaged in TV watching and taking a bath back home and can’t remember what it is he’s supposed to be remembering. Homer leaves him there all day through a dark thunderstorm, during which Bart nearly is struck by lightning. Homer falls asleep in the bathtub and has a dream that he goes to pick up Bart and he’s a skeleton. Once he picks him up, Bart gives him the silent treatment, and Homer refuses to apologize. That night while watching Krusty host Saturday Night Live, Bart sees a commercial for the Bigger Brothers Agency. The lady at the agency assigns a cool guy named Tom (Phil Hartman) to Bart, and they drive off on Tom’s motorcycle. Meanwhile, Lisa has racked up a phone bill of nearly $380 for making 900-number calls to the Corey Hotline, where she can hear messages from her favorite teen idol. Marge demands that she stop calling that number, and Lisa assures her that she’ll never see another bill for the calls. Instead, she makes phone calls from her doctor’s office, the school, and her grandfather’s nursing home. Tom takes Bart to do fun things like a baseball game, the gym, to watch Ren & Stimpy, and hang-gliding. Homer spies him on the hang-glider using his binoculars. Homer then goes to the Bigger Brothers Agency to take on his own son. He winds up with a lonely, curious boy named Pepi (Tress MacNeille). Although Homer generally gives Pepi all of the wrong information. Pepi thinks Homer is a brilliant man. Marge and Lisa talk to Principal Skinner about Lisa making the long-distance calls, and Marge tells her that she needs to make it until midnight without calling the Corey Line. Lisa struggles while watching the clock as each minute ticks by. Marge then finds her asleep on the phone as midnight closes in, but she is only calling Time & Temperature. Homer takes Pepi to Marine World on the same day that Tom takes Bart. When Tom sees Homer there, he attacks him since Bart has told him all of the horrible things Homer has done to him. They fight all over the park, an antique store, and downtown Springfield. Eventually Tom gets the best of him, and Homer is taken away in an ambulance. Bart sets up Tom to be Pepi’s Bigger Brother, and Bart goes home and asks Homer to teach him to fight dirty like he did with Tom. 12/16/22
• 074. I Love Lisa – 2/11/1993
  • It’s Valentine’s Day and Homer is again caught unprepared, as is the radio station that accidentally plays Monster Mash. After Marge makes him a special breakfast, he flees to the Kwik-E-Mart, where Apu price gouges him for a box of candy. Lisa’s class exchanges Valentines, and she feels sorry for Ralph Wiggum doesn’t get any so she gives him one. He thinks this means she really likes him so he asks to walk her home. Meanwhile, Bart learns about an upcoming 29th anniversary show for Krusty the Clown, featuring clips from past shows of him with Sideshow Mel (Dan Castellaneta), and hopes to get tickets to see the event. Ralph continues to pursue Lisa, so she asks her mother how to nicely tell him she’s not interested, and Marge advises her to say that she’s not ready for a relationship at this time. However, Ralph’s father Chief Wiggum tells him to be persistent the same way he would be for anything in life that he wants. Ralph is able to get tickets for Krusty’s anniversary show from his father, who blackmails Krusty after finding him in an adult movie house watching Debbie Does Springfield. The Chief also bribes Miss Hoover to give Ralph the part of George Washington in the President’s Day Pageant, in which Lisa is playing Martha Washington. Lisa agrees to go to the show with him, which is attended by President and First Lady Clinton. They show clips of Krusty with Robert Frost and show clips of him singing the music of The Doors, and his early days with Sideshow Raheem (Michael Carrington) before doing into the audience to interview them. When Ralph announces that he is in love with Lisa, she freaks out on the air and tells him that she only gave him the card because she felt sorry for him. Chief Wiggum begins to harass Homer by breaking his taillight and giving him a ticket for it. When it comes time to act in the pageant, Ralph burns the card Lisa gave him, but then gives the performance of his life. Even Lisa tells him how well he did, before giving him a card offering to be friends with him. Chief Wiggum looks on from his police car as the radio once again mistakenly plays Monster Mash. Doris Grau is the voice of Lunchlady Doris. 5/17/23
• 075. Duffless – 2/18/1993
  • With the Science Fair coming up at school, Bart dreams of perfecting the Go-Go Ray, which can make the teachers break into dance, and being awarded first prize. However, it seems Lisa has more of a chance with the giant tomato built from steroids she perfects. However, when she gets it to school and asks Bart to hold it, he can’t resist nailing Principal Skinner in rear end with it. Meanwhile, Homer lets it slip to Marge that he plans to leave early from work to tour the Duff Brewery. Homer winds up breaking off from the tour to visit other areas of the tour where he encounters a giant spider. Later he and Barney sneak off again, and Barney gets incredibly drunk. Homer thinks he is too drunk to drive, so Homer takes the keys from him. The police pull Homer over, and although he passes the physical tests, he fails the breathalyzer and is arrested. Marge comes to bail him out, but he gets his license suspended, has to watch accident films, and attend Alcoholics Anonymous. Marge asks him to give up drinking beer for thirty days and he reluctantly agrees. He battles his way through the days, realizing that everything, including baseball, seems boring without beer. Lisa picks another Science Fair project, proposing to answer the question “Is a hamster dumber than my brother?” Lisa sets up some maze tests and electric shocks for the hamster, then does the same for Bart. However, the hamster winds up learning more than Bart does, as he repeatedly grabs a cupcake when it continues to shock him, whereas the hamster refrains. When Bart finds Lisa’s Science Fair report, he decides to get his own revenge and creates a project to find out whether hamsters can fly planes. All of the teachers think it is cute, and Principal Skinner awards Bart the first prize. Once Homer finally reaches the end of the thirty days, he takes the money he has saved and heads directly to Moe’s, even as Marge tries to convince him that he doesn’t need to start drinking right away. Moe, after trash talking him for the last 30 days, welcomes him back and pours him a beer. However, when Homer looks around and sees how pathetic everyone in the bar looks, he decides to forego the beer and spend some time with Marge, giving her a ride on his bicycle into the sunset. 5/21/23
• 076. Last Exit to Springfield – 3/11/1993
  • As Mr. Burns reflects on his family history of becoming a business tycoon, he decides that he must take something away from his employees and settles on getting rid of their dental plan. Meanwhile, Lisa sees the dentist Dr. Wolff (Hank Azaria) and she finds out that she will need braces. When the company announces the removal of the dental plan, but gives them a keg of beer, no one seems to care about the insurance, but after mulling it over, Homer realizes that this will mean he has to pay for the braces. He tries to convince everyone not to stand for this, so they make him the company’s Union president. He sees himself as somewhat of a mafia Godfather in this role and imagines a life as Don Homer. Since the braces are now unaffordable, Lisa is forced to receive antiquated and ugly braces. As she receives gas to put her out, she imagines herself on a Yellow Submarine-like journey through the Beatles’ film. Mr. Burns starts to feel the pressure from the employees on the dental plan, so he sends two thugs named Crusher and Low Blow to pick up Homer and bring him to Mr. Burns’ house. This seems to have no effect on the situation, as Homer has no idea what Burns’ threats or negotiations mean. As Lisa gets her school pictures in her horrible braces, the power plant employees announce a strike. Mr. Burns tries to hire strike breakers, including Granmpa Simpson, while Mr. Burns and Smithers try to run the place by themselves, and then bring in robots. Mr. Burns then goes on Kent Brockman’s Smartline show along with Dr. Joyce Brothers (herself) and threatens the entire community if the strike doesn’t end. He then shuts down the power in all of Springfield. However, when Lisa starts to leads everyone in acoustic protest songs, Burns realizes that his tactics aren’t working. He turns the power back on and restores the insurance to the workers. Lisa gets the old braces removed, and has stylish invisible ones put on. When she makes a corny joke, Dr. Wolff and the family can’t stop laughing… but this is because Wolff has left the gas tank on in the room. 6/6/23
• 077. So It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show – 4/1/1993
  • Homer is engaged in fooling Bart over and over again on April Fools’ Day to the point that Bart wants serious revenge. He takes one of Homer’s Duff beers to the hardware store and shakes it up in a paint mixer, so that when Homer opens it, it blows the roof off of their house and puts Homer in the hospital. He is diagnosed by the doctor as having brain lesions and irregular brain waves. Marge recalls various incidents that could have caused brain injuries including one situation reminiscent of Psycho. She also remembers the time he fell into a ravine, was hauled out by a helicopter, and then dropped down the ravine again when the ambulance hits the tree, and he rolls out the back of it. Although it was actually a veterinarian who diagnosed him, Homer is confined to a wheelchair, nonetheless. Everyone shares memories of Homer, like the time he and Bart were lost in the woods, and the time the family was picked up by aliens. Bart randomly recalls an episode of Itchy & Scratchy. Moe and Barney stop by, and Barney feels so bad for Homer that he attempts to smother him… then pulls the drinking fountain out of the wall and escapes out the window. Marge recalls an incident in their marriage in which Homer behaved like the hero in An Officer and a Gentleman. The doctors continue to try and get him to walk, but he can’t get out of his chair. However, when he sees the candy machine in the hall, he dreams of going to Fudge Land, causing him to get out of his chair and walk to the machine, which collapses on him. Put back in his hospital bed, he dreams of driving his car off a cliff next to rolling beds, being lifted by angels, and traveling to the moon. Mr. Burns shows up and tries to unplug Homer’s devices since it is costing him insurance money. He brings in Dr. Nick to declare Homer dead. Mr. Burns recalls all of the times that Homer tries to get money from him. Starting to give up, Lisa says her goodbyes and recalls a time that she really moved him with her sax playing and plays it for him again. Bart apologizes for his imperfections, particularly a time when he stole Homer’s jar of change and is pursued by him Indiana Jones style. He remembers all the times he infuriated his father, but how Homer taught him how to shave. Bart admits that he had only attempted an April Fools joke and didn’t mean for it to go so far. This wakes up Homer, who becomes enraged and tries to strangle Bart. Fully recovered, Homer declares that they will celebrate by going to Hawaii. He only means it as another April Fools’ joke, but Marge advises him that it is now May 16th, and his coma has caused him to lose five percent of his brain. The entire family laughs, although Homer isn’t sure why. 6/6/23
• 078. The Front – 4/15/1993
  • After watching a particularly lame episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show, Lisa and Bart decide that they could write a better show, so they get to work penning an episode called The Little Barber Shop of Horrors and send it off to producer Roger Meyers Jr. (Hank Azaria). He takes one look at the letter that accompanies it, and since it is from a pair of kids, he tosses it all aside. Lisa has the idea to put an adult’s name on the script, so they find out that their Grampa Simpson’s name is Abraham and they credit him as the writer. Meanwhile, Marge gets an invitation to their class of 1974 High School Reunion, but Homer doesn’t get one. He is forced to admit that he never graduated because he didn’t pass Remedial Science. Grampa gets a call from Meyers’ secretary Roxie (Doris Grau) letting him know that there is a big check coming to him. Marge and Homer go to the reunion and have a great time, with Homer even winning a number of superlative trophies. However, the old principal Mr. Dondelinger (Harry Shearer) announces that he checked the records and that Homer never actually graduated, and then rescinds all of Homer’s awards. Grampa shows up at Meyers’ office and asks for more checks, so Meyers retains him as a staff writer at $800 a week. Homer is embarrassed to tell his kids that he never graduated from school. The kids then tells Grampa that they were the ones writing the scripts and offers to continue writing and splitting the money three ways. Homer goes to Adult Education school to take the Science class that he failed. Meyers tells Grampa that he’s been nominated for an animation award for Outstanding Writing. Krusty the Clown and Brooke Shields (herself) hosts the segment with the award, and Abraham Simpson is announced the winner. However, when he sees a clip form the episode, he announces to everyone that he thinks the show is disgusting and violent and that he wants no part of it. He hands the award over to the kids. Homer passes his first exam and tells Marge that he’ll have nothing to be ashamed of at the next reunion. Flash forward to 2024, when he shows up to the reunion and he has a plunger attached to his head that he can’t get off. 6/7/23
• 079. Whacking Day – 4/29/1993
  • Principal Skinner is preparing for a visit from Superintendent Chalmers (Hank Azaria) by having everyone clean up the school. He also calls Bart, Jimbo Jones, and Nelson Muntz to come pick up mountain bikes that they won and then locks them in an old bomb shelter. Bart is able to escape through an air vent, and when he emerges he finds Willie the Groundskeeper’s riding lawnmower and goes for a joy ride. He manages to hit Chalmers right in the rump, which causes him to cancel the promotion he was planning to give Skinner. That causes Skinner to react by expelling Bart from school. His parents try to enroll him in a Christian school, but he is immediately kicked out of it after reciting an inappropriate poem as a Psalm. Marge then decides to home school Bart. Meanwhile, Lisa learns about Whacking Day,  a holiday originated during Springfield’s early days when the townspeople would drive snakes into the center of town and then beat them to death. Everyone seems to be excited about this ritual except for Lisa, who finds it inhumane. Marge begins teaching Bart, but becomes subject to the same bad behavior to what Bart displayed in real school. Marge brings in Grampa to talk about his World War II days when he posed as a female cabaret singer. Amazingly, Marge gets Bart interested in the book Johnny Tremain when Bart finds out that he has a deformed hand. Marge offers to take Bart on a field trip to Old Springfield Town to learn more about colonial days. During the tour, Bart points out a discrepancy about the town’s founder Jebediah Springfield being at the Battle of Ticonderoga on the same day that Whacking Day first began. He is quickly whisked away by the authorities, as he was about to uncover a conspiracy. As the town prepares to celebrate the big day, Mayor Quimby and singer Barry White (himself) kick off the festivities with a speech. However, when Barry White learns what the holiday is really about, he realizes that he doesn’t approve of it and leaves the ceremony. When Bart reads an expose about Whacking Day by Bob Woodward, he learns that he and Lisa could lure the snakes to their house by playing bass into the ground. At that moment, Barry White passes by the house, so they invite him to sing Can’t Get Enough of Your Love Baby to help save the snakes. With all of the snakes in the house, the mob cannot find them. Bart tells them all that Whacking Day was really just an excuse to beat up the Irish. The crowd then turns on Mayor Quimby when he pulls up in his limo, showing off a handful of snakes that had been pre-whacked. All of the snakes slither off into the sunset to the tune of Born Free. Principal Skinner is impressed by Bart’s independent learning, and he is welcomed back to the school. Skinner then remembers that he left the other three bullies locked in the shelter. He and Willie bring them all mountain bikes to try and avoid a lawsuit. Pamela Hayden is the Scottish woman who lures Willie away. 6/7/23
• 080. Marge in Chains – 5/6/1993
  • Marge is transfixed by a TV show called I Can’t Believe They Invented It! hosted by Troy McClure that focuses on an item called The Juice Loosener invented by Dr. Nick. Homer is quick to jump on the offer so he sends away for one from Osaka, Japan. One of the workers in the Osaka plant has the flu and coughs directly into the box. Along with many other members of the town, several Juice Looseners make their way to Springfield, where the Osaka Flu is quickly spread all over town with more than 300 cases. Everyone in the Simpson family except for Marge comes down with the flu, leaving her the only one left to take care of everyone in the family. The mayor takes off for the Bahamas, while Mr. Burns locks himself in a germ-free chamber, where he finds Homer hiding. The town starts clamoring for a cure, at least a placebo, and wind up overturning a truck full of bees. The Flanders family wonders why God has forsaken them. Ned assumes that it is because he watched Al (Dan Castellaneta) and Peg Bundy (Tress MacNeille) in an episode of Married…with Children. When Marge goes to shop at the Kwik-E-Mart, she accidentally shoves a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon in her pocket and forgets to pay for it. Marge goes to lawyer Lionel Hutz, while Homer tries to get Apu to drop the charges against Marge, but he refuses. The world spreads around, and the Mayor even announces this at one of his rallies. The prosecuting attorney (Dan Castellaneta) not only prosecutes her for the shoplifting but carries her into the Kennedy assassination as well. Lionel Hutz has to take a break from his defense to call his AA sponsor David Crosby (himself). Marge is found guilty by the jury, and Judge Snyder (Harry Shearer) sentences Marge to thirty days in jail. Apu thinks that the store is now secure, but a thief steals the entire Kwik-E-Mart building and takes it to Mexico. Marge meets some tough inmates in Phillips (Tress MacNeille) and Tatoo Annie (Pamela Hayden) who has a MAD Magazine fold-in on her back as a tattoo. Back home, Lisa suggests that they all pitch in to keep the house clean, but ten minutes later is completely trashed with an alligator running loose. The family comes to see Marge on visiting day. Homer, who is wearing an old Halloween costume since his clothes are all dirty, gets a conjugal visit with Homer, who jumps his bones. The town bake sale loses $15 or profit without Marge’s marshmallow squares. This means they can only afford a Jimmy Carter statue instead of an Abraham Lincoln. The entire town uses the statue to start looting, leading to fires and violence all over town. The town realizes that none of these things would happens if Marge weren’t in jail, so Mayor Quimby gives her an early release. Bart and Lisa sweep all of the trash under the living room rug, so it is like walking on waves. When she returns home, she finds the Mayor and many town members welcoming her home with a statue of herself derived from the Carter statue, which the kids turn into a tetherball pole. 6/7/23
• 081. Krusty Gets Kancelled – 5/13/1993
  • While watching The Springfield Squares on TV, with special contestant Barry White (himself), Homer and Bart witness a tidal wave on Springfield Harbor overtake the show, followed by a subliminal flashing of the word “Gabbo” on the show. In the days following, the mysterious Gabbo (Hank Azaria) figure takes over the news cycle until Gabbo is finally unveiled to be a ventriloquist dummy operated by a man named Arthur Crandall (Hank Azaria). Gabbo’s team plans for him to dominate the airwaves and take over Krusty’s timeslot. Krusty claims that he isn’t worried, and soon he tries to develop his own ventriloquism act. Krusty tries to come up with his own ventriloquist act, and when Itchy and Scratchy are stolen for the new show, Krusty begins to run another German cat and mouse show called Werker and Parasite. Soon Krusty is cancelled and says goodbye to all of his co-workers. Krusty goes to see Johnny Carson (himself) for advice and they play tennis together. Krusty to tries to get work on Melrose Place, but fails, and then resorts to the track. Meanwhile, Bart and Lisa recognize that Gabbo is stealing Krusty’s material by making prank phone calls to Krusty himself. They go and find Krusty in the streets offering to drop his pants for cash. They go back to his house and notice all of the photo of him with various celebrities over the years. When they suggest that he call in his celeb friends to do a TV special, Krusty gives them his address book. Bart and Lisa go around enlisting various celebrities including Johnny Carson, Luke Perry (himself), Bette Midler (herself), who is picking up trash on her adopted highway session, Hugh Hefner (himself), how is searching for alternative energy, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (themselves – Chad Smith, Flea, Anthony Kiedis, Arik Marshall), who have been rooked to play at Moe’s Tavern. Elizabeth Taylor‘s (herself) agent turns down the request. By the time they return to tell Krusty, he has put on a lot of weight and is completely out of shape. Homer allows Krusty to move in with them while he trains to get back into shape by boxing with Homer. Krusty returns to form and tries to get Sideshow Mel to come back from the Gulp ‘n’ Blow, but he decides to stay. On the night of the special, people come and line up for Krusty’s special, while Gabbo gets nary a crowd. Krusty sings Send in the Clows and is joined by Sideshow Mel. Luke Perry is launched out of a cannon and injured. The Red Hot Chili Peppers perform Give it Away. Johnny lifts a Buick Skylark over his head. Hugh Hefner plays Peter and Wolf on the glasses. Bette Midler sings The Wind Beneath My Wings with Krusty. Elizabeth Taylor watches from afar and decides to fire her agent. After the show, everyone goes to Moe’s, and Johnny Carson reminds Krusty to save his money this time, but he has already purchased a ruby encrusted clown nose. Krusty thanks Bart and Lisa, but they tell him they are getting 50 percent of his t-shirt sales. 9/19/23

SEASON 5

• 082. Homer’s Barbershop Quartet – 9/30/1993
  • While attending the Springfield Swap Meet, Bart and Lisa search through some old records and discover the album Meet the Be Sharps with Homer on the cover. The kids ask their father about the band, so he gives them the history dating back to 1985 when he performed in a barbershop quartet with Principal Skinner, Chief Wiggum, and Apu at Moe’s Cavern every afternoon. Soon they start performing at other functions including retirement homes, prisons, and churches. One day at Moe’s, Homer is approached by a theatrical agent named Nigel (Harry Shearer) who offers to represent them and advises them to dump Chief Wiggum because a police officer is too Village People. After Homer drives Wiggum out into the middle of nowhere and abandons him, the quartet auditions others to replace Wiggum. They can’t find anyone they like, until they overhear Barney Gumble singing in the restroom at Moe’s and ask him to join the band under protests from the public. They name themselves the Be Sharps. Back in the present, the Simpsons drive home from the meet, and Homer brags about selling their spare tire. They wind up with a flat, and while Marge walks on foot to get a new tire, Homer continues telling the story to the kids. Based on a car novelty sign, Homer pens a new song called Baby on Board, which becomes a huge hit. Nigel tells Homer that he needs to pretend to be married in order to keep the women interested in him, but Marge doesn’t take it well. By 1986, the Be Sharps fly to New York and begin their massive press junkets and perform for President (Harry Shearer) and Mrs. Reagan at the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Meanwhile, talk show hosts are making fun of Chief Wiggum for getting kicked out of the band. The Be Sharps (The Dapper Dans aka James Campbell, George Economou, Shelby Grimm, Dan Jordan) win a Grammy Award for their album, which is presented to them by David Crosby (himself). At the afterparty, Homer meets George Harrison (himself) and is especially excited when he finds that Harrison is eating free brownies. From then on, the Be Sharps start their descent out, of fame and fortune. Barney begins dating a Japanese conceptual artist and Us magazine notes that they are no longer ‘hot’. When the kids ask how come they never hears of this before Homer tells them that it is a story for another time. Homer quietly then gets the band back together and they perform a rooftop concert on top of Moe’s. 9/20/23
• 083. Cape Feare – 10/7/1993
  • While watching the new Up Late with McBain TV show, Marge brings Lisa and Bart letters from the mail. Lisa’s letter is from her pen pal Anya (Pamela Hayden), whose government has been overthrown and has hijacked her letter, and Bart’s is an anonymous note that says “Bart, I am going to kill you.” Bart is unable to laugh at even the Itchy & Scratchy show Spay Anything because of his worry about the letter. He keeps receiving more and more of them, so he has Milhouse see if he can find out from his classmates, but they don’t yield any suspects. To Bart’s eyes, everyone becomes a suspect and he gets scared of his mother, Mrs. Krabappel, and Ned Flanders. Marge reports the letters to the police, and Lisa thinks it might be Moe retaliating for all of Bart’s prank calls. However, it turns out to be Sideshow Bob sending the notes in blood from the prison. Bob comes before the parole board, and they somehow agree to release him, despite the “Die, Bart, Die” tattooed on his chest. The Simpson family run into Sideshow Bob at the movie theater where he is smoking a cigar and laughing obnoxiously. They try to hire a persuasive man (Harry Shearer) to run Bob out of town, but the man is unable to convince him. Sideshow Bob drives through town in a food truck announcing all of the people who he is not planning to kill, but doesn’t mention Bart. The family goes to see Witness Relocation officers, who advise the Simpsons to go live on a boat in Cape Terror and start going by the name Thompson. Sideshow Bob follows them by strapping himself to the bottom of their car, gaining multiple injuries from the rocks in the road, hot coffee, and Homer’s drive through a cactus patch. Homer tells Marge that he has all of the loose ends tied up back home, but they lock Grandpa Simpson out of their house where his medicine is stashed. Bart sees Sideshow Bob strapped under another car, and is threatened by him again before Bob unstraps himself in the street and is run over by an circus of elephants in a parade. He later manages to get onboard the boat, tie up the other members of the family, and try to kill Bart with his machete. He asks Bart if he has any last requests, so Bart asks him to perform the entire production of H.M.S. Pinafore. Bob complies as Bart sits by eating popcorn and enjoying the show. Once he finishes, he tries to continue the slaying, but the boat hits rocks and causes the murder to be interrupted. The police arrive on the shore and arrest Sideshow Bob. The Simpsons drive back home and find Grandpa outside their house, now looking like a woman because he had skipped his medicine. Another elderly man asks him on a date to see Steve and Eydie and Grandpa accepts. 9/20/23
• 084. Homer Goes to College – 10/14/1993
  • The nuclear power plant receives a surprise inspection from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Homer is awakened and shoved into the basement with the plant’s ‘less gifted’ employees. However, he comes up through a manhole when he is stung by a bee, and they test him with a replica of his workstation to see how he handled a power surge. Even though it is just a simulator, he still manages to cause a meltdown of the simulator van. They discover that Homer was never college trained for his job, so Mr. Burns and his men are forced to stop by Homer’s house and tell him that he must pass Nuclear Physics 101 in order to keep his job. Homer had always wanted to go to college but got distracted by a dog carrying a ham while he was filling out his application. He submits new applications to several colleges but is denied by all of them. Being on the board of Springfield University, Mr. Burns is able to threaten the Admissions Board to get Homer in. Once he shows up, he starts in with pranks like spiking the punch at he welcome party and declaring himself a jock ready to take on the nerds. He criticizes the dean, Bobby Peterson (Hank Azaria), and mocks his Nuclear Physics professor (Harry Shearer). When he’s asked to demonstrate a proton accelerator, he causes a nuclear meltdown in the school. Dean Peterson suggests that Homer may need a tutor, so he goes to see three students: Gary (Harry Shearer), and two others (Hank Azaria, Dan Castellaneta). When he tells his family about them, they all call them out as being nerds, but Homer doesn’t want to admit it since he’s supposed to be the enemy of all nerds. They try and convince Homer that he needs to study, but Homer wants to go get into mischief with them, so they head to the Springfield Petting Zoo bring along Bart and Lisa. Homer tries to talk them into pulling a prank, so Bart comes up with an idea to kidnap Sir Oinks-a-Lot, the mascot of Springfield A&M. When Homer gets the pig drunk, Dean Peterson is forced to expel the three nerds. Homer feels bad, so he allows them to come live at their house. They wind up causing the house to lose its electricity just as Bart and Lisa are about to see a rare episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show that will never be shown again. Everyone wants the nerds out, so Homer vows to get them back into college. Homer tries to fix it so the nerds save the Dean’s life by letting them push him out of the way while Homer nearly runs him over. The nerds miss saving him, and Homer runs him over and puts him in the hospital. Homer offers to be expelled in the guys’ place, but the Dean agrees to re-admit them and forget about the incident. Homer then realizes that his final exam is the next day, so the nerds cram with him all night, but he still winds up with an F. The guys wind up dialing into the school’s computer system and giving him an A+. Homer tries to find the lesson learned in all of this but comes up short. However, Marge suggests that to be a good example for Bart, he will re-take the class. 9/20/23
• 085. Rosebud – 10/21/1993
  • Mr. Burns tosses and turns at night, dreaming about his childhood as a boy named Happy who had a Teddy Bear named Bobo that he left behind when he makes the decision to go and live with a billionaire instead of his parents and brother George Burns. As Smithers wakes Burns up while he is breaking snow globes in his sleep, he utters the word “Bobo.” Meanwhile, Homer wakes up dreading Mr. Burns’ birthday party since all of the workers are expected to participate. Burns sees a video of Homer making people laugh, so he wants Homer to do a comedy act at his party, so Homer prepares a roast. The birthday party is a star-studded affair that includes Bill Clinton and all living ex-presidents and the vocal stylings of The Ramones (themselves – Joey Ramone, Marky Ramone, Johnny Ramone, and CJ Ramone aka Christopher Ward). Homer’s comedy act follows the announcement that a puppy was run over in the parking lot. Burns says he wants Homer destroyed and ends the party. Mr. Burns goes through his basement to look at all his treasures, but still wants his bear, Bobo. In reality, the bear floated from the outdoors where Burns had left him to New York City, where it flew with Charles Lindburgh in the Spirt of St. Louis It was thrown from the plane to the crowd and caught by Adolf Hitler. As Berlin fell, it was sent to the North Pole in a submarine, was later dug up inside a piece of ice, and brought to the Kwik-E-Mart to sell to customers. Bart finds it in a bag of ice and gives it to Maggie. With efforts going on to either reproduce Bobo for Burns or find the original, Homer soon realizes that Bobo is in his house. The Simpson family all agrees that they should receive a reward for the bear, so Homer takes it to him. Burns refuses much of a reward but offers Homer a drink. Homer is quick to turn down the offer and leave with the bear. Homer can barely refrain from calling Burns and accepting the drink, but then Burns shows up to find out what Homer wants. Burns agrees to a million dollars and three of the Hawaiian Islands, but Maggie won’t let Bobo go. When he sees Maggie crying once he takes it away, he refuses to give it to Burns. Grandpa then crashes through the house and tells Homer that he just hit three people and has no insurance. Burns and Smithers attempt to sneak into the Simpson chimney from the roof of the Flanders. When they get stuck on the wire between houses, the fire department has to rescue them. Homer is demoted at work, so he tries to beg Maggie to give up Bobo again, but she refuses. Burns then takes over all 78 TV channels and appears on all of them, warning Homer that he won’t be seeing any more of his favorite shows until Burns gets the bear. He then diverts all beer trucks being delivered to Springfield and tells the rest of the public they can take it up with Homer if they ever want beer again. Barney comes to the house and threatens Homer with a gun. Boys at the school start taking it out on Bart. Moe leads a mob to come and take the bear from Homer, but when they see Maggie’s sad face, they give it back. Burns comes to the house and makes Smithers beg, but Homer tells him that the bear belongs to Maggie. Burns goes to talk to Maggie and after failing to talk her out of it, he tells Maggie he’s been beaten and to not make the same mistake he made. Maggie then gives Burns the bear, and he tells Smithers to make a note that he is happy for the first time and will only be good and kind to everyone. Smithers doesn’t have a pencil, but Burns thinks he’ll remember it. Homer isn’t sure if it is a sad ending or a happy ending. As Burns goes to bed that night with Bobo, he wonders what the future will hold. In One Million AD, apes dig up the remains of Bob, and Burns, who is now just a head with a robot body takes Bobo from them and tells the bear that he’ll never leave him behind again, as he says every century. Smithers is a head on a robot dog’s body. 9/22/23
• 086. Treehouse of Horror IV – 10/28/1993
  • Bart hosts the Halloween Special in the style of Rod Serling on Night Gallery. The first scary tale is The Devil and Homer Simpson, in which dreams about a donut fashion show and misses eating the donuts at work that morning. When he finds that he’s already eaten his emergency donut, he says out loud that he’d sell his soul for a donut. The devil does in fact show up in the form of Ned Flanders. Homer outsmarts the devil by not eating the very last bite. He takes it home and stores it in his refrigerator, but accidentally eats it when he sleepwalks to the frig to get a midnight snack. The devil then appears to claim Homer’s soul, but Lisa pleads that he deserves a trial. The devil sends Homer to hell for the day, where he is sliced into hot dog mean, revived, and fed all of the donuts in the world… but he never tires of them. He returns from hell inside a fire cage, and his lawyer Lionel Hutz pleads his case. Although it appears that Homer is doomed because Flanders produces a copy of the contract. The devil chooses the jury of a handful of villains throughout history. The judge finds him guilty, but Marge intervenes and shows the jury a photo of Homer and Marge on their wedding day, on which Homer has written that he is pledging his soul to Marge. Lizzie Borden (Pamela Hayden) finds that Homer’s soul is legally the property of Marge. Flanders gives him his soul back, but changes his head into a donut, on which he can’t stop eating. All of the city’s cops are waiting outside his house. The next tale is called Terror at 5 1/2 Feet, which starts with Bart having a nightmare of his school bus having a loose wheel which leads to a head-on collision. The next morning is rainy, and after Bart boards the bus, he spots a gremlin (Frank Welker) on the side of the bus. He tries to warn Otto, but he just runs an old man off the road. From outer space Kang and Kodos watch from their spaceship, and then notice that the gremlin is working on their ship as well. Bart tries to warn everyone on the bus, including Principal Skinner, who is riding with the kids. Bart tries to get the gremlin with a flare but is nearly sucked out the window.  However, he drops the flare on the gremlin which then falls off the bus and hits Ned Flanders car. Although everyone can clearly see the damage to the bus when the arrive at school, they still send Bart to the New Bedlam mental hospital. On his way there, the gremlin latches onto the back of the ambulance and shows Bart Ned Flander’s disembodied head. Bart then introduces the final story called Bart Simpson’s Dracula. A news story talks about a dead victim with two holes in his neck and a cape with Dracula’s name on it. However, the police think that the killer is a mummy, so they close down the Egyptian wing at the museum. Meanwhile, Mr. Burns makes a deal to buy the local blood bank, and the invites the Simpsons to a midnight dinner at his house in Pennsylvania. Things are strange in Burns’ castle, with him wearing his white hair high on his head, and his shadow not being synced up with his movements. After Burns serves them blood at dinner, Bart and Lisa go off in search of clues and find all the clues they need to realize that Burns is a vampire, and they are attacked by the undead. Lisa rushes back to her parents to warn them that Burns has Bart, who re-emerges with Burns… and bite marks on his neck. They all return home, but Lisa can’t sleep at night. She then sees Bart and some of his friends floating outside the window coming for her. Homer and Marge come in and see Bart turn into a bat. Lisa tells them that they need to kill the head vampire Mr. Burns, so they head back to his castle. They find him in his coffin and drive a stake through his heart. Her turns to dust, wakes up to fire Homer, and then turns to dust again. Back home, everyone thinks that everything is normal, but Grandpa floats in claiming to be a vampire. They all then admit that they are vampires except for Lisa. As they descend on her, they face the camera and yell “Happy Halloween everybody!” and then start humming Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, ala A Charlie Brown Christmas. Hank Azaria is Blackbeard. Dan Castellaneta is Benedict Arnold. 9/22/23
• 087. Marge on the Lam – 11/4/1993
  • After donating $30 to the public television channel, Marge gets free tickets to the ballet. Homer is initially excited to go with her when he thinks the ballet involves a bear riding around in a tiny car, but then becomes hesitant to go when he realizes what it really is. On the day of the performance, Homer heads out to go home, but finds that he has gotten his arm stuck in the vending machine trying to get a free soda. He then gets his arm stuck in one soda and one candy machine and can’t get home to go the ballet with Marge. When paramedics arrive, they are ready to cut off his arms when they realize that Homer merely needs to let go of the soda can and candy. Marge can’t find anyone to go with her to show, but when her neighbor Ruth Powers stops by, Marge invites her to come along. They have a nice time at the ballet and then stop at Jittery Joe’s Coffee Shop afterward. Ruth tells Marge that she envies her and Homer since her ex-husband did nothing but eat, sleep, and drink beer. When Marge gets home, she tells Homer that she and Ruth are going to go out again the next night. Homer is resistant for her to go out on the night they usually watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. The next night, after Marge leaves with Ruth, Homer decides he wants to go out too. Homer tries to find someone to go out with, but no one is available, so he hires lawyer Lionel Hutz to watch the kids, and then heads out by himself. Marge and Ruth go to the country-western bar Shotkickers and the nightclub The Hate Box. Homer finds things depressing at Moe’s, so he tries the Kwik-E-Mart, where he gets thrown out for reading magazines, and the library, where he gets thrown out for eating food. Marge and Ruth then go to a field to shoot off Ruth’s gun. Then they head to the top of the city near the giant Springfield sign. Marge reminisces that she and Homer used to go there. Marge can see a lot of smoke coming from her chimney, where Lionel is burning all of his papers. As they are leaving to head home, Homer wanders up to the sign himself, reminiscing about Marge. There he runs into Chief Wiggum, who offers to give him a ride home. As they are driving, they wind up behind Ruth and Marge, and Wiggum decides to pull them over. Ruth admits to Marge that she stole the car from her ex-husband since he wasn’t making his child support payments. They wind up on a high-speed chase, but Ruth turns off her lights and then heads to the Seething Sisters restaurant to drop off Marge. When Marge sees tables full of women who are vowing to stick together, she runs outside and re-joins Ruth on the chase. Just as they are about to cross the state line, scads of police cars come directly toward them. Marge grabs the wheel and takes them off-road, but unbeknownst to them, they are heading for a the Grand Chasm. Homer uses a megaphone to profess his love for Marge and begs them not to head toward the chasm. They immediately slam on their brakes… while Wiggum and Homer drive straight off of it. They wind up landing in a pile of solid waste in a landfill. In a Dragnet-esque summary, George Fenneman narrates the results of everyone’s trial. Ruth Powers auto theft charges were dismissed, and her husband was forced to pay all back child support. Marge was fined 50 cents, plus $2000 in punitive damages for the cans she shot. Homer was sent to the United States Army Neurochemical Research Center for extensive testing. 9/27/23
• 088. Bart’s Inner Child – 11/11/1993
  • Homer sees an ad in the paper indicating that someone is giving away a free trampoline. Homer goes to retrieve it and is surprised that it is Krusty the Clown getting rid of it in favor of concentrating more heavily on dirty limericks. Homer has wild ideas about opening his own amusement park Homerland, so he starts charging the neighborhood kids to jump on it, despite Marge’s warning that it is a bad idea. Soon kids start getting injured and before long, the entire yard is filled with injured kids. Homer tries to return it to Krusty, but he threatens Homer with a rifle. Homer tries to throw it off a cliff, and then saw it to pieces, but keeps failing to make it go away. Bart suggests attaching a bike lock to it, and this quickly forces a criminal to steal it. With the trampoline gone, kids start coming over and jumping on Homer’s car. Marge won’t let Homer live down his bad decision, but Homer tells her that at least he tries to do something different and fun. When even Bart and Lisa agree that Marge does a lot of nagging, Marge goes over to her sisters’ place, and they advise that she pick up some self-help videos from Brad Goodman (Albert Brooks). She and Homer watch one of his instructional tapes together, and soon they are openly discussing their feelings and alleviating fights. When Goodman comes to Springfield in person, seemingly the entire town goes to experience his Inner Child Workshop. When Bart makes a smart alec comment during the seminar, Goodman brings him on stage and celebrates his openness to do what he feels like doing. The message becomes that everyone should behave like Bart, much to Lisa’s annoyance. Soon the whole town is doing what they feel, and to Bart’s annoyance, are stealing his thunder as the class clown or the kids who spits off of the bridge. The town throws a giant Do What You Feel Festival, where everyone celebrates their newfound freedoms. However, while James Brown (himself) is performing I Feel Good in the park, one of the bleachers falls apart thanks to a maintenance man (Dan Castellaneta) not double bolting the grandstand… because he didn’t feel like it. Likewise, Groundskeeper Willie didn’t feel like oiling the Ferris Wheel, causing it to come its base and roll into the city zoo, freeing many of the wild animals into the streets. Soon a fight breaks out among the crowd, all of whom are quick to blame Bart for the entire mess. Homer and Bart make their escape in a slow-moving float and go back home. The family try to discover the moral of the story, and then they watch the new show McGonigle (Dan Castellaneta). 9/27/23
• 089. Boy Scoutz ‘n the Hood – 11/18/1993
  • Bart and Milhous get kicked out of the video arcade when they run out of money, but it just so happens that Homer finds a $20 bill under the couch, which flies out the window at home and wafts its way to Bart and Milhous. They decide to use the money to get a Super Squishee from Apu that is made entirely of syrup. While high on the sugar, the boys sing the song Springfield, Springfield and spend the evening all over town, attending Broadway shows and living it up. The next morning Bart is crashed from his sugar high, and realizes to his dismay that in the chaos, he joined the Junior Campers. He is ready to turn the uniform back in, but when he realizes that being part of the club can get him out of taking a test, he joins their meeting. He is initially excited when he realizes he might get a knife, but then he is told by the pack leader Ned Flanders that he has to pass a safety test before receiving it, he walks out on the group. However, when he sees how handy a knife can be in various situations all over town, he returns and goes through the procedures, and is finally given a fake knife. When he learns of a father-son rafting trip, he doesn’t want Homer to embarrass him, but assumes Homer will decline anyway. Homer tries to get out of it by accepting, but it backfires, and they wind up going together. Homer and Bart wind up in the raft with Ned Flanders and his son Rod. When Homer loses the map, which also shows the location of all of the Krusty Burgers, the group takes a wrong turn in the raft. While the rest of the group is traveling through areas reminiscent of Deliverance, Homer, Ned, and the boys find themselves lost at sea. Ned tries to keep a positive attitude and looks on the bright side, while Homer does little but complain. Attempts to catch any fish quickly vanish, and everyone finds themselves weak and hungry. Homer presents Bart with his own Swiss Army Knife, which he stole from Ernest Borgnine (himself), a celebrity guess who joined the trip to accompany the boy Warren (Maggie Roswell), whose father is in jail. The knife nearly punctures a hole in the raft, but then ultimately causes the sun to burn a hole in the boat anyway. Just as they are sinking, Homer smells hamburgers and realizes that there is a Krusty Burger on an unmanned oil barge. He uses his gift of smell to guide them to it, where they all fill up on burgers and celebrate their rescue. Meanwhile, the rest of the group finds an old summer camp where they hold up. As Ernest Borgnine leads them in the song Bingo, someone or something stalks them from the woods. 1/17/24
• 090. The Last Temptation of Homer – 12/9/1993
  • Homer and several other workers at the power plant are nearly gassed to death by a leak, only to find that one of the emergency doors is painted on. Charlie (Dan Castellaneta), the dangerous emissions supervisor, requests that Mr. Burns rectify this, so Burns sends him to India via a pneumatic tube. To replace Charlie, they hire an illegal alien named Zutroy (Dan Castellaneta), causing them to be invaded by Department of Labor, who demands that the plant hire more women. They rectify this by hiring an attractive lady named Mindy Simmons (Michelle Pfeiffer), with whom Homer becomes instantly attracted. Homer’s friends advise him to get to know her so that he can see that the two of them have nothing in common, but on the contrary, he finds that they are exactly alike in many ways. Meanwhile, Mrs. Krabappel assumes that it was Bart who painted the school parking spaces closer together and vows to call on him first for every question. Bart quickly discovers that the words on the chalkboard are blurry to him, so Marge takes him to the eye doctor. They give him huge temporary glasses, and because of some other issues, they slick his hair down, give him lift shoes, and spray his throat making him sound like Jerry Lewis. When Bart returns to school, the bullies all descend on him, and he quickly realizes that he is now a nerd. Homer hopes that seeing Marge will quell his lust for Mindy, but when he gets home, he finds that she has a bad cold and looks terrible. When Homer knocks a phone booth over, he dreams of a guardian angel in the form of Hogan’s Heroes Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) who shows him what life would be like if he married Mindy. Unfortunately, he and Mindy are rich and happy together, while Marge is the First Lady in the White House. While Bart is running from bullies in the school, Martin shows him a secret spot within the wall of the school where the nerds go to work on their homework. Homer decides to tell Mindy that they need to avoid each other at work since they have an obvious attraction, but when Mr. Burns sees them talking, he likes the comaraderie between them and decides to send them to the Energy Convention together. They manage to avoid any physical contact, but wind up on the bed, ordering room service and eating like pigs. When the come to the last chili dog, they share it from each end and wind up touching lips. They decide to never be alone together, but they are named as the King and Queen of Energy of the convention and given a night alone at Madame Chao’s. When Homer’s fortune cookie indicates he will find a new love, he is ready to give into temptation. Mindy can tell that he feels guilty when he starts crying, so she tells him that he needs to follow his heart and do whatever he thinks best. Although they share a quick kiss, ultimately Homer calls Marge to come and join him at the hotel. Bart is finally able to shed all of the accessories and return to school. Although he is no longer a nerd, the bullies still beat him up. 1/17/24
• 091. $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)  – 12/16/1993
  • A vintage newsreel highlights Springfield as one of the nation’s fastest growing cities. In the current day, Henry Kissinger visits the Springfield Nuclear Plant and drops his glasses in the toilet, and when Homer finds them, he begins wearing them. When Mr. Burns gets word that the economy is failing, he decides to lay off employees, but seeing Homer with the glasses, thinks that he is an egghead that needs to keep his job. As the economic slump moves across Springfield, Mayor Quimby hosts a town hall meeting and proposes that the town turn to legalized gambling. Many people look to Marge as the moral compass, but she sees the benefits in raising money this way. Mr. Burns takes charge of building the casino and sees opportunities to fill his own coffers. Boxer Gerry Cooney (himself) is brought in to act as host for the grand opening. Burns hires Homer to be a blackjack dealer, and then keeps his eyes glued to the video monitors all over the casino. Bart tries to play games in the casino, but he is quickly kicked out for being underage. He decides to start his own casino in his treehouse, even managing to meet Robert Goulet (himself) at the airport and tricking him into performing at his casino. Marge comes to meet Homer at the casino and finds a quarter on the floor, which she pops into a slot machine. When it pays off, she quickly becomes addicted to gambling and cannot be pulled away. As Mr. Burns becomes richer and richer, he also becomes more and more eccentric, soon resembling a bearded Howard Hughes, afraid of germs and using jar to urinate into. Marge begins to completely neglect the family, not noticing when Maggie crawls away from her at the casino and into harm’s way of the tiger from the circus act Gunter (Hank Azaria) and Ernst (Harry Shearer). She had also promised Lisa to help her with the Geography Pageant, forcing her to wear a shoddy costume that her father helped her create. After also becoming frightened of a bogeyman in the house, Homer decides he’s had enough of Marge’s addiction, so he heads to the casino and goes on a rampage looking for her. This causes him to be demoted back to the power plant, but he is successful in convincing Marge she has a problem and needs some professional help. Mr. Burns also decides that he misses the plant and decides to abandon the casino and return to it. Lisa wins special recognition for her Florida costume, as the judges are convinced that she must have had to complete it by herself. Homer is pleased that he finally has something he can laud over Marge, despite all of his own shortcomings. Dan Castellaneta is the rich Texan. 1/19/24
• 092. Homer the Vigilante – 1/6/1994
  • One night while the family is asleep, a burglar enters the Simpson home and steals Lisa’s saxophone, Bart’s TV, and Marge’s necklace. The burglar leaves behind his calling card indicating his name is the Springfield Cat Burglar. The burglar hits a total of fifteen residential houses that night across the Springfield. Many neighbors put in high-tech security systems to thwart the bandit. Grandpa Simpson thinks he sees the Cat Burglar in his nursing home, but it is only fellow resident Malloy (Sam Neill) looking to borrow some ointment. Lisa laments the loss of her sax especially, so Homer replaces it with a musical jug. When she breaks down crying, he vows to get back the sax. When the cat burglar continues to strike, Ned Flanders visits Moe’s Tavern to encourage everyone in the neighborhood to get involved by forming a neighborhood watchdog group. Homer volunteers to be in charge of it, and soon they have a full-fledged group of vigilantes who travel around town enforcing minor infractions like burning leaves without a permit and graffiti. Homer is confronted by Ken Brockman on Frontline, but while they are on the air, they get a call from a man claiming to be the cat burglar who tells Homer that he is holding Marge’s necklace. He also tells Homer that he plans to rob the Springfield Museum and to steal the world’s largest Cubic Zirconia. The museum is surrounded by armed guards, but Homer is distracted from his post when he sees underaged kids drinking beer and decides to join them. The Cat Burglar sneaks into the museum and gets the Zirconia. Homer is ostracized for the robbery and pelted by vegetables by the other neighbors. Grampa, who has his offer to join the vigilante group denied, comes to Homer’s house and tells him that he knows who the burglar is. He believes that the burglar is Malloy, who he caught walking up the museum building in his sneakers. He also has the world’s largest Cubic Zirconia sitting on his coffee table. Homer announces to the gathered crowds that he knows where the burglar is, and they all head to the retirement home. Malloy returns all of the merchandise to the citizens, including Lisa’s saxophone. Everyone is so taken by how nice Malloy is that they want to let him go, but Chief Wiggum puts him in jail anyway. While Malloy is sitting in jail, he lets it slip to Homer and some of the cops that he has hidden his treasure under a big “T” somewhere in Springfield. Soon everyone in town is looking for it, and when no one in town can figure out his clue, Malloy gives them address and directions to get to the address. Soon the whole town is after the treasure, which turns out to be buried under a tree shaped like a “T”. Otto Mann unburies a suitcase with a note inside telling everyone that there is no treasure, but while everyone was looking, he has escaped jail. No one likes this, so they all keep digging to see if they can find anything else. They all dig so deep in the hole that they’re not sure how to get out. Dan Castellaneta is the voice of Otto Meyere form the film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. 2/4/24
• 093. Bart Gets Famous – 2/3/1994
  • Bart is excited because he has a class field trip, while Lisa is happier to stay with academic pursuits and daydream about Bart being her servant later in life. However, Bart’s excitement is short-lived when he finds out that they are once again touring the box factory. The factory manager (Dan Castellaneta) conducts a boring tour, but Bart is more distracted by Channel 6 next door, so he sneaks out of the factory to visit the station. No one from the school can find him, so they call Homer to come to the factory, where he believes that Bart was turned into a box. Meanwhile, Bart explores the studio and eats all of the Danishes belonging to Krusty the Clown. Bart swipes the Danishes that belong to broadcaster Kent Brockman and gives them to Krusty. Although Krusty has no recollection of Bart saving his job in the past, he offers Bart the job of being his assistant on the set. Bart initially finds the job rewarding, but then starts to feel overworked and abused, hardly able to stay awake in school. Bart eventually gets asks to do a walk-on and say one line on Krusty’s TV show. However, before Bart can get out his full lie, he trips on the stage and knocks over the entire set, much to the delight of the audience. Furthermore, when Bart utters the phrase “I didn’t do it,” it quickly catches on, and the audience demands to see more and more of Bart on the show. Bart quickly becomes the rage all over town, with everyone asking him to say his famous line. He records his own song, appears on Late Night with Conan O’Brien hosted by Conan O’Brien (himself), and has his own line of toys made in his image. Bart gets tired of the whole thing and imagines himself as a washed-up guest on Matchgame 2034. Just as he’s about to give it all up, his mother reminds him that his job makes other people happy. He realizes that everyone is counting on him and decides to throw his heart into his work. Unfortunately, on the next show, no one finds him funny any longer. He can’t get a laugh no matter what he does, so Krusty tells him he’s washed up and throws him out of the studio. Lisa points out that he can now go back to being himself instead of being just a one-dimensional character with a silly catchphrase… just as he, Homer, Marge, Maggie, Ned Flanders, Barney Gumble, Martin Prince, and Mr. Burns all deliver the lines and noises they are best known for, much to Lisa’s irritation. 2/1/24
• 094. Homer and Apu – 2/10/1994
  • When Apu marks down some expired ham at the Kwik-E-Mart, Homer quickly snatches it up and eats it, which lands him in the hospital with stomach pains. When Homer confronts Apu about it, he merely offers Homer some funny-smelling shrimp as compensation. While watching Bite Back with Kent Brockman and His Channel 6 Consumer Watchdog, Lisa suggests that he go to Brockman to report Apu’s bad business practices. The show sends Homer in to record Apu with a hidden camera inside a novelty cowboy hat, but when Homer hears the buzzing in the hat, he assumes it is full of bees and smashes it on the floor of the shop. Nevertheless, it still manages to record Apu putting a hot dog dropped on the floor and covered with dirt out for sale… which Homer is the one to purchase. As a result, the footage makes the news and Apu is fired by representatives from Kwik-E-Mart. Actor James Woods (himself) is hired to take Apu’s place to run the store, a job he desires because he wants to research a similar character who he will be playing in his next film. Apu realizes that this is all Homer’s fault, so he goes to pay Homer a visit. Homer initially thinks that Apu is trying to kill him, but then realizes that Apu has realized that it is his own negligence that got him into trouble, and he offers to become Homer’s servant to pay him back for his misdeeds. Apu cooks, cleans, and teaches the Simpson family, until they start to look at him as a member of the family. Since Apu doesn’t want to go to the Kwik-E-Mart to shop, Marge takes him to the new Mostromart, where Apu seems to know all of the inner-workings of the business. Apu sings a rousing song called Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart? However, when Apu is caught sulking on the Simpson rooftop, they realize that he really does miss the Kwik-E-Mart and wants his job back. Apu plans to go see the brass in the head Kwik-E-Mart office and Homer offers to go with him, not realizing that the head office is in India. Homer flies across the world and then they hike to the first Kwik-E-Mart on a mountaintop, and they meet the CEO (Harry Shearer) who allows them to ask him three questions. Homer quickly interrupts and wastes the three questions, and Apu is consequently then turned away without recovering his job. Apu finally loses his temper and tries to strangle Homer. Apu comes back to America beside himself with grief. Apu decides to go to the Kwik-E-Mart and face his demons. James Woods is honored to meet Apu, as he’s heard about his famous 96-hour shift. As they are chatting, a robber enters and fires his gun at James Woods, but Apu jumps in front of him and saves his life. The bullet ricochets off of a bullet that was already lodged in his body. Woods is so grateful that he gets Apu his job back. The entire family gives Apu a big hug as he lays in the hospital. Michael Carrington is the voice of the TV comedian. 2/1/24
• 095. Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy – 2/17/1994
  • When Grandpa Simpson attends a meet and greet for Matlock and sees him get trampled and taken away in an ambulance, he starts to number the days in his own life. He decides to give his family their inheritance early, and one of the items is a cigar box full of old silver dollars that rich people used to discard and throw to him. The family decides to go spend the money at the mall, and while Homer is occupied dancing on a giant electronic piano keyboard, Lisa fights the crowd to get the latest Malibu Stacy (voice of Nancy Cartwright) doll. When they get home and everyone starts avoiding Grandpa, Homer explains to him that he loves him but that he is a strange old man who nobody likes. He decides to make the most of his remaining life and gets a job working as a clerk at Krusty Burger. When Lisa starts playing with her new doll, she is disturbed to find that the doll is so clearly self-loathing and degrading towards women. Lisa takes up the cause and tries to call and complain to the doll manufacturer’s headquarters, but instead finds out that they give tours. Lisa decides it would be better if she and her mother visit in person so that she can complain. During the tour, Lisa learns that the company was founded by a now-reclusive woman named Stacy Lavelle (Kathleen Turner), and also that it is Waylon Smithers who has the world’s largest collection of Malibu Stacy dolls. When Lisa’s complaints fall on deaf ears, Lisa attempts to go through Mr. Smithers to track down Stacy Lavelle. She finds her mansion, and Lavelle lets her come inside. Lisa is able to convince her that they need to update the doll, so Lavelle helps her get her own doll produced, which they name Lisa Lionheart and include more empowering feminine talking quotes. Kent Brockman’s daughter (Nancy Cartwright) convinces Brockman to do a story on Lisa Lionheart, while the Malibu Stacy division at the manufacturer’s plant figures out how to counter the marketing nightmare. As a group of little girls rush to the toy store to pick up the new Lisa Lionheart dolls, the clerk wheels out the new offering from Malibu Stacy, who is now wearing a new hat. Most of the girls – and Mr. Smithers – all switch gears and pick up the new Malibu Stacy doll. Lisa is disappointed, but then sees one little girl grabbing a Lisa Lionheart, so she is thrilled that she was at least able to touch one person. After Grandpa plays pranks and suffers wartime flashbacks at his new job, he decides to join a group of elderly complainers and quits the job at Krusty Burger. 2/2/24
• 096. Deep Space Homer – 2/24/1994
  • Homer, having never been awarded with a Worker of the Week award, is disappointed to be passed over once again in favor of an inanimate carbon rod. While sulking at home, Bart writes on his head in magic marker “Insert Brain Here,” causing Homer to scurry around in circles trying to read it. Later, while he is watching a space mission on TV, he gets so bored that he panics when he can’t change the channel due to dead batteries in the remote control. Meanwhile, the brass at NASA are concerned about their Neilsen ratings being incredibly low. They put together a meeting and decide that the public seems to favor the common man based on popular TV shows like Home Improvement and Married…with Children. Later, Homer makes a prank call from Moe’s to NASA to complain about their boring space TV programs. NASA traces the call to Moe’s and sends two agents to track down the caller. Homer becomes scared and blames it on Barney, but then when he realizes that they want him for a space mission, he confesses that it was him. NASA has a fitness contest between the two of them to see who will qualify. Homer thinks he is a shoo-in when they tell the guys that they can’t drink as they are getting prepared. To his surprise, Barney stops drinking and proves to be in better shape and more adept than Homer. They end up awarding the spot to Barney, but when they toast the occasion with non-alcoholic champagne, Barney suddenly becomes drunk and runs off with the bottle, leaving Homer the selected man for the mission. NASA provides experienced astronauts Race Banyon (Hank Azaria) and Buzz Aldrin (himself) to accompany Homer in space. After watching a particularly violent episode of The Itchy and Scratchy Show that finds Scratchy being tortured in space, Homer starts to have second thoughts about the mission. Marge is able to talk him into taking advantage of such an opportunity. After the men get into space, Homer opens up a bag of potato chips that he’s smuggled aboard, and they all float around them. Homer floats along with them and tries to eat them all, but winds up crashing into a glass ant farm, which also releases ants into the air. Viewers of the mission at home believe that the ship has been overtaken by giant ants. All the while, music legend James Taylor (himself) plays them acoustic guitar numbers You’ve Got a Friend and Fire and Rain via satellite. He also gives NASA the idea to use a vacuum to rid the air of the chip and ant debris. Homer doesn’t buckle himself in and nearly flies into space through the hatch. The other men pull him in, but he breaks the handle on the hatch causing the door to fail to latch. Banyon attacks Homer, but Homer defends himself with a carbon rod, which he accidentally gets stuck in the door handle, effectively sealing the door shut. After they successfully land into a building holding a news reporters convention, Buzz Aldrin attempts to give Homer the credit, but the public gives all of the credit to an inanimate carbon rod. Homer’s family all see him as a hero, but Bart won’t actually say. Instead, he writes the word “Hero” on Homer’s head. Maggie Roswell is the voice of Peggy Bundy. Dan Castellaneta is the voice of Al Bundy and the head of NASA. Pamela Hayden is the voice of reporter Toby Hunter. 2/2/24

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