Amusing Tombstones: A Spirited Beginning (Treehouse of Horror edition)

It took The Simpsons six years to revisit the holiday season that kicked off their run as a standalone series, but they had no such hesitation about ringing in Halloween year after year, a tradition established with their sixteenth episode, "Treehouse of Horror" (which bore the more conventional onscreen title "The Simpsons Halloween Special"). And little wonder - the Halloween episodes yielded the perfect excuse to snake into darker and weirder territory than a regular episode would allow. Twenty-nine sequels later and the basic formula has remained unaltered - three self-contained stories, each with no bearing on the show's continuity - but the series has undergone its share of evolution over the years, and it's inevitable that we've seen a few of the early conceits and innovations be discarded along the way (for one, only the first "Treehouse of Horror" was set principally inside a treehouse, meaning that the title hasn't made a whole lot of subsequent sense, except as a callback to that original episode).

One early tradition that lasted for only the first few Treehouse of Horrors was the opening pan through the Springfield Cemetery (which, in Halloween episodes, was always conveniently located directly before the Simpsons' house), complete with an annual selection of tombstones bearing sardonic engravings. These were abandoned after "Treehouse of Horror V" because the writers figured that they had exhausted all possibilities on that front (and in fairness, they were already starting to repeat themselves by "Treehouse of Horror IV"), but for as long as they lasted, the Springfield Cemetery served as a nice all-purpose resting ground for the macabre heritage that continues to haunt our collective cultural psyches. From contemporary pop cultural digs to bizarre urban legends, it all lay buried six feet under, and only metres from the Simpsons' front yard. To mark the twenty-ninth anniversary of the original "Treehouse of Horror" (which first aired on 25th October 1990), here's a run-down of what lies beneath throughout our first graveyard stroll:

Ishmael Simpson, Ezekiel Simpson and Cornelius V. Simpson: I assumed at first that these alluded to actual historical people with the name Simpson, but my research has come up disappointingly short on the matter. So I think they're just supposed to be members of the Simpson lineage from earlier generations. Cornelius V. Simpson, though, may be an allusion to Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), a prominent 19th century American business magnate who had a major hand in shaping the country's railroad industry. Incidentally, Ishmael and Ezekiel were also the names of the two children who, in the Season 3 episode "Bart's Friend Falls In Love", were permitted to step outside and pray for us all during Ms Krabappel's sex ed class.

Garfield: I presume this refers to the fictional cat created by cartoonist Jim Davis in 1978, and not the US president James A. Garfield. As such, I'm not entirely sure what this is getting at, for in 1990 both the Garfield comic strip and TV series Garfield and Friends were still going strong. But if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say it has to do with the fact that, in 1990, Garfield was twelve years old, which is about the average lifespan for a domestic cat (it is not at all uncommon for cats to make it into their teens, but a cat as morbidly obese as Garfield probably wouldn't fare so well).

The Grateful Dead: Californian rock band founded by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Ron McKernan, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann in 1965. I don't think there's any greater subtext here than what's in the name. Dead and thankful for it.

Casper The Friendly Boy: Casper The Friendly Ghost was a character created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in 1939 for a children's book, The Friendly Ghost, who later went on to appear in a series of theatrical animated shorts from Famous Studios between 1945 and 1959, and a popular series of spin-off comics published by Harvey Comics. Casper was a young, non-threatening ghost with a greater interest in befriending the living than in haunting them, but people tended to run screaming from him anyway (as most humans don't like staring their own mortality in the face). The tombstone glimpsed at the start of "Treehouse of Horror" touches on the grim implications of the concept, in that Casper was presumably once a living child who died at a tragically young age. In the 1995 feature film Casper it was established that he died of pneumonia after playing out too long in the snow, but I think I prefer Bart and Lisa's joint hypothesis in the Season 2 episode "Three Men and A Comic Book". Bart offers a theory that Casper is the ghost of Richie Rich (a young millionaire, also of the Harvey Comics line-up). Lisa acknowledges that they do look eerily similar and muses, "Perhaps he realised how hollow the pursuit of money is and took his own life." Suddenly everything is clear.

Elvis: Rock n' roll legend Elvis Presley died of a heart attack on 16th August 1977, but the general public doesn't relinquish its cultural icons quite so easily, and since that fateful day various conspiracy theories have abounded that Elvis faked his death in order to escape the tyranny of fame and live out a private life. Hopeful fans have subsequently spotted their hero everywhere, from the Memphis International Airport to the 1990 film Home Alone (where you can reportedly see The King lingering in the background in one of the airport scenes just behind Catherine O'Hara). The Elvis conspiracy is touched on, among other places, in the 1991 film Slacker, in which a character theorises that if Elvis were alive and half-ass cool, he would be working as an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas, living out the daily spiritual hell of having to parody himself at the height of his ridiculous - which is what those of us who are over 28 are having to do every day of our lives anyway.

Your Name Here: Self-Explanatory.

Paul McCartney: More rock n' roll mythology, only this one pushing in the opposite direction of the aforementioned Elvis Presley legend. Because while we as a species might have this thing about letting go of our cultural icons, what we're really suckers for, at the end of the day, is a good cover-up story. Paul McCartney, of course, is alive and well and would later make a guest appearance in the Season 7 episode "Lisa The Vegetarian", but back in 1967 rumors circulated that he had been killed in a traffic accident and replaced with a lookalike, and lo, the "Paul Is Dead" conspiracy theory was forever cemented into popular culture. Proponents of the theory were scanning the Beatles' recent discography for hidden "clues" that the Paul featured therein was an imposter, and came up with a wealth of compelling evidence - among them, that the cover to the band's 1969 album Abbey Road showed the foursome walking in a funeral procession, amid which Paul is conspicuously out of sync with the others, and is the only one walking barefoot (because he represents the "corpse"). Paul, who was left-handed, was also holding a cigarette in his right hand, while the license plate on a car in the backdrop reads "28IF", alluding to what would have been McCartney's age, IF he had lived (in actuality, McCartney was 27 at the time). Elsewhere, some fans thought they heard John Lennon blurting out "I buried Paul" at the coda to the band's 1967 single "Strawberry Fields Forever" (the actual words, according to Lennon, were "Cranberry sauce"). Plus, the Beatles did seem eager to push this mysterious Billy Shears in "Sgt Peppers", so...might that be the true identity of our imposter? The most credible explanation would be that human beings are simply highly adept at seeing whatever they want to see, but even today there are those who remain fascinated by this legend.

Disco: Well, there is this tendency to equate disco music with death. Although as a personal rule, anyone who uses the phrase "deader than disco" is not getting into my good books.