Itchy & Scratchy Land (aka Bort, Retry, Fail?)

Let's take a look at one of the strangest and most ambitious installments in The Simpsons' classic run, "Itchy & Scratchy Land" of Season 6 (2F01), an episode born out of much the same thirst for rebellion as "Treehouse of Horror V", which aired shortly after. As then-showrunner David Mirkin explains on the episode's DVD commentary, it came about at a time when media violence was one of the hot political issues of the day, and tighter regulations were being enforced in an effort to sanitise the airwaves. Fox had recently informed The Simpsons that they could no longer use Itchy and Scratchy, and that any further installments from the cat and mouse would be met with a swift visit from Fox's censorship scissors. Unfazed, the show's creative team called Fox's bluff by concocting an entire episode set around the bloodthirsty antics of Itchy and Scratchy, daring their overlords to whip them into line. Kyle Ryan, reviewing the episode on the AV Club, suggests that Fox's objections were indicative of a fundamental failure on their part to understand the point The Simpsons was looking to make: "the preposterous violence of Itchy and Scratchy satirized cartoon violence—the message behind was clearly concerned about the content of entertainment geared toward impressionable children. In their own way, the Simpsons writers were Helen Lovejoys: “Won’t someone think of the children?!”" Were they, though? Not according to Mirkin himself, whose own words on the DVD commentary are "comedy violence, I think, is therapeutic and not troublesome", before descending into a full-blown rant of the "I was raised on a steady diet of cartoon violence and it didn't turn me into a serial killer" ilk. (I do not disagree with the point Mirkin raises, although I kind of wish he hadn't taken up a third of commentary time in making it, meaning that we don't get to hear anecdotes about the road trip the family takes in the first act, including one of the series' finest and most underrated gags.)

Itchy and Scratchy are two of the longest-standing supporting characters on The Simpsons, having made their first appearance all the way back in the Tracey Ullman era. They are profoundly useful characters, providing an easy analogue by which the series can make self-reflexive gags about itself and the animation industry in general. Their main raison d'être, however, has always been to satirise anxieties surrounding media violence and its hypothetical effect on those who watch it. Their first Ullman short, which opens with Homer complaining that Itchy & Scratchy is too violent and ends with him throttling Bart, points an obvious accusatory finger at the hypocrisies of the family values brigade which painted television as the root cause of familial disarray. The issue was revisited, in greater depth, in the Season 2 episode "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge". There, Marge's crusade against cartoon violence is depicted with more sympathy than was Homer's in the aforementioned Ullman short, while the purveyors of senseless violence, Meyers and his cronies, come across quite unfavourably. It's still evident that the writers are not on her side, however. Overall I think the series backs Mirkin's stance about media violence providing a valuable and healthy outlet for our emotional debris, albeit from a distinctly double-edged angle that also satirises the very nature of that fascination. The Simpsons celebrates the vital role that violent imagery plays in our lives and the well-defined need it meets, all while making no bones about what a perverse and ugly need that frankly is. The Itchy & Scratchy Show might be senseless violence, but its depraved energy in always wanting to push the boundaries of good taste engenders a kind of admiration, even if that admiration is ultimately tempered by the uproarious laughter with which the characters react in-universe. They laugh just a little too loud and hard at the sight of a mouse making mincemeat of a cat. This becomes more salient two or three seasons in, when the series shifted away from the Tom & Jerry model and took to depicting Scratchy as an innocent victim who is butchered by Itchy for no discernible reason. The characters' total indifference toward the plight of this hapless cartoon cat is disconcerting, even if it is all make-believe. I feel that one of the protestors in "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge" raises a sound philosophical point on their signage in positing: "What if they blew up a cat and nobody laughed?"

"Itchy & Scratchy Land" might have been conceived as a gigantic FU to the FCC, but what it ultimately endures as is the most flagrantly (and deliciously) anti-Disney episode the show ever yielded. In this one, The Simpsons really sharpens its claws and goes after The Big D - which, these days, obligates some acknowledgement of the fundamental ironies of life (how much longer until guys in ridiculous Bart Simpson suits are getting kicked in the shins by kids at Disneyland?). It's also pertinent to note that, as the Simpsons universe expanded over the years, so too did the cultural significance of Itchy & Scratchy. Earlier episodes never let on that they were anything other than a crudely conceived and animated junk cartoon that fascinated kids but was generally looked down upon by the adult populace, who wished they could be watching something more constructive (I note that Bob kept Itchy & Scratchy during his brief tenure as top TV clown, even when he revamped everything else, but this may have been a contractual obligation he had no control over). Later, it was established that the characters, and their bloodthirsty antics, had a rich and long-running legacy dating back to the Golden Age of Animation. By the time we reached this particular installment, it was clear that the characters are this universe's equivalent of Mickey Mouse, an institution as powerful and iconic as that of Walt Disney. Such expansion was necessary to satirise other aspects of the animation industry beyond the Simpsons' own televisual turf (although as a side-effect, the larger Itchy & Scratchy grew in magnitude, the greater the suspension of disbelief required that these world-renowned toons would be made in Springfield, of all places). Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie, from the Season 4 episode of the same name, was potentially inspired by the actual Tom and Jerry: The Movie (it predates that film's stateside release by several months, although I'm sure that others in the animation industry were aware of the film's existence at the time the episode was written), but the story seems to have been conceived more as a reaction to the newly-awakened Disney Renaissance, the recent success of Beauty and The Beast having done a lot to restore the commercial and artistic credibility of the animated feature.* Suddenly, the industry was ripe with optimism. Here, the main gag seems to revolve around the absurdity that the prospect of seeing this ridiculous cartoon translated onto the big screen should be hailed as such an earth-shattering cultural milestone. Bart is denied seeing the much-anticipated film as a punitive measure by Homer, and since the viewer sees the episode predominantly from Bart's perspective, we share his frustration at being shut out of the event; at the same time, and for all the plaudits heaped on it by the rest of Springfield, the viewer is plagued by a nagging doubt as to just how good this movie could actually be. Common sense would dictate that a formula as aggressively basic as Itchy & Scratchy's does not lend itself to long-form storytelling. And yet the accolades get all the more ridiculous. The movie receives a novelisation by Norman Mailer, runs for eight months and wins nine Academy Awards. When, in a flash-forward forty years into the future, Bart and the viewer are finally awarded a glimpse of the forbidden feature, it frankly comes as no surprise to see that there is nothing to distinguish it from your common or garden Itchy & Scratchy cartoon (an aged Bart and Homer watch the film in mild bewilderment, and Homer opines that "Itchy's a jerk" as if this has just come as an epiphany to him). In a clever visual gag, we see that, in this inverted universe, the acclaimed Beauty and The Beast has attained only B-movie status, as an extra attached to the main attraction.

By Season 6, Itchy and Scratchy's popularity was gargantuan enough for them to have an entire amusement park constructed in their honor - there, the Disney allusion is finally completed when we learn something of the original creator of Itchy & Scratchy, Roger Meyers Sr, an unsubtle stand-in for Walt Disney. How unsubtle? We're told that Meyers Sr loved almost everybody and that he, in return, was beloved by the world "except in 1938 when he was criticised for his controversial cartoon, Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors." A hilarious gag, and one certain to piss off the Disney aficionado in your life, it does more than just provide a cheeky nod to Walt's alleged (though hotly contested) antisemitism. It suggests that there's a dark underbelly to the purported magic of the Itchy & Scratchy empire - this malaise manifests itself all over the park, but the reference to Roger Meyers Sr's fascist leanings make it especially alarming when, shortly after, Bart is apprehended by a couple of sinister-looking security personnel and hauled off to the Itchy & Scratchy equivalent of Disneyland Jail (that's an actual thing).

This was not the first time that The Simpsons had taken a swipe at Disneyland. Duff Gardens, the shoddy amusement park visited by Bart, Lisa and Selma in the Season 4 episode "Selma's Choice", was ostensibly a parody of Busch Gardens, a park similarly owned by a beer company, but many of the attractions were digs at some of the most iconic features encountered at Disneyland (Small Word ride, Hall of Presidents, Main Street Electrical Parade). There the joke didn't go much further than the park being badly-run and a colossal letdown. Itchy & Scratchy Land, on the other hand, is a whole different level of evil, one that by turns plays like a nightmare vision of a dystopian future, or a glimpse into a twisted parallel reality. So much about the park feels profoundly, eerily wrong, and not just the violent motif that has Marge so repulsed. In the second act a lot of the really troublesome stuff tends to be happening on a more muted level. There's a park executive who seems to be stalking Marge, showing up a little too conveniently every time she expresses her reservations. A disturbingly large percentile of the park's visitors identify to the creepy and unpleasant moniker of "Bort". To say nothing of the horrors Maggie encounters when she's dumped in The Ball Room for the duration of the family's visit. The park is an odd, off-kilter place, one that plainly doesn't adhere to the same reality as the rest of the world. Part of this taps into the paradoxical discomfort brought on by the zealous measures deployed by Disneyland to maintain a strictly controlled environment. George Ritzer has something to say about this in The McDonaldizaton of Society, when he describes the almost utopic qualities of the Disneyland milieu - "Visitors will likely not have their day disrupted by the sight of public drunkenness. Crime in these parks is virtually nonexistent" [although still existent enough to necessitate Disneyland Jail] - before hinting that there may be a hidden price to all this cleanliness:  "Disney offers a world of predictable, almost surreal orderliness." (p.112-13) In the Itchy & Scratchy equivalent, there is a heartless, calculated coldness to the efficiency, one that shows little regard for anything below the most surface level of emotions. This is particularly evident in The Ball Room, where the babies' inactivity is equated with satiation; the daycare staff are oblivious to how much the babies dislike the plastic balls, the physical weight of which renders them unable to play. When Maggie and the other babies finally manage to claw their way to the top of the ball heap, the staff are alarmed, and their go-to response is to bury them under even more balls.

On arrival, the family are transported to the main body of the park by helicopter, where they are assured by the pilot that, "Nothing can possi-blye go wrong." He then insists that his mispronunciation of the word "possibly" is the first thing that's ever gone wrong, something that does little to quell the family's unease. The appearance of the helicopter is a nod to Steven Spielberg's latest action blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993), and at this point it's worth acknowledging that the episode first aired on October 2nd, 1994, making the plot an obvious product of Jurassic Park hype (although it clearly predates Pulp Fiction - there is a wry jab therein at the state of John Travolta's career pre-Pulp). Jurassic Park, of course, was centred around a revolutionary theme park in which specimens from the age of the dinosaur were resurrected and showcased for the amusement of guests, and which offered enormous and very obvious potential for things to go spectacularly wrong. In one of the film's most iconic one-liners, Jeff Goldblum's character contrasts the hazards of the park with the relative orderliness of Disneyland, noting that, "if the Pirates of The Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists." For viewers with Jurassic Park still fresh in their minds, the helicopter scene would have provided a major tip-off as to the nature of what would inevitably to go wrong at Itchy & Scratchy Land, a promise finally fulfilled in the third act when the park's animatronics malfunction and turn against the guests - although the presence of killer robots in place of dinosaurs has the outcome more closely resemble that of the 1973 film Westworld, directed by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton (the pilot's self-defeating assurance is a variation on a gag used on the Westworld poster, which told us that "Nothing can possibly go worng."). The family are abandoned and forced to fend off armies of renegade robots by being obnoxious tourists and directing the flash on their cameras here, there and everywhere. It's an exciting finale, and one that realises a personal nightmare of series creator Matt Groening, who has spoken about his childhood phobia of robots in numerous venues. But, let's face it, it's a less persuasive nightmare than the one we've already experienced, concerning how the park operates on any given day. The Jurassic Park/Westworld homages, while cute, are neither the backbone of the episode, nor the real anxieties articulated in the verbal flubs of the helicopter pilot. That has more to do with how Disney endeavors to manufacture the perfectly immaculate family day out, in which all of our enjoyment is carefully pre-determined, our every need hotly anticipated, and our desires all aggressively funneled. To an extent, we welcome the surveillance, and the predictability - the last thing we want is for anything nasty or unexpected to happen when we ride Pirates of The Caribbean, after all. But there's something kind of stifling about it too - and still ample room for error, mechanical or human, to worm its way into the most airtight of systems.

Oh, but I've gotten way ahead of things here. At its heart, "Itchy & Scratchy Land" is an episode about the Simpsons taking a family vacation, something we hadn't seen them do since as far back as the Season 1 episode "Call of The Simpsons". Marge, who has a pre-established distaste for the violent antics of Itchy & Scratchy, was hoping for a more peaceful vacation at the Highway 9 Bird Sanctuary (home of a diner-shaped bird feeder, on a really high pole) but is eventually won over by the promise of recipe-related bumper cars. She has some lingering reservations, however, based on her experiences in past vacations. Marge yearns for an ordinary family vacation, instead of one where "we end up in a big fight and we come home more miserable than when we left" (do you want to tell her or shall I?). And, for as wild as the episode gets in its third act, it starts out in a fairly down-to-earth place, and is quite happy to take its time in getting to the main attraction. The family do not arrive at the pivotal location until a third of the way into the episode - before then, we get to experience the drudgery that accompanies any extensive road trip. The mileage the episode gets out this is just as toothsome as the Disney skewering, what with the endless roadblocks, the dull landmarks and the jabbering AM radio. There's a shrewd reminder that it's not just our amusement parks that artfully distort and command our desires - in a wonderful, wonderful gag, Bart and Lisa become increasingly enraptured by a series of billboards advertising their increasing proximity to a Flickey's eatery, for no other reason than that it offers relief from the monotony. When Homer curtly denies them the stop, the kids are immediately greeted by another a billboard, seemingly positioned only to taunt onlookers with the information that they are now 25,000 miles from the next Flickey's (I see what you did there), and that their chance for salvation has passed them by. The power of the sequence lies in the viewer's empathy for Bart and Lisa, their youthful curiosity as to what might lie ahead and their frustration in being utterly at the mercy of parental control. But it's equally hilarious just how much anticipation is built up for the looming eatery through such a hopelessly banal succession of imagery. We feel Bart and Lisa's disappointment whilst being wise to the unlikelihood that they missed out on a one-of-a-kind experience, for Flickey's is almost certainly no different to any other eatery they're bound to encounter along the way. All that the relentless signage does is prey on the need for alleviation from tedium, and in that regard we might see Itchy & Scratchy Land as doing more-or-less the same thing, in convincing consumers of a magical reality lying straight up ahead.

On the surface, the sadistic violence of Itchy & Scratchy would appear to be the very antithesis of the wholesome values and fairy tale fantasies embodied by the Walt Disney brand (although I would note that the "Steamboat Willie" parody from "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is probably less disturbing to modern sensibilities than the real thing). But they meet much the same end, in offering their clientele the realisation of dreams they were probably unaware they even had until they were packaged and sold to them as the ultimate in wish fulfillment. Sara Raley, in McDonaldization: The Reader, defines Disneyland as "every child's media-generated fantasy" (p.127), which is echoed here in Bart's observation that the hideous robot parade, "is so much like my dreams, it's scary" (the true banality of the experience, meanwhile, is summed up in Homer's proclamation that, "It's the 12:00 robot parade! Hurry up or we'll have to wait for the 12:05 parade!"). Visitors to Itchy & Scratchy Land are pre-conditioned to find their escapism in violent fantasy, and to that end Itchy & Scratchy certainly offers the ultimate in barbarous wish fulfillment. The very premise of the cartoon is one of cruelty without consequence - Marge challenges the executive who insists otherwise with a hilariously pedantic example ("On TV, that mouse pulled out that cat's lungs and played them like a bagpipe, but in the next scene the cat was breathing comfortably!"), but neglects the most obvious, which is that none of Itchy's demented antics have any kind of lasting impact on Scratchy. The cat always comes back, alive and unharmed, and the viewer is not encouraged to have stakes in the outcome of any given episode. The climactic showdown, in which the animatronics direct their homicidal programming at the park's guests, can be seen as the logical progression of this, with a society that revels in simulations of blood and mangling finally having its fantasies made a little too real and turned back on itself. This is a point that Marge puts to Bart and Lisa in the very last scene, in offering the episode's ostensible moral: "I hope you realize now that violence on TV may be funny, but it's not so funny when that violence is happening to you." The sincerity of the message is immediately undermined by Bart's response, "But it would be funny to someone who was watching us," thus tapping on the fourth wall and implicating the show's own audience in the ongoing fascination with violent fantasy. The Simpsons' disastrous visit to Itchy & Scratchy Land was our own joyous escapism, and the episode posits that it is as essential to us as the feel-good fantasies of Disney's happily ever afters.

 

Of course, for a park founded on the reassurance that nothing can possi-blye go wrong, Itchy & Scratchy Land seems awfully determined to tempt fate, as we see when the family takes a ride on the log flume, a heinously unsafe amalgamation of Splash Mountain and Pirates of The Caribbean that ends with the carriage being severed by a ripsaw and the occupants having to leap out to safety onto a heap of mattresses below. This sequence highlights the other, somewhat incongruous fantasy on which the park has built its public image - the promise of refuge from the realities of family living, aka the one on which Marge has pinned her own emotional investment for the visit - and how this, too, is fated to fall apart. The ride starts out serenely, accompanied by the sounds of a twanging banjo that is obviously designed to replicate that heard at the start of Pirates of The Caribbean, but puts us on edge for how eerily reminiscent it also is of certain details from the movie Deliverance. Marge comments that, "This is just what I was hoping for...spending the day together as a family," and even before the ride suddenly gives way to a stomach-rending drop, there's a falseness to this image of immaculate family bliss, brought on by the crudeness of the ride's cheesy cardboard props, a ludicrously unconvincing realisation of actual imagination. The log ride splits the family down the middle (although not literally, as it so easily could have done), and Marge willfully abandons her visions of family togetherness so that she and Homer can head off to the park's big draw for the adult set, Parents' Island (a play on Disney World's Pleasure Island), in search of a very different kind of escapism - one in which time stands completely still. The attractions of the island are rooted heavily in a nostalgia for the past and a resistance to the realities of time, although there is a small disturbance to this fantasy in the signage of Itchy's 70s Disco, which recreates the 70s down to the smallest detail but advertises itself as being established in 1980. More telling is Marge's exchange with a waiter at T.G.I. McScratchy's, where New Year's Eve is being celebrated in a continuous loop (a nod to an actual practice at Pleasure Island, in which every night was New Year's Eve for fifteen years straight). Marge tells the waiter that, "It must be wonderful to ring in the new year over and over", to which he implores her to kill him. Visitors to T.G.I. McScratchy's want the symbolic promise of the new year - the renewal and the optimism for what might lie ahead - but none of the ramifications of the passage of time, ie: a world that is constantly changing and the unwelcome reminders that they are adding further years to their own lives. The actual horrors of being permanently stranded in such a hollow spectacle are indicated in the plight of the waiter, who, we later learn from the surveillance team in the park's ominous underground quarters, has gone out to the roof of the bar and is threatening to jump. Their words also make it clear that he is not the first employee to be driven to suicidal despair by the monotony of the park's routines. One person's escapist fantasy is another's stifling nightmare.

In spite of everything, by the third act Marge does appear to have come around to the park, for she is seen purchasing t-shirts with the slogan "Best Vacation Ever", although by this point she has shed her emotional baggage in the form of her entire family - Homer has wandered off and is about to cause her a world of embarrassment by harassing a costumed employee and getting dragged to the same detention facility as Bart. Following the robot rampage, Marge is all prepared to condemn the vacation as a write-off, although Bart and Lisa attempt to counter this by pointing out how it met all of her requisites for an ideal family outing - in their battle against the renegade animatronics, the family were brought together and got a lot of exercise outdoors. Ostensibly, Marge agrees, but then immediately goes back on her final requisite, that the family create a lot of happy memories, with her instruction that they never speak of it again (a call-back to something said by Homer earlier on in the episode, when his impromptu shortcut caused the family unspecified grief en route to the park). On a meta level, it's a reference to the unlikelihood of the episode's events being brought up again in the show's continuity, so Marge knows intuitively that it's easier just to nod her head and move on. A lot of your trauma gets conveniently consigned to oblivion when your life follows an episodic structure.

Some random observations:

• Among past family vacation embarrassments is a trip to Amish Country, which recreates a scene from Peter Weir's 1985 film Witness. Homer harasses the non-violent Amish by smearing them with ice cream, like the tourists in that film. Here, Harrison Ford isn't around to kick his ass, but an actual ass manages just as well.
  
• The short-lived "Itchy & Scratchy & Friends Hour" is often assumed to be a reference to the late 80s/early 90s animated series Garfield and Friends - I suppose because their names are kind of similar and they both involve cartoon cats? I'm not really feeling that connection, however. I suspect that the "Itchy & Scratchy & Friends Hour" was intended more as a nod to the 1980s trend for cartoons featuring cute, non-threatening characters designed with their greeting card potential most in mind (which makes the inclusion of a character named Ku Klux Klam all the more disturbingly inappropriate). Garfield and Friends itself was one of the early shows to consciously move away from this trend - Mark Evanier, who wrote for the series, has been very outspoken in his criticisms of what he calls the "pro-social" cartoons of the 1980s, which he (not inaccurately) saw as promoting conformity, and in Garfield he took the opportunity to extend his middle finger through a trio of characters known as the Buddy Bears, who emphasised group harmony and explicitly discouraged independent thinking. The Simpsons, in their early days, had taken their own potshot at such cartoons with The Happy Little Elves, characters which, as I noted in my coverage of "Some Enchanted Evening", the show largely stepped away from as the trend dissipated and the satire became less relevant. Elsewhere in the animation industry, however, it seems that a number of other writers still had a lot of anger in their system for these pro-social pricks, hence the utterly savage eviscerations we continued to get well into the 90s through shows like Garfield and Friends and Rugrats.
• Ku Klux Klam himself, meanwhile, might be an additional reference to the reputed racism of Walt Disney. I notice that the character is positioned beneath an unnamed bear resembling Br'er Bear from Song of The South. Subliminal mise-en-scene?  

• For all of Groening's musings about how being cornered by a homicidal robot would be the most terrifying thing ever, the most disturbing aspect of the final showdown comes not from the mindlessness of machinery, but the vindictiveness of humanity. The family finds possible rescue on an emergency helicopter, but are denied entry by costumed employee, who recognises Bart as the one who harassed him earlier and boots him off, yelling, "When you get to Hell, tell 'em Itchy sent you!" Another reminder that acts of violence entail consequences, although the employee's retribution seems somewhat...disproportionate - given that it involves kicking a ten-year-old and abandoning a family to their presumed deaths. I would say "what the hell, Itchy?", but come to think of it that's pretty much the entire basis of Itchy's character. Itchy's a jerk.
  

* Of course, it may also have represented wish fulfillment following The Simpsons' own recent failure to get a movie off of the ground. Consideration was at one point given to expanding the plot of "Kamp Krusty" to feature length, but it didn't work out.