The most striking thing about "Itchy and Scratchy: The Movie" (9F03) is how it ends. In the past, I've been critical of Season 4 for its prioritisation of gags over story and its tendency to end episodes with glib wrap-ups that resolve the central problems in only the most superficial and nonchalant of ways, but let it be said that "Itchy and Scratchy: The Movie" has an extraordinarily good ending - one which, I believe, gave us our first proper glimpse into what the world of tomorrow might have in store for the characters. Having spent the latter stages of the episode denying Bart the privilege of bearing witness to his generation's equivalent of the moon landing, Homer promises his son that he will ultimately benefit from his seeming defeat in the long-term, after which we jump ahead several decades into the future, where the fifty-year-old Bart (now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and seventy-something Homer are strolling through the streets of a seedy space age Springfield, and notice that the object of Bart's childhood fascinations is currently playing at the Aztec Theater. The series would get a lot more mileage from its vision of a futuristic Simpsons universe a couple of years down the line with "Lisa's Wedding" of Season 6, but here I think they manage to pack a wonderfully telling and succinct amount into this one short sequence. An immediate incongruity is created by the mixture of old-school science-fiction cliches (the hover cars, the flashy space age clothing) and the local environs looking as though they've barely progressed at all over the past forty years, but for the thick air of decrepitness that now hangs over them. It's a subtly pessimistic vision of what lies ahead, undercutting Homer's assurances, in the present day, that Bart is on the road to somewhere very special, although our single hint that the characters are living in a dystopian future comes in a cinemagoer's request at the snack bar for Soylent Green, which we all know is bad. Mostly, the pessimism comes from a sense of stagnation, from a civilisation that clearly hit its peak many years ago and has had nowhere to go but into decline. Callbacks to a sequence from earlier in the episode, where Bart was refused a sale by a ticket booth operator heeding a notice that he was not to admit Bart, feed into this sense of nothing moving on - the man who serves Bart and Homer in the future appears to be the same character, and if you look closely, the notice instructing him not to sell to Bart is still hanging in the booth. If you're particularly sharp-eyed, you'll not only notice that Moe's Tavern is still open, but that a senior Barney is lingering outside it (actually, I'm amazed that he would even live that long). Except that nowadays, of course, the episode's vision of a future where movie theaters are still going strong seems almost bittersweet in its optimism.
What I love most about the ending, though, is the way it seems to echo back to the opening sequence. The themes regarding the inevitability of decay and the displeasures of the aging process are reflected in the episode's very first gag, where the characters watch Star Trek XII: So Very Tired, a commentary not only on how much older the original cast of Star Trek was obviously looking with every new installment, but also the unenviable challenges in having to eke more and more life out of a long-running franchise, a point made especially salient in Kirk's jaded groan, "Again with the Klingons!" The echo to which I mainly refer, however, is in Abe's line, "Movies! What a rip-off!", which not only foreshadows the ending when Homer is charged $650 for two movie tickets, but basically predicts the entire episode trajectory. We are given every reason to believe that The Itchy & Scratchy Movie, despite the insane amount of hype it garnered on release, really wasn't worth the heartbreak in the end. But perhaps the journey was the important part.
The Simpsons crew were apparently hesitant about this ending, as they weren't keen on cementing Bart into a future in the Supreme Court on the basis of a running gag from this one episode. But it does feel entirely appropriate that we would see the adult Bart at the end, because "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" plays convincingly like a coming of age episode in which Bart is forced to make his first real transition toward maturity. When the episode starts, Bart is an incorrigible whirlwind of amorality - there isn't much of a rhyme or reason to his mayhem here, other than him having a whole lot of anarchic energy to spare. Hence, we're treated to the dizzying sight of him ripping out Abe's dentures and spinning from a ceiling fan to sounds of the "Sabre Dance" from Gayaneh, and later trying to recreate the sounds of "Jingle Bells" by hammering sachets of mustard over the living room floor. By the end of the episode, when Bart has finally accepted his lesson in accountability, it feels as though a spark has faded from within him, and that this all-out anarchy will never quite hold the same allure. There is a very beautiful moment, near the end, marking the point at which Bart basically gives up hope that he will ever get his way, and we see a leaf fall from an overhead tree, which then transitions into a shot of the same tree with its branches largely bare, and the remaining leaves dead and shriveled. Naturally, this signals a substantial elapse in time, but on a symbolic level it also indicates the death of Bart's resistance, and a facet of his youthful innocence along with it. Subsequent episodes would, of course, confirm that his anarchic spirit was as robust as ever, but as a self-contained story this feels like a powerful enough turning point as to suggest no going back. Even between those two bookends, and their respective displays of decay and stagnation, the episode does wind up making a positive point about the triumph of personal growth. At the same time, there's more than a little sadness in the proceedings, as if we are on some level sorry to see Bart's carefree spirit reined in.
A great micro-narrative, more succinct and perhaps even more poignant than Bart's loss of innocence, concerns Scratchy's loss of happiness.
"Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is fundamentally about the relationship between Bart and Homer, but it was also an important episode for the titular cat and mouse, in building upon their history and establishing that, more than just mindless filler sandwiched in between an equally mindless local clown show, they were long-standing cultural icons, filling much the same niche in this universe as Mickey Mouse, Tom & Jerry and the Looney Tunes combined. We get a good range of affectionate digs at the Golden Age of Animation, notably a well-observed parody of Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, and there's likewise opportunity for a few self-depreciating gags about the show's own production, including a glimpse in a Korean animation studio that better resembles a sweatshop. The episode also satirises the concept of an "event movie", a phenomenon largely credited as having started with Steven Spielberg's Jaws in 1975, and which had only gained more traction in the multiplex age. By possible coincidence, the most obvious models for Itchy & Scratchy, Tom & Jerry, had just released a theatrical feature film, Tom & Jerry: The Movie, when the episode first aired on November 3rd 1992, albeit only in some European markets; the film would not receive its Stateside release until 1993, although the episode title does at least seem to have been in reference to it (note that it does not match the title given to the film in the episode itself). Elsewhere in the industry, the Disney Renaissance was officially underway, with Beauty & The Beast having made history by being the first animated picture to be nominated for Best Picture (and receiving a far more dubious honor here, in being the B-picture attached to the decades-delayed re-release of The Itchy & Scratchy Movie), and theatrical animation was suddenly getting general audiences excited again, not just genre enthusiasts or parents needing to keep the kids quiet for a couple of hours. Excluded from the theatrical action were The Simpsons themselves, and it's here that we might detect a poignant undercurrent to The Itchy & Scratchy Movie's great (if somewhat improbable success) - its function as wish fulfillment, in allowing the show to live out its own big screen fantasies vicariously through the cat and mouse. The Simpsons had only recently toyed with the idea of expanding its talents into the feature film arena, but it hadn't gotten far. James L. Brooks was particularly keen to release a theatrical Simpsons film while the iron was still relatively hot (the series had already exceeded expectations in lasting this long, and Season 4 was the point at which the series showed its first real signs of self-consciousness about its own longevity). Brooks had suggested that the premise of "Kamp Krusty" be expanded to feature-length, but came into conflict with showrunner Al Jean, who felt that the premise barely had 22 minutes worth of material in it, and was also dead set on having "Kamp Krusty" as the Season 4 opener.
I sometimes wonder how this hypothetical Kamp Krusty flick would have turned out had the rest of the crew shared Brooks' enthusiasm. I'm pretty sure I can guess how the expanded plot would have gone - instead of inciting a rebellion then and there, Bart, Lisa and a few of the others would have escaped Kamp Krusty and hung around in the wilderness for a handful of scenes while they debated whether to return to civilisation or to go back and liberate the other kids. Obviously Bart would split from the others and have a change of heart, and then we'd have our climactic uprising. Basically a variation on the exact same plot they went with in the actual Simpsons Movie of 2007. It's easy enough to apply the formula when you've seen it play out numerous times. Anyway, maybe it's for the best that they didn't go that route, not least because the following year, The Addams Family Values yielded a pretty unassailable arc in taking down the Summer Camp From Hell. I suspect that the film would have done okay at the box office, though it wouldn't have touched the same heights as Beauty & The Beast. The decade went on, and several other popular animated TV shows made the leap to the big screen, including Beavis & Butt-Head, South Park and Rugrats, yet The Simpsons remained a curious outlier. There were countless rumors that a Simpsons movie was coming, but for a long time they proved bogus. I suspect that what ultimately played their hand was that by the mid-00s the series had proven itself a cultural mainstay and was guaranteed a built-in level of interest. The Simpsons Movie was upfront in its opening scene (based around an apparent sequel to The Itchy & Scratchy Movie) about the underlying con that accompanies many an upgrade from small to big screen, when Homer points a finger directly at the audience and suggests that they are a sucker for paying for something they could have seen at no extra cost at home. He was right, on one level. The Simpsons Movie was functional, but it was no more innovative, distinguished or even memorable than your typical episode of the series. You may as well as stayed at home and marathoned a few classics. (Yes, I am still somewhat sour that they left Sideshow Bob out, wouldn't you know it?)
Ah, but maybe that's to miss the true point of such a venture. The real allure of The Simpsons Movie lay not in the prospect of getting an amazing ambitious Simpsons story, but in the experience itself of seeing it on the big screen. There is something very magical about seeing a familiar property in a theatrical setting, even if the film itself proves fairly middling. I can recall my excitement, aged 5, when I learned that there was a DuckTales movie on the way, and my anxiety to see it at absolutely the closest possible opportunity. In the end, the movie left less of an impression than the experience of seeing it. Treasure of The Lost Lamp was a fine way of passing 69 minutes, but even at the time I could think of numerous episodes of the regular TV series I considered better. It was the same deal with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie - I was thrilled when I learned that it existed, and then slightly perturbed when I realised it would be live action with actors in ghastly rubber suits, not a big screen translation of the cartoon series with which I was familiar, but a Turtles movie's a Turtles movie, right? For years, there were only two scenes from the actual film that stayed with me - one of the turtles (I forget which) spitting water into the face of one of the Foot Clan, and the final confrontation between Splinter and Shredder. But I never forgot the gleeful anticipation of wandering down that sticky cinema lobby to see it.
And so it is with Bart and The Itchy & Scratchy Movie. When he learns of the movie's existence, he's filled with the irrepressible urge to see it. The only thing standing in his way is his lifetime of misbehaviour finally coming to a head and Homer suddenly having a lock on his son's Achilles' heel. The episode starts out by suggestion that Bart's rambunctious behaviour stems from him being unfamiliar with the notion of consequence because Homer and Marge - but especially Homer - are totally ineffectual at disciplining him. The suggestion that Homer is incapable of administering any kind of negative reinforcement at all is obviously not borne out by the rest of the series, where Homer has an infamous tendency to throttle Bart should he challenge his parental authority. "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", though, is more interested in whether or not Homer is capable of meaningful discipline that might give Bart pause about his personal choices, in part because Homer himself would sooner not have to deal with the responsibility of taking charge of Bart's behaviour. We see this in the first act, when Homer purposely ducks out of having to meet with Ms Krabappel at a parent teacher evening, preferring instead to get the sweeter end of the deal and take (undue) credit for how well Lisa is doing. Ms Krabappel, meanwhile, feels so strongly that Bart's misdeeds are a reflection of Homer and Marge's failings as parents that she subjects Marge to the very same rigmarole as Bart in the opening credits every week. Marge, after experiencing a nightmare vision dictating how Bart, if he does not better himself, could grow up to be a male stripper with an unattractive gut, comes away with a newfound resolve to lay down the law. It takes a while, however, for Homer to come up to speed. The middle portion of the episode, when it's not detailing the upcoming Itchy & Scratchy film, deals with just how easily Bart can manipulate Homer by playing on his own aversion to facing up to consequence. Eventually, though, Bart goes just a step too far and Homer cottons onto how to really hit him where it hurts, in forbidding him from ever seeing The Itchy & Scratchy Movie. From then on, the episode devolves into a battle of wills between Bart and Homer, with Bart's pining to see the movie weighing in against Homer's determination to keep the line drawn. Eventually Marge, who had previously criticised Homer for being too slack with his parenting, comes to Bart's defense and suggests that he might have made his point by now, but Homer refuses to back down. It's clear that Homer isn't punishing Bart out of spite, but of the sincere belief that his future life choices hinge on his own ability to lay down the law, and he reasons that to back out could nullify whatever lesson Bart otherwise might have taken. And apparently it works - by the end of the episode, when Bart concedes to Homer that he won, he does so with none of the resentment we saw from their previous discussion on the matter, imply that Bart ultimately respects Homer for sticking to his guns.
"Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is an effective episode for how it taps into the one of the great universal frustrations of childhood. I think all of us at some point experienced the pain of having our heart set on something, only to be told no by an adult authority figure and eventually realising that we were powerless to change their mind and that our only recourse was acceptance. When Bart lets out that groan after being thwarted in his efforts to purchase a ticket without Homer's consent - basically, the point at which he realises that he's lost - it's powerful because we've all been there. Which is not to say that "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is grounded in a gritty realism all throughout. Make no mistake, this is still a Season 4 episode, and there are few characteristically wacky gags thrown in. The incident that finally prompts Homer to draw the line - Bart's failure to keep an eye on Maggie results in the baby crawling into the family car and goes for a joyride - is frankly too ludicrous to illicit much concern on the part of the viewer. To think that something truly serious could have happened to Maggie. On a tonal level, it doesn't quite feel as though the punishment fits the crime, because Bart's upset seems raw, genuine and painful while Maggie's adventure is obviously way off the charts. Perhaps something with a bit of gravitas might have made it doubly satisfying when Bart finally accepts the consequences of his actions. But then atonement for whatever he might have done wasn't really the point of this particular journey. This is about Bart and Homer each learning to take responsibility for their side of the equation, and to respect each other all the better for it.
There is also a gaping big hole in the central scenario, which makes the final conflict seem curiously antiquated for a sitcom set in the 1990s. The success of Homer's chosen course of action hinges on the implication that once the movie has finished its theatrical run, it's gone for good, and Bart will have missed his opportunity to see it. This might have worked for a sitcom in the 1970s, or even the 1980s, when there was no guarantee as to if or when a theatrical film would be released to home video. By the 1990s, however, there is no way that The Itchy & Scratchy Movie wouldn't be lined up for an extensive afterlife on VHS and LaserDisc. On the DVD commentary, they concede that "nowadays Bart could see the movie on DVD", but what was to stop him from eventually seeing it on either of those aforementioned formats at the time? Not to mention that it would find its way to TV eventually. So the idea that Homer has banned Bart from ever seeing the film is highly questionable. (Obviously, it would be an even harder swallow in the 00s - not because of DVD, but because Bart could pirate a copy so easily on the internet). The episode blatantly isn't set in some strange time bubble where VHS never existed - the second act ends with a strange (but hilarious) non-sequitur, with Snake running through Evergreen Terrace with a stolen video system, only to register, to his chagrin, that he snagged an obsolete Betamax player.*
So realistically there would be numerous options available to Bart. And even if Homer does somehow manage to prevent him from getting anywhere near a VHS release of the film, there's also the factor that Homer's parental authority comes with an obvious time limit. He couldn't reasonably forbid Bart from seeing the film as an adult. So what's to have prevented Bart from waiting until his 50s before finally watching that forbidden picture? Unless of course by the time he became an adult he had simply moved on and lost interest. After all, it's only a dumb movie.
That is of course the really bitter bugbear hanging over the back end of the episode. As much as the viewer shares in Bart's frustration in not being able to see the movie, we are given ample reason to believe that, no matter how many celebrities cameo and how many Academy Awards it walks away with, it probably isn't that good. We're told from the very first promo that it contains only 53% new footage, so the odds are that Bart has seen only slightly less than half of it already. To say nothing of the larger question of how a formula as basic as Itchy & Scratchy's could be adapted to longform storytelling (Tom & Jerry: The Movie did it by effectively ditching everything about their property's established formula, and audiences didn't exactly take kindly to that). When asked for her honest review, Lisa proclaims that it was the best movie she's ever seen in her life, but I'm not convinced that her enthusiasm stems from the movie itself as from the excitement of participating in such a hotly anticipated cultural event. I suspect that what's really been eating Bart this entire time, even if he did foresee the film coming to VHS sooner or later, is the pain of being excluded from the same event. It's not so much about the movie, but the thrill of being part of a shared experience bringing the rest of the world together. By not having seen the film, Bart cannot be on quite the same wavelength as everyone else, and when he tries to substitute with something from his own imagination, gets nowhere - having to go it alone is precisely what he doesn't want, after all. "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" is about the tortures of being shut out of zeitgeist, of never quite being able to get what the rest of the world is so enraptured with, but it also works as a cautionary fable about the perils of putting much stock in the dictations of zeitgeist in the first place. It seems unlikely that the film could ever live up to the hype, and in the end it doesn't. When, ultimately, we catch a glimpse of the tantalising feature, there is nothing to distinguish it
from your typical Itchy & Scratchy episode. What's more is that Itchy & Scratchy as a whole might have lost some of its luster in the intervening years - it seems to have finally occurred to a nonplussed Homer that the series is based on the central premise of Itchy being a jerk, with which Bart cannot disagree.
The writers had different ideas over how to handle the movie. Their initial idea was to go the opposite direction and make it extraordinarily violent in ways that made the regular series appear quite tame, but that never got further than the scripting process. For a while, they intended for the viewer never to actually see the screen itself, only Bart and Homer watching it, but decided that the viewer would feel teased if they never caught a glimpse of the great McGuffin, and the footage from the movie was apparently taken from a regular cartoon we were supposed to see earlier in the episode. It was a smart decision. I think it was important that the movie would ultimately lose its mystique by the end, so that the viewer can see that the real victory was not in Bart finally getting to indulge his boyhood fascination, but in his having overcome his differences with Homer. This is where the real emotional pay-off of the ending lies, and in a way it possibly explains why Bart might not have chosen to see the film on his own terms, as by now he respects his father enough to only want to see it with his blessing. Actually, there's nothing to definitely confirm that he hasn't already seen it by this point - what's important is the final symbolic act of his seeing it with Homer, and his laughing and putting his arm around his father in the final image, thus positing that they are both now clearly equals, the antagonistic parent-child having given way to a mutual friendship. Neither Bart and Homer seem terribly enraptured by the film itself - their real enjoyment comes from the understanding that they are finally seeing eye-to-eye.
To wrap-up, a couple of random side-notes. Firstly, when this episode aired on Sky One in the UK, it was yet another casualty of their stringent cutting, with just about every Itchy & Scatchy sequence being truncated in some way (the Steamboat Willie parody, for example, included the part where Itchy shoots Scratchy in the kneecaps but cut the subsequent bit where Itchy kicks the wounded Scratchy's into the furnace). Also excised entirely was the blood-leaking billboard advertisement and its barber shop replacement. In fact I think That Happy Cat and the movie itself were the only Itchy & Scratchy sequences that weren't butchered in some way.
Secondly, here's a mystery that still perplexes me to this day. A snippet of dialogue from this episode was included in the 1997 soundtrack release Songs In The Key of Springfield. Track 26 was entitled "TV Sucks!" and consisted of the portion of the episode where Homer regales Bart with the story from his own childhood detailing how, when Abe wouldn't buy him a catcher's mitt, he held his breath in protest and banged his head on the coffee table, possibly incurring brain damage. Obviously, this isn't a song, and it's conspicuously out of place on the album, being the only sample of dialogue that's used as a stand-alone and doesn't segue into a musical sequence (Homer's "Honey Roasted Peanuts" monologue from "Boy Scoutz 'n The Hood" is also included as its own track, but it does tie in with the succeeding track with Bart and Milhouse's musical number). Instead, it's sandwiched awkwardly in between "Baby on Board" from "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" and the Planet of The Apes suite from "A Fish Called Selma". In the end I have to ask much the same question as Bart does - what's the point of the story. Is the answer possibly as simple as the one Homer gives?
* A functional Betamax player would of course be worth a whole lot now. Let's hope that Snake had the foresight to hang onto his booty.
