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The Simpsons/Treehouse of Horror III

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Treehouse of Horror III
Treehouse of Horror III
Season 4, Episode 5
Airdate October 29, 1992
Production Number 9F04
Written by Atrocious Al Jean &
Morbid Mike Reiss
Johnny Katastrophe Kogen &
Warped Wally Wolodarsky
Scarifying Sam Simon
Vicious Jack Vitti
Directed by Bloodcurdling Carlos Baeza
← 4x04
Lisa the Beauty Queen 		4x06 →
Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie
The Simpsons — Season Four

Treehouse of Horror III is the fifth episode of the fourth season of The Simpsons, and the sixty-fourth episode overall. This is the third episode in the Treehouse of Horror series and features three vignettes based off of well known horror stories: Clown Without Pity, King Homer and Dial "Z" for Zombies.

Special Guest Voice: Macabre Marcia Wallace (Milhouse Van Houten)

Also Starring: Rabid Russi Taylor (Martin Prince)

Contents

Plot Overview

To inform audiences that the show is going to be far scarier than usual, Homer appears underneath a drawing of himself done in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. During his warning, he dares crybabies and religious types to turn off their televisions right now. The screen goes blank and Marge chastises her husband for calling America chicken. This gives way to the actual framing device where many of the neighborhood kids are at a Halloween party at the Simpson house instead of trick-or-treating. When Homer ruins the fake corpse body parts gag, Lisa decides to tell a story about "a doll from hell." After her story, Homer tells a fragmented, incomplete tale about a ghost and Grandpa tells a story based on King Kong. After Grandpa's story, Marge tries to pawn fresh fruit off on the kids instead of candy and Bart tells a story about raising the dead (after a brief interruption by Flanders in a decapitated zombie costume.

Clown Without Pity

It's Bart's birthday and Homer has forgotten to give the boy a present. He runs out the door to get him one now at the House of Evil, which sells forbidden objects and frozen yogurt. The spooky Asian man who operates the store hands Homer a talking Krusty the Clown doll, but warns him that the doll is cursed (although it comes with free frogurt, which is also turns out to be cursed). He brings it home and gets the immediate approval of Bart, but Grandpa shouts that it's evil.

Sometime later, Homer is watching television when the doll appears next to him and starts spewing hateful speech about how it's going to kill him. Homer laughs it off and tosses the doll across the room, but it reappears with a big knife. Naturally, his family doesn't believe that the doll is really going to try to kill him. Homer makes it through the day long enough to take a bath later on, but the doll appears again with a harpoon, causing him to run naked through the kitchen in terror.

Fed up, Homer grabs the doll and throws him in a sealed bag full of his dirty socks, weights it down with chains and hurls it down a "bottomless pit." Little does Homer know, the doll followed him home strapped to the undercarriage of the car and goes right back to trying to drown him in the dog's water. Marge, finally seeing that her husband isn't crazy, calls the manufacturer of the doll, who dispatches an engineer to flip the doll's switch from "evil" to good. From then on, the doll becomes Homer's slave whose only joy comes from his Malibu Stacy dreamhouse.

King Homer

Marge Bouvier answers the personal ad of two adventurers, Mr. Burns and Smithers, for a mysterious expedition. The crew, Lenny, Carl and ?, comments that they're going to Ape Island to capture a giant ape as long as he exists and isn't just a myth created by the island's tourism board. The crew lands the boat allows the natives to use Marge as bait. Homer does the giant ape equivalent of flirting with Marge after abandoning his fight with a dinosaur, which is when Mr. Burns decides to strike. Homer eats Lenny before being gassed and taken alive for a Broadway show produced by Mr. Burns.

Back in Springfield, Burns presents Homer (The Eighth Wonder of the World) to a sold-out crowd. He breaks loose from his chains after being spooked by a bunch of photographers and eats a little girl playing Annie in a neighboring play. Homer kidnaps Marge and starts to climb a building but falls off when he can't even make it to the third floor. Homer may not be dead, but his career is, so Marge marries and takes care of him, even though he eats his father-in-law at the wedding.

Dial "Z" for Zombies

At Springfield Elementary, Bart has just attempted to pass off a pop-up book on the alphabet meant for toddlers as his book report. Mrs. Krabappel forces him to read another book and do a better report, so Bart chooses "Find Waldo Again" before spotting the occult section of the library. A book of magic and spells mystically flies off the shelf and hits him in the back of the head. Back at home, Bart suggests to Lisa that they use a spell in the book to bring their old cat back from the dead. In the Pet Cemetery, Bart recites the spell, but it doesn't have any effect on the pets. Instead, he's accidentally raised zombies.

The zombies quickly spread across town, taking victims like Flanders, Krusty the Clown and Principal Skinner, who starts feeding on the students. Zombies break into the Simpson home and prepare to eat Homer's brains, but find that he has no brain. They barracade themselves in Lisa's room until Lisa comes up with a plan to reverse the spell using the book from earlier. Homer kills Zombie Flanders and the family drives off to the book depository.

Meanwhile, Kang and Kodos enjoy zombies taking over far too much from their view in space.

The family finally makes it to the school, where they find Barney eating flesh too, although he isn't a zombie and is just following along with the crowd. They also find the zombies of George Washington, Albert Einstein and William Shakespeare. Bart and Lisa make it to the occult book section and Bart recites the correct spell after accidentally turning Lisa into a giant slug. The zombies return to their graves and everything is as it was. Except the family has turned into zombies in front of the TV after all.

Notes

Title Sequence

  • Blackboard: There was no blackboard gag in this episode.
  • Couch Gag: Skeleton version of the family, including Marge with a "Bride of Frankenstein" streak in her hair and Maggie with a bone pacifier, sit on the couch.

Creepy Credits

Opening Credits

Closing Credits

Trivia

The Show

  • Gravestones: The stones in the opening graveyard were marked with these names: Drexell's Class, I'm With Stupid ->, R. Buckminster Fuller and American Workmanship. Later on, during the zombie segment, several more joke gravestones appear including: Eaten By Mistake, Fish Police, Capitol Critters and Family Dog. The latter three were all failed primetime cartoons which had all been cancelled before this episode aired, although it wasn't meant maliciously as producer Al Jean actually liked Family Dog. It was only coincidental that they were all animal based and fit into the context of the story.
  • Costume Party: The kids and adults at the Halloween party are dressed as follows:
    • Homer as Julius Caesar
    • Marge as Cleopatra
    • Bart as Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange
    • Lisa as the Statue of Liberty
    • Milhouse as Radioactive Man
    • Martin as Calliope
    • Nelson as a pirate
    • Wendell as an astronaut
    • Janey as a princess
    • Lewis as Frankenstein's Monster
  • Incantations: Bart's incantations aren't actually just nonsense. In fact, they are all linked by a common thread. The chant which raises the dead was a combination of game show hosts (Collin - Rayburn - Nars - Trebek) and convenience stores (Zabars - Kresge - Caldor - Walmart). The spell that turned Lisa into a slug was '70s television detectives (Kolchak - Mannix - Banacek - Dano) and the final spell was brands of condoms (Trojan - Ramses - Magnum - Sheik).

Behind the Scenes

  • Rewrites: After the episode came back from being animated, it underwent around 88 line rewrites because the writers felt that the show just wasn't good enough in its current draft.
  • Random Cell: At the end of the episode, during the end credits, there's a random animation cell of Bart and Lisa in the cemetery. This was included in the episode because they had forgotten to put in a commercial break between the end of the episode and the credits so they tried to justify it by saying there was content in the credits.

Allusions and References

  • Gremlins: The Asian macabre shopkeeper in the evil doll segment is based heavily off a similar character from the horror/black comedy Gremlins, where an unsuspecting patron buys a mogwai from a mysterious Chinese man and is warned that if he doesn't follow the rules caring for it, he'll unleash a horde of terrible monsters.
  • King Kong: The segment "King Homer" is a Simpsons remake of the 1937 classic King Kong, about a filmmaker who tries to make a movie on Skull Island but winds up tranquilizing the giant ape and taking him back to New York, where he kidnaps the film's starlet and is killed by airplanes after climbing the Empire State Building.
  • Love American Style: The heart-shaped wipes and music sting that play at the end of the first two segments is akin to the outros at the end of segments in the 1969-1974 ABC anthology series.
  • Plan 9 from Outer Space: The brief scene where Kang and Kodos plot to take over the world after the zombie menace has savaged their numbers is a reference to the cult film Plan 9 from Outer Space, directed by notorious b-movie filmmaker Ed Wood. In the movie, "Plan 9" was an plan to revive Earth's dead as zombies and take advantage of the chaos. It's often considered to be one of the worst movies ever made.
  • Shirley Temple: The child star of the 1930s, singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop" (from the movie Bright Eyes), makes an appearance in the "King Homer" segment. (She sings to an apathetic audience ... and is eaten alive(!) by King Homer.)
  • The Twilight Zone: The first segment with the evil doll is essentially a remade version of the classic sci-fi series' episode "Living Doll," where a father buys his daughter a Talking Tina doll that starts saying creepy, suggestively violent things to him. As much as he tries, he can't get rid of the doll and it drives him insane. The segment also contains influences from Trilogy of Terror (particularly "Prey," which also featured an evil doll) and Psycho.

Memorable Moments

Quotes

  • Owner: Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse!
    Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.
    Owner: But it comes with a free Frogurt!
    Homer: [relieved] That's good!
    Owner: The Frogurt is also cursed.
    Homer: [worried] That's bad.
    Owner: But you get your choice of topping!
    Homer: [relieved] That's good!
    Owner: The toppings contains Potassium Benzoate.
    (Homer stares blankly.)
    Owner: That's bad.
  • Lisa: Dad, we did something very bad!
    Homer: Did you wreck the car?
    Bart: No!
    Homer: Did you raise the dead?
    Lisa: Yes!
    Homer: But the car's okay?
    Kids: Uh-huh.
    Homer: All right then.
  • Bart: Dad, you killed the Zombie Flanders!
    Homer: He was a Zombie?
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