Treehouse of Horror 3
Simpsons Halloween Special 3
Season 4 Episode 5, Oct. 29, 1992
Stories:
Clown Without Pity
King Homer
Dial Z for Zombies
Front Matter: As seen above, Homer is too fat for the classic Alfred Hitchcock Presents silhouette, and provides the disclaimer/warning, and we get our first Halloween couch gag.
The framing device for the third special is a Halloween party, with various family members taking turns telling ghost stories instead of going trick or treating. This special, which is from season 4, is also the first special from the show’s undeniable golden age, and comes from the same season that gave us Marge vs The Monorail, The Front, Last Exit to Springfield, Mr. Plow, and a handful of other truly funny episodes1.
Clown Without Pity: The first story is told by Lisa and is an homage of every doll that comes to life and tries to kill you story, mixed with a little bit of the Gremlins. Forgetting Bart’s birthday (which is bad) Homer goes to get him a talking Krusty doll (which is good) from a mysterious shop that sells evil antiquities (which is bad) but it comes with a free frozen yogurt (which is good) but the frozen yogurt is cursed (which is bad) leading to Homer having the bit with the shop keeper that I’m parodying here (which is good), and leads to Homer rushing home with the gift and smashing a blindfolded Millhouse with the door (which is funny).
The Talking Krusty doll then goes on to try and kill Homer, but nobody believes him. The doll pulls a Robert DeNiro from Cape Fear and straps himself under the car after Homer tries to get rid of it, after attacking Homer with a harpoon while he was in the tub, and trying to score with Lisa’s Malibu Stacey doll (that is not sentient).
Ultimately it turns out the doll was “set to evil”, and when set to good becomes a servant of the family, living with Malibu Stacy in a miserable work a day life.
King Homer: After Homer fails at telling a scary story Grandpa Simpson ends up telling a version of King Kong where Marge is the girl, Homer is King Kong, and Mr. Burns and Smithers are the showman that want to capture King Homer and put him on broadway.
King Homer goes on stage (look at the size of that platform), runs amok, and tries to climb the Empire State Building with Marge in hand, but is too out of shape to make it more than a few feet off the ground.
The story ends with the first of at least 2 Halloween story marriages
The story is colored in gray scale, and like all of season 4 has the clean animation and modeling lines that separate season 4 on out from the previous seasons
Dial Z for Zombies: Titled after Dial M For Murder2, after Marge attempts to pass of fruit as nature’s candy, and Flanders shows up with a lifelike decapitated zombie costume, Bart tells the third and final story, one of accidentally raising the dead.
With homages to the zombie movie genre writ large, and a little bit of Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery, curtesy of Bart reading a book of dark magic for a book report and Lisa wanting to bring their cat Snowball 1 back from the grave… zombie chaos ensues. This story is the most violent we’ve seen so far, both with zombies attacking, and Homer gunning down everyone from Zombie Flanders (He was a zombie?) to Zombie Shakespeare, all while segment is filled with animator name references, and condom names as part of spell incantations.
The episode ends with the family sitting on the couch, eating and watching TV, speaking monosyllabically… like zombies.
Funniest Bit: This is from King Homer because I already did the Good/Bad bit from Doll Without Pity
Carl: Hey I heard we’re going to Ape Island.
Lenny: Yeah to capture a giant ape. I wish we were going to Candy Apple Island.
Charlie: Candy Apple Island, what do they got there?
Carl: Apes, but they’re not so big.
Moment of Note: This whole episode is of note as it does two critical things. First and foremost it breaks from the punitive irony as humor that defined the first special and parts of the second in favor of a stronger reliance on jokes. And second, it demotes Kang and Kodos from being the featured stars of the show, having them relegated to a cutaway gag for the first of many times.
The show also demonstrates an indulgence in the writers and artists desire for homage, and for inside jokes and visual gags/pause-worthy moments. Having multiple Hitchcock references
It should also be said that one Halloween Special is a special event, two is a sequel, but doing it a third year in a row, and receiving the excitement and fanfare that it did also established the special as an ongoing feature.
Join me tomorrow for Treehouse of Horror 4… and the last of the framing devices.
Marge vs the Monorail is a top five, maybe top 3 all time episode and everyone knows is. The Front is the one where Bart and Lisa use Grandpa’s name to write Itchy and Scratchy cartoons. Last Exit to Springfield gave if “Dental plan. Lisa needs braces. Dental plan. Lisa needs braces.” And Mr. Plow, what’s that name? That name again, it’s Mr. Plow.
My long distance ex was a big Hitchcock fan and one Christmas we watched Elf and later Dial M For Murder over the phone together. There is an exchange in Dial M about the female lead staying home to catch up on her clippings, and to this day we still reference “clippings”. This has nothing to do with anything, save the spirit of reference, but I thought you’d enjoy that.