The Unsettling Simpsons

My name is Brother Bill and I am a Simpsons fan.

I can spout Simpsons quotes off the top of my head the way a revival tent minister can quote the Good Book (and with comparable fervor!) Sure, the show has had its ups and downs--its salad days and dry patches--and the occasional unwatchable episode, but I just can't stay mad at The Simpsons. It gives so much and asks so little in return.

The Simpsons is one of the rare (maybe only? Roesanne is perhaps another) television series to truly embrace the concept of the Halloween special. And while there have been several Christmas-themed episodes, and the occasional story set around Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, or Valentine's Day, only Halloween gets the blood-red carpet rolled out for it every year, consistently and thoroughly.

Titled "Treehouse of Horror" (the debut Halloween episode, first broadcast Oct. 25, 1990, was framed as a trilogy of ghost stories being told in Bart's treehouse, and the name stuck) these non-canon episodes reimagine the first family of Springfield in a wide variety of fantastic scenarios, evoking horror films (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Amityville Horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Nightmare on Elm Street), science fiction (Fantastic Voyage, Demon Seed, The Omega Man, The Fly) classic anthology television (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents), fantasy fiction (Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe), and even Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Even relatively obscure horror radio drama Lights Out is referenced in one episode depicting a mist that turns people inside out.

Sometimes these episodes were actually set on Halloween, with The Simpsons telling ghost stories, throwing costume parties, or going trick-or-treating. The best "Treehouse" episodes captured the spirit of the season with macabre imagery and situations while still retaining the classic Simpsons humor.

But the series did not save all its "scary" content for the Treehouse episodes. Several non-Halloween episodes dealt with spooky subject matter (relatively speaking--it is a sit-com, after all).

"The Springfield Files" (S8,E10), an X-Files themed episode, follows Homer's nightly close encounter with a glowing, supernatural presence lurking in the woods. Contributing to the suspenseful atmosphere is the spine-tingling staccato of Bernard Herrmann-esque strings that, in a truly surreal spectacle, are coming from live symphony musicians riding together on a bus.

Bart carelessly sells his soul (symbolically represented by his autograph on church stationary) to Milhouse, and soon regrets it, in "Bart Sells His Soul" (S7,E4), a genuinely uneasy episode that manages to tap into real anxiety about loss of agency and regret. You can feel the existential desperation as Bart first begs for, then tries to take by force, a replacement soul from a frightened Ralph.

A stage hypnotist using Homer as his subject accidentally unlocks repressed childhood horrors in "The Blunder Years" (S13,E5), sending him into a days-long seizure of non-stop shrieking that manages to be both hilarious and horrifying at the same time. Peer counseling (and some "Yaqui memory tea") eventually help Homer come to terms with a long forgotten incident involving a drowned corpse in a canal.

Sometimes isolated spooky elements would creep their way into otherwise non-scary storylines. "Lisa's First Word" (S4,E10), for example, is a funny flashback episode in which a toddler-aged Bart adjusts to the arrival of his new baby sister, Lisa. But when Homer tries to entice Bart to vacate the crib by building a homemade clown bed, the results are accidentally horrifying...

...even at a distance!

It's Lisa who is afraid to go to bed in "The Girl Who Slept Too Little" (S17,E2), after a cemetery is built next to the Simpson house, casting nightmarish shadows through her bedroom window.

In "The Ziff Who Came To Dinner" (S15,E14), Homer thoughtlessly takes the kids to R-rated horror film The Redeadening when the family-friendly cartoon they hoped to see is sold out. The children cower in their theater seats as the story of murderous possessed doll 'Baby Button Eyes' unfolds.

Sometimes these moments were not scary in a traditional sense, but were funny or weird or strange in vaguely unsettling ways.

Like this uncomfortable moment when the barber, who Bart has been working for part-time, tries to pay him with an envelope of hair, grinning vacantly as a frightened Bart backs out of the store ("Lisa the Tree Hugger", S12,E4).

In "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (S5,E22), a fight with Marge finds Homer evicted from the house and forced to live in Bart's treehouse. Lisa pays him a visit only to find her disheveled father fashioning a substitute Marge out of a shrub. "You will respect your new mother. Now kiss her!" he insists, while shoving the effigy in Lisa's face.

Homer and Mr. Burns get a severe case of cabin-fever after becoming snowed in during a team building exercise in "Mountain of Madness" (S8,E12). Hungry and freezing, they build snowmen to pass the time. But their complete disconnection from reality comes to the fore when they decide to dress the snowmen in their own clothes, a portrait of madness as they stand shivering before their creation.

In "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade" (S14,E3), Bart becomes so addicted to their new satellite TV that he can't concentrate at school. He hallucinates a giant TV remote while his schoolmates turn into various TV characters, including a clown (not Krusty, ironically) who informs him in a matter of fact voice that will send chills down your spine, "It's finally happened, Bart. You've lost your mind."

In another example of disturbing hallucinations, Homer imagines himself becoming wealthy through pearl diving ("Saddlesore Galactica", S11,E13), waking up in a pearl-encrusted house from a pearl-encrusted bed, being served by a pearl butler who pours him a bowl of pearls for breakfast. But even in this fairy-tale fantasy, the spoonful of pearls shatters all his teeth, causing Homer to laugh like a mad man while staring at his gaping mouth in a pearl-encrusted mirror.

In "I'm Going To Praiseland" (S12,E19), Ned Flanders builds a Bible-themed amusement park to honor the memory of his recently passed wife, Maude. The tribute takes a turn for the creepy when Ned dons a souvenir Maude mask and mimics her voice.

In that same episode, we find out Ned has been preserving the indentation of Maude's body in the bed sheets.

In "Homer vs. Dignity" (S12,E5), Mr. Burns declares war on the town of Springfield, enlisting Homer in a series of cruel and disgusting pranks, which culminate in Burns posing as Santa Claus for the Christmas parade so he can throw buckets of fish guts on the unsuspecting children gathered to see him. The deliberate spoiling with liquid viscera of what should have been a beautiful moment had me flashbacking to Carrie White's prom.

Finally, this vignette from "Colonel Homer" (S3,E20) plays like a ghost story of sorts. Homer is on a long road trip and passes a restaurant sign, "Flaming Pete's; 75 Miles". The sign entices him and he clearly looks forward to arriving there.

A while later, a second road sign, "Flaming Pete's; 30 Miles". Homer is too tired from driving to react this time.

A third sign: "Flaming Pete's; Next Exit!" Homer perks up with excitement. Flaming Pete has been beckoning to him all night and they are finally going to rendezvous.

But there is no Flaming Pete's. Flaming Pete burned down years ago, on a night just like this one. Not sure who you think you saw waving to you out there on the road, but it couldn't have been Flaming Pete.

(Yea, yea yea---I understand the actual punch-line is that a restaurant with "flaming" in its name literally went up in smoke. But I tell you, there's a ghost story buried in there!)

Beautiful Ruins: Sifting Through the Wreckage of Thundarr the Barbarian (1980)

When Thundarr the Barbarian finally made landfall on the shores of the 1980 Saturday morning cartoon lineup, the accompanying shockwave upturned the nation's cereal bowls.

Thundarr the Barbarian was the glorious mash-up of Robert E. Howard's Conan (hey, the word "Barbarian" is right in the title!), classic 60's Hanna-Barbara sci-fi adventure fare (Space Ghost, The Herculoids, Birdman, etc.), Star Wars (don't dare call Thundarr's "fabulous Sun-sword" a light-saber) and Planet of the Apes/Damnation Alley (or whatever scorched-Earth post-apocalypse title works for you) that I didn't realize I was waiting all my life for.

A Ruby-Spears production, Thundarr the Barbarian was the fortunate son of three Dads who could definitely beat up your Dad: writer Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck, Man-Thing), and legendary comic book/animation artists Jack Kirby and Alex Toth (a collective legacy too rich to enumerate here).

Thundarr's back-story, told in the quickly edited opening sequence, is merely the destruction of modern civilization as we know it, a global catastrophe of massive tidal waves, volcanoes, and earthquakes caused by a close call with a runaway planet in the too-far-away-to-fathom year of 1994. Fast-forward two-thousand years later, and life on Earth has become an anachronistic hodgepodge of Medieval barbarity, futuristic technology, and mutated life forms resembling mythic monsters, extra-terrestrial aliens, and everything in between.

Episodes would often start in media res, right in the middle of an action sequence whose beginning we never saw, and could feature anything from pirates to robots, wizards, werewolves, giant insects, helicopters or hover boards.

Thundarr was an unapologetic fighter, eager to slice first, ask questions later (...or never). After one particularly impressive demonstration of swordplay protecting a village from flying monsters, a gawking villager asks, "What kind of man are you?"

"Free!" Thundarr barks in reply.

Is it okay to swoon now?

His traveling companions are Ariel, a self-sufficient magic-wielding Princess (princess of what, we're never really sure) who acts as Thundarr's guide (she's learned about the ways of "old Earth" from her father's library) and Ookla the Mok, a tall, growling lion-man, clearly modeled after Chewbacca, who provides both muscle and the occasional comic relief.

But these were dramatic adventure stories, not comedies, a refreshing dose of seriousness when so many cartoons of the day relied on gags and canned laughter.

That these adventures of "savagery, super-science and sorcery" play out across the wreckage of "old Earth", often in the shadow of real-world landmarks, adds a layer of poignancy, a constant, bitter reminder that the world we know has ended in tragedy.

Below are selected images of the beautiful ruin that is old Earth.

New York ("the ruin of Man-Hat") from S1E1, Secret of the Black Pearl.

Space shuttle carcass at a ruined NASA Space Center, S1E3 Mindok the Mind Menace. This episode predates the first space shuttle launch by almost six months.

Empty streets and a crashed ocean liner from S1E4 Raiders of the Abyss.

WWII-era plane and hangar, S1E5 Treasure of the Moks.

The remnants of Mt. Rushmore, S1E6 Attack of the Amazon Women.

The Capitol Building, a fallen Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian Institute, the U.S. Supreme Court Building, and the White House. From S1E7 The Brotherhood of Night.

Fremont Street, downtown Las Vegas. S1E8 Challenge of the Wizards.

This is not an actual castle, but a crumbling movie set on a studio backlot in Hollywood. S1E9 Valley of the Man-Apes.

An old church covered in snow. S1E10 Stalker from the Stars.

An amusement park from the same episode.

The Alamo, San Antonio, Texas. S1E11 Portal Into Time.

Chinatown, San Francisco. S1E12 Battle of the Barbarians.

Artifacts from the old world, embedded in rock. S1E13 Den of the Sleeping Demon.

Abandoned hospital and operating theater, from the same episode

Skeleton of a swingset.

The remnants of the St. Louis Arch, Missouri, from S2E1 Wizard War.

Corpse of a Hyundai. S2E2 Fortress of Fear.

All the time in the world. Big Ben, London. S2E3 Island of the Body Snatchers.

Two freeway exits and Logan Airport, Boston. S2E4 City of Evil.

Abandoned zoo. S205 Last Train to Doomsday.

Beverly Hills, California. S2E6 Master of the Stolen Sunsword.

Eternal Pasture Cemetery, Hollywood, CA. S2E6.

Hollywood sign. S2E6.

Hollywood Magic Palace, S2E6.

Los Angeles parking garage and poolside wreck. S2E6.

Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles. S2E6.

Welcome to Atlanta, Georgia. S2E7 Trial by Terror.

...
The backgrounds weren't all doom and gloom. Sometimes the animators would slip in pop-culture references or in-jokes (in one episode you can just make out a sign for "Westwind Steak House Restaurant"... Westwind was the name of the studio that handled production layout for the show).

Here's a Jaws sequel reference (S1E1) that predates the one in Back to the Future II by almost a decade:

A reference to the forthcoming Star Wars sequel, still titled "Revenge of the Jedi" when this episode aired in November 1980, and another Jaws reference, from S1E5:

Thundarr the Barbarian can be purchased on a 4-DVD set as a Warner Archives Collection MOD release.