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| Nightmare fuel, in its purest form. |
Censorship, always a controversial topic. Most of the controversy stems not so much as to how much of something should be censored, but rather if one thing should be censored over another. This episode... doesn't get to that point until the end, but before then it chronicles one woman's quest to end cartoon violence.
Marge's motivations for doing so begin when Maggie bonks Homer on the head with a mallet, an action Marge determines Maggie learned from the Itchy & Scratchy show, the ever-so-lovable violence central. While banning Bart and Lisa from watching the show (they go elsewhere to watch instead), she tries writing Krusty, an animator for some reason, and Roger Meyers Jr., the head of Itchy & Scratchy Studios, asking them to cut out the violence. Meyers in particular shrugs her off, and calls her a screwball in a reply letter. Angered, Marge leads a campaign against the studio, which quickly gains steam. After a television appearance where Marge pleads viewers who dislike the cartoon's violence to write to Meyers, tons of angry letters get swamped to I&S Studios, and Meyers has no choice.
Indeed, the Itchy & Scratchy cartoons become tamed. Instead of the two inflicting pain on one another, they instead share lemonade, dance, or tell bedtime stories, which was the best part of the episode. Marge notices the immediate impact: Maggie imitates the nice cartoons and gives Homer a glass of lemonade. Meanwhile, given the cartoons are awful now, kids all around Springfield have no reason to stay inside, and head back out and go on all sorts of grand adventures. It seems the Marge did the town real good.
A short time later, an incoming presentation of Michelangelo's David prompts Marge's protest group back into action. However, Marge is actually fine with the statue and sees no reason to join along. Its soon after that, on TV again, that Marge is faced with the realization that she can't be fine with not censoring one kind of thing (the nudity on David) while going all in on another form of censorship (TV violence). Disgusted, Marge gives in, and soon thereafter Itchy & Scratchy are back to their old violent selves, but at least the school will be forced to visit David on a field trip which is only fair.
Quick Review
It was a fun episode, really. This was the first episode where Itchy & Scratchy gets a good amount of attention and, as a result, we good a fair amount of I&S cartoons to look at, even if a couple of them were of the 'be nice' variety. Homer, who was a background character in this episode, still made a lot of good jokes as well. A good episode overall.
Final Score: 7.9
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