Wild Barts Can't Be Broken (S10, E11-214)

Is this really that spooky?  Season 1's coloring goofs were spookier than this.

Plot Summary
The family goes to see a Springfield Isotopes baseball game, and the 'topes lose.  Homer writes them off.  Six months later, certain circumstances allow the Isotopes to get hot and they make it to the championship game.  Homer bandwagons the team.  The team ends up winning the title, causing mass celebration.  Homer, Barney, Lenny and Carl go nuts and drive around town.  They reach the elementary school, and decide to cause drunk havoc there by driving around.  The damage caused is most notable.  The next morning, Chief Wiggum states that the people responsible are unknown, therefore kids are responsible for it, and thus establishes a curfew where all kids must be home by dark.

Kids are left being either bored or horrified to spend time with their parents at night.  One night, while sifting through the perils of primetime TV, Bart and Lisa see a commercial for a scary movie shown at a drive-in theatre, but only at night.  The two rally kids across town to break curfew to see it.  The movie features creepy kids who know all the secrets of the adults, and can also get them to beat up themselves.  However, Wiggum catches the kids and as punishment forces them to clean a billboard featuring Wiggum telling kids not to break curfew.

Angry over these turn of events, the kids wish they knew adults' secrets like the children in the movie.  However, they do: they know their parent's secrets.  Again finding a way to break curfew, and sneaking away with the required equipment, the kids set up a radio program which reveals secrets of people across town, mostly Homer.

Panicked, the town has a meeting to figure out what to do.  Meanwhile, Chief Wiggum enlists Professor Frink to help him find the broadcast, and Frink does find them - behind Wiggum's billboard.  Using the 3D cup in the billboard as a broadcasting device, the kids have been using that to send out the program.  Adults across town confront the kids and the two engage in a battle of song.  In the middle of the song, the senior citizens arrive, unable to get any sleep from the singing.  As both kids and adults try to shoo them away, the seniors reveal their true power: by voting for an ordinance that installs an after-dark curfew for anyone under 70.  The night theirs again, the seniors have fun frolicking across the streets.

Quick Review
This was an okay episode.  The baseball story to open up the episode was fine, and the movie had its moments as well.  What bugged me, though, was the "kids vs adults (and later vs seniors)" theme the episode had going for it.  It bugged me because the only adult that was actually against kids for most of the episode was Chief Wiggum: he was the one who blamed kids for the school disaster, he was the one who started up the curfew, he was the one who set up the billboard, he was the one who enforced the curfew, and he was the one to punish the kids for breaking curfew.  He did practically all of it, the rest of the town only got on the kid-hating bandwagon in a mob-mentality sense near the episode's end.  How Wiggum's kid agenda became a kids vs adults theme never sat well with me.

Final Score: 7.8