Itchy & Scratchy & Marge - round up! (Patreon)

I know that Roger Myers Jr is the most "important" new addition to the Springfield cast, but I'm pulling rank here and giving MVP to the Marge Squirrel.

I didn't cover it with any specific character, but a lot of this episode is inspired by Terry Rakolta, and her protest of Simpsons channel mate Married...with Children, which lost sponsors following Rakolta's campaign against their raunchy humour. The Simpsons attempts to take a fairly neutral tone on the issue here - on one hand, it argues that there is a direct link between watching cartoons and violence, and that Marge is right, but the ending argues the point that people should have access to art, and that everyone's line of acceptability is different. Plus, you know, it's a cartoon, so it's probably at least slightly "pro-cartoon".

I think it's an effective episode. Sometimes you can sense a struggle among the entirely male-led writers (at this time) to make Marge episodes interesting, and they circumnavigated this by talking about cartoons a lot, which I can respect. I can respect anyone who talks about cartoons a lot.

We all know you're here for the NCHC, and it's either 0% or 12.5%, depending on where you stand on the controversial "are bandages a hat" issue.

We've met 8 new characters in this episode, and 7 of them exist in the reality of Springfield. That's 349 total so far! Come back on Monday if you want to see what type of vehicle Bart gets hit by!

This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.