Cultural References
"Dog of Death" features a number of references to popular culture and famous dogs. Santa's Little Helper's adventure resembles the plot of the 1963 film The Incredible Journey. The scene in which Mr. Burns brainwashes Santa's Little Helper with the Ludovico technique is a parody of Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange, including the way Santa's Little Helper's eyes are held open while he is forced to watch a film featuring dog abuse, such as dogs being physically assaulted and getting their heads slammed by falling toilet lids. Ludwig van Beethoven's ninth symphony is heard during the sequence. In another scene, the dog Lassie is referenced when Santa's Little Helper rescues a child from a burning building. Homer claims that Santa's Little Helper will be going to Doggie Heaven, while Richard Nixon's dog Checkers and Adolf Hitler's dog Blondi will be going to Doggie Hell. The doctor that performs the surgery on Santa's Little Helper is based on the main character in the Ben Casey television series.
"Dog of Death" also parodies lottery advertisements. In one commercial featured in the episode, an announcement states: "The state lottery, where everybody wins," while a tiny disclaimer at the bottom of the screen can be seen saying: "Actual odds of winning, one in 380,000,000." During the peak of the lottery fever in Springfield, news anchor Kent Brockman announces on television that people hoping to get tips on how to win the jackpot have borrowed every available copy of Shirley Jackson's book The Lottery at the local library. One of them is Homer, who throws the book into the fireplace after Kent reveals that "Of course, the book does not contain any hints on how to win the lottery. It is, rather, a chilling tale of conformity gone mad." In her book Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy, Bernice Murphy comments that this scene displays some of the most contradictory things about Jackson: "It says a lot about the visibility of Jackson's most notorious tale that more than 50 years after its initial creation it is still famous enough to warrant a mention in the world's most famous sitcom. The fact that Springfield's citizenry also miss the point of Jackson's story completely can perhaps be seen as an indication of a more general misrepresentation of Jackson and her work."
The episode contains several references to previous episodes of The Simpsons. For instance, Santa's Little Helper gets picked up by a car on a street called "Michael Jackson Expressway", a reference to the season three premiere episode "Stark Raving Dad" that Michael Jackson guest-starred in. In another scene, Ned Flanders is seen wearing his "Assassin" running shoes from the season two episode "Bart's Dog Gets an F". The flyer Homer replaces with the "lost pet" notice is Principal Skinner's "Have you seen my body?" flyer from "Bart the Murderer".
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Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“If we can learn ... to look at the ways in which various groups appropriate and use the mass-produced art of our culture ... we may well begin to understand that although the ideological power of contemporary cultural forms is enormous, indeed sometimes even frightening, that power is not yet all-pervasive, totally vigilant, or complete.”
—Janice A. Radway (b. 1949)