Cultural References
"Simpsons Tall Tales" has been described as a "skewed" retelling of old tales. The beginning of the episode shows the family winning a trip to Delaware. This is a reference to the end of "Behind the Laughter", in which Homer is seen watching an episode of The Simpsons wherein the family is visiting Delaware. The first segment is based on the mythological lumberjack Paul Bunyan, who carved Babe the Blue ox out of the Blue Mountains. The second segment shows Lisa as Connie Appleseed, a female version of the American pioneer nurseryman Johnny Appleseed who introduced apple trees to large parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. "Tom and Huck" features Bart as Tom Sawyer and Nelson as Huckleberry Finn, both of whom are characters in Mark Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Despite the episode's title, only the first two segments are actually tall tales. This is referenced in the episode, when Lisa says "That's not tall tale, it's a book by Mark Twain." In the first segment, Paul Bunyan and Babe fight Rodan, a fictional Japanese mutated pterosaur introduced in the 1956 tokusatsu film Rodan. When showering Marge with stuffed animals, Bunyan accidentally drops a guard next to her. When noticing the guard, Bunyan tugs his collar in a similar way as American comedian Charles Nelson Reilly. In the third segment, Dr Hibbert can be heard singing the 1927 song "Ol' Man River".
Read more about this topic: Simpsons Tall Tales
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)