Plot
After being disappointed by a new episode of Itchy & Scratchy, Bart and Lisa decide that they can write a better one themselves. Inspired by the sight of Homer accidentally slicing Marge's hair off with hedge shears, they write a script titled "Little Barbershop of Horrors", but their episode is rejected by Roger Meyers, head of Itchy & Scratchy International. Correctly guessing that Meyers did not take them seriously because they were children, they resubmit the manuscript under Grampa's name, leading Meyers to hire Grampa as a staff writer. Bart and Lisa inform Grampa about what they did and the three of them conspire to continue passing off Bart and Lisa's scripts as Grampa's own, splitting the money three ways. Grampa then confesses to Meyers, but is ignored.
For his work on Itchy & Scratchy, Grampa is nominated for an award for Outstanding Writing in a Cartoon Series (presented by Krusty the Clown and Brooke Shields). When Grampa sees Itchy & Scratchy for the first time in a clip show introducing the award, he is appalled at the violent humor, and turns his acceptance speech into an assault on both the cartoon and the audience amused by it. He storms off the stage amidst boos and thrown vegetables. Grampa gives the award to Bart and Lisa, and Bart swears never to watch an award show again, unless Billy Crystal is featured.
In the subplot, Homer and Marge attend their "Class of 1974" high school reunion, where they have a great time and Homer wins a variety of humorous awards. However, Principal Dondelinger interrupts the ceremony to announce that Homer never graduated high school because he failed a remedial science course, leading Dondelinger to revoke Homer's awards. Determined to win back the accolades, Homer retakes the course and passes the final exam, finally graduating.
The conclusion of the episode features a brief segment, complete with its own theme song, entitled "The Adventures of Ned Flanders". In the sketch, Ned scolds his sons for failing to get ready for church, until they inform him that it is Saturday and the family laughs together.
Read more about this topic: The Front (The Simpsons Episode)
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)