Cultural References
The episode's plot is loosely based on the American comedy film Paper Moon, which was also the inspiration for Bart and Homer's swindle of Ned Flanders in the episode. The title of the episode is a parody of the 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper. The title was pitched by Simpsons writer Matt Selman. The episode's ending lampoons the cliche of having twist endings at the end of heist films. ”Magic Palace”, the magic-themed restaurant that the Simpsons visit in the beginning of the episode, is a parody on The Magic Castle, a nightclub in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, California. Marge's line "I didn't say that for clapping" is a reference to a speech given by John Wayne while he was intoxicated. At the end of the episode, Bart exclaims “Cowabunga!”, a catch-phrase of the main characters in the animated television series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the scene where Grampa joins Bart and Homer, Grampa mentions the film The Sting II.
Read more about this topic: The Great Money Caper
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)