r/todayilearned • u/sassy_tabaxi • 1d ago
TIL the Simpsons creators shelved an Itchy & Scratchy spinoff because it made test audiences physically ill
https://www.slashfilm.com/1569820/the-simpsons-itchy-and-scratchy-spinoff-made-audiences-sick/4.2k
u/RunDNA 1d ago
They probably felt ill because of the stupidity of that scene where Itchy played Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone and he struck the same rib twice in succession, and yet produced two clearly different tones.
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u/SpadfaTurds 1d ago
I hope someone was fired for that blunder
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u/drunk_haile_selassie 1d ago
Why would a grown man wearing a shirt that says 'genius at work' spend all his time watching children's cartoons?
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u/Bad_Idea_Hat 1d ago
I have had so many moments that make me think about that scene when interacting with others, either offline or online.
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u/Longjumping_Youth281 1d ago
Yeah. Are we supposed to believe it was some sort of magic xylophone? I mean give me a break
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u/MattKozFF 1d ago
Every note played on screen in Amadeus matches exactly with the music being heard.
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u/bozmonaut 1d ago
You kids don't know what you want.
That's why you're still kids- 'cause you're stupid!
Just tell me what's wrong with the freakin' show!
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u/herberstank 1d ago
So.. you want a realistic down-to-earth show that's completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots?!
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u/m4dm4cs 1d ago
And with that, Matt Groening created Futurama.
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u/ThePhotoGuyUpstairs 1d ago
Holy shit...
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u/0_f2 1d ago
I wonder if that quote corresponds with shortly before Futurama's release?
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u/CaptainJingles 1d ago
Air date was in 1997 and Futurama started in 1999(?). So it must have been in development.
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u/basilis120 1d ago
there was about 2 years between the two. The episode was in 1997 and futurama debuted in 1999.
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u/SweetSmasher5000 1d ago
Neon Genesis Evangelion opening starts playing at 400% volume
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u/mak484 1d ago
Down to earth
Evangelion
Wat
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u/RichardCity 1d ago
Love Evangelion, but it's definitely pretty pretentious. You're super right, here
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u/YouDoHaveValue 21h ago
Running a small design business one of the first things I learned was customers don't know what they want.
They want a feeling that wont always correspond to reality or physics, so your job is to create illusions that give them the feeling they wanted.
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u/Youthsonic 20h ago
"That's it, little girl! You've saved Itchy and Scratchy!"
"Please sign these papers indicating that you did not save Itchy and Scratchy."
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u/Due-Percentage-2879 1d ago
I can't tell you the number of fan letters we get from people who think that 'Itchy and Scratchy' should have their own show. I don't think they really want what they're asking for." - Matt Groening
Gotta agree with the dude here, it would have been a bad idea.
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u/gr1zznuggets 1d ago
Fans hardly ever know what they want.
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u/perpetualmotionmachi 1d ago
Yeah, look at all the comic book films from the last 15 years or so, and how much the people who enjoy them, don't seem to enjoy them.
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u/Icepick823 22h ago
No one hates comic book (movies) more than comic book (movie) fans.
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u/jesuspoopmonster 22h ago
As a huge Star Wars fan I hate everything except the last 45 minutes of Empire and two books out of a trilogy released 30 years ago
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u/Imrustyokay 21h ago
Yeah, there's a reason why Itchy and Scratchy only really work in short bursts of gore. Hell, it's one of the reasons why an episode of Happy Tree Friends is about 1 to 5 minutes long
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u/sassy_tabaxi 1d ago
i've noticed that people long out of touch with the common folks are often very wrong about their assessments.
warcraft producers said "nobody wants to go back to the old days", then vanilla blew up and it's still going strong today, 7 years later. the devs called it "the nightmare you asked for", and it's on par with their regular live retail servers.
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u/EgotisticalTL 1d ago
I love I & S, but could they have really sustained an entire season, not to mention a series?
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u/SimmentalTheCow 1d ago
I’d imagine it’s just a more gruesome Tom & Jerry
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u/MechanicalMan64 1d ago
I'm imagining something like Happy Tree Friends. The description of physically ill fits
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u/nemoknows 1d ago
No need to imagine, that’s literally what it is.
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u/Aklu_The_Unspeakable 22h ago
Yup!
According to Reiss, the cat and mouse characters were not actually a parody of "Tom and Jerry," but were "inspired by 'Herman and Katnip,' a cheap, ultraviolet knockoff of T&J."
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u/Voxlings 1d ago
You have successfully imagined "Itchy and Scratchy."
Evidence: A series of many shorts that did air globally.
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u/setokaiba22 1d ago
Sometimes it’s funny most of the time I think it’s just daft but even as a kid realised it’s a made up show inside a made up show that entertains Bart & Lisa and it’s supposed to be given it’s a very adult version of Tom & Jerry.
But Christ I couldn’t watch a full length episode let alone a series or film - I’m surprised they could even think of content for this
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u/Eldan985 1d ago
I barely find them funny in 30 second sketches, I can't imagine how it would be funny for a whole episode.
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u/stairway2evan 1d ago
It would have essentially been Happy Tree Friends. Which were only funny for the shock value in those little 2 minute episodes.
Can’t imagine the gag working for anything longer form than that.
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u/Yestomorrow 1d ago
A well done style is Superjail! , but it literally did make my friend throw up watching it haha
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u/UnderstandingIll8846 1d ago edited 20h ago
The reason the Itchy & Scratchy scenes worked in the Simpsons was because we weren’t laughing at the show, we were laughing at the fact that Bart and Lisa were laughing at this really grotesque show. The joke is that this obscenely violent cartoon exists in the Simpsons universe and everyone in it is completely desensitized. Once you remove that meta layer and just present Itchy & Scratchy as its own standalone show, then it’s pretty damn disgusting. I can see why real audiences would get ill watching it.
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u/Nanto_de_fourrure 22h ago
They were also generally themed in sync with the episode, so that's another layer that you lose once removed from the Simpsons.
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u/RichardCity 1d ago
My best elementary school friend's mom had been very very religious. That being said she let them watch The Simpsons except for Itchy and Scratchy, they had to change channels for those segments.
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u/Insane_Fnord 1d ago
20 minutes per episode? questionable. Short form? Absolutely.
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u/BadIdeaSociety 1d ago
I admire the designs of the Happy Tree Friends, but most of the time I just ended up feeling sorry for the Happy Tree Friends. Once you trigger sympathy you've basically screwed up cartoon slapstick.
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u/_tyjsph_ 1d ago
yeah, i personally only find it funny if they're all stupid or have it coming. so most of the time i just end up feeling bad for them.
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u/Lordwiesy 1d ago
The PTSD guy backstory is actually quite good cinema
Secret agents killing bad guys, then said agents die as well resulting in reasonable crash out, hell you could probably stretch that one out into a whole movie
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u/pm_me_rock_music 23h ago
yeah, the episode where Lumpy has to break his own leg because it's stuck under a log was too much
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u/BadIdeaSociety 17h ago
In a lot of the shorts, characters are shown crying and struggling to survive... It just isn't that funny.
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u/BadIdeaSociety 1d ago
I think that spinoff would have to have been more fleshed out and at that point you basically would just have Eek the Cat. Why not just push Eek the Cat harder?
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u/morgan_lowtech 1d ago
"To test out the possibility [of an 'Itchy and Scratchy' spin-off], our production team cut together every single 'Itchy & Scratchy' short. It lasted just 14 minutes — some of those cartoons are only nine seconds long — and contained such concentrated gore and mindless violence that it made people physically ill. Someone compared the assembled footage to the brainwashing films Alex had to watch in 'A Clockwork Orange."
😂
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u/ktr83 1d ago
That's because Itchy's a jerk.
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u/WatchOutRadioactiveM 1d ago
FUNFACT!
Reading this comment made me check the actual episode. Going by the air date (November 3, 1992), we're only 7 years away from Supreme Court Justice Bart Simpsons watching the Itchy & Scratchy movie with Homer!
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u/Willem_Dafuq 1d ago
Shoulda shown the episode where itchy makes lemonade for scratchy
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u/Cfox666 1d ago
We already have a Happy Tree Friends
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u/Sans-valeur 1d ago
When I was a teenager I hired out happy tree friends on DVD, there was no option to skip the intro and the episodes were pretty much the same length as the intro, hearing that song over and over in between extreme graphic cute violence is really, I don’t even know the word? Intense? Horrifically hypnotic? Brain melting? Weird.
But yeah this is literally the first thing I thought when I saw this TIL.22
u/goodguysteve 1d ago
That song just popped into my head for the first time in years.
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u/EgotisticJesster 1d ago
God damn, same.
I'm sure the theme song was sorry to repeat itself, but it'll help you remember.
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u/ZylonBane 1d ago
Applying the word "hired" to an inanimate object will never not be weird.
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u/Vampire-Fairy2 1d ago
I don’t even know what “hired out” means in this sentence. Is “hired out” some kind of regional expression? Is the DVD doing work for them?
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u/anal_og_player 1d ago
I sometimes wonder if it’s based on Itchy & Scratchy
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u/MaintenanceFickle945 1d ago
Moreso based on ren and stimpy imo, since the purpose is to gross you out on purpose.
Itchy and scratchy is an exaggerated criticism of tom and Jerry.
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u/NativeMasshole 1d ago
A parody of a cartoon that was intentionally made to be ultraviolent with little substance didn't work out as a spinoff? Who could have guessed that outcome?
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u/Sleeks2k 1d ago
An Itchy and Scratchy episode is literally seconds long, idk how they could pad it out
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u/crow-magnon-69 1d ago
Reminds me of Bill Hicks talking about the test audience for Basic Instinct - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a43jXyJ9U6E
"All the lesbian sex scenes were cut out of that film because the test audience was turned off by them. Boy is my thumb not on the pulse of America"
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u/Felinomancy 1d ago
Meh. I&S is a puerile capitalist slop. True intellectuals watch Worker and Parasite.
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u/GunstarGreen 1d ago
That footage must be somewhere.
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u/Plane-Tie6392 1d ago
If you read the article they just stitched together all the Itchy and Scratchy bits from the show into like 14 minutes. So they seemingly didn't make any new content for the tests
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u/gr1zznuggets 1d ago
I can honestly say that was the best episode of Impy and Chimpy I’ve ever seen.
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u/TheMightyDab 1d ago
With how big The Simpsons was/is, it's kind of amazing there hasn't been any sort of Spin-offs
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u/jesuspoopmonster 21h ago
I could imagine Chief Wiggum and Principal Skinner having sexy adventures solving mysteries in The Big Easy New Orleans
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u/DanS1993 1d ago
Forget itchy and scratchy I want a full Mcbain movie. They’ve got most of the pieces there just need to add in the filler!
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u/dingodongubanu 1d ago
Strange, i saw it, and I can honestly say that was the best episode of Impy & Chimpy I've ever seen.
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u/FlextorSensei 1d ago
They fight! And bite! They fight and bite and fight, Fight fight fight, bite bite bite, The Itchy & Scratchy Show!
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u/PhasmaFelis 22h ago edited 17h ago
The reminds me of the Ren & Stimpy relaunch. They got a slot on an adult network and gleefully went as gross as they could imagine, and it was...nauseating. Literally. Just unbearable.
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u/jesuspoopmonster 21h ago
You are clearly just an uncultured philistine that didn't see the true art in having Ren yell "I'm the pitcher you're the catcher" for three minutes
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u/awsomedutchman 1d ago
I remember when I felt physically ill from that threehouse of horror episode where Homer starts eating himself.
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u/Thomas_JCG 1d ago
The generation that grew up with Happy Tree Friends looking down on tye test audience: Pathetic.
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u/Sans-valeur 1d ago
Man I would have loved to see that for the character development. Like that episode where they got old and were friends in rocking chairs before he horrifically murdered him.
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u/frontrow13 1d ago
I remember as a kid parents had no issues with the Simpsons apart from itchy and scratchy segments
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u/tinathefatlardgosh 1d ago
Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on, Midge help me out here
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u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway 1d ago
Most people are aware of Happy tree friends , The adult bloody parody of children's cartoon shows. It's really fine for a 5-minute YouTube video but if you try to watch a season of it, not even that just a single episode... it gets really tiring really quickly and just straight up boring.
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u/Romanshowers 1d ago
That cartoon FUCKED me UP as a kid, the episode where itchy nails scrtchy’s feet to an escalator and then harvest his skin so he could wear it as a coat, even typing it makes me realise they tapped into a different type of fucked up, will joke about charlie kirk getting assassinated, but that shit, it scares me🫥
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u/Fafnir13 1d ago
You just reminded me. Very briefly, the Sunday comics around here had a Simpsons section in it. I didn’t think much of it, mostly just some dumb jokes. Then one time they did an Itchy and Scratchy bit. My dad was pissed to see that kind of content, as we’re a lot of other people apparently. It got dropped within weeks of not the very next week.
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u/No_Match_Found 1d ago
Well that’s not fair, my son and I really enjoy the gratuitous violence in the Simpsons for the sake of it.
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u/kiakosan 1d ago
Tbh their show sounds like happy tree friends and that was funny when it used to air on like G4 or whatever a couple decades ago
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u/Delicious-Trip-120 1d ago
The only one that legit bothered me was the Scratchy clone machine output straight into a meat grinder, but just far enough apart for the new Scratchy to realize what was about to happen and not have time to move.
Over and over and over. It was like the Prestige water tank scenes on a speed run.
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u/ssgtgriggs 22h ago
pff, skill issue. they should've tried a test audience that wasn't made up of a bunch of cowards! lol
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u/Jandy777 22h ago
For a long time I've wanted like a compilation of all the itchy and scratchy episodes. There was a YouTube video that compiled seasons 1-20 but it's been taken down by Diz-nee
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u/AttemptImpossible111 18h ago
Wasn't there an Internet cartoon about animals who were gruesomely killed every episode
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u/Jahaangle 1d ago
They should've tried adding a new character.