Bart tries to save his new cow from the slaughterhouse — and ends up nearly married to a hillbilly girl named Mary.
Tropes:
- Accidental Proposal: Bart presents Lou to Mary in the hopes of saving his cow from being slaughtered. However, her parents view this as him proposing to marry her.
- Bait-and-Switch: During the montage of Bart and Lou bonding, Bart is handling a branding iron, making it look like he's about to brand Lou...but he's actually making a collar sign for him.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Transclown-O-Morphs. As their theme song says, the transclown-o-morphs are "transforming clowns that morph".
- Feed by Example:
- During the bonding montage, Bart tried to feed Lou grass, but Lou refused to eat it, so Bart tried to show him it tasted good. Bart ended up hogging the grass.
- When Maggie refuses to eat her baby food, Homer and Marge use sock puppets to convince her to, with Homer's puppet eating the food. The tactic works, but before Maggie eats a bite, Lisa comes in talking about Bart's situation.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: The tactic of switching Homer with the cow is given away briefly by the fact that when Lou moos, not only does his mouth not move, but it doesn’t sound like Tress MacNeille
- Kick the Dog: Lisa hides a CD player under Bart's bed with sounds of cows and other farm animals to guilt trip him into giving up meat.
- Lazily Gender-Flipped Name: Bart names his calf 'Lulubelle'. Mary suggests he calls him just 'Lou' because he's a young bull. Bart likes it because it rhymes with Moo.
- Meaningful Name: Mary got her name because she's the one her parents expected to get married. It's mentioned that all of the Spuckler's children were named after what they would do when they grew up. Yes, the Spucklers were that crazy. Also a display of a Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom.Cletus: Isn't that right, Stabbed-in-jail?Stabbedinjail: (wielding a whittled spear) We'll see who stabs who.
- Merchandise-Driven: The transforming clowns that morph use their show to sell their cereal. When they're losing, one of them says it's because someone isn't buying it.
- Partially-Concealed-Label Gag: Homer is going to save Bart's cow, Lou, from slaughter. He looks through binoculars and sees a "laughter house," which he likes the idea of. He zooms out and notices it's a slaughterhouse, and screams.
- Series Continuity Error: A minor one as back in "The Bart Of War", Marge said the 4-H Club were renamed to the 5-H Club after they were forced to admit homosexuals.
- Shout-Out: Tress MacNeille gets mentioned a couple times in this episode, meaning that the woman who voices dozens of characters on The Simpsons is famous enough In-Universe that Bart and Homer can recognize her voice.
- Show Within a Show: Bart and Lisa watch an animated show Transclown-O-Morphs.
- Spit Take: Upon hearing about Bart getting married, Homer's sock puppet spits out the food in its mouth.
- Take That!:
- "4-H: It's still a thing."
- When Bart is using an industrial bundling machine, the hay comes out as blocks of hay, the water he drives through comes out as blocks of water that quickly soak into the ground, and the manure? The bundles come out as packed DVDs of Pirates of the Caribbean 3.
- The opening segment is a dig at Merchandise-driven franchises such as Transformers, and shows overreliant on product placement in general.
- The way cows are farmed takes a pretty hard hit.Bart: Wow, Lou, what happened to you? You got fat.
Lisa: Of course he got fat. The food he ate was laced with growth hormones.
(Lou licks Bart's arm; the area he licked immediately grows a thick patch of hair)
