Original air date: 5/19/1996
Production code: 3F21
Tropes featured:
- All Just a Dream: Otto wins an award for "Safest Bus Driver", and tearfully says this is just like a dream. Cue Milhouse yelling at him to wake up, because he is asleep at the wheel again.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: The whole plot starts going when Homer is one these to his children and they call him out on it and his very antiquated music likes, so Homer tries to make himself cool again by getting tickets for Hullabalooza.
- AM/FM Characterization: Homer's love of old-school rock-and-roll (in an episode produced at the height of Grunge Rock) becomes plot-important because his children find him old-fashioned, uncool, and infuriatingly embarrassing.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- When Homer's stomach started growling strangely, the tour organizer says "Homer, nothing's more important to me than the health and well-being of my freaks. I'm sending you to a vet."
- When Homer, a rock-and-roll fan, comments that he was most fond of the music growing up a Description Cut occurs to show a teenage Homer and Barney rocking out to Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" - a disco-pop song with a heavy use of falsetto.
- Bowdlerize:
- UK airings of this episode usually edit out the roadie and Peter Frampton's lines "He's gonna be pissed off." and "You're damn right I'm gonna be pissed off!" just after Homer gets hit in the stomach with the inflatable pig.
- Recent airings have also cut out the scene of Homer standing at the music store's front, due its name being "Suicide Notes: Formerly Good Vibrations" and some drug references (Bart and Lisa associating the smell of pot to Otto's jacket and Otto thinking his shoes are talking) are also cut.
- Butt-Monkey: Peter Frampton can't catch a break.Peter: God. Homer Simpson wrecks my pig, Cypress Hill steals my orchestra, and Sonic Youth's in my cooler! Get out of there, you kids!
- Cameo Cluster: Features Smashing Pumpkins, Cypress Hill, Sonic Youth and Peter Frampton as performers on the Hullabalooza music festival.
- Cannot Convey Sarcasm: This exchange between two disaffected teenagers.Teen 1: Here comes that cannon ball guy. He's cool.
Teen 2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Teen 1: I don't even know anymore. - Celebrity Is Overrated: Parodied towards the end.Homer: I'll miss you, Pumpkins, but I just can't share your bleak world view. I've got too much to live for.
Billy Corgan: We envy you, Homer. All we have is our music, our legion of fans, our million of dollars and our youth...
(Beat)
Smashing Pumpkins: Woo-hoo!
James Iha: Let's all go out and buy fur coats!
Jimmy Chamberlin: I want a walk-in humidor. - Couch Gag: The living room is bathed in black light, with the Simpsons in fluorescent colors while a hard rock guitar riff plays until Homer turns the light on and the normal music plays.
- Dented Iron: Homer eventually takes so many cannonballs to the stomach that one more would kill him.
- Disco Dan: Homer towards the start.Homer: Where can I find the latest releases by Bread?
Record Store Clerk: Oldies.
Homer: Oldies? But you've got all the top bands in here. - Dissimile: When Homer is being introduced in Springfield, the organizer describes him as "The man who embodies everything about rock 'n roll, except the music."
- Everybody Do the Endless Loop: The teenagers dancing during the show. Reused during the ending credits.
- Growling Gut: Homer develops one due to frequently taking cannonballs to the stomach.
- Jacob Marley Warning: In Homer's flashback, Abe warns him and Barney that someday they will find themselves out of touch with what the youth consider cool just like him. Homer in the present is not happy when he realizes Abe was right.
- Kevlard: Homer uses his body fat to stop cannonballs when performing in a freak show. His body still accumulates damage over doing this repeatedly, which would have inevitably killed him if he continued.
- Like Father, Like Son: Abe's famous line from Homer's flashback invokes this.Homer: You wouldn't understand Dad. You're just not with it.
Abe: I used to be 'with it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it', and what's 'it' sounds weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you! - Made of Iron: Subverted when the doctor informs Homer that his cannonball-to-the-gut sideshow act is killing him.
- Misblamed: The stagehand assumes that Cypress Hill hired the London Philharmonic Orchestra while high and pressures them to own it. It was actually Peter Frampton who did, and later believes that Cypress Hill stole the Orchestra from him as a result.
- Mondegreen Gag: When Homer buys a Rastafarian hat and shows it off to his kids, Bart protests that he can't wear that hat, Homer says he's been "safarian" since before his kids were born.
- Rhetorical Request Blunder: After the veterinarian warns Homer that he'll die from taking another cannonball, Homer dismisses him.Homer: Got any messages for Jimi Hendrix?
Veterinarian: Yes: "Pick up your puppy."
(pan down to an ailing, elderly dog called "Rover Hendrix")note - Rule-Abiding Rebel: This episode mocks Generation-X'ers for thinking they're cool when in fact they're just insecure and cynical en masse, to the point that they're not even sure if they're really being sarcastic.
- Self-Serving Memory: Homer thinks back to his teenage years as his Glory Days, while the actual flashbacks show him as an unpopular dork who was just too much of a doofus to realise it. The highpoint of his high school years was being an unwanted spectator to someone else's Glory Days, this being the Dazed And Confused parody mentioned below. The only real camaraderie he had was with Barney.
- Shout-Out:
- The "Second-Base Mobile" scene, which is a parody of Dazed and Confused.
- Homer's failed attempt at blending in at the music festival includes doing the iconic "Keep On Truckin'" walk created by counter-culture cartoonist Robert Crumb.
- Otto hallucinating that his shoes are talking to him (specifically, what they're saying) is a slightly paraphrased version of the Lyrical Cold Open to the title track of Prince's album 1999.
- Sophisticated as Hell: The London Symphony Orchestra plays the instrumental portion of "Insane In the Membrane" for Cypress Hill.Marge: Now this, I like!
- Special Guest: The Smashing Pumpkins, Cypress Hill, Peter Frampton, and Sonic Youth all appear as themselves.
- Stealth Pun: When Homer speaks with a vet, he learns that the vet also has Jimi Hendrix's dog, Rover, presumably since 1970, when Hendrix died. The Jimi Hendrix Experience song "Fire" features the line "Move over, Rover and let Jimi take over.".
- Stop Motion Lighting: A flashback shows teenagers partying to a strobe light as young Homer watches from a distance. With each flicker, Homer is standing a little closer. When he's rejected, the next flicker has him immediately back where he started, parodying a similar scene from Dazed and Confused.
- The Stoner: Cypress Hill assumes they got so high they ordered the London Symphony Orchestra. It was actually for Peter Frampton, who was on stage at the time.
- Totally Radical: Homer's silly attempts to look cool and hip are a big part of the episode.
- Undercover Cop Reveal: Inverted. Homer's attempt at looking cool in Lollapalooza (wearing a Rastacap
, a button that reads "Too Cool For This Planet", and talking in old slang) makes the Grunge-rocker teens assume that he's a "narc" and kick him out. - Waxing Lyrical: Homer laments the loss of the freedom he had in his youth, saying "I used to rock and roll all night and party ev-e-ry day. Then it was every other day. Now I'm lucky if I can find one night a month in which to get funky."
- Who's on First?: When Homer first meets Billy Corgan.Billy: Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins.
Homer: Homer Simpson, smiling politely.
