Trivia / The Simpsons S 12 E 15 Hungry Hungry Homer

• Defictionalization: Two years after this episode aired, Albuquerque's new minor-league baseball team named themselves the Isotopes. (It should be pointed out that, aside from the Simpsons connection, the name is appropriate to the area as New Mexico is home to several scientific facilities dealing with nuclear technology, and was famously the site of the Trinity atom bomb test.). According to the owners, they can tell whenever an episode featuring the Isotopes airs in a market by the influx of online merch orders from that area.
• Deleted Scene: The Season 12 DVD has a scene that shows the family watching TV at the beginning of the episode before the Blockoland commercial came on, which would have explained why Homer was strangling Bart this time at the beginning of the episode.
• Edited for Syndication: The original ending where the Mayor of Albuquerque decides to forgo his plans to buy the Isotopes and sets his sights on the Dallas Cowboys was cut in syndication, making the episode end with Homer celebrating the end of his hunger strike by eating the stadium food. The DVD version, the versions seen on FXX and Disney+, and several overseas cuts (particularly in France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) have the original ending intact.
• Throw It In!: Homer's "Dancing Away My Hunger Pangs" song was ad-libbed by Dan Castellaneta.
• What Could Have Been: The concept of Homer on a hunger strike originally began for an episode pitched years earlier, where Homer does it in protest of a new helmet law after he obtains a new motorcycle; his hunger strike causes him to pass out while riding and getting a concussion.