YMMV / The Simpsons S 11 E 1 Beyond Blunderdome

• Crosses the Line Twice: Everything about Homer's changes to the film, turning a classic, nonviolent, dramatic scene into a random assortment of mindless action schlock. It's tasteless and horrible... but it's also incredibly funny to watch.
• Fridge Horror: Assuming Gibson's remake includes the character of Clarissa Saunders, there's every chance she may have been killed in the revised ending, either during Smith's indiscriminate shootout or when he blew up the Capitol.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Mel Gibson is genuinely shocked when audiences react badly to his ultra-violent climactic blood bath ending to his remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. A few years later, Gibson's life and career would spiral out of control when he couldn't cope with general audiences reacting badly to his very bloody 2004 Crucifixion film The Passion of the Christ, seriously damaging his reputation in the process as he suffered a serious nervous breakdown complete with alcohol relapse and the end of his long standing marriage to Robin Moore.
  • Mel in the episode looks shocked as Homer yanks Marge's wedding ring-adorned hand to him pointing out that "This symbolizes she's my property and that I own her!". A decade later, Mel's ex-girlfriend records audio of him unleashing several misogynistic and racist rants towards her, sentiments that aren't too far from that quote about Marge.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Several years after the episode, the idea of Mel Gibson being beloved is ridiculous at best and him getting his wish of no one liking him anymore isn't so far-fetched, thanks to his transgressions.
  • Mel Gibson doing an overly-violent retelling of a well-known story and getting his career derailed by it becomes this after The Passion of the Christ and its controversy over its Gorn began Gibson's career downward spiral.
  • While in Hollywood, the Simpsons see Robert Downey Jr. in a shoot-out with the LAPD, which Marge thought was a movie being filmed until Bart pointed out that there weren't any cameras, parodying his drug problems and arrests at the time. Downey would go on to basically pull a reverse of what happened to Gibson, becoming clean and sober and resurrecting his career thanks to his roles as Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes, culminating in him winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for Oppenheimer.
  • This episode names a hilarious (and often used) trope. A few years later, one of the endings of Silent Hill 2 has a dog inside of the control room, apparently engineering the events of the game. It seems like the dog really was the mastermind!
  • In the Couch Gag, the Present Day Simpsons meet their counterparts from The Tracey Ullman Show counterparts and all 10 of them run out of the room scared. The two families would meet again 15 years later in the Treehouse of Horror XXV segment "The Others".
• One-Scene Wonder: The shifty-eyed dog that appears at the end, for being a hilarious Brick Joke.
• Salvaged Story: Feels like one to "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" (besides "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?", of course). As seen in the trivia section, this episode follows the exact same beats as the aforementioned one, with the exception that, unlike Herb, Mel Gibson supervises all of Homer's work, gets to see the finalized product before releasing it to the public, and takes responsibility when it inevitably crashes and burns rather than blaming it entirely on Homer.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The episode is a Mel Gibson vehicle. Gibson complains that people love him too much and that violence is dead in cinema (he partly blames the "swing revival", now seen as part of the "corporate reaction" on the music industry of the late '90s against the alternative boom). He ruins his career by filming a hyper-violent adaptation of a classic story beloved by many. This is not an ironic statement. Also, while in Hollywood, Marge sees Robert Downey Jr. in a shootout with police and thinks they're filming a movie, to which Bart replies that there are no cameras, a reference to his drug problems and arrests at the time. Downey has since cleaned up and revived his career.
  • Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche are shown to be a couple; in real-life their relationship ended not long after the episode aired, and Heche passed away in 2022.
  • A rare example of one caused in a dub: When Mel Gibson first asks Homer to help him with his movie, Homer, still mad at him due to Marge's infatuation with him, tells him "Listen, Gibson, I'm tired of Hollywood pretty boys like you and Jack Valenti thinking you can have any woman you want!"^ExplanationThe joke apparently being that Valenti was the then-President of the MPAA and was 78 years old at the time Since Valenti is virtually unknown outside of the United States, in the Latin American Spanish dub he was replaced with Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin. This clearly dates the episode as being made before Ricky Martin came out as gay in 2010.

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