YMMV / The Simpsons S 11 E 2 Brothers Little Helper

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The revelation that Major League Baseball was spying on Springfielders for market research can get rather uncomfortable considering the enormous market that's grown (especially on social media) around mass-collecting personal information for advertising purposes.
  • Likewise Major League Baseball and Mark McGwire covering up a scandal became less funny after the revelations that he and other famous players like Barry Bonds were involved in Steroid abuse.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Chief Wiggum calling Bart “Drugs Bunny” after the end of his Focusyn-fuelled destruction spree. Coincidentally, Bugs himself previously underwent a drastic (and drug-aided) personality change in the 1956 cartoon Hare Brush (which, similar to this episode, was written as a Take That! on the prevailing trends in psychoanalysis of the day). Modern viewers, however, will much sooner associate Wiggum’s line with Bugs’ growing dependence on the unsafe energy drink Spargle, culminating with a Sanity Slippage rampage not dissimilar to Bart’s, in an episode of The Looney Tunes Show.
• Informed Wrongness: Taking into account the fact that Bart was right about the baseball satellite, stealing the tank wasn't even an extreme reaction by his usual standards, so whether Focusyn really had a negative effect on him is debatable. Of course, Marge only takes him off the "psychotropic hayride" in question to put him on Ritalin.
• Values Dissonance: During the fire safety assembly, Bart gets a kick out of Principal Skinner saying the names of various firefighting implements. One of them was "Retardant," which Bart found funny because it sounded like "Retarded," which is now generally considered to be at best, a very rude term for mentally disabled people, and at worst, a slur. It’s no longer used in a medical term by most organizations since the 2010’s, using more PC terms instead.
• Values Resonance: The episode actually has some relevance today, as there is still concern over giving kids medication for attention deficit disorders and that companies in the age of the internet are aggressive in seeking out personal data for the sake of targeted advertising. Instead of being seen as crazy had this episode aired today, everyone would just take it as a given that companies and the government are spying on them with tech for petty reasons, though there are still attempts to curb their power.

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