YMMV / The Simpsons S3 E1 "Stark Raving Dad"

• Awesome Music: "Lisa, It's Your Birthday".
• Broken Base: The episode becoming a Missing Episode as of 2019. While allegations of child molestation, one resulting in a court trial that ended in a not guilty verdict in 2005, had been leveled by multiple parties against Michael Jackson from 1993 onward, the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland (focusing on two of the alleged victims' detailed stories of abuse and manipulation) was the tipping point for the Simpsons producers, who now feel that Jackson's motives for appearing on the show were not what they believed them to be. Especially after the show's streaming move to Disney+, which was how many people first found out that the episode was no longer available anywhere aside from older pressings of the Season 3 DVD set, there is a debate between fans who feel that the producers have a right to choose to drop the episode, and those who feel Jackson's presence was/is no worse than that of other controversial guest stars and contributors (i.e. Mel Gibson, Ted Nugent, John Kricfalusi, etc.) and/or do not believe the documentary in the first place and feel a classic episode is being unnecessarily locked up.
• Growing the Beard: The official start to what is considered to be the Golden Age of the show and would contain the elements of what made the show so great. The animation was heavily improved, the humor was perfected, the comedy and drama were well-balanced, and the characters have finally been realized after two seasons.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the Funniest Home Videos Homer watches is "Baby with a Nail Gun". Guess what Homer suffers at the hands of Maggie several seasons later?
  • Carl and Lenny poke fun at Homer by saving him a pink donut to eat, to which a frustrated Homer insists that wearing a pink shirt doesn't make him "some kind of pink donut-eater" (before immediately going for the donut). Although donuts were already Homer's Trademark Favorite Food at this point in the series, it would eventually turn into a love for pink-frosted donuts specifically, to the point of a pink-frosted donut being the "O" in the logo for The Movie and a specialty snack at Universal Studio's real-life incarnation of the show's Lard Lad franchise.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Since 2019, it has become pretty much impossible to discuss the episode without discussing it being made a Missing Episode following the release of Leaving Neverland and the allegations against Micheal Jackson. This is despite (and in many ways because) the episode long being viewed as a major Growing the Beard moment for the series.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The unbridled excitement surrounding the prospect of the actual Michael Jackson coming to a small North American town dates the episode to pre-1993. After Jackson was accused of child molestation in August of that year and chose to settle the matter out of court, his reputation in the U.S. took a hit. Four seasons later, the episode "Bart Sells His Soul" featured Bart claiming to Milhouse that Michael Jackson is, like the boogeyman and the soul, a myth that parents use to scare children. In 2019, the show's producers decided to withdraw "Stark Raving Dad" from circulation upon viewing the documentary Leaving Neverland, which brought forward additional allegations against Jackson.
  • Bart believing it's Michael Jackson because he can list his last four dates to the Grammys is less impressive with the Internet making such trivia easy to track down.
  • Lisa's room has an "End Apartheid Now!" poster; South Africa was in the process of repealing it when the episode first aired.

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