YMMV / The Simpsons S4 E5 "Treehouse of Horror III"

• Angst? What Angst?: Played for Laughs. The ending of "King Homer" has Marge's father being eaten by Homer. Whereas her mother is semi-frantic, Marge's only reaction is "Oh, Homer" while smiling, implying that she finds it cute.
• Ass Pull: Played for Laughs. The allegedly cursed Krusty doll actually being evil because of a switch in his back that controls his behavior.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Also counts as Distanced from Current Events: The swirling newspaper gag from King Homer briefly had a subheadline that reads "Woody Allen Born"; they were initially going to use the joke, but decided not to given what happened a few months before the episode aired.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Clown Without Pity," Patty claims that she lost the last lingering thread of her heterosexuality after seeing Homer run naked through the kitchen. 12 years later, she would come out of the closet as a lesbian in "There's Something About Marrying" (though it wasn't because of Homer's nudity; Patty always knew, but Marge was too naïve to notice even when she saw Patty make out with another woman).
  • In the same short, the doll coming back after being buried and then purified of all evil is basically the climax to Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders 4 years early.
  • In "King Homer," Homer attempts to perform a "King Kong" Climb, only to get exhausted two stories up due to being completely out of shape. When the segment was reused as the final level in The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror, Homer actually made it to the top this time.
  • The joke in "Dial Z for Zombies" about Barney deciding to eat people despite not being a zombie because "hey, when in Rome!" probably became a lot funnier for fans of World War Z, where a minor plot point is people who cracked under pressure and started thinking they were zombies (which didn't work out for them).
  • One of the gag tombstones in the opening is "Eaten By Mistake" (a gravestone for a lobster). In "Lisa Gets An 'A'", Homer adopts a lobster, and guess what happens to it?
  • Springfield invaded by zombies seems to be an ongoing problem.
  • One of the sections in the book Bart borrows is "How to sell your soul in the buyer's market". In "Bart Sells His Soul", Bart would sell his soul to Milhouse and suffer an existential crisis afterwards.
  • The fact that Waldo "isn't even trying anymore" when Bart finds him as soon as he opens the book becomes this when a later episode has his father utterly fail at trying to find Waldo, even after the latter walks right past the window.
• Hollywood Pudgy: The theater in King Homer advertised "the chubbiest kickline" of chorus girls, who definitely were very curvy but by no means overweight. This is likely a comment on how beauty standards have changed from the 1930s to the early 1990s (when the special came out).
• Most Wonderful Sound: The adorable sound Lisa makes when she's turned into a snail and Bart lies to say she's a "beautiful young woman".
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • There's an Expy of Shirley Temple who gets eaten by King Homer. She has about ten seconds of screen time, but Russi Taylor does a great impression that ensures she's remembered.
  • There’s also living undead versions of George Washington, Albert Einstein, and of course, William Shakespeare, with his own strangely meaningful last words.
    Zombie Shakespeare: Is this the end of Zombie Shakespeare?
• Signature Scene: Homer shooting zombie Flanders and saying "he was a zombie?" in response. It's one of Matt Groening's favourite lines and the writing staff consider it one of the all-time classic Simpsons moments.

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