YMMV / The Simpsons S8 E11 "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"

• Aluminium Christmas Trees: Disco Stu's platform shoes with live (well, initially) goldfish in them? Real. As you might've guessed, the goldfish typically didn't live through one trip to the disco.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At the Springfield Isotopes game, Springfielders are so angry at Mr. Burns winning the raffle that they start throwing Marge's pretzels, littering the field and hurting Whitey Ford. During a 2001 NFL game with the Jacksonville Jaguars vs. the Cleveland Browns, the NFL referees controversially overturned a potentially game-winning play for Cleveland, making Cleveland fans so angry that they threw bottles and other objects at them, leading to the game being dubbed "Bottlegate".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The short Yakuza member that Homer insists on wanting to watch instead of running away because he hasn't done anything yet and expects him to do something awesome wears a suit similar in design and color to the one worn by Kazuma Kiryu, the main protagonist of the Like a Dragon series who's known for his unmatched fighting ability. As a bonus, he also apologizes to Homer after he's thrown through their kitchen window and Kiryu is also known for being a Nice Guy despite his previous occupation as a member of the Yakuza.
  • The episode ends with a big gang fight between the Springfield Mafia and the Yakuza. Many years later, a very similar scenario would play out on an episode of the show Deadliest Warrior.
  • The usage of the stock music piece "The Lineman" during the montage of Marge making pretzels and the mobsters assisting her became this, considering how it became famous as the theme for Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy just a couple of years after the episode was made.
  • The Fleet-A-Pita saleswoman desperately trying to rename all the Middle Eastern food to sound American, such as calling pita "pocket bread" and tabbouleh "a Ben Franklin." Nowadays, this looks like a satire of the 2003 incident in which the White House cafeteria renamed French fries "freedom fries" due to France protesting the invasion of Iraq.
  • The last two children Cletus calls out of his house are Q-Bert and Phil. This comes across as a retroactive Futurama reference, given Cubert Farnsworth and Philip J. Fry are (distant) relatives. It helps that both have red hair, a common trait among the Spuckler kids.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The main plot of the episode concerning the two rival snack food franchises was selected because at the time of production, pita bread and pretzels were "becoming popular". Josh Weinstein expressed his wish that the ideas had been changed to something more "fun", as both snacks have since "gone out of fashion". That said, Pita and Pretzels might still be novelty snacks depending on where you live, seen as "exotic" Middle Eastern and European food.
  • One scene centers on an Overly Long Gag where Cletus calls for his many children to come out of the house, and their names are all ones that were trendy at that specific time.
  • The Investorettes food truck plays Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop", a song that was on an upswing in the 90s as Bill Clinton used it as his campaign theme but now is just a reference that flies over the heads of the young.
  • Disco Stu's trying to promote a vinyl record business is meant to be another example of his Disco Dan nature due to records falling off in popularity during the 80s and 90s in favor of CDs. The 2010s saw the "Vinyl Revival" as audiophiles started buying more records due to their sound quality meaning Stu's business could in fact be successful again.

---