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Book Home  Books Information Itchy & Scratchy Show
Itchy & Scratchy Show
The Itchy & Scratchy Show is a segment of the fictional
Krusty the Klown TV show, watched regularly by child characters on
the animated series The Simpsons. Itself an animated cartoon, The
Itchy & Scratchy Show depicts a mouse, Itchy, and a cat, Scratchy,
who attack and graphically mutilate each other with deadly weapons.
Poochie
Poochie was a dog character added to the Itchy & Scratchy lineup
in The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show. According to the show's
plot, the producers believed the cartoons were getting stale, and
needed a new character to reinvigorate the show. Homer Simpson gets
the job of voicing Poochie, who is introduced in the Itchy & Scratchy
cartoon "The Beagle Has Landed." A product of marketing
department thinking, Poochie was near-universally despised, and was
killed off in his second appearance, despite Homer's objections.
Both plots were a reference to TV shows which added
new characters purportedly to reinvigorate the show (often in the
show's waning years and/or to replace stars who had either departed
or grown up, if they were child actors). Famous examples include Scooby-Doo
(when his nephew, Scrappy-Doo, was suddenly added); The Flintstones,
who suddenly found themselves co-starring with The Great Gazoo; and
The Brady Bunch, when Cousin Oliver came to live with the Bradys.
Quite often, these additions of superfluous characters are seen as
jumping the shark moments; such changes are regarded by fans to be
the defining events in the decline of a TV show. This is itself satirized
in the episode, with the mysterious addition of a new character, "Roy,"
to the Simpson family; Roy leaves the show at the end of the episode.
Many fans of the show also saw Poochie's creation, depiction,
and demise as a response to various criticisms of The Simpsons by
its viewers. The focus group's desire for a show where its characters
solve real-life problems, and simultaneous desire for a show with
its characters "getting into far-out situations involving robots
and magic powers" reflects the division between fans of earlier
episodes of the series, which tended to focus on the family's relationships
with each other, and fans of the later episodes, which tended to rely
more heavily on sight gags, cameo appearances, and non-sequiturs.
Other aspects of the episode also play up this argument, including
Bart's declaration that the creators of Itchy and Scratchy are "giving
you thousands of hours of entertainment for free" and Lisa's
closing lines about how Itchy and Scratchy's viewers "should
thank our lucky stars that they're still putting on a program of this
caliber after so many years."
Despite being created for a single-episode appearance
(and despite a legal document from Krusty stating that he would never
reappear), Poochie has appeared in later episodes of The Simpsons,
such as the 11th Halloween show, an Itchy & Scratchy episode ("Tears
of a Clone"), and was on a Krusty-Brand show T-Shirt (as well
as "Itchy-Poochie").
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