Helter Shelter
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"Helter Shelter" is the fifth episode from the fourteenth season of The Simpsons that aired December 1, 2002. This was the last episode that had no digital pen.
[edit] Plot
After Homer suffers a brain injury at work, Mr. Burns offers his family tickets in a luxury sky box at a hockey game as compensation. Lisa receives a player's hockey stick for shouting advice to him during the game. However, termites, which were living in the stick, end up eating away at the entire Simpson house. An exterminator says their house should be tented and fumigated, and they cannot return for six months. However, the family has no place to go. They tried to stay with Lenny and then Comic Book Guy but their apartments were too weird. At Moe's, their last resort, Barney and Carl inform the Simpsons about a reality show, where a family is put in a Victorian house, where they must live like it was the year 1895. Homer is reluctant at first, but then they go to the reality show.
At the studio, the executives screen many families and finally they settle on the Simpsons, after viewing Homer's overreactions over nothing. They are taken to the Victorian house and shown around by the Network Executive, who says that they will be filmed round the clock. The only thing of the 20th century there is a "Confessional Room", which is a small room with a video camera where they say what they feel about the lifestyle. The family struggles with all of the drastic changes in their daily life and are pretty miserable, much to the delight of the show's audience. Homer tries to lighten up the family, saying they should be glad on TV, and begin to conform to their new lives cheerily. This is not deemed as entertaining, however, and viewership begins to drop. In attempts to save the show, the executives decide to introduce Squiggy from Laverne and Shirley into the household. But even his presence (and that of a taser which he uses on Homer) does not boost the ratings. Finally, one of the executives comes up with an idea. The house is airlifted at night and put into a river.
The Simpsons are shocked to find what had happened the next morning, and the house finally washes up on shore and falls apart, with Squiggy in it. The network crew is filming it and loving the drama that unfolds. They then break for lunch, but deny the Simpsons any of it so they go to eat some bugs. Later on, the family is confronted by a bunch of savage-looking people, who turn out to be contestants in other reality shows, whom the network ditched after they failed in their tasks. They decide to overpower the crew and return to civilization. Together with the Simpsons, they attack the crew, overpowering them. Homer then tried to crush the helicopter with a giant boulder but he was pushed into the ground. Finally at home, Homer decides to watch scripted TV shows, as he has had it with reality shows, but the family finds more pleasure in watching him continually spraying himself in the eye with the hose.
[edit] Cultural references
- The title is a play on the Beatles song "Helter Skelter".
- The reality show the Simpsons end up on is a parody of the British reality show The 1900 House.
- The scene where the Simpsons are waiting for time to fly by mirrors the opening sequence of King of the Hill.
- Not for the first time, this episode of The Simpsons contains a reference to the 1990s TV character Steve Urkel from the show Family Matters. When Marge attempts to buy groceries from the Kwik-E-Mart, Apu informs her that he is under instructions from the producers of the reality show to vet her purchases for items that were not available in 1895. As such, he deems the breakfast cereal Urkel-O's "delicious, but forbidden."
- "Law & Order: Elevator Inspectors Unit" is a reference to the TV show Law & Order and its various spin-offs.
- The label on the exterminator's van says A Bug's Death, a reference to Pixar's A Bug's Life.
- The piano number played throughout the sequences in the old house is The Entertainer by Scott Joplin, popularized by Marvin Hamlisch, who arranged a version of the rag for the movie The Sting that was also a hit single which reached #3 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 music chart in 1974.
- In the confessional room, Bart expresses his disappointment with living in the 1895 house. He displays a Mutt and Jeff comic strip and berates it. Mutt and Jeff, however, was created in 1907, and so should not be present in the 1895 house.
- The final scene with the hose is based on Louis Lumiere's 1895 film L'Arroseur Arrosé.
