Original Air Date: Sunday, November 2, 2003 A Family Feud and This November Thing This episode opens with Bart and Lisa dressed up as Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt from 'Peanuts', coming in from a night of trick-or-treating and going through their candy. When Bart complains about Lisa getting all the "good stuff", Lisa claims she's still not satisfied and steals one of Bart's chocolate bars. A fight breaks out between Bart and Lisa, starting sort of average (as far as 'The Simpsons' goes) with some strangling and some beating over the head. Bart accidentally stabs Homer with a fire poker, which starts a chain reaction. Homer throws a flaming log at the kids, accidentally hitting Grampa, and Marge eventually enters the room to blow Homer away with a shotgun while he's "beating the lumps" of Bart and Lisa in a rolled up rug. The blood from Homer splatters on the wall with the title "Treehouse of Horror XIV". The camera then heads up to Kang and Kodos' saucer where they criticize the show for being aired in November. This brings light to the fact that this is actually the fourth year this has happened, and it would unfortunately continue to happen for the years to come leading up to 'Treehouse XX'. That's right - every single 'Treehouse of Horror' episode from the eleventh to nineteenth aired some time after Halloween. This probably helped them to lose a lot of their luster during this time. Anyway, the aliens make a joke about them already having their Christmas decorations up, seemingly mimicking the potentially irked audience that's watching a Halloween special well after they've packed Halloween up for another year. 'Reaper Madness' I tend to enjoy this one for the laughs, but things are admittedly pretty absurd throughout the segment. It all starts with a Benny Hill style chase around the Simpson home as the Grim Reaper has come to collect Bart. Just when his number looks to be up, Homer ends up bashing Death over the head, killing him. We then see short but funny clips from around Springfield as the world deals without death for a little while. However, when Homer tries on the Grim Reaper's robe, the job of Death passes on to him, and he finds himself at a tremendous advantage - that is until God wants him to take out the one he loves most. While the segment starts of on a very stupid note, it does manage to gain momentum, like a car that can't find its gear for a little while at a green light. It's actually full of funny moments, especially when we see what the world is like when death is taken out of the equation. I don't honestly know where the idea for someone becoming Death comes from, but 'Family Guy' did a very similar farce for a whole episode a couple of years prior to this - and frankly funnier. Although I have to say, this isn't bad either. It opens weak and ends pretty weak as well, but the in-between stuff is pretty well done altogether. The question is though, did 'The Simpsons' try to copy 'Family Guy' here? If anyone can tell me where this concept really comes from, I'd be much obliged. 3/5 'Frinkenstein' In a very loose parody of 'Frankenstein', Professor Frink is finally the center of attention when he has won the Nobel Prize (likely for the invention of a hammer with a screwdriver on the end of it). Frink brings up the possibility of making his father proud if he were still around. Lisa (the one who passes on the message to Frink of a nomination) offers to help reunite them, but Frink shows her what really happened with him. It turns out, Frink has been hiding his father for experimentation, planning to reanimate his corpse (after a shark bit him for using blood-based sun tan lotion). He's quickly successful, but Frink's father (Jerry Lewis, himself - the man the Frink character is based on) isn't entirely grateful for being resurrected in the 21st century. He then goes around stealing vital organs from various citizens of Springfield. Can Frink and Lisa stop him? So, if Jerry's brand of comedy is something you might find a bit grating, this isn't exactly the best segment. But I can't help but at least appreciate that he was willing to lend his voice to something so stereotypically him. In that sense, it's a fun segment. Hell, even real-life Nobel prizewinner, Dudley Herschbach (for crossed-molecular-beam techniques with which to study in detail the dynamics of chemical reactions) makes an appearance to present the award to Frink. It's a pretty fun segment, but I still find it rough around the edges with some of the writing, and it's not at all my favorite. With the efforts involved though, I can't help but give it a respectable boost. It's decent for the era. 3/5 'Stop the World, I Want to Goof Off' Once again, we have a segment that's a little too far separated from Halloween for my liking. There's nothing Halloweenish here at all, and the very premise of it is laughable. It all starts when Marge finds a bunch of old comic books that Bart and Milhouse dig through. They find an ad for a watch that can stop time, order it, it arrives, it works, and there's way too much wrong with all of this already. The friends then take to the streets where they consistently stop time to mess with people. It doesn't take long before things get out of hand and Bart and Milhouse find themselves stopping the watch to escape an angry mob. This time, however, they drop the watch and break it, seemingly freezing time forever. It's just a segment about pranking people, and I can't really figure how it got into a Halloween episode. There isn't even mention of Halloween in this one, unlike other segments that find themselves separated from the theme. In fact, this may be the first time something like that has happened. While the segment isn't without a decent gag here and there, it just plain doesn't fit, and it's yet another one that lends itself to my displeasure of this era of 'Treehouse'. The whole idea that they can mail order something from so many years ago and it arrives is silly enough, but the idea that anyone could have gotten their hands on this time-controlling stopwatch is just ridiculous. I know I'm being harsh on something so trivial, but for some reason it really irks me. 1/5 For the first time in these reviews, I have almost nothing beyond the last segment to talk about, as the episode just ends there. The best I can add is that they bring back the "spooky credits". Another thing that set 'Treehouse XIII' apart from the others was that they actually ditched these credits for an episode, and things were just normal. These "spooky credits" are, of course, when they would replace real names with Halloween themed nicknames. Otherwise, the episode is mediocre at best.
Overall Episode Rating: 47%
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