Treehouse of Horror XXXI

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Treehouse of Horror

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Original Air Dates: Sunday, October 18, Canada / Sunday, November 1, USA, 2020

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Political Parody, 2020

This episode opens on November 3, 2020; election day in the US. While Marge is at the polls, she calls Homer, still relaxing in his hammock, to remind him to come and vote. He hesitates, because his horoscope is telling him not to, which may or may not be a callback to the 'G-G-Ghost D-D-Dad' segment of 'Treehouse XI'. Eventually, however, Marge convinces him, and he rushes over.

He hesitates on who to vote for, but Lisa comes in asking him to remember all of the bad that Trump has accomplished in the last four years. This is followed by a long, written list that Homer reads while breaking the fourth wall, and with that, he casts his vote. It's presumably for Biden considering his next line on late night comics not being able to make fun of anyone anymore (they'll find a way), but none of that even matters because it turns out that he dreamt it and has been asleep the whole time.

Marge wakes him up, telling him he missed out on voting. When he asks what the worst that can happen is, things fast-forward to a completely devastated Springfield, along with a visual of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Pestilence, Famine, War and 'Treehouse of Horror XXXI' (aka Death). This is a pretty decent opening, and it further pushes the notion that when it comes to political satire, 'The Simpsons' does a pretty good job at squeezing it into Halloween.

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'Toy Gory'

With Disney now owning Fox, it was only a matter of time until they started delving into their own collection of classics. Here, they parody Pixar's classic 'Toy Story', and it gets much darker than one might possibly imagine. It all opens with Marge getting Bart to pack up his old toys, but Bart wants a moment to say "goodbye". These "goodbyes" come in the form of sheer destruction, and we see Bart's not so much like Andy from the original film as he is Sid.

Upon getting a new Radioactive Man (with real radioactivity), he immediately goes to work on destroying him too. Before long, the toys get sick of Bart's shenanigans and decide it's high time they fought back. With the help of several other mangled toys, Bart's talking Krusty doll (taking the role of Bart's favorite and most unharmed toy) leads the gruesome revenge plot, and as mentioned before, it gets super dark - almost to the point of hilarity, it's so over the top. It may not be perfectly done, but I have to admit that I enjoyed a lot about this one.

The CG animation is smooth and textured, lending itself to what its parodying, and it's a neat "what if" story, as in "what if the toys really got revenge on Sid in the first movie?" They even have a farcical, twisted Randy Newman song to kick things off here, and to top it all off, it's Disney making fun of Disney, and that's always a bit of a treat for yours truly. It's also interesting to note that this is a bit of a "full-circle" deal as 'Homer³' came out the same year as the first 'Toy Story' film, and was their first attempt as a CG-fueled segment. If nothing else, it's just interesting.

​4/5

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'Into the Homer-Verse'

This is another one of those weird ones that has very little to do with Halloween, other than crowbarring in the idea that it happens to take place on that night. Homer ends up working late at the plant, and Marge calls him asking where the Halloween candy is. No on viewer's surprise, Homer plays back the security tapes that reveal he ate it all while at work.

In a desperate attempt to find more candy somewhere in the massive nuclear plant, he stumbles on something that looks like a vending machine, and tries to stick a coin in the USB slot. When nothing works, he hits it, and opens up a hole in the space-time continuum, bringing in five different Homers; Homer Barbera (who shifts between a Yogi Bear and Snagglepuss type character), Disney Princess Homer (perhaps a little heavy-handed on the self-awareness there), 8-bit Homer, Anime Homer, and Homer Noir. For a while they kinda just do stuff together, but Lisa soon informs them that for some reason they'll keep dying unless they can open up that hoe again and return all of the Homers to their respective dimensions.

It's neat that they actually manage to give each Homer some sort of respective moment, but all in all, it's a slapped together and rushed farce on 'Into the Spider-Verse'. It's another segment that shows a lot of promise for what it is, but the execution is really quite weak. Anime Homer was the only one I really enjoyed here, as he was so over the top, but there's not much laughter to be had with the rest of them. It's a decent effort, but would have been much better as some kind of full, non-Halloween related episode. There's just too much to play with in only about 6 or 7 short minutes.

​2/5

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'Be Nine, Rewind'

In this parody of 'Happy Death Day', Lisa is trying to celebrate her 9th birthday. When she is called down for cake while writing in her log (meanwhile all of her friends and well-wishers are downstairs), she is suddenly struck by a car coming through the front bay window of the house. Miraculously, however, she seems to awaken on the same day to repeat the same process.

She soon finds out that Nelson is actually caught in the same loop, and therefore they decide to work together to figure out how to solve their temporal loop problem. After many times dying over and over again in various, gruesome ways, they eventually seek further help from Comic Book guy who suggests that every temporal loop story between 'Groundhog Day' to 'Edge of Tomorrow' has its own solve, and they have to figure out their own which ends up being super lazy, considering that's what they were already doing.

This segment has a few decent visual gags, but all in all it's very weak. It's pretty bad when even Comic Book Guy refers to the temporal loop storyline as both incredibly ambitious and lazy all at once. That alone seems to suggest that the show is self-aware that it's trying but failing, and it's a bit jarring. A lot of the deaths are actually pretty funny, along with a few one-liners, but it's not something I see holding up for years to come

​2/5

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After the final segment closes out, the credits start rolling on their 31st Halloween show, giving us multiple screenshots of all 90 of the 'Treehouse' segments from previous episodes, working backwards. It's an interesting way to end a well-rounded 31 Halloween episodes (one for each day in October), but it does leave one wondering what the future has in store for these 'Treehouse' episodes. Time will tell in 2021!

​​​Overall Episode Rating: 53%