The Simpsons’ Itchy & Scratchy Were Inspired By An Old Cartoon

“Simpsons” have never moved away from violence. Indeed, the show undoubtedly benefited from the controversy caused by the representation of a father who regularly strangles his own son. Simpsons were not your typical television family, and that was the point. The program and the Fox network on which it is still broadcast inaugurated a whole new generation of small screens, to the chagrin of the president of the time, George Bush, who deplored that American families should be much more like the Waltons and “much less like the Simpsons”.

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But even when Bush produced this poorly informed snicker, it was already too late. “The Simpsons” could have had a strong emotional heart and often delivered sincere episodes that affected the public much more than a animated comedy should never. But it was also, a bit like the de facto mascot of the show in the first years, Bart Simpson, vulgar and proud.

One of the most violent elements in the series was Bart’s favorite cartoon, “The Itchy and Scratchy Show”, which was part of “The Krusty The Clown Show”. This show in a show in a program included a psychopathic mouse, Itchy, which, with each episode, would mutilate and kill a perpetually terrified cat, Scratchy. The writers “Simpsons” loved “Itchy and Scratchy” because it allowed them to break all the rules of television, and viewers loved to be so absurdly exaggerated in his brutality. The joke was immediately obvious for anyone who grew up with “Tom and Jerry” and recognized this sadistic parody of the beloved caricatured MGM. But even the experienced fans of “Simpsons” could be surprised to learn that this legendary cat and mouse duo was not really inspiration behind “Itchy and Scratchy” – at least, not the only inspiration.

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Created in 1940 by legendary animators Will Hanna and Joe Barbera, Tom and Jerry have succeeded in succeeding that they are undoubtedly even more famous than their creators, to the point that they are now an indelible part of the 20th century pop culture. The series presented Tom the cat who, despite his endless desire to capture and kill Jerry, is always thwarted by the cunning rodent. In “The Itchy and Scratchy Show”, this dynamic is adopted at extreme levels, with itching, the mouse being described as a killer who repeatedly extinguishes the cat increasingly ingenious and sadistic. Regarding the vast majority of fans of “Simpsons”, the joke here was simple. It was an absurdly bloody parody of “Tom and Jerry”. But it turns out that this is not really the complete story.

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Mike Reiss, the oldest writer and producer on “The Simpsons”, wrote a book entitled “Confidential Springfield: jokes, secrets and purely reduced of life writing for Simpsons,” In which he remembers how much Itchy and Scratchy have been with “The Simpsons” from the very beginning, when he was launched by Sketch Comedy Series. “The Simpsons” started life as a series of shorts that would act as bumpers between commercial breaks on “The Tracey Ullman Show” and “The Itchy and Scratchy Show” made its debut in one of these 1988 shorts, entitled “The Bart Simpson Show”. The chat and mouse duo then presented itself for the first time in “The Simpsons” proper in the episode of season 1 “there is no shame like the house”. But as Reiss remarks, the characters of the cat and the mouse were not in fact a parody of “Tom and Jerry”, and were rather “inspired by Herman and Katnip ”, an ultraviolet ITITIATION Bon Marché de T&J”. Ultraviolet could be a little exaggerated, but “Herman and Katnip” was certainly an imitation “Tom and Jerry” which included a much more intense Slapstick violence than the original.

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Unlike “Tom and Jerry” and his theatrical shorts from MGM, “Herman and Katnip” was produced by famous studios, the first animation department of Paramount. The studio produced a series of theatrical cartoons featuring Herman the mouse and Katnip the cat in the 1940s and 50s. These caricatures had a similar rivalry between the titular characters, but took things further than “Tom and Jerry”, with Slapstick getaway than the original MGM. The poor old Katnip was sent at one point to the bottom of a well, before Herman sends a stick of dynamite after him, trapping the cat underground and transforming the well itself into a tombstone of fortune. Oh, and Katnip was sent to hell at some point. In these surprisingly violent vignettes pose the seeds of “itching and rough”, which, at one point, became a spin-off which, once tested, was so violent that it made the public sick.

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Interestingly, it seems that if Mike Reiss unequivocally claims that “Herman and Katnip” were the inspiration behind “Itchy and Scratchy”, things could be a little more complicated than that. On the one hand, director David Silverman supported Reiss’s complaint in a MSNBC Interview saying:

“People say [‘Itchy and Scratchy’ is] Like a crazy “Tom and Jerry”, but it’s really more a crazy “Herman and Katnip”. “Herman and Katnip” is hilarious because it’s just bad. It’s painfully bad. The key to comedy is a quick recovery, and “Itchy and Scratchy” has no quick recovery. There is no quick recovery that you normally associate with the violence of cartoons. It is the big joke behind the segments. “”

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But in an old television guide interview (via Simpsonarchive) The designer of the show Matt Groening said that “itching and rocks” were “inspired by all the cartoons of chat and mice that we grew up looking at”, suggesting that Tom and Jerry had their influence. This makes sense, because there is no way that a parody cartoon on a rivalry between a cat and the mouse cannot take some clues of the most culturally significant example of this popular animated trope of the mid -20th century.