IV (Season 5, Episode 5, Aired October 28th, 1993)
I forgot the framing sequence was a parody of Night Gallery, Rod Serling’s other major horror themed anthology after The Twilight Zone. Complete with Bart describing a painting (Night Gallery is pretty good, btw. The film that serves as its pilot has a segment starring an old Joan Crawford directed by a young Stephen Spielberg and a later episode has a Lovecraft adaptation). Check it out if you can.
Anyway, this first one, “The Devil and Homer Simpson”, is a classic. Homer’s personality set up against eternal damnation (including selling his soul for a donut). Religious Ned Flanders as the devil. This gag, still one of my all-time favorite Simpsons gags:
The trial featuring all of history’s villains (including Richard Nixon and the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers). A very sweet ending, where with a lot of these segments, the standard ironic punishment ending is subverted.
I remember not really liking the second segment, “Nightmare at 5 1/2 Feet”, a parody of the Richard Matheson penned Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (which was directed by Richard Donner, incidentally), but actually this was pretty funny. A good subversion of the format of that episode, with Bart in…
