The Simpsons take a wild, wacky look at romance in this retelling-o-the-tales, “Love, Springfieldian Style”. Keep your wee candy hearts at the ready…

Kredit Kookies: Chalkboard Gag: None. Couch Gag: Each family member enters the living room and ends up strapped into a baby's bouncy chair.

We open on the Springfield Fair one Valentine’s Day afternoon. Various Springfieldians are in the mood for love (Memorably, Smithers is presented with a candy heart reading “release the hounds” from Mister Burns). Marge and Homer loose the kids upon the fair in general and  take a ride through the tunnel of love.

Bart is, naturally, irritated at being ditched in the lame fair. He decides to pull a prank on his parents – Lisa briefly tries to stop him, but quickly gives up when he spies a keg of Jell-O, which he dumps into the ride’s waterway.

Naturally, the gondola’s halted, interrupting Homer and Marge in mid-make out session. To pass the time, Homer vows to tell Marge of the greatest love stories of all time, beginning with Bonnie and Clyde.

We flash back to the 1930’s. Bonnie Parker (Marge) is a popular young lady, being courted by every eligable man in the county, but none of them can offer her the special brand of heart-racing excitement that she’s looking for. Clyde Barrow (Homer) offers his services – but realizes she’s looking for a “bad boy” type. Clyde responds by robbing his father’s feed store (which he co-owned). This thrills Bonnie and sets them off on a country-wide crime spree.

They eventually take on a patsy (played, of course, by Ned Flanders), who drives the getaway car and remains completely oblivious to their wicked ways until they all end up in Louisiana. He stumbles into a movie theatre and ends up watching a news reel about their exploits (there’s even the popular “Bonnie and Clyde” radio hour, with the twosome being voiced by Burns and Allen). Flanders doesn’t feel the need to turn in the new heroes until he finds out they’re not married – and then, outraged,  he asks Sherriff Wiggum for assistance.  He's interested but wants to finish watching a cartoon first.

Ned arranges for the twosome to be ambushed, and they’re soon assailed by a hail of bullets. Clyde proposes to Bonnie, but she rejects him – yes, she’s looking for yet more excitement, and tries to entice Wiggum.  Obviously, they're soon both dead, at what point we cut to commerical.  When we return, the sheriff's shooting the birds pecking on their flesh. 

Cutting away from the flashback, Homer’s still miming the violent execution of Bonnie and Clyde. Marge is vaguely nauseated by the tale.  At this point, Bart and Lisa come wading through the Jell-O to see them, and Marge decides to tell a more family-appropriate story.

We cut to “Shady and the Vamp” (a parody of the Disney tale "Lady and the Tramp"), which features Marge as a blue-haired cocker spaniel named Vamp and Homer as a bald-pated mutt named Shady. As in the original tale, Shady's friend (Moe) tells him he’s way out of purebred Vamp’s league, but he still tries to court her. His unsuccessful attempts ultimately result in her coming to his rescue after he's trampled by children.

He takes her out to Luigis’, where they reenact the famous spaghetti and meatballs scene from the film, which ends with Vamp's entire head being drawn into Shady’s mouth and the two of them being driven off by Luigi, who’s forced to shoe away many multi-species couples from his back alley as he expects a visit from the health inspector.

Shady and Vamp end up on a picturesque cliff overlooking the city; suffice to say that the next morning she feels nauseous and he’s run back to his streetbound life.

Vamp is left alone and pregnant, listening to the doubting sneers of the two Siamese cats inhabiting her house (portrayed by Selma and Patty). She expresses her fading faith in Shady through song, as he, in split-screen, expresses his mirrored guilt at leaving her.

Soon, Vamp’s had her enthusiastic puppies (who look like Bart and Lisa); they keep asking her where their father is. She breaks down and flees from them; the Bart puppy finds an old picture of Shady among his mother’s things and the puppies set out to find him.

Shady hears the twosome calling “Daddy!” and he hides; this makes them an easy target for Willie the Dogcatcher, who nabs them and takes them to the pound. This finally sets Shady to motion and he chases after the wagon.
 
At the pound, a Goofy-like verbally-gifted dog is put in the gas chamber despite his protests that he has a job and car; the pups are set to go next. Willie pours them their last meal and is stunned to find Shady at the bottom of the bag of dog chow; he leaps out and attacks Willie, giving the kids the opportunity to flee. Shady  decides to go with them, releasing "Goofy" from his fate. 

Once they're all safe at home, Vamp gladly accepts Shady apology, he dons a collar, and they're all a happy family – a LARGE happy family, which includes nine more puppies (one of which resembles Maggie, the rest identical to the Bart-and-Lisa puppies).  Whoops.

Bart complains that Marge’s story is boring; he wants to tell his own tale of simple musicians, from a simpler time. Cut to a retelling of the motion picture (and real life love story) “Sid and Nancy”, featuring Bart as Johnny Rotten and Nelson as Sid Vicious. They and the rest of the Sex Pistols (played by Dolph, Jimbo and Kearney) are onstage playing at a bar in London when the American scholar Nancy (Lisa) passes by with her pathetic wannabe-boyfriend Milhouse in tow.  She hears their music and is enchanted.

Nancy insists on entering the club, over the protests of her paramour. She quickly falls for Sid Vicious, the band's bassist.  A dealer (Otto) opens his trench coat and offers them a wide selection of chocolate; Milhouse declares that Nancy, a spelling bee champion, is too smart to try it. Nancy's love for Sid is galvanized  when he pitches his bass at a fan; she finds out that Sid loves chocolate and decides to buy some for him.  Milhouse tries to stop her but the crime is pinned on him, resulting in Otto (actually an undercover bobby) scooping him up and sending him to jail.

Cut to the Boiled Potato Pub, where the Sex Pistols are beating up on Ralph Wiggum, who’s happily listening to the Bay City Rollers on the jukebox.
 
Lisa enters and shyly offers Nelson some chocolate; he tries it, declares it heavenly and tells her to try some. She does so, and in a musical montage we watch their slow descent into the horrors of chocolate addiction.

It all comes to a head one night in Texas when a bleary Sid shows up trashed on chocolate to a gig. The songs are a mess; the crowd boos and their drummer (Dolph) is crushed under a pile of speakers. Johnny, backstage, declares his disgust for what Sid’s become, but Sid could care less.  A haggared Nancy cuts in and brashly declares that Sid’s going solo, and SHE’S gonna be writing all of the songs this time.

Cut to Sid and Nancy, together onstage at a bar, clean cut and in lettermen sweaters. They sing a Donnie and Marie-esq song about love to their unreceptive patrons, who boo them off the stage. A disgusted Comic Book Guy tosses Sid and Nancy out into the cold back alleyway, declaring that they’ve been “banned forever from CBGB’s…Comic Book Guys’ Bar!” The two of them could care less, declaring their love for one another as they kiss in the alleyway under a hail of trash.

We pan up to see Homer on a fire escape, shaking from his can over the duo. “Have a Happy Valentine’s Day – and Shut your Gobs!” He instructs, shaking more trash onto the screen until it forms a heart-shaped ring. We fade to black.

Red Dress Press: An inventive little episode similar to “Margical History Tour” and the show’s mythological and Easter-based programs, "Love, Springfieldian Style" has fun exploring an alternate universe with its familiar characters.  Less a collection of great love stories than a collection of parodies of great movies, each segment does a good job of mocking noteworthy segments from each of its targets.

The weakest part of the entire episode is its framing device, though there are a few funny gags in the opening scene.  Homer declaring that the Christmas they lost the kids at the mall was the "best Christmas ever" is one of the more jerkassy moments for him this season (his suicide axe in "PDL" and fantasy of killing Abe in "ESOTSM" are also up there) and felt unnecessary. The best thing about the fair scenes is that they're used briefly. 

The first segment was amusing but ultimately the most pointless.  The character design is perhaps the best thing about it, though Ned and Bonnie being decidedly un-Marge like are also hilights.  Its great flaw is its pacing, as we whiplash from the twosome's first meeting toward Bonnie and Clyde's death.  It ultimately plays with a missing ingredient, some spice that's fatally missing that makes the experience turn flat.  I must say, though, that the portrayl of the endless gunning down of Bonnie and Clyde is an accurate parody of the final scene from the 1969 Beatty/Dunaway film.

The second segment is excellent, a dead-on parody of Lady and The Tramp, with "Any Minute Now" harkening back to song parodies from the show's golden days.  Sympathetic characterisation for Shady, Vamp and the puppies help to make the segment a worthwhile experience, even though it doesn't take advantage of several skewerable elements offered by the movie, such as Lady's human family and Tramp's pound-dwelling buddies.  Maybe we should just be glad we were spared a visit from the Crazy Cat Lady.

The catalyst for the third segment was easy to call far away (who didn’t read spoilers for this episode and imagine chocolate as a replacement for smack?), but was still executed well.  Obviously lacking the tragic impact of the movie (and by turn that of the real-life Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen relationship), the minisode neatly manages to make disaster a comedy without mocking the doomed lovers behind the story.  Bart was perfectly cast as Johnny Rotten, though Nelson was written as a bit of a non-entity in his role as Vicious.  We don't get to see much of Lisa as a brassy post-addiction Nancy - more of a focus on her and on her passionate devotion to Sid/his music/the chocolate would have made it more interesting.  Another segment that could have run longer.  Of the three of them, it made the most explicit homage to its source material, and in that it becomes my favorite of them all.

Knit together as a whole, only the filler material at the fair ultimately dragged down the episode.

Did It Fail At Masonry?: Altogether one of the better episodes of the season. Worth catching in reruns and recording, depending on your tolerance for Jerkass Homer – FF the semi-pointless first segment unless you’re into the Depression/BC.

What The Screwballs Think: The show gained a 4.4, a surprisingly weak turnout for a holiday-centered episode.
 
Springfield Shopper: This Krusty Klassik Rekap covers an episode missed during the original run of the show. Keep your eye out for my recap of The Debarted, coming soon!