Krusty Gets Kancelled

After a successful advertising campaign on Springfield Television, a new children's entertainment show begins: a talking wooden doll named Gabbo. The show competes fiercely with the Krusty clown show. Gabbo conquers the target audience of children's television shows with his catchphrase “I'm a bad bad boy”. At first, Krusty was dismissive of the competitor, but his ratings were steadily falling. Krusty tries in various ways, up to plagiarism , to regain popularity with his program, but all to no avail. In the end, his show is closed. Left without work, Krusty becomes depressed .

Bart is unhappy with the cancellation of his idol program. At first he tries to discredit Gabbo, but his provocation does not reach the goal.

Bart and Lisa come to visit Krusty. There they see his photographs in the company with various stars: Elizabeth Taylor , Luke Perry , Bette Midler and others. Lise comes up with the idea that if all these people would appear on the Krusty show, then it would receive a fairly high rating. Krusty likes this idea. He gives Bart and Lisa his notebook with the addresses of the stars, and they go to invite the stars to participate in the show. In the end, they manage to collect everyone except Elizabeth Taylor (her agent refused the children before they could talk to her). In addition, Bart cunningly persuaded Red Hot Chili Peppers to take part in the show, invited by Mo Sislack to his tavern to attract customers.

The Krusty Special Show is a great success. “We need to fire the agent,” Elizabeth Taylor decides, sitting in front of the television on which the show is running and polishing the diamond on her ring.

Everyone celebrates the success of the show in Mo's tavern.

• The name "Gabbo" is a reference to the 1929 Great Gabbo movie ^[2] . The scene with his song contains several references to the 1940 film Pinocchio ( English Pinocchio ) ^[3] .
• The scene in which Krusty asks the Red Hot Chili Peppers to change the words in their song “Give It Away” is a reference to Ed Sullivan's demand for The Doors to change the words of their song “Light My Fire”. The Red Hot Chili Peppers poses on stage in the Krusty show are based on the Dorz movie about the band of the same name ^[4] .
• The musical piece that Hugh Hefner performs on wine glasses is “ Peter and the Wolf ” by Sergei Prokofiev ^[5] .

The scriptwriters of the series considered the idea of ​​closing the Krusty show a great opportunity to invite several stars at once ^[4] . Prior to that, they had already done so in the series “ Homer at the Bat ” (in which several players of the Major League Baseball participated), and they hoped to repeat the success of that series ^[4] . Executive producer Mike Reiss called this episode a “nightmare,” because some celebrities at the last moment refused to participate in the filming of this series, and its script had to be rewritten several times ^[5] . It was originally planned that one of the invited celebrities was to become one of the former presidents of the United States. Each of the ex-presidents who lived at that time was sent invitations, but all of them were rejected ^[5] . Work on scoring guest stars continued for several months ^[5] .

Betty Midler agreed to participate in the creation of the series, provided that her anti-garbage campaign is mentioned in it ^[2] . Elizabeth Taylor, simultaneously with participation in this series, also recorded the voice acting of Maggie Simpson for the Lisa's First Word series ^[4] .

The cartoon “Worker and Parasite” (Translated on REN-TV - “Hard worker and lazy person”, and in the original - SEER et SEqONZH), which Krusty launched instead of the Tickle and Scratch Show in this series is a reference to some Soviet cartoons , in particular the style resembles the cartoon “Big Trouble” , and also, this is a reference to the cartoons about Tom and Jerry 1961-1962, when they were made by the Czechoslovak animator Gene Deich ^[3] . The name of the cartoon is a reference to the composition “Worker and Collective Farm Girl”. The screensaver of the cartoon "Worker and Parasite" is made using the pseudo-Cyrillic alphabet. And in the end, it is written in Latin: “ENDUT! HOCH HECH! ”As the screenwriter of the series, John Schwarzvelder, explained, this is an onomatopoeia to the Klingon phrase“ HoH'egh ”, meaning“ Communist suicide. ” ^[6] But there, in the end, we hear a completely Russian replica of the Tickling-Parasite "Factory, get rid of (get out?) To hell!". Although after this episode, the Worker and the parasite no longer appeared in the series, but they appeared in the comics, where they already spoke quite intelligible English. ^[6]