But before “USS Callister” was able to riff on the premise of “It’s a Good Life,” “The Simpsons” had already gone and given the story their own modern spin. In the 1991 Halloween episode “Treehouse of Horror II,” one of the segments followed Bart as the town monster, and Homer as the unfortunate fool who summoned his wrath. Like Dan Hollis thirty years before him, Homer is transformed into a jack-in-the box for trying to put an end to Bart’s reign of terror.
“The Simpsons” keeps up the “Twilight Zone” episode’s theme of bad parenting, this time by having the jack-in-the-box Homer still stick around in the narrative. The town’s therapist, who is inexplicably not afraid of telling Bart how he feels, diagnoses him as someone who desperately needs attention, and then criticizes Homer for not giving that proper attention to him in the first place. So begins a loving sequence of Bart and a deformed Homer spending some quality father-son time, ending with Bart giving him his body back and the two sharing a tender hug.
Sounds like a happy ending, right? Well, not from Bart’s perspective. The idea of giving his father an actual earnest show of affection is so horrible to Bart that he wakes up screaming. It may not be as bleak as the original “Twilight Zone” episode, but for Bart, at least, the story still ends on a horrifying note.
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