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The Itchy & Scratchy Show is a Show-within-a-show (or more accurately a show-within-a-show-within-a-show) of The Simpsons which appears as a segment of the fictional Krusty the Clown TV show, watched regularly by Bart and Lisa Simpson and other characters on the animated series. Itself an animated cartoon, The Itchy & Scratchy Show depicts a violentmouse, Itchy, and a cat, Scratchy, the former of whom mutilates the latter with deadly weapons. The Itchy and Scratchy show is a parody of shows like Tom and Jerry, that actually have a lot of violence depicted between otherwise cute cartoon animals. It points out that these shows actually do not send a very good message, being that they are targeted at a young audience.
Itchy and Scratchy often play out an exaggerated form of the conflict in the surrounding episode. An episode in which the Simpson children are taken into foster care, for example, contains an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon with a similar theme. Another episode in which Homer is recruited by NASA has an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon which directly (and gruesomely) parodies the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alien.
Itchy and Scratchy have occasionally been used to parody the work of famous directors specifically. One episode is supposedly guest-directed by Quentin Tarantino and mocks Tarantino's films Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. In it, Itchy douses a bound Scratchy with gasoline while the melody of Stuck in the Middle With You plays. The camera moves away while Itchy slices off Scratchy's ear. Tarantino then enters and explains his motivation behind the violence in the episode before being brutally attacked by the duo, who then begin twisting to Dick Dale's Misirlou. Another cartoon was "guest directed" by Oliver Stone and shows Itchy shooting Scratchy in a manner similar to Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, in reference to Stone's film JFK.
Background
The Itchy & Scratchy Show is a parody of violent animated cartoons. Matt Groening states that the show is based upon a mix of older cartoons, mostly Tom and Jerry and Herman and Katnip, although there are other opinions . While not usually as openly graphic or bloody as Itchy and Scratchy, these works depicted physical abuse between their characters with no long-term consequences; Itchy and Scratchy take this violence to its logical extreme.
The fictional series has supposedly been in continuous production since the early 20th century, first for theater release and then for radio and TV. Older Itchy & Scratchy cartoons are occasionally shown which satirize other aspects of early animation; for example, a cartoon called Steamboat Itchy resembles the early Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie. However, in Steamboat Itchy, Itchy shoots out Scratchy's knees, then kicks his head into the steamboat's firebox. Lisa Simpson once mentioned the tasteless and racist Itchy & Sambo cartoons of the 1930s. Itchy and Scratchy, in one Simpsons episode, star in a feature movie entitled Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie, which went on to win nine Academy Awards.
The characters of Itchy and Scratchy are voiced (within the reality of The Simpsons) by a woman named June Bellamy (whose physical appearance is said to be based on June Foray, a famous voice actress) who also claims to be the voice of Road Runner. (Apparently, she recorded a lone "meep," and they doubled it so as not to have to pay her for two "meeps.") In reality, Itchy is voiced by Dan Castellaneta and Scratchy is voiced by Harry Shearer, while June Bellamy's normal speaking voice is provided by Tress MacNeille.
Itchy and Scratchy themselves were once replaced by a show called Worker and Parasite, a parody of Soviet-bloc government-made cartoons. Because of licensing restrictions, Krusty could not run Itchy and Scratchy, so he had to show "Eastern Europe's favourite cat-and-mouse team" from the 1950s. The resulting cartoon showed a poorly drawn cat and a poorly drawn mouse jumping around inexplicably while experimental music played. This may be a reference to the surreal and poor quality short run of Czech-produced Tom and Jerry cartoons.
In the Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming," Sideshow Bob's threat of detonating a nuclear bomb caused all TV to be cancelled. However, Krusty went to a small broadcasting shack in the desert to stay on air. His heavily improvised show contained The Stingy and Battery Show, starring a found scorpion and battery. (The shows theme song was also improvised by Krusty "They bite, and light, and bite and light...")
History within The Simpsons
Within the Simpsons universe, the characters were created by Roger Meyers, Sr., who built the legacy of Itchy and Scratchy and established Itchy and Scratchy Studios in 1921. It was revealed in the episode "The Day the Violence Died" that Chester J. Lampwick actually invented Itchy in 1919 and owns the rights to that character. It is unknown who created Scratchy, or if Roger Meyers Sr. plagiarized him the same way he did Itchy. Originally Itchy was called "Itchy the Lucky Mouse" (a parody of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit).
Scratchy starred in his first cartoon in 1928, entitled That Happy Cat. The film, which is ten seconds of animation showing the cat whistling and tipping his hat, did very poorly. Later that year, Itchy and Scratchy starred in their first cartoon together entitled "Steamboat Itchy" a parody of Disney's Steamboat Willie featuring Mickey Mouse. In the 1930s, there were a series of tasteless Itchy & Sambo cartoons.
During World War II, cartoon shorts were created teaming the pair together, supporting the United States against Germany. Despite creator Myers, Sr. being labeled as a Nazi sympathizer (he was criticized for his 1938 cartoon "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors"), one film showed Adolf Hitler being repeatedly injured and eventually beheaded by the cat and mouse team.
In the 1950s, the duo appeared in television commercials for Laramie Cigarettes; this was a spoof of television stars pitching cigarettes in 1950s- and 1960s-era television commercials (most notably The Flintstones).
In the 1970s there were a series of Itchy and Scratchy cartoons featuring sex and adult situations.
Itchy and Scratchy Studios is currently run by Roger Meyers, Jr., the son of the cartoon's creator. It is animated in Korea, just like the Simpsons cartoon itself.
Revealed in the episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" are characters from the short-lived Itchy & Scratchy and Friends Hour: Uncle Ant, Disgruntled Goat, Flatulent Fox, Ku Klux Klam, and Rich Uncle Skeleton. These characters lampooned the addition of superfluous, two-dimensional characters to TV shows in an effort to draw viewer interest.
In 1990, The Itchy and Scratchy Show underwent a non-violent retooling following a protest campaign led by Marge Simpson. Marge was later discredited and the cartoon returned to its original violent format.
In 1992, Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie was released. It received nine Academy Awards.
In 1992, when Itchy and Scratchy briefly defected to The Gabbo Show, Krusty the Clown found a cheap replacement in Worker and Parasite, a 1959 cartoon featuring Itchy and Scratchy's Eastern Bloc counterparts. The Soviet-era cartoon is incomprehensible, and Krusty responds with, "...What the hell was that?!"
In 1994, Itchy & Scratchy Land opened, although it was temporarily shut down because of malfunctioning robots (a la Jurassic Park or the movie Westworld). Unfortunately, Euro-Itchy and Scratchy Land apparently failed to match the success of its domestic counterpart, with no visitors upon its opening (in a parody of the early failure of Euro Disneyland theme park).
In 1997, the show began declining in ratings and a third character, Poochie the dog, was added (see below).
Forty years from "now," Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie will be the first-billed film at a "Classics of Animation" screening at the Aztec Theater in Springfield (Beauty and the Beast gets second billing).
Poochie
Poochie was a dog character added to the Itchy & Scratchy lineup in The Itchy & Scratchy... & Poochie Show. According to the show's plot, the producers believed the cartoons were getting stale, and needed a new character to reinvigorate the show, despite the objections of one of the show's writers, who 'at the risk of sounding pretentious', felt that Itchy and Scratchy comprised 'a dramaturgical dyad'. Homer Simpson gets the job of voicing Poochie, who is introduced in the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon "The Beagle Has Landed." A product of marketing department thinking, Poochie was near-universally despised, and was killed off in his second appearance, despite Homer's objections.
Both plots were a reference to TV shows which added new characters purportedly to reinvigorate the show (often in the show's waning years and/or to replace stars who had either departed or grown up, if they were child actors). Famous examples include Scooby-Doo (when his nephew, Scrappy-Doo, was suddenly added); The Flintstones, who suddenly found themselves co-starring with The Great Gazoo; The Brady Bunch, when Cousin Oliver came to live with the Bradys; and Inspector Gadget when they added Corporal Capeman to the cast. Quite often, these additions of superfluous characters are seen as jumping the shark moments; such changes are regarded by fans to be the defining events in the decline of a TV show. This is itself satirized in the episode, with the mysterious addition of a new character, "Roy," to the Simpson family; Roy leaves the show at the end of the episode.
Many fans of the show also saw Poochie's creation, depiction, and demise as a response to various criticisms of The Simpsons by its viewers. The focus group's desire for a show where its characters solve real-life problems, and simultaneous desire for a show with its characters "getting into far-out situations involving robots and magic powers" reflects the division between fans of earlier episodes of the series, which tended to focus on the family's relationships with each other, and fans of the later episodes, which tended to rely more heavily on sight gags, cameo appearances, and non-sequiturs. Other aspects of the episode also play up this argument, including Bart's declaration that the creators of Itchy and Scratchy are "giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free" and Lisa's closing lines about how Itchy and Scratchy's viewers "should thank our lucky stars that they're still putting on a program of this caliber after so many years."
Despite being created for a single-episode appearance (and despite a legal document from Krusty stating that he would never reappear), Poochie has appeared in later episodes of The Simpsons, such as the 11th Halloween show, an Itchy & Scratchy episode ("Tears of a Clone"), and was on a Krusty-Brand show T-Shirt (as well as "Itchy-Poochie").
According to The Simpsons comic system, many spin-offs featuring Poochie were made before his debut on the show. Many of these spin-offs were simply badly-disguised rip-offs of other popular comics. A Poochie comic was called Astro-Poochie (a rip-off of Astro Boy) which shows Poochie resembling the anime character. Some small print on the top reads "here is another idea we had...".
Other Itchy & Scratchy characters
There was also a vulture modeled after Mr. Burns — in a cartoon he himself scripted and directed ("Fraudcast News") — who touted the virtues of nuclear power.
When Marge protested the cartoon's violence, a cartoonist modeled a squirrel with tall, blue hair after her. The squirrel interrupted a baseball bat fight between the title characters shouting "Don't do that! Hey! Don't do that!" to which Itchy whacked her head off.
Elvis Presley also appears in a cartoon, shooting Scratchy when he gets his head stuck in Elvis' television set — a reference to Presley's fascination with firearms and habit of shooting televisions.
In the Episodes Itchy and Scratchy Land and The Day the Violence Died several other characters in the Itchy and Scratchy world created by Meyers included Disgruntled Goat, Uncle Ant, Brown-nose Bear, Flatulent Fox, Rich Uncle Skeleton, Ku Klux Klam and Dinner Dog. It is revealed in The Day the Violence Died that all these characters were plagiarized due to the fact Meyers only thought up stick-figures called Sarcastic Horse and Manic Mailman. Since they stank he stole other people's characters (but little did Meyers Jr. know that the postal service plagiarized Manic Mailman). Meyers claimed Flatulent Fox was based on a true story. Ku Klux Klam is a Ku Klux Klan member because of his name and clothing.
In Margical History Tour, Homer/King Henry VIII watches a version of Itchy and Scratchy. It is performed by hand puppets and consists of them beating each other with clubs after accusing each other.
The show has recently gained several derivative characters, based on other famous people and characters such as Austin Powers Itchy, Scratchbob Itchpants and Osama Bin Scratchy.
Video games
A video game named The Itchy and Scratchy Game was released for Sega Genesis, Game Gear, Super NES and Game Boy. Another game Itchy and Scratchy in Miniature Golf was released for Game Boy.