Studio: Gracie Films, Film Roman, 20th Television
Distributor: Fox (Fox Broadcasting Company)
Short Synopsis
Lisa needs braces, and the family's dental plan is about to disappear: Mr. Burns plans to scrap the union's dental coverage in exchange for a keg of beer at the next contract negotiations. Homer is horrified, realising ("Dental plan!" "Lisa needs braces!") that losing the plan means paying for Lisa's braces himself. At the union meeting he speaks up so passionately that the workers elect him their president. Burns, who assumes Homer is a cunning negotiator, invites him to his mansion for talks; Homer, who simply needs the bathroom, keeps interrupting, and Burns mistakes his urgency for brilliant brinkmanship. Homer leads the power plant's workers out on strike, with Lisa writing a protest song for the picket line. Burns tries everything to break it, including running the plant himself and finally cutting off the power to the whole town, but the strikers sing on in the dark. Eventually Burns gives in, the dental plan is restored, and Homer resigns as union president. Lisa gets her braces, first a monstrous contraption, and then a new, invisible model paid for by the plan.
Why It Matters
- The episode is famous for its density of jokes: Lisa's dentist showing her The Big Book of British Smiles, the "Dental plan! Lisa needs braces!" refrain, Burns's flashback to his grandfather in the atom-smasher factory, and a sequence in which Lisa, under laughing gas, has a Beatles Yellow Submarine-style hallucination. Nearly every scene has been quoted for decades.
- It is often named the best episode of The Simpsons, regularly topping critics' and fans' lists, and it shows the series at the height of its fourth-season creative peak, when it was transforming American television comedy and proving that an animated prime-time series could be the sharpest satire on the air.
Notes and Trivia
- Burns's Grinch-like moment, looking down on the town singing in the dark, parodies Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.
- See also: Treehouse of Horror V (1994).