Page "Treehouse of Horror" Paragraph 6

The episode opens with Marge standing on a stage in front of a curtain and warning parents about the content of the episode to come, advising them to put their children to bed.

The warning was put in as a sincere effort to warn young viewers, as the producers felt it was somewhat scary.

In 2011, staff writer Al Jean commented on the episode: " The idea of it to parody EC Comics was really original and kind of shocking for a cartoon on network television.

producer Jim Brooks said, ' We better have a disclaimer at the beginning of this Halloween show ,' so Marge came out and warned people that they were going to see something scary.

And the funny thing is it's now very tame by our Halloween standards and by network animation standards.

" According to M. Keith Booker, author of Drawn to Television, the warning only made the episode more attractive to children.

The entire segment was a parody of the opening of the 1931 film Frankenstein.

While similar " warnings " were used to open the second and third " Treehouse " episodes, these quickly became a burden to write and there was no warning for the fourth episode.

Instead, it had Marge ask Bart to warn people how frightening the show was during his introduction paying homage to Night Gallery.

The tradition was revived for " Treehouse of Horror V "; after that, they were permanently dropped and the writers did not make any attempts at reviving them.

In the opening segment of the episode, and the four subsequent episodes, the camera zooms through a cemetery where tombstones with humorous epitaphs can be seen.

These messages include the names of canceled shows from the previous television season and celebrities such as Walt Disney and Jim Morrison.

They were last used in " Treehouse of Horror V ", which included a solitary tombstone with the words " Amusing Tombstones " to signal this.

The tombstone gags were easy for the writers in the first episode, but like Marge's warnings, they eventually got more difficult to write, so they were abandoned.

Of the series, " Treehouse of Horror " was the only one that included a treehouse as a setting.

" Treehouse of Horror " was the first time that an alternate version of the theme that airs over the end credits was used.

Originally it was supposed to use a theremin ( an early electronic musical instrument ), but one could not be found that could hit all the necessary notes.