Candice Drouet is a 19-year-old video editor living in France. She’s also a huge fan of both cinema and The Simpsons. That brilliant combination of factors led to the following genius supercut of every moment from nearly three decades of nerdy, film-loving Simpsons animators paying homage to Stanley Kubrick.
Watch: 25 years of The Simpsons’ homages to Stanley Kubrick, in one supercut
Aja Romano wrote about pop culture, media, and ethics. Before joining Vox in 2016, they were a staff reporter at the Daily Dot. A 2019 fellow of the National Critics Institute, they’re considered an authority on fandom, the internet, and the culture wars.
Drouet’s two-minute video packs in loads of Simpsons references to eight of Kubrick’s most landmark films, from Paths of Glory to Full Metal Jacket. But most of the love goes to Kubrick’s legendary adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange — which also provides the supercut’s soundtrack, a jaunty video game–style version of the second movement from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
The most overt references in the video come from “A Clockwork Yellow,” a segment from the 2014 edition of The Simpsons‘ annual “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween anthology episode. Part of the long-running TV series’ 24th season, the segment is virtually a shot-for-shot homage to A Clockwork Orange, with a taste of Eyes Wide Shut, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, Barry Lyndon, and even Kubrick himself appearing in the climax:
“A Clockwork Yellow” wasn’t the only instance when The Simpsons devoted an entire episode or a segment of an episode to Kubrick. Season six’s “Treehouse of Horror V” included the opening segment “The Shinning,” a shot-for-shot homage to The Shining, and season five’s “Deep Space Homer” included a wealth of sci-fi references, many of them to 2001.
Who would have thought when The Simpsons first began airing in 1989 that it would become not only a cultural juggernaut but one of our best examples of art imitating art?
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