While the Simpson family had to wait until 2007 before making the leap to the big screen, Bart and Lisa’s favorite cat-and-mouse team landed their own feature film way back in Season Four of The Simpsons. Although Bart wasn’t allowed to see it, Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie played in theaters for eight months straight, won nine Academy Awards and even inspired a novelization by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer.
Even though the movie was in no way real, is it possible that Itchy & Scratchy managed to influence the promotion of a film by one of the most famously violent filmmakers of all-time? I am, of course, talking about Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino, who once collaborated with Itchy and Scratchy for “Reservoir Cats” (before getting his head cut off by Itchy).
When Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie was first released in Springfield, it was memorably advertised with a motorized billboard depicting Itchy bludgeoning Scratchy with an old-timey film camera. And every time the camera came down upon Scratchy’s head, torrents of blood spilled onto the street, soaking unsuspecting, yet weirdly overjoyed, passersby. It was eventually replaced with a similarly-gory ad for the “Springfield Barber College.”
Ten years after the episode aired, Tarantino released his blood-soaked martial arts revenge epic Kill Bill Vol. 1. In order to promote the movie’s New Zealand TV debut in 2008, the government-run TV2 put up a billboard (a Kill Billboard, if you will) featuring Uma Thurman’s katana sword-wielding The Bride, and a giant bloodstain covering the wall behind her, the sidewalk and several parked cars.
Of course, the billboard didn’t contain any free-flowing fake blood like Itchy & Scratchy’s did. All of the stained cars were really props, put there by the advertising agency behind the inventive campaign, Saatchi & Saatchi. While some have claimed that this stunt was another of The Simpsons’ so-called “predictions,” it’s also entirely possible that the company saw the episode and took inspiration from the cartoon billboard.
But as VICE once pointed out, the Kill Bill ad was part of a larger trend of big swing creative movie ads that popped up in New Zealand. Another agency promoted Knocked Up’s TV premiere with a poster containing a sponge shaped like a human egg and several live tadpoles pretending to be Seth Rogen’s sperm. Also, the sponge was filled with fish food to further simulate the act of fertilization in the middle of a shopping mall.
Come to think of it, maybe that idea came from The Simpsons too!
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