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Itchy & Scratchy Show

The Itchy & Scratchy Show is a segment of the fictional Krusty the Klown TV show, watched regularly by child characters on the animated series The Simpsons. Itself an animated cartoon, The Itchy & Scratchy Show depicts a mouse, Itchy, and a cat, Scratchy, who attack and graphically mutilate each other with deadly weapons.

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. 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; and The Brady Bunch, when Cousin Oliver came to live with the Bradys. 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").