Ever since the show’s inception, the Simpsons writers’ room has been full of the kind of worldly, annoying nerds who play My Dinner with Andre arcade games and say things like “Spring forth, burly protector, and save me!” For a cartoon about the dumbest fictional town in America, The Simpsons had some serious brainiacs crafting the immaculate Golden Age seasons, and the Harvard-educated comedy writers were constantly sneaking esoteric references to classic literature and world history into many of the best episodes of television ever. As such, we can hardly call it a coincidence that, in the Season Four episode “New Kid on the Block,” the Simpson kids’ hip new babysitter Laura Powers just so happened to let it slip that her estranged father was once stationed in a hotly contested city in Afghanistan, definitely during the war with the USSR and probably as part of a since-declassified covert ops campaign called “Operation Cyclone.” “The joke is that Laura is casually admitting that the USA actually had operatives on the ground during the Soviet-Afghan war, in direct conflict with the Soviet Union, the kind of thing which could have started a major war between the superpowers,” comfy_wol wrote.
Author: Keegan Kelly
Published at: 2025-07-07 20:30:00
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