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*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This episode was a very interesting one. It opens with a potential storyline - Homer actually taking care of his kids for once - but then cuts to Bart at school without a lunch. The story he tells to discourage other kids from eating - Dark Stanley - was simple brilliance: the old-fashioned animation, the ghostly music; all of it enraptured me. I was quite sorry when the sequence ended.Then, after the children have fled the school, we see the first musical number (parodying "How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria"). It took me a while to figure out that this was a parody of The Sound of Music, because the actual tunes were different than the original. The episode sags ever so slightly in the middle, but picks right up again when Cletus' kids, the ones Lisa had been tutoring, are signed to Krusty's show and Stephen Sondheim (my all-time favorite composer) makes a cameo. Bart's meeting with a psychiatrist (Meg Ryan) is almost equally memorable, although the two feel almost like separate story lines that require separate episodes to cover.Overall, I was impressed with this episode. It was hilarious at times, with the wit and wonder of the Simpsons of old creeping back in.
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