The Most Referenced Movie Genres on The Simpsons
Movie references on The Simpsons have a distinctive flavor. Whenever we’re watching the show and a scene suddenly shifts in tone or style, there’s a good chance that a parody is coming.
What makes these movie parodies feel different from the rest of the show? In a word, genre. By integrating elements from outside the show’s default animated sitcom format, The Simpsons is able to tell jokes and stories that it couldn’t otherwise while keeping the audience on its toes. But what movie genres are featured most often in movie references on The Simpsons?
In this article, we break down the movie genres referenced on The Simpsons in comparison to the AFI 100 Years… 100 Movies list from 1998, as well as the genre distribution of IMDb overall. What we find confirms what many fans probably sense intuitively about The Simpsons—the taste of the writers room skews toward cinematic masterpieces, like those found on the AFI list, as well as “genre movies” that fall outside the big three of Drama, Comedy, and Romance.
The Cinephile Bump
Much like the AFI list, The Simpsons tends to include more references to Crime, Biography, War, Western, and Film-Noir movies than IMDb at large. In fact, The Simpsons references 69% of the movies on the list overall, and 7 of the top 10 most referenced movies on the show appear on the AFI list.
Perhaps no movie better embodies this genre venn diagram than the crime epic The Godfather, which appears in the top 10s of both lists, but critically lauded war movies like Apocalypse Now are also well represented on The Simpsons. Ironically, while Westerns are overrepresented compared to IMDb, The Simpsons only references 5 of the 10 Westerns included on the AFI list, with The Searchers being probably the most notable omission.
We were also not surprised to find that Musicals are also overrepresented in both the AFI list and The Simpsons. In The Simpsons: The Musical: The Miniseries, we dug into this genre’s influence on the show as well as some of the most memorable Simpsons musical numbers. This included AFI lister My Fair Lady, with special guest Michael Price to talk about his episode “My Fair Laddy” (S17E12), as well as On the Town, Mary Poppins, and Paint Your Wagon. Given the show’s vaudevillian sensibility, it’s not surprising that bursting into song became part of the show’s vocabulary.
Much like the AFI list, The Simpsons also contains fewer movies that fall into the genres of Comedy, Family, and Animation than the overall IMDb list, perhaps because these fall to close to the usual tone of the show itself. A couple notable exception is the 1966 Batman TV series (and its feature film), which had a clear influence on the show’s surreal and satirical comedy, as well as the movies of the show’s future owner Disney, which the animators often affectionately recreate.
Finally, Music, History, and Sport movies are also underrepresented on The Simpsons. What do they all have in common? They’re based on real life.
The Genre Bump
Compared to both the full database of films on IMDb and AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movies (1998), movie references on The Simpsons also tend to embrace more genre and populist film.
Sci-Fi, Horror, and Fantasy films all feature more heavily in Simpsons movie parodies than both the IMDb list and the AFI list. Of course, this includes Treehouse of Horror all-timers, like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it also reflects the massive pop-culture impact of characters like King Kong, Godzilla, and the Universal Monsters, which can be found throughout the canon episodes of the show. The social commentary and irony of the Twilight Zone and Planet of the Apes
The Simpsons also frequently dips into the the Thriller genre in its movie parodies. This is thanks in part to one of the most-referenced directors on the show, Alfred Hitchcock, whose suspense movies like Psycho and Rear Window have been parodied frequently and comprehensively. The gadgets, over-the-top villains, and modernist sets of Goldfinger and other movies in the James Bond series are sprinkled throughout the show. Political thrillers are also well represented, especially for showrunners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein who were obsessed with conspiracy movies like All the President’s Men and JFK.
As box-office behemoths of the 1980s and ‘90s, Action movies also offered an opportunity for more topical movie references on The Simpsons. From Arnold Schwarzenegger’s one-liners in The Terminator to Jerry Bruckheimer’s excessive explosions to the pseudo-historical nonsense of The Mask of Zorro, action movies often stand in for the entertaining idiocy of Hollywood.
The Normie Slump
While still the top three genres, Drama and Romance are underrepresented on The Simpsons compared to both other lists. One simple explanation for this is that these genres are simply crowded out by the more popular genres.
What’s more, movie parodies often provide a way for The Simpsons to incorporate a variety of tones to the show, Drama is part of the show’s bread and butter. I mean, why parody the dramedies of James L. Brooks when he’s one of the creators of the show?
Romance, on the other hand, may just be harder to incorporate into the show because of who the main characters are. Marge and Homer are in a committed marriage, while Bart, Lisa, and Maggie are a little too young for a full-fledged relationship. That means romance often requires a flashback to Marge and Homer’s college days or a flash forward to the kids’ adulthood in order to make sense.
The Simpsons, a Genre Unto Itself
While The Simpsons is first and foremost an animated sitcom, it invites in a kaleidoscope of cinematic genres that have always made it something more. It offers a unique blend of flavors, culled from the stew of cinematic classics and monster movie madness airing on television in the 1970s, as well as the writers’ own obsessions.
The result is something unique. While The Simpsons is definitely not a lesson in film history, and thank god for that, every time the tone or style shifts suddenly, take it as an invitation to dig into the movie genres that define its colorful palette.
Explore the Data
Ah data, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems. In the table below, you’ll find every movie referenced in the first 13 seasons of The Simpsons, grouped by genre. Try using the “Filter” button at the top to find your favorite genres!
Note: Best viewed on desktop.
