The first episode of the second season is the highest rated episode of The Simpsons overall, getting 33 million viewers when it originally aired. I remember “Bart Gets an F” (S2, E1) being the last episode of the first season. Since it takes place at the end of the school year when seasons typically end, this would make sense, but I guess my memory is wrong. I was fully expecting Bart to go on to the fifth grade the next episode and was surprised when he remained in the fourth grade. I was Bart’s age when the first season aired, so I thought Bart and I would always be the same age. Alas, I have continued to age while he has remained a permanent fourth-grader.

The opening credits get a revamp for the second season. Bart no longer steals the bus stop sign causing people to miss the bus, instead he weaves between different characters on his skateboard. While there were guest stars in Season 1, Season 2 has a lot more guest stars and many of them were really famous at the time. James Earl Jones, Tony Bennett, Larry King, George Takei, Danny DeVito, Ringo Starr, and Dustin Hoffman are just some of the famous guest stars who appear this season. This goes to show how big The Simpsons was right from the start, although I suppose it’s easier to get a celebrity to do a guest voice than make a guest appearance.

The second season has a better hit/miss ratio than the first. The first Halloween episode “Treehouse of Horror” (S2, E3) is still fun to watch and “Bart the Daredevil” (S2, E8) had a surprising-for-its-time ending. In order to teach Bart a lesson, Homer jumps Springfield Gorge on a skateboard. The expectation of viewers at the time was for him to make it. The Simpsons was a “realistic” cartoon, after all. When he didn’t make it, but instead fell into the gorge, it was so unexpected, you had to laugh. The helicopter airlifting him out of the gorge bumps his head against the side of the cliff, then, unexpectedly, the ambulance immediately crashes into a tree and Homer’s stretcher slides out the back of the ambulance, and he falls down the gorge again! My friends and I talked about how funny this was the next day and The Simpsons became much-watch viewing. This was the moment The Simpsons went from being an ordinary show to being something special. Being like a regular cartoon full of cartoon violence was a recipe for success.

Watching The Simpsons on streaming is quite a bit different from watching it on the air. Back then, you had to wait a week between each episode, you had to watch commercials during the episode, and sometimes it was an episode you’d seen before. Over the next week, you’d relive your favorite moments from the episode with friends and tell people who missed the episode what the funniest parts were. You’d watch a commercial featuring a few brief scenes from the upcoming episode and look forward to seeing it. However, sometimes you’d miss it because your family was doing something else and you had to wait for it to be rerun. I’m glad we can watch any episode whenever we want now, but it’s a different experience. TV shows felt more valuable back when they were more scarce.

Apparently, TV Tropes coined the term Flanderization to describe characters who change into completely different people over the course of a series. Flanders originally was just the neighbor who was better off than Homer, but I don’t think him becoming a super-Christian really changes that. TV Tropes claims Flanders has become more obsessively religious as seasons have progressed, but I disagree. He’s obsessively religious already in “Dead Putting Society” (S2, E6) when we first learn he’s religious. To my mind, the portrayal of Flanders has remained surprisingly consistent.

Despite watching this show in reruns for years, I’ve only now noticed certain things. I didn’t realize until now that the woman the sushi chef made out with in the car in “One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish” (S2, E11) was Bart’s teacher. In “Bart Gets Hit by a Car” (S2, E 10), I didn’t notice how similar the devil’s voice was to Flanders. This is foreshadowing (perhaps unintentionally) that Flanders will play the devil in a later season. Also, I didn’t notice it was Phil Hartman’s voice that welcomed Bart to heaven initially, but it makes sense they’d use him since he was already there to debut the voice of Lionel Hutz. Phil Hartman also does the voice of Moses in “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment” (S2, E13) where his other character Troy McClure makes his first appearance. I guess they thought Phil Hartman had a good religious-figure voice.

The “Bart vs. Thanksgiving” (S2, E7) episode was disappointing, not only because it isn’t as funny, but to add insult to injury, it was reran every Thanksgiving for years (unlike the Treehouse of Horror which got a new episode each Halloween, but like the Christmas episode which also got rerun every Christmas for years).

The Simpsons introduced me to concepts I wasn’t aware of before. In “Principal Charming” (S2, E14), Homer mentions Marge’s sister Patty doesn’t like to be touched and Marge says she chose a life of celibacy. Raised as a Mormon, I was familiar with the rule to stay celibate until marriage, but it never occurred to me before that some people choose to be celibate for life. Later in the series, we learn Patty is gay, but for the first several seasons, she’s depicted as being asexual. I sympathized with Patty since I have a slight aversion to touch myself. For example, I asked my mom to stop hugging me when I was five, but I’m not completely against touch altogether the way Patty originally was.

In “Brush with Greatness” (S2, E18), Marge’s art teacher gets upset when Marge compliments him, saying he doesn’t handle compliments very well. It was meant to be a funny line since he does nothing but compliment everyone else, but this also resonated with me since it makes me uncomfortable when people compliment me.

When I first started watching The Simpsons, I assumed their home town of Springfield was located in Illinois where the most famous Springfield is. However, according to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, it’s named after Springfield, Oregon. As far as I know, they’ve never made this explicit on the show, but there’s several clues. A pretty significant clue appears a couple times in the first two seasons when we see gas stations. The only two states where you can’t pump your own gas are New Jersey and (at the time the early seasons aired) Oregon. Since residents of Springfield don’t pump their own gas, it must be located in one of these two states.

I’d say the funniest episodes in Season 2 are “Treehouse of Horror” (S2, E3), “Bart the Daredevil” (S2, E8), and the final episode “Blood Feud” (S2, E22) in which Bart donates blood to save Mr. Burns’ life. Mr. Burns sends a thank-you card without any cash reward, which infuriates Homer. Homer writes an angry letter, but then decides not to send it. However, Bart has already dropped the letter in the mailbox. Homer decides to put a hose in the mailbox to ruin the letter. When Bart points out it will ruin all the other letters, Homer claims other people’s mail isn’t important, and just say things like “Dear Someone You’ve Never Heard Of.” My dad, the lifelong postal employee, was horrified at this scene.

When a postal employee stops Homer from filling the mailbox with water, he next goes to the post office posing as Mr. Burns. When the mailman asks him what his first name is, he says he doesn’t know, which is one of the funniest moments in The Simpsons.

I was used to television shows having a moral to the story, so it was also funny that the episode ends with the Simpson family arguing what the lesson was and Homer concluding that it was just a bunch of stuff that happened. Although I think the moral to the story is obviously “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” since Homer’s complaining earned him a gift from Burns in the end. “Blood Feud” is also the first episode in which Homer has a conversation with his brain and the first episode in which he uses his impersonating voice. These two things will go on to become mainstays of the show.