Into the Woods/References

General

References/Trivia

Appearances

Credits

Quotes

Cultural references

• The story title may be a reference to one or both of two books by Jon Krakauer:
  • Into the Wild, which tells the story of Christopher McCandless. In 1992, McCandless went into the Alaska wilderness on a personal quest and ended up starving to death.
  • Into Thin Air, which tells the story of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster.
  • Due to Bart's preoccupation with starvation during the story, Into the Wild is the more likely possibility.
• When Martin and Lisa discuss the hardships the pioneers endured, Lisa mentions the Donner Party's having had to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.
• Bart sarcastically asks if the Donner Party were too cheap to install GPS on their wagons.
• When Bart and Milhouse pooh-pooh Lisa's mention of the Donner Party, Lisa tells Martin to ignore them, as "They think that 'The Old West' is an actor who played Batman on TV", a reference to Adam West.
• Martin tells Lisa not to stoop to the level of the Philistines (referring to Bart and Milhouse). In the Bible, the Philistines were the most prominent enemy of the nation of Israel, but Martin is using "Philistine" in its modern sense, a term for an uncultured person.
• The bear statue with the sign admonishing visitors to not smoke in the woods ("Keep your butts out of the forest") resembles Smokey Bear.
• After Bart and Milhouse get lost, they get hungry and Bart recalls other accounts of cannibalism, including "those rugby players whose plane crashed in the Andes".
• The story's plotline is reminiscent of the M*A*S*H television episode "They Call the Wind Korea", where Winchester and Klinger get lost in a windstorm and endure a night stopped on the road. The next morning, after the storm abates, they discover that they were only two hundred yards from camp.

Continuity

• Kamp Krusty was first seen in the television episode "Kamp Krusty".
• Bart also gets lost in the woods (albeit with Homer rather than Milhouse, and with a considerably different outcome) in the episode "The Call of the Simpsons".