All's Fair in Oven War

"All's Fair in Oven War" marks the premiere of the sixteenth season of The Simpsons. It guest stars James Caan and Thomas Pynchon.

Synopsis

Marge and Homer attend an open house when the house next door is put up for sale. Marge falls in love with the large extensive kitchen. Back at home Marge asks Homer for a new kitchen. Homer agrees and attempts the renovation himself.

While demolishing the kitchen, Homer unearths his old collection of Playdude magazines. He innocently tells Marge he kept them only for the articles, and she responds by cutting out all the nudes from the magazines. Now that they are useless, Homer throws them away; but they are discovered by Bart and Milhouse. They read the articles and are greatly inspired. Using these 70s-era magazines as a model, Bart decides to renovate the Treehouse.

After Homer's remodelling makes the kitchen useless, Marge hires a contractor to complete the job. The dishes that come out of Marge's new kitch get rave reviews and, on Ned's suggestion, she decides to enter the Ovenfresh Bakeoff with her Dessert Dogs.

At the bakeoff, Marge encounters stiff and ruthless competition. Some of the chefs mock her, and sabotage her cooking. Her Dessert Dogs almost ruined by the end of the time limit, she barely manages to make them presentable and get them to the room where the entries have to be stored. Still fuming about the behavior of the other chefs, she resorts to cheating to get even, by spiking the other entries with Maggie's ear medicine, much to Lisa's dismay.

Meanwhile, Chief Wiggum and other concerned parents talk with Homer about Bart's spreading the Playdude philosophy to the other children. Homer has a talk with Bart about the true facts of life, which a horrified Bart quickly spreads to the other children, who are just as horrified.

Marge's cheating gets her to the finals, and Lisa confronts her. Marge retorts saying that the other chefs deserved it for the way they treated her; Lisa urges her to do the right thing. In the finals for the bakeoff against Brandine, Marge admits to her foul play and Lisa's faith in her mother is restored. Brandine wins by default and collects the prize from James Caan.

Later, the Simpsons meet Cletus, who is angry that Brandine has left him for Caan; but he swears he'll get her back. As James and Brandine drive towards a tollbooth, a bunch of hillbillies ambush the car and gun Caan down.

Trivia

• Thomas Pynchon, an author famous for being a recluse, looks just like he did in "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife" with a paper bag over his head.
• Homer calls Milhouse "Milton" in this episode; Bart called Martin Prince "Milton" in the episode "Bart on the Road".
• It takes two years for the contractor to rebuild the kitchen, however, nobody has appeared to have aged.
• The kitchen is back to normal in the next episode.

Cultural References

• The title is a play on the phrase "All's fair in love and war."
• The scene where Caan is gunned down at a tollbooth is cartoon reenactment of a scene in The Godfather in which Caan's character Sonny is killed. This scene has already been parodied in The Simpsons many times, such as when Bart is pelted with snowballs in Mr. Plow.
• The music Bart's friends play in his treehouse is "Take Five" by Paul Desmond.
• The music Homer asks himself to turn down is the classic 80's power ballad "Separate Ways" by Journey.

Quotes

• James Caan: (after getting machine-gunned) Next time, I fly.

• Lisa: (reading letter) "Dear Mrs. Simpson, thank you for sending your recipe. Each year thousands of people fail to qualify..."
  Marge: (sighs) Oh well.
  Lisa: ...but screw them, you're in!"

• Marge: I call them "Dessert Dogs".
  Stuart: Ooh, you're doing a tasty-fake? That is so 1990s! Why don't we move to Seattle and use slow modems!

• Marge: They pushed me and pushed me like the pushywushies they are!

• Television announcer: We now return to Blackula meets Black Dracula.