bloodoftheyoung:

“I Love Lisa” is the fifteenth episode of The Simpsons’ fourth season, and originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on February 11, 1993.

Written by: Frank Mula | Directed by: Wes Archer

Controversy

When Principal Skinner tells the children at school that Valentine’s Day is not a joke, he has a flashback in which he is sitting in a PBR somewhere in Da Nang in 1969. On an oil drum next to him is a manila envelope and a photograph of Colonel Kurtz. Skinner sees one of his army friends holding a Valentine card and asks him, “Sending your chick a Valentine?”, to which the guy replies “Yep”, right before he is shot to death. After the episode aired, a Vietnam veteran sent in a letter to the show that read, “I was watching the Valentine’s Day episode of your cartoon and I saw the horrifying Vietnam flashback. Do you really think this was funny, this horrible experience?” The staff ignored the letter and, as Wes Archer pointed out, the scene was “an obvious” reference to Apocalypse Now. In contrast, Mark Groening—the brother of Matt Groening and himself a Vietnam veteran—”loved” the sequence as well as the episode.

- from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia