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Homer falls down the gorge twice
This was one of the show's earliest stunts. The next shot showed Homer with his head bandaged, being raised up the cliff on a gurney, and his head banged into the side of the cliff all the way up.
The paramedics loaded him into the ambulance, which rolled ten feet, hit a tree, and let him slide out the back. He went over the edge and all the way down again.
Cartoons weren't supposed to show blood, and the writers made Homer very bloody many times anyway. A fall that long left him bruised and bandaged instead of reappearing a second later unharmed. For show creator Matt Groening, that sequence was the moment he knew he had a show.
Why was blood so rare in cartoons?
Network standards departments reviewed children's cartoon scripts in the 1970s and 1980s, and slapstick injuries were played without blood or lasting harm. Pressure for those limits came from groups such as Action for Children's Television, which Peggy Charren and other parents founded in Massachusetts in 1968. Prime-time animation sat outside the Saturday morning system. The Flintstones, which premiered on ABC in 1960, was the best-known earlier example.
Why does a failed rescue get a laugh?
Comedy often works by setting up an expectation and then reversing it, and a rescue creates a strong expectation of relief. When the rescue itself causes the next disaster, the audience gets the reversal at the moment they were relaxing. Silent-film comedians such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin built routines in the 1910s and 1920s on fixes that made things worse.
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