Simpsons, "The Heartbroke Kid"

'''"The Heartbroke Kid." The Simpsons.''' Fox-TV, first aired 1 May 2005. Production Code GABF12, episode 352, season 16. Steven Dean Moore, dir. Ian Maxtone-Graham, script.

Machine-takeover motif for first act and premise, with a switch: except for a brief shot of a Terminator Marge, the technological threats are vending machines at frequent intervals along the walls at Springfield Elementary. Half the profits go to the school (district), but the machines are designed to seduce children—including a science-fictional "subsonic neuro-jammer [that] disrupts the child's judgment center!" Bart gets very fat on junk food and has a heart attack. Climax of episode shows Bart destroying machines with an ax—puns on "Rage Against the Machine" are inevitable in on-line descriptions—and bringing home their loot to his family. If S.F. threatening machines are sometimes extrapolations, exaggerations, and displacements into horror of everyday threats, then the vending machines at Springfield Elementary take such threats and displace them back into more mundane reality, such as vending machines suckering kids into addiction to junk food. Note also opening business of Simpson's couch at end of catapult (episode 337 also?), and image of Bart at fat farm as one of the «pampered jades of Springfield» pulling a chariot along with Kent Brockman, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, and Rainier "McBain" Wolfcastle (I allude to C. Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Part II and its chariot drawn by conquered kings; the episode probably doesn't—Rich Erlich, initial compiler).