'The Simpsons' Fan Video Imagines Principal Skinner Is Completely Unhinged

No, this is not a Treehouse of Horror short. This is just a plain, old, ordinary day where Seymour Skinner utterly snaps and loses touch with reality.

The cause? Why, the death of his mother, of course. In a memorable episode of The Simpsons, Skinner has to pretend everything is fine when Superintendent Chalmers comes over for dinner, in spite of everything that can possibly go wrong, including a fire in the house, actually going wrong. Here, we see what might have been if he had lost his mother in the blaze.

We probably should have seen the signs, what with his actually being an entirely other person who took over the life of Seymour Skinner, and then forced the real thing back into isolation after he arrived and was a minor inconvenience.

In the video posted above (via the Four Finger Discount podcast), and the one below (the second half), fan editor Dave Wilson takes the deeply dysfunctional relationship between Principal Skinner and his mother to its obvious extreme, with Skinner completely failing to accept her death and carrying on as if everything was...well, not normal, but what passes for normal in the Skinner household.

As you can see, the second video is even darker, ending with Skinner in a mental hospital after finally coming to grips with reality (briefly, before resuming his delusion in a padded cell).

The next obvious step is arguably for Skinner to become a serial killer, haunted by the overcritical voice of his mother in his head like Norman Bates in Psycho. The Bates/Skinner parallels have been made by fans and critics for years, analyzed and joked about for the nearly three decades that The Simpsons has been on the air. The character design is even evocative of Tony Curtis's take on Bates in the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock classic.

The fact that Skinner, real name Armen Tamzarian even if we aren't ever supposed to speak of that again, has these unhealthy obsessions about the parental (dis)approval of someone who is not even his biological (or childhood) mother figure is perfectly Simpsons, of course, even if it is a bit inexplicable.

The Simpsons airs on Sunday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on FOX.