The Throwaway ‘Simpsons’ Line That Has Ruined ‘Little Women’ for a Generation

Next they’re going to tell us that Planet of the Apes doesn’t end with Charlton Heston singing “I hate every ape I see from chimpan-a to chimpan-z!”

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If your only exposure to great works of American storytelling was through the greatest one of all, The Simpsons would have you thinking many incorrect things about a many classics. Earlier today, a startling number of Twitter users admitted that, for years since the episode “Homer Loves Flanders” premiered in 1994, they thought that Louisa May Alcott’s timeless coming-of-age novel Little Women ended with the line uttered by a tearful Moe Szyslak to a group of homeless men: “And then they realized, they were no longer little girls: they were little women.”

The iconic line was meant to comically illustrate the soft side buried beneath Moe’s cynical and suicidal exterior, but it inadvertently turned off an embarrassing number of readers from touching the novel that continues to inspire Hollywood adaptations to this day. These self-described illiterates are going to lose their minds when they learn that Al Gore never actually wrote a book called Sane Planning, Sensible Tomorrow.