Here’s How A Presidential Death Affected A Classic ‘Simpsons’ Episode

One of the greatest episodes from The Simpsons’ Golden Age almost had a very different ending, but it’s probably for the best that Richard Milhous Nixon died when he did — he didn't seem like much of a beer-and-nachos President.

In January 1996, former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara decided to get away from the world of politics that had taken up so much of their lives and move to a town where people followed current events about as closely as they paid attention to nutritional science. In the Season Seven Simpsons episode “Two Bad Neighbors,” the Bushs found that life in a small town can be every bit as tense and destructive as the White House Situation Room during Desert Storm, as the neighbor and his miscreant son drive the former President to insanity before running him out of town.

Then, in the closing scene of the Simpsons classic, President Gerald Ford moves into the old Bush house, quickly finding Homer to be the perfect block companion. But, as Simpsons legend Josh Weinstein recently revealed on Twitter, Ford wasn’t the writing staff’s first pick, as his predecessor was supposed to be the final president in “Two Bad Neighbors,” but he died before the episode made it to production.

It wasn’t the first time that Ford replaced Nixon, but it would be the last. 

As Simpsons fans and 1990s iconoclasts will remember well, the choice to have Homer fistfight the first President Bush in the sewers underneath their block wasn’t some arbitrary choice made on the basis of topicality. In fact, the feud between the Bushs and the Simpsons started in 1990 when then-First Lady Barbara Bush called The Simpsons “the dumbest thing I had ever seen.” Then, two years later, during his doomed re-election campaign, President Bush touted of his “family values” platform, “We are going to keep on trying to strengthen the American family, to make American families a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons.”

But Ford, on the other hand, had never publicly attacked The Simpsons, and as such, deserved no undignified treatment in any of Springfield’s underground infrastructure. Instead, his inoffensively masculine demeanor made him the perfect drinking and eating buddy for America’s favorite animated patriarch. 

And, despite his spotty record, Nixon was a non-threat to The Simpsons like his Vice President, and unlike President #41. If anything, Nixon was a huge help to the series, as he unintentionally lent his middle name to the show’s most unfortunate fourth-grader. But, sadly for Nixon, when it finally came time to put together “Two Bad Neighbors,” everything was not coming up Milhouse.