A Milhouse Divided/References

Trivia

 * Homer mentions that he pictured his marriage as is but he also thought they would be, "driving around in a van solving mysteries". This is a reference to the series of Scooby Doo television programmes.
 * The producers had contacted and asked her to record Kirk's song "Can I Borrow A Feeling" to play over the closing credits. Crow declined.
 * The first scene where the family is eating dinner in front of the television with TV trays is the actual test for background artists to be hired for the show.
 * The premise of this episode was inspired by a scene in a previous episode "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming" where Milhouse, while playing in the cockpit of an F-15, pretends to launch missiles at his parents out of anger that they had to send him to a psychiatrist, as well as mentioning the doctor by name, Sally Wexler, and pretending to attack her as well..
 * This is the only episode written entirely by Steve Tompkins, although he had been a part of the writing staff for several years.
 * The writers wanted to break a typical sitcom convention by having the Van Houten's divorce, and remained divorced at the end, as opposed to the stereotypical sitcom which often has a "reset button technique" of change being unchanged by the end, or the "happy ending in 30 minutes or less", in which actors neatly solve all their problems by the end of each show.
 * The episode originally featured a subplot involving Bart getting jealous of the attention Milhouse was getting and wanting Homer and Marge to divorce. This idea was scrapped on the basis the main plot took up enough time.
 * The Simpsons have a dinner party similar to the one in "The War of the Simpsons", in which the Flanderses, Hibberts, van Houtens and Lovejoys were invited. Both dinner parties resulted in later problems for a married couple that everyone else saw. The main difference is that this dinner party was "the straw that broke the camel's back", where tensions between Luanne and Kirk reached a boiling point, whereas the earlier problems were started by Homer's boorish behavior when he had too much to drink.
 * Kirk loses his job at Southern Cracker. It was previously established that he worked there in "Homie the Clown" and "Bart on the Road;" in the former, Milhouse states Kirk is "a pretty big wheel down at the cracker factory."
 * Milhouse's toy car is designed to look like a S-class Mercedes.
 * The sign outside of the Cracker Factory reads: "Southern Cracker: The dryyyyyyyy cracker."
 * Aside from the obvious long-term consequences of the Van Houtens' divorce, the events of this episode are referenced again in "Wedding for Disaster," which reveals that, due to a bureaucratic error, Reverend Lovejoy's clerical licence had been invalid at this time, and therefore he was not legally able to re-marry Homer and Marge (Meaning that they are technically divorced from now until that episode). This also meant that Ginger was legally Homer's wife.

Cultural references

 * The song "" is heard when Luann packs away Kirk's clothes and sets them on fire.