"The Tears of a Clone" is an episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show.
Plot[]
Scratchy has recently died, and mourners (including Poochie who smiles briefly and could've been revived) pass by his coffin at his funeral. Itchy's crying because Scratchy was so young, and he later flips through a photo album, reminiscing about all the times he killed him. Itchy perks up, however, when he sees a newspaper headline about a scientist cloning a sheep. He rummages through his closet, finds a meat cleaver with Scratchy's blood on it, and decides to make Scratchy clones. Itchy builds a cloning machine and places a sample of Scratchy's blood from the cleaver in it. As the Scratchy clones emerge from the machine, Itchy kills them using various weapons. However, the clones come out faster than Itchy can kill them, and he gets tired. Then he gets another idea: he builds a "killing machine" and puts it directly after the cloning machine. With this setup, to Itchy's delight, the Scratchy clones are killed as soon as they come out of the cloning machine. The blood of the clones sprays out of the killing machine, spelling "THE END" on the wall.
References / Trivia[]
- The newspaper headline Itchy sees is a reference to Dolly the real-life cloned sheep.
- The pictures Itchy looks at in his photo album are of Scratchy being killed in previous Itchy and Scratchy cartoons:
- "My Dinner with Itchy"
- "Spay Anything"
- The untitled cartoon where Itchy replaces Scratchy's eyes with bombs, shown in the episode Itchy & Scratchy & Marge
- Poochie is shown in this episode, despite being killed off the Itchy & Scratchy Show and being legally forbidden from ever appearing again.
- The Treehouse of Horror XXVI segment Wanted: Dead, Then Alive follows a similar plot line where after Sideshow Bob (finally) kills Bart, he soon becomes unsatisfied so he then reanimates Bart multiple times for the purpose of killing him over and over again.