A wooden chalkboard eraser rests beside three plain wooden blocks and white chalk dust on blue ground.

Original artwork, not a still

Principal Skinner

Uh oh, two independent thought alarms in one day. The children are overstimulated. Willie remove all the colored chalk from the classrooms.

— The Simpsons  ·  1989

Behind the line

What it means

Our interpretation.

Skinner treats a couple of independent thoughts as a crisis in need of tidying. His fix is to take the colored chalk away, as though color were what overstimulated the children. It's funny because the school's answer to curiosity is to make everything plainer.

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