The Halloween Episode is a rarity among rarities, a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in wax paper. In episodic shows, the passage of time is generally ignored - it draws too much attention to the artificiality of the premise and questions how the world of the setting syncs chronologically with the world of the audience. On top of that, when holiday episodes do come along, they generally have certain expectations of tone and theme - particularly when it comes to Christmas. Halloween episodes, though, are something different: the only real expectation is that they’re going to break from the normal “reality” of the show. They don’t necessarily have to be scary (or even have the trappings of scary things), but they do have to be weird. In some cases, particularly with more serialized shows, this shift allows for a new perspective in the ongoing story, a different way of seeing the narrative that will put past and future events in a new context. My favorite example of this would be Mill

The NSD Team are both 90s kids, and nerdy ones at that, so the recent passing of rapper Coolio hit us both because of his own work (near-inescapable for a period in our adolescence) and because of the odd relationship he had with "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody of his biggest hit, " Gangsta's Paradise ," as " Amish Paradise ." Al had been given permission by Coolio's record label, but not Coolio himself, who had issues with his work being parodied. To my knowledge, this is the highest-profile of a parodee being upset about Al's version, and it's certainly the one time I was around to experience it. But what makes a parody stick with us just as long as the original, and, in some cases, even longer? What do we, as audiences, get from them and how should we approach them as creators, ourselves? "Weird Al" Yankovic,as I've written about before , played a vital role in my musical journey. He wasn't constrained by genre, so eac