It might be surprising to learn how much the latest Indiana Jones film has in common with The Simpsons.
In its eighth season back in 1997, The Simpsons addressed its own audience’s fatigue with the animated series, in the classic episode, “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show.”
The episode was all about how ratings for The Itchy & Scratchy Show (a show-within-the-show that was a blatant metaphor for The Simpsons itself) were declining, because Itchy & Scratchy was no longer the fresh new thing. To shake things up in response, the fictional studio heads introduced a hip new character: a dog named Poochie (voiced by Homer). Despite the network’s hype, however, Poochie’s introduction fell flat. What promised to be a bold new era for the cartoon turned out to be a total misfire, and the Itchy & Scratchy writers immediately reversed course.
It all led to a scene that is now famous among Simpsons fans, in which Poochie awkwardly says, in a voice that’s obviously not Homer’s, “I have to go now. My planet needs me.” He then floats up to the sky with insultingly lazy animation. To rub salt in Homer’s wounds, this was followed up by a note reading, “Poochie died on the way back to his home planet.” When the episode ends, Krusty the Clown appears and excitedly announces, “Poochie’s dead!” to a bunch of cheering children in his audience. Then, to make it absolutely clear that Poochie was dead dead, Krusty brought out a sworn affidavit ensuring Poochie would never return, and had a lawyer confirm it was air tight. Poor Homer was devastated.
Since then, Poochie has been referenced whenever a series callously discards a controversial character. Season 8 of That ’70s Show, for instance, famously had new member of the group Charlie (Bret Harrison) break his neck and die after falling off the town’s water tower. It seemed like it was because fans realized Charlie was meant as a replacement for Eric in the final season and weren’t thrilled about it. But it was mainly because Harrison was cast in a new show The Loop between seasons, and could no longer be a Season 8 cast member as planned.
But you don’t have to be literally killed off to qualify as a Poochie-esque character: Rise of the Skywalker lazily diminished the role of Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), doing so as a cowardly response to the racist backlash to the franchise’s previous installment, The Last Jedi. Rose didn’t die on the way back to her home planet, but as far as the plot was concerned, she might as well have.
Beyond the fate of these characters, the Poochie phenomenon can be so depressing for fans because of how much it reminds us that we’re watching a work of fiction, made by people whose business interests can often trump creative vision.
Just as Poochie’s death is obviously the result of studio meddling, it’s hard to watch something like the early Season 7 episode of Orange is the New Black—where annoying inmate Madison (Amanda Fuller) is suddenly transferred to another prison, never to be seen again—and not immediately recognize it as the writers’ response to the real-life backlash against her in Season 6. Even if the viewer doesn’t know the legend of Poochie from The Simpsons, they can tell on some level that this isn’t an organic storytelling decision; real-world conditions are bleeding into this fictional world in an obvious, awkward way.
Such is the case with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which hit theaters over the holiday weekend. The movie was forced since it began production to deal with one major, uncomfortable question: What do they do about Mutt?
Played by Shia LeBeouf in 2008’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Mutt is revealed to be Indiana’s son. The final scene in the movie has Mutt pick up Indie’s iconic hat, playfully hinting at the idea that LeBeouf might take over Ford’s role as the new lead of the franchise. Indiana then quickly snags the hat away from Mutt, but the seed was still planted: Mutt might not have officially been the new Indy yet, but surely that was the long-term plan. “I have an idea to make Shia the lead character next time and have Harrison come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie,” George Lucas said at Cannes that year. “I can see it working out.”
But while Crystal Skull was not a flop, it also didn’t do the kind of business or garner the audience response needed to greenlight a new sequel right away. Fans didn’t appreciate the introduction of aliens to the franchise, nor were they in love with that ridiculous nuke the fridge moment in the first act. Most of all, they didn’t like Mutt. The character was thinly drawn and not portrayed with anywhere near the same charisma Ford has given Indie—which LeBeouf himself would be the first to admit. “You can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg, who directed],” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2010, “But the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So that’s my fault.”
To make matters worse, the late 2000s would turn out to be the height of LaBeouf’s acting career, not the start of it. After a string of plagiarism accusations, multiple arrests, and domestic abuse allegations, no one would’ve blamed Dial of Destiny for dropping Mutt even if the character had been well received. By 2023, the writers could’ve easily just never mentioned Mutt at all and most of the audience wouldn’t have complained. What they did instead was worse: They had Mutt die in Vietnam, completely off-screen, a few years before the start of the film.
The first mention of Mutt’s death is a blink-and-you-miss-it shoutout on a news segment about Indy, and for a moment it seemed like that was all the movie was going to say on the topic. But then Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) asks Indy what he’d do if he could go back in time, which leads to a tearful monologue in which Indy wishes he would have stopped his son from enlisting in the war. Indy reveals that he feels responsible for the tragedy, since Mutt joined the war to spite him. He also says that this was what drove him and ex-wife Marion (Karen Allen) apart for the third time; Marion was inconsolable with grief, and Indie didn’t know how to help her.
It’s all devastating material, and Ford delivers it like the talented, award-winning actor he’s always been. But it’s all undermined by the very funny realization that, in essence, Mutt’s been Poochied.
Mutt didn’t die in Vietnam because that was the natural next step for his character after Crystal Skull; he died because audiences didn’t want the character or the actor to return. As poor Indy chokes up about the unimaginable tragedy that’s befallen his family, it’s not hard to imagine Mutt saying in a stilted voice, “I have to go now. Vietnam needs me”—echoing Poochie’s own infamous phrase on The Simpsons. Dial of Destiny tries to make Indy and Marion’s broken marriage a major emotional throughline, but it doesn’t work because it hinges on this manipulative revelation of Mutt dying on his way “back to his home planet,” so to speak.
The other big issue with a franchise pulling a Poochie with its handling of Mutt’s death is the way it concedes to fan complaints, allowing the initial narrative surrounding the character to be the final word rather than challenged in this new sequel.
As Homer argued throughout “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show,” the cartoon could’ve still turned fans’ opinions of Poochie around by putting extra effort into the writing and giving viewers more time to get to know the guy; instead the writers took the easy way out, killing off Poochie at the first sign of backlash and destroying any chance of redemption he might’ve had. It may have been the smart choice from an immediate business standpoint, but it was also a cowardly one. Following through on Poochie, even just to give him a proper farewell an episode later, would’ve been far more admirable than the showrunners’ actual approach.
We know this because other franchises, like the Scream series, have stuck by their less popular entries over the years. Scream 4 continued Sydney’s character arc from the unpopular third film, and Screams 5 and 6 brought characters back from the once unpopular Scream 4. Some say these decisions have paid off because Scream 3 and 4’s reputations have improved over the years, but there’s another argument: Those entries’ reputations have improved because the franchise refused to disown them. The Scream films have followed through on most of their questionable story choices, instead of abandoning them at the first sign of fan complaints. The series as a whole is stronger for it.
Because Dial of Destiny has so firmly walked back what Crystal Skull set up with Mutt, undoing Indy and Marion’s relationship in the process, they’ve cemented the fourth movie’s status as the dud in the franchise. There is no returning to Crystal Skull and giving it another more charitable look. By erasing all its most significant story contributions, the series itself has given us full permission to discard it.
Giving Indy a son in Crystal Skull was a bold choice that promised to meaningfully alter the series’ status quo, and Dial of Destiny should’ve had the courage to at least try to follow through on that choice. Obviously Mutt was never going to be the new Indiana Jones, but when it comes to explaining his absence, the series surely could’ve done a little better than this.
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