The Gag Credits at the End of ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’ Tricked These ‘Simpsons’ Showrunners’ High School Into Thinking They Died

Because it apparently needs clarifying, the credits of The Simpsons’ annual “Treehouse of Horror” special aren’t actually the legal names (or obituaries) of the creatives involved in the making of the episode — despite what you may have read, Matt Groening is not the “Funk Lord of the USA.”

When The Simpsons first started putting out its annual anthology Halloween episode “Treehouse of Horror” back in Season Two, Groening and his writers hadn’t yet thought to turn the obligatory roll of credits into another themed gag as they would in the following 34 installments. For that reason alone, I’m going to give the St. Albans School alumni office the benefit of the doubt and assume that, when they tuned in to “Treehouse of Horror VI” half a decade later, they had missed the four intervening “Treehouse of Horror” episodes and thought that the normal Christian names of their most hilarious alumni (besides Gore Vidal, of course) would appear in the closing shot of the famous “Homer³” segment. Instead, their hearts dropped.

Legendary Simpsons writers and showrunners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein recently spoke to Cracked about the making of the ambitious “Treehouse of Horror VI,” and Weinstein was kind enough to continue the discussion about the episode on Twitter where he revealed that his and Oakley’s credits gag nearly scared their alma mater to death:

“We were pretty much alive,” Weinstein clarified in the replies of the thread, in case any other alumni from the elite Washington, D.C. boarding school where he and Oakley first teamed up were following him on Twitter. Since The Simpsons wasn’t quite a global phenomenon in Season Seven (at least by Weinstein and Oakley’s assessment), it would be interesting to catch up with the rest of the show’s staff at the time to see if they had a similar problem with someone from their past not getting the now-ubiquitous joke credits.

Did Harvard University inquire about Greg Daniels’ supposedly Bloated Body? What was Holyoke Community College’s reaction to Mikey Morphin Power Scully’s new profession? Does anyone from the unincorporated wilderness where John Swartzwelder presumably lives know that he’s now going by the title of “Scary”?