“Kids, Itchy & Scratchy can’t be here today, but instead we’ve got the next best thing!  It’s the Stingy and Battery show!” – Krusty the Clown

Simpsons Wikia has a great page where they list all of the Itchy & Scratchy episodes.   Helpfully, there’s even a table that lists the title of the Itchy & Scratchy episode next to the title of the Simpsons episode in which it appears.  Even more helpfully, the table lists which season each episode is from and you can sort by season.  This means we can easily and quickly see when and where Itchy & Scratchy appear over the 20+ year history of the show. 

Because of the different ways Itchy & Scratchy are presented in the show some of the lists are a bit meatier than others.  For example, the Wikipedia list of these episodes has an entry for “Nazi Supermen are our Superiors” even though we never see it.  It also has an entry for an Itchy & Scratchy thing that appears on the Simpsons ride at Universal Studios.  (The SNPP list seems to have stopped updating a few years ago, not that I blame them.)  Both Wikia and Wikipedia also contain entries for a video game and a Butterfinger commercial.  We’re not counting those.  Near as I can tell the Wikipedia page has only one legitimate entry that the Wikia page does not, there was an Itchy & Scratchy bit in Season 20’s “Mypods and Boomsticks”.  We are counting that one. 

There are 63 Itchy & Scratchy episodes on the table at the Wikia page.  48 of them occur in episodes from Seasons 1-10, 15 occur in episodes from Seasons 11+.  The bottom of the page contains a listing of episodes that are not in the table (mostly because they don’t have a title), there are 9 of these, of which 7 come from Seasons 1-10 and 2 come from Seasons 11+.  And we have to include the one from “Mypods & Boomsticks”.  Add those all up and you get:

As you can see, the first ten seasons accounted for three times as many Itchy & Scratchy cartoons as the last ten and a half. 

But even those numbers don’t tell the full tale.  I picked Season 10 as my dividing line because it’s a nice half-way break and it’s the same one I used when I was counting clips for the Spurlock special.  But if we lower the cutoff to Season 8 (a popular line for demarcating the end of classic Simpsons) things get even more tilted:

In the first eight seasons Itchy & Scratchy is used at rate almost four times greater than in the last twelve and a half seasons.  In fact, Seasons 17, 18 and 21 (so far) don’t contain any Itchy & Scratchy episodes. 

So the next time somebody tells you Zombie Simpsons is just as good as The Simpsons was, ask them if they like Itchy & Scratchy.