"Treehouse of Horror VII" is the first episode of the eighth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.
In the seventh annual Treehouse of Horror episode, Bart discovers his long-lost twin Hugo, Lisa grows a colony of small beings, and Kang and Kodos impersonate Bill Clinton and Bob Dole in order to win the 1996 presidential election.
In preparation for the school science fair, Lisa performs an experiment in a petri dish to see if cola will dissolve her baby tooth.
The electric charge is then passed on to the tooth when Lisa tries to touch it, causing it to undergo an unusual reaction which creates a race of miniature beings.
Kang and Kodos kidnap both Dole and Clinton and place them in suspended animation, assuming their forms through "bio-duplication" to ensure that one of them will become the next leader.
On the day before the election, Homer stumbles upon the badly hidden spaceship, hijacks it and releases Dole and Clinton from suspended animation.
Both candidates agree they should put aside their differences and join forces to defeat the aliens and bring about a new age of bipartisanship, but Homer accidentally ejects them into space.
However, despite being exposed, Kang and Kodos declare to the people that the two-party system means they still have to choose one of them, mocking a bystander's suggestion of voting for a third-party candidate instead.
Kang is subsequently elected President of the United States, ruling as a monarchical tyrant and enslaving the American population in order to build a giant death ray.
[5] According to Cohen, the "Citizen Kang" short violated every rule of The Simpsons as it locked the episode in one time and named specific candidates.
[2] In a 2000 Entertainment Weekly article, Matt Groening ranked this episode as his seventh favorite in the history of the show.
[11] A filmed clip of this moment was shown at the Simpsons panel during the 2024 San Diego Comic-Con, at a time when Harris was both the sitting vice president and the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.