Santa's Little Helper of their sacrifices and starts treating him badly, causing him to run away. He ends up in the possession of Mr. Burns, who trains him to become a vicious attack dog. Several days later, Bart stumbles upon the trained Santa's Little Helper and is attacked, but the greyhound eventually recognizes his old friend and stops. In "The Canine Mutiny" (season eight, 1997), Bart uses a fake charge card to buy a well-trained rough collie named Laddie from a mail-order catalog. Laddie learns many tricks that Santa's Little Helper is completely unable to perform, and the Simpson family nearly forgets about
Brother's Little Helper which Homer and Marge go to see. Homer says that, since taking Focusyn, Bart has gone "from Goofus to Gallant", a reference to the characters Goofus and Gallant from the children's magazine "Highlights". When Lou sketches Bart based on Homer and Marge's description he ends up drawing Dennis from the comic strip "Dennis the Menace". A shirt at the military base Fort Fragg reads "I Went to the Persian Gulf and All I Got Was This Lousy Syndrome", a reference to Gulf War syndrome. In its original American broadcast on October 3, 1999, "Brother's Little Helper" finished at no. 51