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 Meyer and directed by director Mark Kirkland. It was first broadcast on the Fox network in the United States on October 3, 1999. After the season 5 episode "Bart's Inner Child", Meyer got "a little burned out on writing scripts", so he wrote "Brother's Little Helper" in order to "try [his] hand again". While writing the episode, Meyer was going through "some psychological problems" and found the episode very difficult to write. He was initially so dissatisfied with the first draft that he turned it in with a pseudonym; Vance Jericho. Co-producer Tim Long jokingly commented that the script was