He and Marge ride a bike into the sunset. Bart's go-go ray idea was "stolen" from the opening credits of "Johnny Quest". Mike Reiss said they did not want to show the hamster getting shocked but had to for plot purposes. The first line Richard Nixon says, during the Duff commercial, was taken verbatim from the Kennedy-Nixon Debate during the 1960 Presidential Campaign. Adolf Hitler's head, among other things, can be seen going by in bottles of Duff when the quality control man is not paying attention. The Troy McClure driver's education film title "Alice's Adventures Through the Windshield Glass" was pitched by Frank Mula. The episode contains the first appearance of Sarah Wiggum. The episode also contains a two-second snippet of footage from "Bart the Daredevil": a close-up of Homer making a disappointed face and saying "D'oh!" when he gets arrested. When Bart reaches for the cupcakes and collapses, it is a parody of a scene in "A Clockwork Orange", where the main character Alex reaches for a woman's breasts. The Duff clock is a parody of the "It's a Small World" clock. In the Duff TV advertisement, a group of women were leading an anti-sexism protest in front of the McMahon and Tate building, a reference to the advertising agency from "Bewitched". The scene toward the end where Moe points toward individual customers declaring they will "be back" before pointing toward and addressing the viewer (later revealed to be Barney via a cutaway) is a parody of the end of the film "Reefer Madness". The final scene, where Homer and Marge cycle into the distance while "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" plays is a reference to the film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid". Homer's song "It was a Very Good Beer" is sung to the tune of the 1961 song "It Was a Very Good Year"; one of its lyrics is Homer stating he stayed up and listened to the music of the British band Queen. Bart sitting in the chair, stroking the hamster is a reference to "James Bond" character Ernst Stavro Blofeld, who strokes a cat in his chair. Lisa imagines Bart as a hamster trapped in a maze saying "Help me! Help me!" which is a reference to "The Fly". "Duffless" aired during February sweeps and finished 19th in the weekly ratings for the week of February 15–21, 1993 with a Nielsen rating of 15.2 and was viewed in 14.2 million homes.