Kang and Kodos: The Simpsons' Rigellians, Every Treehouse of Horror and Citizen Kang

Kang and Kodos arrived on October 25, 1990 in the first Treehouse of Horror, in a segment called "Hungry Are the Damned" that was a straight parody of The Twilight Zone's "To Serve Man." The Simpsons are beamed from a backyard barbecue aboard a saucer, fed enormously by two tentacled, one-eyed, drooling hosts, and Lisa finds a book in the galley titled How to Cook Humans. Kang blows dust off the cover to reveal How to Cook for Humans; Lisa blows off more to reveal How to Cook Forty Humans; Kang blows again: How to Cook for Forty Humans. The aliens, hurt, fly the family home, and Marge blames Lisa for ruining paradise. The gag reversed the 1962 twist, and the characters, who had been designed for one segment, were kept for every Halloween since.

The design was octopus by way of the pulps: a green, gelatinous body on a spread of tentacles, a single large eye, a fanged mouth that drools constantly, and a glass dome helmet with a stem, like a specimen jar, that the show has never explained. The names came from Star Trek, where Kang is a Klingon commander in the 1968 episode "Day of the Dove" and Kodos is the executioner of the 1966 episode "The Conscience of the King." Harry Shearer voices Kang and Dan Castellaneta voices Kodos, and the writers have said that the two are siblings, Kodos the sister, though the drawings give no clue.

The Rigellians are from Rigel VII, and the show has used the planet, over three decades, as a place where everything is a slightly worse version of Earth. The 2015 episode "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner," the pair's only regular-season outing, took the family there and showed a world of tentacled citizens, a queen, an arena and a cuisine built around visiting species; the Simpsons were the dish, and Homer was fattened for a feast that the episode, being canon, could not quite go through with. Rigellian biology is whatever a segment needs. They breathe Earth's air, eat everything, reproduce in ways the show has depicted at least twice with different results, speak a language identical to English, and can pass as human by wearing a suit, which fooled the entire United States in 1996.

The saucer is the classic disc, with a ramp and a tractor beam, and it is usually the first thing on screen in a Kang and Kodos segment: a light over Springfield, a beam through a window, the family lifted out of bed. The abduction imagery is the standard one, and the show plays it as a formality, the way a Halloween episode plays a graveyard. Over the years the pair have invaded Earth, run for office, been invaded by Earth, been eaten, married Marge, hosted a talk show and appeared as a rollercoaster; Kang and Kodos' Twirl 'n' Hurl opened at Universal Studios Florida in 2013.

The segment everyone remembers is "Citizen Kang," the closer of Treehouse of Horror VII on October 27, 1996, a week before the Clinton–Dole election. The Rigellians abduct both candidates, replace them with themselves in suits, and campaign on speeches of pure noise, Kang promising to move forward, not backward, and upward, not forward, and twirling always towards freedom. Homer exposes them on election eve, and Kang points out that it makes no difference: Earth has a two-party system, the voters have to choose one of them, and a vote for a third party would be thrown away. Kang wins, the population is enslaved, and Marge complains as she hauls a plank on a chain gang. The final line, Homer's protest that he voted for Kodos, became a slogan on a decade of bumper stickers.

The segment has been rerun and quoted in every American election since, and the pair have appeared in campaign-season episodes and promotional shorts through the 2000s and 2010s, always as the same candidates, which is the joke's point: the aliens do not change, and neither does the choice. It is the purest example of what the Rigellians are for. Springfield's other monsters are horror parodies; Kang and Kodos are political ones, invaders who need no invasion because the system will hand them the planet.

The Rigellians are a compilation of every invader before them. The tentacles and the single eye are the Martians of H.G. Wells, who were all brain and tentacle and who also arrived to eat us; the cookbook is the Kanamits of The Twilight Zone; the saucer, the beam and the bedroom abduction are the abduction lore of the 1980s, the Hill case as a Halloween formality; and the candidates in suits are the pod people, the alien that wins by being indistinguishable from us. The show assumes the audience carries all of these, and it has been right for thirty-five years.

Rigel itself is real and unlikely. The star is a blue supergiant roughly 860 light years away, tens of thousands of times as luminous as the Sun and only a few million years old, far too young and too hot for a seventh planet to have grown drooling octopods; it will explode long before anything there could learn English. The habitable exoplanets article covers which stars could host a Rigel VII, and the invasion narrative entry in the glossary traces the story the Rigellians keep failing to complete. Roger, the other great animated alien, is what happens when the invader gives up and moves into the attic.