Lisa's comments - "romance is dead, it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Hallmark and Disney, homogenized, and sold off piece-by-piece" - have been used in case studies of the cultural representations of organizations.
During the early years of the show, the staff was forced by the Fox network into doing clip shows to save money. There was originally intense pressure on the producers of the show to create extra episodes in each season, and the plan was to make four clip shows per season to meet that limit. Writers and producers, however, felt that this many clip shows would alienate fans of the series. The Fox network's reasoning was that clip shows cost half of what a normal episode costs to produce, but they could sell syndication rights at full price.
Marge says they watch the same shows all the time, while Lisa says that the Itchy & Scratchy cartoons are just pasted together from pieces of old episodes (and pointing out that Ren and Stimpy do it all the time). This comment is a sly joke about the construction of this episode; the blackboard and couch gags are taken from other episodes, there are clips from past episodes, and the interstitials are actually clips from past episodes that feature the family members talking in the kitchen. These three aspects support the idea of this episode being a clip show to the extreme.
Jon Vitti is credited under the pseudonym Penny Wise in the closing credits because he did not want to be credited for writing a clip show
The line "It was an unusually warm February 14th" retroactively acknowledges that it was an error for the weather to be warm in the Valentine's episode I Love Lisa, given that Springfield has cold, snowy winters in some episodes.