Bart becomes a genius

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Episode of the series The Simpsons
title Bart becomes a genius
Original title Bart the Genius
Country of production United States
original language English
length approx. 22 minutes
classification Season 1, Episode 2
2nd episode in total ( list )
First broadcast January 14, 1990 on FOX
German-language
first broadcast		 September 20, 1991 on ZDF
Rod
Director David Silverman
script Jon Vitti
music Richard Gibbs
synchronization

 ►  Main article: Dubbing The Simpsons

chronology

←  Predecessor
It's hard Christmas

Successor  →
The Failure

Bart is a Genius ( English original title: Bart the Genius) is the second episode of the first season of the US animated series The Simpsons .

action

The Simpsons play a game of Scrabble together to prepare Bart for the test he has to take the next day at the elementary school he attended. However, the latter does not take the game seriously and invents the word "Kwyjibo" with the definition: "A fat, fat, stupid, North American monkey who is losing its hair." Homer , who has understood that Bart actually describes him and thus offends him , gets angry and chases him around the house, which causes Marge to add "... and be patient quickly." to the word explanation.

The next day, Bart sprays a caricaturing picture of Headmaster Skinner on the school wall, so Skinner has a conversation with Bart's parents about him. Bart now tries the test, but considers it too difficult. While his teacher Mrs. Krabappel is distracted, he swaps his test with that of the best-in-class Martin Prince . When his parents return from meeting Skinner, they are informed that the results of the test would show Bart is a genius with an IQ of 216 . The school psychologist Dr. J. Loren Pryor orders that Bart be sent to a school for the gifted.

Homer is very proud of his boy and encourages him to make the effort in his new class. However, Bart is unable to follow the material covered in his new school. His classmates also easily outperform him in intelligence. As soon as they notice this, they start to trick him and take his lunch away from him. When Bart wants to do something with his friends from his former school, they deny him their company and ridicule him for his high intelligence. At home, Marge insists that the family visit the opera to further develop Bart's intelligence. Bart, who is bored in the opera house, makes fun of the opera, which makes Homer and Lisa laugh, but makes Marge angry.

The next day at school, Bart's chemistry experiment explodes, leading to a second meeting with Dr. Pryor leads. Bart tells him he'd want to go back to his old school. Dr. Pryor has him write a letter in which Bart admits that he cheated on the test, whereupon he is sent back to his old class. That night, Bart also confesses to Homer that he was never really gifted, but adds that he still hopes to get along well with his father in the future. But Homer gets angry and chases Bart through the house as at the beginning of the episode.

production

In the comments attached to the episode DVD, the following is stated about the production:

The concept for the episode came from screenwriter John Vitti , who wrote a long list of dire, Bart-walkable deeds and their effects. The only idea that turned into an interesting episode concept was to have Bart cheated on an IQ test . This idea is based on an incident from Vitti's childhood when some of his classmates did not take an intelligence test seriously and suffered the consequences of it. Because Bart was already obviously unintelligent, Vitti reversed this problem for the episode. Vitti used all of his memories from elementary school and drafted a 71-page script, which exceeded the required length of 45 pages. It was Vitti's first script for a 30-minute television program. Bart's use of the quote “Eat my shorts” was there to show that the very same quotes that he hears on television are used in language; the creative team forbade Vitti to use an original saying. The scene in which the Scrabble family is set was inspired by the cartoon The Big Snit published in 1985 .

Director David Silverman struggled with developing a legible Scrabble board for the opening scene that was supposed to give the impression that the Simpsons could only put very simple words into the game. The style of the scene in which Bart's math problem was visualized was inspired by the art of Saul Steinberg . The increasing number of numbers appearing in the scene stems from Silvermann's use of the same technique in developing the sets for The Adding Machine . Every scene that occurred in the episode was exactly one frame shorter than the previous one. The scene in which Bart is writing the letter, which was shot as a particularly long take, was animated by Dan Haskett in the USA. There were some problems with the finished animation of the episode: The banana in the opening scene was colored incorrectly because the Korean artists were not familiar with this fruit. The final bathtub scene turned out to be particularly problematic, largely because of the lip-syncing. The version of the episode that aired was the best of several attempts.

This episode was the first to feature the full intro including the table and couch gag. Matt Groening developed the intro, which is long in the full version, with the intention of cutting it as short as necessary for the respective episode, but using these 2 constantly new gags to compensate for the material repeated every week. Little did Groening pay little attention to television since childhood, that such long intros were rare at the time. Because the finished episode was longer than planned and the production team hesitated to shorten the actual episode in order to be able to broadcast the full intro, shorter versions of the intro were developed.

As a result, the characters Martin Prince and his parents, Richard, Melissa, Mrs. Krabappel, Dr. J. Loren Pryor and Krusty the Clown (pictured on a cereal box) for the first time.

reception

In a 1991 interview, Vitti describes this episode as the best he has written at the time. James L. Brooks also called the episode one of his favorite episodes, saying, "We did things with animation that when it happened opened doors for us."

The show received letters from viewers complaining that throwing away a comic was an incident of censorship. Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood, authors of I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, hailed the episode for being "superbly written and staged, often a literal look at parenting from the eyes of a child" and "properly a classic ”. They continued with, “These 20 minutes cement Bart's position as a cultural icon and hero for all failures, while also doing a few taunts at Hothouse schools. Particularly noteworthy is the sequence in which Bart visualizes his math problem, the viewing of which should be a necessary part of teacher training. "Bart's quote" If you do it, it is bad, you leave it, then even more. "Is part of the song Deep, Deep trouble .

When it first aired in the US , this episode had the 47th highest ratings for the week of January 8-14, 1990, with a Nielsen rating of 12.7 and the second highest ratings on Fox .

David L. Smith from New Jersey , programmer of the Melissa computer virus , which first appeared in 1999 , left his pseudonym Kwyjibo in the code as well as further quotations as a reference to the episode. The word Kwyjibo served as the name of the Kwyjibo ore mining area in Québec .

Cultural references

In the context of the episode theme, reference was made to various works of cultural history. For example, the books Plato , Puskin , Wana by Emile Zola , Crime & Punishment , Shakespeare I – XV , Dante's Inferno , Moby Dick , Ilias by Homer , Odyssey by Homer , Balzak and other books such as Mechanics , Wife of Leonardo , Babylonian Myths , Design of Computers and Astrophysics .

The winter , the fourth violin concerto of Antonio Vivaldi's composition The Four Seasons , can be heard in the art hall of the gifted school . In one scene, student Ian says that, according to Sigmund Freud, the subconscious is shaped by childhood memories. The chess player Anatoly Evgenyevich Karpov is pictured on the school suitcase of one of the gifted children. The Simpsons also attend the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet , conducted by a character named “Boris Csupowski”, who is a reference to the draftsman Gábor Csupó , during which Bart parodies the aria Toreador . Homer mentions that Marge bought a film from a Swedish "Heini", by which Ingmar Bergman is meant. The psychologist compares Bart's work with Jane Goodall's studies on chimpanzees . The episode also includes several references to Albert Einstein : At one point builds Maggie a Block Tower, the word "EMCSQU" ( "SQU" here is an abbreviation for the word "square", which in German means "square"), which is probably the most famous formula from Einstein's theory of relativity , "E = mc²". A portrait of Einstein can also be seen in the psychologist's office. At another point Homer directly incorrectly refers to Einstein as the inventor of the incandescent lamp .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Jon Vitti . (2001). DVD commentary for the episode "Bart Becomes a Genius". In: The Simpsons: The Complete Season One [DVD]. 20th Century Fox .
  2. ↑ Jankiewicz, Pat. "Jon Vitti." Comic Scene # 17, February 1991.
  3. ↑ a b c d e Matt Groening . (2001). DVD commentary for the episode "Bart Becomes a Genius". In: The Simpsons: The Complete Season One [DVD]. 20th Century Fox .
  4. ↑ a b c d e David Silverman . (2001). DVD commentary for the episode "Bart Becomes a Genius". In: The Simpsons: The Complete Season One [DVD]. 20th Century Fox .
  5. ↑ a b Martyn, Warren; Wood, Adrian Bart the Genius
  6. ↑ St. Petersburg Times (USA) January 19, 1990; Buck, Jerry: ABC's 'Roseanne' takes first place in Nielsen ratings
  7. ^ About.com: Virus Encyclopedia Melissa
  8. ↑ Hossein Bidgoli: Handbook of information security, Volume 3 John Wiley and Sons, 2006. ISBN 0-471-22201-1 , page 147