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"Bart the Genius" was the second full length episode of The Simpsons released on television.

In this episode, Bart is caught vandalising school property with a crude spray-painting of Principal Skinner and then swaps IQ tests with Martin and is declared a genius.

Synopsis

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The family plays a game of Scrabble to prepare Bart for an intelligence test. He does not take the game seriously. The next day he finds himself in danger of failing the test. Thinking quickly, he switches papers with teacher's pet Martin Prince. Later that day, Homer and Marge are called for a meeting with Principal Skinner, where they are told that Bart has an IQ of 216, and is a certified genius. The counselor recommends moving him to a gifted school, and Bart heartily agrees.

Unfortunately, his experience at the new school is a disaster. He is not allowed to read comic books, he is cheated out of his lunch, and he is ostracized by his genius classmates. However, his relationship with Homer greatly improves. Hoping to nurture Bart's creative mind, Marge takes the family to see an opera, which they loudly mock.

Meanwhile, Bart continues to struggle in his new surroundings, and finds himself rejected by his old friends for being a "poindexter." One day, in an attempt to do a routine chemistry experiment, Bart manages to nearly destroy his new school, and turns himself green. Asked to explain himself, Bart tells his counselor that he would like to be transferred back to his old class to "observe" less intelligent kids. He attempts to write a proposal, but gives up and writes a confession instead. That night, he admits to Homer that he cheated on the test. Homer angrily chases Bart to his bedroom.

The Family Scrabble Game

• When the family is playing Scrabble, Homer has difficulty making a word with his letters, which spell out "oxidize" (the highest scoring word in Scrabble). He decides to make the word "do".

• Bart introduces the word "Kwyjibo" in this episode, meaning, according to him, "a big, dumb, balding North American ape with no chin."

Cultural References

• Books on the shelf in Bart's new advanced school classroom include Crime & Punishment, Babylonian Myths, Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, Plato, Dante's Inferno, The Illiad, Design of Computers, Astrophysics, Wana by Emile Zona, Puskin, Shakespeare I-XV, Quantum Mechanics, and the Life of Leonardo.
• The work of Sigmund Freud is mentioned when the class discusses paradoxes, as is the quote, "If you want peace, you must prepare for war," attributed to Roman military writer Flavius Vegetius Renatus.
• Albert Einstein is referenced repeatedly in this episode. There is a picture of Bart on the wall opposite one of Einstein in Dr. Pryor's office, under which Dr. Pryor says "It doesn't take a Bart Simpson to figure out that something's wrong." Later in the episode, Homer consoles Bart by saying, "I bet Einstein turned himself all sorts of colors before he invented the light bulb." Thomas Edison, famous to Americans as the inventor of the light bulb, would later become a fascination of Homer's in the episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace".
• The Simpson attends the opera "Carmen", advertised as "Tonight Only in Russian."
• On the opera poster, the conductor is identified as Boris Csuposki, a play on the name of producer and supervising animation director Gabor Csupo.

Quotes

• Lisa: (playing scrabble) Id, triple word score!
  Homer: Hey, no abbreviations!
  Lisa: Not I.D., Dad, id, it's a word!
  Bart: As in "this game is stup-id".
• Bart: (at the opera) Toreador, oh, don't spit on the floor,
  Please use the cuspidor,
  That's what's it's for. (Homer laughs quietly)
• Homer: (to Bart) Someday, you may achieve something that we Simpsons have dreamed about for generations: You may outsmart someone!

Goofs

• In the opening sequence, at the point where Homer gets off his car and shouts before running into the garage, no yell can be heard.
• Milhouse has black hair in this episode instead of his normal blue hair.
• Martin's last name is misspelled as "Prace" when Bart changes the name on the IQ tests. However, Bart spells it correctly when he writes "Martin Prince" on his paper and hands it in.
• Marcia Wallace's name was originally misspelled "Marsha" in the closing credits. In The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family they misspelled the misspelling and claimed it was misspelled "Masha", which was not fixed until the 3rd printing.

Miscellanea

• The opening title sequence features a worker at the power plant eating a sandwich with tongs, Bart stealing a bus stop sign and forcing those queuing to run after a bus, and Lisa riding her bicycle over a bump in the road. These three sequences were changed in later episodes.
• Being the second episode produced on the show after the disastrous animation of Some Enchanted Evening, the future of the series depended on how the animation turned out on this episode.
• Maggie spells out EMCSQU (E=mc²) with her building blocks.
• This is the first episode where Bart uses his soon to be famous catch phrase "eat my shorts".
• Principal Skinner devotes an entire file drawer to Bart's permanent record.
• Homer writes a check for $75 to the "Dept. of Education" to pay for Bart's defacing of school property.
• Martin's IQ of 216 is higher than that of Professor Frink, whose IQ of 199 is one of the 6 highest in the world in a later episode.
• After he is dubbed a genius, Bart's Principal Skinner graffiti likeness is framed and titled "The Principal by Bart Simpson".

External Links

• Episode capsule on "Simpsons Archive"
• "Bart the Genius" at IMDb

• The Simpsons episodes, season 1