Bart the Genius
[6] The Simpsons spend a night playing Scrabble and remind Bart that he should stimulate his brain by improving his vocabulary if he hopes to pass his intelligence test at school.
After Bart cheats by inventing a nonsense word, kwyjibo – basing its definition on an insulting description of his father – Homer angrily chases after him.
At Springfield Elementary School, Bart is busted for vandalism by Principal Skinner after the class genius, Martin Prince, snitches on him.
After Bart's chemistry experiment explodes, filling the school lab with green goo, he confesses to Pryor that he switched tests with Martin.
The concept for the episode developed from writer Jon Vitti coming up with a long list of bad things Bart would do for attention, imagining the potential consequences.
[8] This idea was based on an incident from Vitti's childhood when a number of his classmates did not take an intelligence test seriously and suffered poor academic treatment because of it.
[8] Bart's use of the phrase "Eat my shorts" was intended to reflect his adoption of catchphrases he had heard on TV; the creative team had told Vitti that he should not come up with original taglines for the character.
The increasing appearance of numbers in that sequence derived from Silverman's use of a similar tactic when he had to develop a set design for the play The Adding Machine.
Creator Matt Groening developed the lengthy sequence in order to cut down on the animation necessary for each episode, but devised the two gags as compensation for the repeated material each week.
[10] As the finished episodes became longer, the production team were reluctant to cut the stories in order to allow for the long title sequence, so shorter versions of it were developed.
[11] The episode also introduced the characters Martin Prince and his parents, Richard, Bart's teacher Edna Krabappel and Dr. J Loren Pryor.
They went on to say, "these twenty minutes cemented Bart's position as a cultural icon and a hero to all underachievers, and managed a good few kicks at hothouse schools along the way.
[14] Colin Jacobson at DVD Movie Guide said in a review that "Bart the Genius" "offered another decent but unspectacular episode" and "its early vintage seems clear both through the awkward animation and [through] the lack of appropriate character development.
[10] The invented word "Kwyjibo" in the episode inspired the creator of the Melissa macro virus[8] and the name of an iron oxide copper-gold deposit in Quebec.
