Lisa's Rival

"Lisa's Rival" is the second episode of The Simpsons' sixth season, which originally aired September 11, 1994. This episode can be found on Disc 1 of The Simpsons Season Six DVD Boxed Set. It was written by Mike Scully, and directed by Mark Kirkland. Winona Ryder guest stars as Allison Taylor.^[1]

1 Plot
2 Production
3 Cultural references
4 Reception
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Plot

Lisa feels her status as top student in the class is threatened when a new student named Allison Taylor (voiced by Winona Ryder) arrives at Springfield Elementary. Allison is as smart as Lisa, younger (having skipped a grade), and like Lisa, a young master of the saxophone.

Lisa tries to be her friend, though she battles her envy and fears that she will lose her purpose. At a band practice, Lisa and Allison battle saxophone to saxophone for the position of first chair; Allison wins as Lisa plays too hard and faints. It comes to a climax during Springfield Elementary's annual "Diorama-rama", a competition in which the students build dioramas. Allison chose and constructed her project early: a scene from "The Tell-Tale Heart", by Edgar Allan Poe. Although Lisa goes to great efforts to produce a better diorama of a scene from Oliver Twist, it is destroyed, and with Bart's help and prompting, Lisa decides to sabotage Allison's entry by switching Allison's diorama with one containing a rotten cow's heart. When Principal Skinner not only criticizes the diorama but begins to question Allison's overall qualifications, Lisa's guilt overcomes her and she produces the real diorama.

However, Skinner is unimpressed by both Lisa's and Allison's work and proclaims Ralph Wiggum's collection of Star Wars action figures, which have nostalgic value to him, to be the winner. In the end, Lisa and Allison put aside their differences and become friends as they walk off into the sunset, picking up Ralph along the way to hang out with them after he accidentally trips and breaks his action figures.

A secondary story arc follows Homer after he encounters and then steals hundreds of pounds of sugar he finds at the site of a truck accident. He has ambitions of getting rich by selling the sugar, as well as indulging his sweet tooth, despite the presence of shards of broken glass and other detritus in the stockpile. In a classic display of his uniquely ignorant brand of optimism, Homer refers to these inclusions as 'prizes'. He keeps the sugar in a pile in his back yard, where he obsessively guards it from thieves. His fears turn out to be well-founded when he discovers a well-dressed Englishman hiding behind the sugar pile, whom he accuses of stealing from it. The English gent admits to having taken some sugar 'in that split second when you let your guard down. And I'd do it again'. Soon, the sugar attracts bees from a local apiary. The beekeepers track the swarm down and offer to buy the bees back from Homer for $2000, but at the last moment it starts raining. The sugar dissolves and the bees fly away. The beekeepers rescind their offer and leave to go looking for their bees again, and a distraught Homer watches his sugar melt away.

[edit] Production

According to the DVD audio commentary for the episode, the Northridge earthquake occurred during the production of this episode. It also notes that Conan O'Brien, who by this time had left the show, suggested having an episode about a rival for Lisa (though it was only the basic concept and not the story line that came from O'Brien). Also according to the DVD commentary, the B story about Homer and the sugar was pitched by George Meyer.

In production order, this episode is the 100th episode.

[edit] Cultural references

The high-seas-themed romance novel Marge is reading, "Love in the Time of Scurvy," refers to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Milhouse's sub-story is a reference to the 1993 film The Fugitive. Principally, the scene where Milhouse is at the end of a dam drainpipe, held at gunpoint by an FBI agent resembling Tommy Lee Jones, who uses the film's famous line "I don't care".^[2] Homer's "In America" speech while guarding his sugar pile is a direct reference to one of Tony Montana's lines in Scarface, and his line "Oh what a world!" when the sugar melts is the same line used by Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, when she melts.^[2] Lisa's hiding of the The Tell-Tale Heart diorama under the gym floorboards is itself a parody of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".^[2] Lisa's nightmare features her playing in a band with famous backup artists: Art Garfunkel, John Oates and Jim Messina.^[2] Ralph's diorama contest entry is just re-packaged Star Wars action figures. His collection includes Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Chewbacca.^[3]