The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace

The living room becomes a movie theater, with many secondary characters sitting in rows of seats. The Simpsons shuffle their way to the couch, muttering, “Excuse me” and “Pardon me”. When the family is finally seated, Homer steals some popcorn from The Comic Book Guy.

Guest star(s)

William Daniels as KITT

DVD
commentary

Matt Groening
Mike Scully
George Meyer
Ron Hauge
Dan Greaney
Julie Thacker
Mark Kirkland

Season 10
August 23, 1998 – May 16, 1999

"Lard of the Dance"
"The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace"
"Bart the Mother"
"Treehouse of Horror IX"
"When You Dish upon a Star"
"D'oh-in in the Wind"
"Lisa Gets an "A""
"Homer Simpson in: "Kidney Trouble""
"Mayored to the Mob"
"Viva Ned Flanders"
"Wild Barts Can't Be Broken"
"Sunday, Cruddy Sunday"
"Homer to the Max"
"I'm with Cupid"
"Marge Simpson in: "Screaming Yellow Honkers""
"Make Room for Lisa"
"Maximum Homerdrive"
"Simpsons Bible Stories"
"Mom and Pop Art"
"The Old Man and the "C" Student"
"Monty Can't Buy Me Love"
"They Saved Lisa's Brain"
"Thirty Minutes over Tokyo"

List of all The Simpsons episodes

Seasons
1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 · 16 · 17 · 18 · 19 · 20

"The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace" is the second episode of the tenth season of The Simpsons which originally aired on September 20, 1998. The episode's title is an allusion to Thomas Edison's nickname, "the Wizard of Menlo Park."

1 Plot
2 Cultural references
- 2.1 Previous Episode References
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Plot

Homer is shocked to hear on the radio that the average life expectancy for men is now 76.2 (76 years of age and two months) years, which makes him realize that at 38.1 (38 years, 1 month) years old his life is effectively half over. When he tells Marge this, she informs him that he is actually 39. Homer realizes that with time running out on his life, he hasn't accomplished anything, and this causes him to fall into a severe depression. Later when the family has a party to honor him, Lisa mentions that Thomas Edison invented the film projector as well as many other inventions Homer uses. Homer learns more about Edison and eventually idolises him. And so, in an attempt to follow in Edison's footsteps, he becomes obsessed with Thomas Edison and quits his job at the power plant to become an inventor.

Homer gets to work and develops several inventions, such as an alarm that beeps every three seconds when everything is OK, a shotgun which shoots make-up onto women's faces, a very difficult to control electric hammer, and a reclining chair which has a built-in toilet. But none of these inventions is well received. Feeling despondent over his failure to invent anything useful, his invention career is saved when he reveals he added two hinged legs to a chair making it impossible to tip over backwards. However, his hopes are dashed when he notices his poster of Edison shows his idol sitting in the same type of chair, which indicates Edison has already invented Homer's untipable chair. But Homer also finds out no one else has seen the extra legs on Edison's chair, and thus Edison has never received public credit for inventing it. So he sets out with Bart and his electric hammer to the Edison Museum in New Jersey to destroy the chair. Before he smashes the chair, Homer notices a poster of Edison's which reveals that Edison idolized Leonardo da Vinci in the same way Homer idolizes Edison. It also shows that Edison was never able to match da Vinci's accomplishments, just as Homer can not match Edison's. Feeling a renewed connection to his hero Edison, Homer decides not to destroy the chair after all and to destroy Leonardo da Vinci's inventions instead.

Unfortunately for Homer, he accidentally leaves his electric hammer at the museum. Later on the news, Kent Brockman announces that the chair and the electric hammer have just been discovered in his museum and are expected to generate millions for Edison's already wealthy heirs.

[edit] Cultural references

When Homer is reading about Edison at the library, one of the books on the table is called A Child's Garden Of Edison. This is a parody on A Child's Garden of Verses, a book of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson.
The electric hammer that Homer invents is very similar to one invented by Rand Peltzer in the 1984 film Gremlins. The character in the film also had a reputation for inventions that either did not work, or only worked for a couple of weeks.
KITT from Knight Rider makes a cameo in this episode.
At Homer's imagined funeral are Lenny (now President of the United States), Flanders (now the Pope), Barney Gumble (winner of four Oscars), the Robot from Lost in Space, and Heckle and Jeckle.
One of the T-shirts in the Thomas Edison Museum says AC/DC a reference to the rock band of the same name, who named themselves after seeing the terms "alternate current-direct current" on a sewing machine.

While doing his experiments Homer writes formulas on a blackboard and writes the (present) density parameter of universe to be greater than 1 (Ω(t₀) > 1) before an experiment and less than 1 (Ω(t₀) < 1) after that experiment fails.
On the same blackboard there is a formula that should provide the Higgs Boson mass, still unmeasured, in some unification theory. It's intresting to notice that the formula provides a result in the range between 0.5 and 1 TeV, which is nowaday exactly where it's expected to be found.
Still on the same blackboard there is written the formula 3987¹²+4365¹²=4472¹², apparently violating Fermat's last theorem. Actually this formula is wrong for one part in one hundred bilionths. This, like the other formulae, is one of the maths jokes put by David X. Cohen inside the Simpsons and Futurama.^[1]
The scene where Homer runs down the imaginary Edison is a reference to the story "The Hitchhiker" in the film "Creepshow 2".
The song playing in the background on the radio show's news section (when Homer finds out about the life expectancy) is a snippet of "Oh Yeah" by Yello.

[edit] Previous Episode References

The couch gag where the living room is a movie theater filled with secondary characters is similar to the one from Marge vs. the Monorail" where the Simpsons sit down, followed by other characters from the show (some of which can be seen in this couch gag, such as Mr. Burns, Smithers, Principal Skinner, Flanders [Ned and Maude], and Milhouse) and, to a lesser extent, the one from "Bart After Dark" where many secondary Simpsons characters (together with the Simpson family) appear in a parody of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.
In the vision of Homer's funeral, one of the names on the tombstone is "Tamzarian," which is Principal Skinner's real name, according to the much-maligned season nine episode "The Principal and the Pauper".
Also in Homer's vision of his funeral, Barney is shown as an award-winning filmmaker. The season six episode "A Star is Burns" (which, like "The Principal and the Pauper", isn't liked by Matt Groening or many Simpsons fans) showed Barney's talent for filmmaking when he created "Puke-ahontas", a short film about his alcoholism.
In this episode, Homer tells Lisa that he's at the Springfield Elementary School library because he's "...not allowed back at the big people's library" (with no explanation of what he did to get banned). The season five episode Marge on the Lam had a scene (often cut in syndication) where Homer gets thrown out of the Kwik-E-Mart for reading a magazine without paying for it, followed by a scene where Homer gets thrown out of a library for eating food.