Copyright Roasting on an Open Fire

Longtime readers of the blog might remember my dissection of The Simpsons Xmas Book, a novelisation of the first ever full-length Simpsons episode, "Simpsons Roasting On an Open Fire", at the end of which I postulated the additional material in the book might be from some alternate version of the episode. Well, here's something to add fuel to the fire.

Why does the episode bear the copyright date of 1990, when it was produced and obviously intended for broadcast in 1989?

There might be a totally innocent explanation for this which has nothing to do with the possibility of multiple different edits existing, I grant you, but if you compare that copyright screen to any of the 648 other episodes, things become even odder.

Why does "Roasting" have its production code (7G08) stuck on the end of the paragraph after where it normally goes, when every other episode has the line "THE SIMPSONS EPISODE NO. ____"? It looks uncannily like the credits were assembled with that line accidentally missing, and they had to hastily shove the production code on to it somewhere. In addition, it is missing the lines "The Simpsons and the Simpsons characters TM Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation".

Mr Ian Robinson of Twitter has suggested that the credits were later redone to match the others, given the episode's one-off nature. If so, is there anyone who happens to have a copy of the original Fox airing and would like to show me how the copyright screen looks there? (I can find all the original advert breaks from that December 1989 showing, so that's a start.) Alternatively, if you happen to own the old Simpsons Collection VHS (where "Roasting" was packaged with "Bart Gets an 'F'"), how it looks there might also prove useful (the episode was also released on a standalone US VHS in 1991 and "The Simpsons: Greatest Hits" VHS and DVD, for completionists).

(NB: I would not be at all surprised to learn that the end credits are the same on all versions, as that would better explain the missing two lines. As for the strange placing of the production code, I reckon Ian was on to something when he mentioned the episode's one-off nature - it may be that it lacked the production code because it was a 'special', but someone decided to add it in at the last minute and they didn't have the time to do it properly. Still, any further information would be appreciated.)