It's All Greek to Me

Time for another quick Simpsons mystery. So quick, in fact, there's not going to be a jump break in this article.

The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Greek" involves Lisa predicting the results of football matches Homer is gambling on, culminating in the Super Bowl. The episode originally aired in 1992, and the teams and stadiums involved in the episode were the same as that year's actual Super Bowl. The episode was repeated on Fox in 1993 and 1994, and on both occasions the episode was redubbed to match the Super Bowl for that year. See the Ambiguities Guide on The Simpsons Archive for full details, and also the DVD Companion for extra details on the 1994 airing.

According to showrunner Al Jean on the DVD commentary, the episode was also redubbed for the 1995 Super Bowl, with the San Francisco 49'ers and San Diego Chargers as the teams (and presumably the Joe Robbie Stadium, plus a change in reference to which state happy fans would be looting and turning over cars in). This would be very odd if so, as the episode was not repeated in 1995. Its final Fox broadcast was in September 1994.

This gives us two possibilities:

1. Jean misremembered this eight years after the fact.
2. The redubbing did occur, but was never used.

Jean claims in the commentary it was only a week or so before the episode went to air; so either he is mixing this up with the '93 or '94 redubbing, or the planned repeat was cancelled, or maybe even there was some error in communication between the network and the producers and the episode was redubbed even though it wasn't going to be rerun. If the redubbing did occur but was never used, it would be nice for it to be released along with the '94 version, but unfortunately Simpsons DVDs are historically quite bad with including alternate versions.

(A final note. Even on the original version, the lip sync is off on any occasion that names the teams, as when the episode was animated it wasn't known who would be in the 1992 Super Bowl. It seems that the original version may have had the Minnesota Vikings as one of the teams. If that version was recorded as well, there could be as many as five different versions of this episode...)