On the 15th June 1992, then-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, on the campaign trail for that year's presidential election, visits Muñoz Rivera Elementary School and commits one of the most famous political gaffes in history when he "corrects" a 12-year-old pupil's spelling of 'potato' to 'potatoe'.
Ten days later, Fox airs a repeat of The Simpsons; appropriately enough, the episode is "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish". The blackboard joke in the opening sequence is usually "I will not xerox my butt", but for this repeat, a new joke is hastily added: "It's 'potato', not 'potatoe'". (On the 18th June there was a repeat of "Bart the Lover", which uses a shortened intro with no blackboard gag; presumably nobody had thought of the joke at that point, it was deemed too much work to completely re-edit the opening, or there wasn't enough time to do so.)
That alternative joke has never resurfaced since then; nobody seems sure of how exactly it was worded now (whether it was "It's potato..." or just "Potato", or if the quote marks were there or not), or how obviously last-minute it looked. But is it totally lost to the ages? Surely someone was taping that repeat, even if it was the third time Fox had shown it? What are the chances that an off-air copy of the episode survives today?
Pretty good, if you consider this YouTube video: All the Fox commercial breaks from 25 June 1992, the date of that repeat. (I did ask the uploader if they still had the episode itself, but they didn't get back to me.) So, frustratingly close but no cigar... but surely there's still hope out there? How unlikely can it be that there's another copy of that night out there somewhere?
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