Potato Man

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, on the 25th June, 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: "'potato', not 'potatoe'".

This alternate blackboard -- seen on that repeat, and that repeat only -- has become one of the few pieces of Simpsons miscellany completely lost to time. It's frustrating, because the joke was reported in advance in newspapers, and you'd expect someone to have their VCR switched on for it. I've made more than one attempt to track it down in the past, but as of yet things haven't gone anywhere.

One thing I did think to do, though, was check alt.tv.simpsons for any contemporary posts regarding the joke. Multiple posts describe the blackboard as looking very last-minute, saying that the text visibly shimmered or moved around:

Great bit on the Simpson's tonight....
For those of you who don't watch the show, a running joke in the opening credits involves Bart writing something on the blackboard over and over. Past sentences have included "I will not expose the faculty's ignorance.". Well, though tonight's show was actually a repeat, they did change the sentence on the blackboard. Looked like a last minute thing, since the blackboard portion of the shot shimmered badly.
Tonight's slogan: "Potato" not "Potatoe".

Well, I saw the "Potato" vs "Potatoe" thing this evening, and the blackboard did shimmer badly. I think that originally, this episode had the old title sequence. Have they been adding the new sequence to all the reruns? Also, it was an appropriate episode to add it.

Sweet potato! Yes it shimmered, but I did love the switch.

It looked like it was slapped on at the last minute; it moved around in relation to the rest of the image (or was that the rest of the image moving around in relation to it?). Even so, for people who don't sit six inches away from their TV (blindness? Nobody told me about blindness) the effect was great.

They didn't even seem to do a good job patching in the potatoe-sequence. My VCR switches from SP to EP as soon as the sequence starts, then back to SP when it's done.

It was just that it was obviously a "hurry-up" job where the panning of the words didn't quite match the panning of the blackboard (to mimic the effect, write some phrase many times in white ink on a sheet of clear plastic and hold it over the blackboard in the opening sequence and try to keep the words in exactly the same spot of the blackboard while the blackboard moves around on the screen -- it stays perfectly in focus, but "drifts" a little). As far as speculation that they added a different beginning to the episode -- no, I don't think so. I think they just used a computer to paste new words on the screen -- hence the slight lack of synchronization between the words and the blackboard.

The words did kind of shimmer, and when the camera "panned" out of the classroom, the perspective was a bit off.

Obviously, all this just makes me want to see the alternate opening even more, so consider this a renewal of my attempts to do so. (It's also remarkable to me that someone wouldn't be sure if the episode had originally used the old Season 1 opening or not. Or that someone was seemingly uncertain if people reading a Simpsons newsgroup had ever watched The Simpsons.)