The Simpsons has clearly had a lot of nice Lisa-centric episodes through the years, however one of many best possible is Season Seven’s “Lisa the Iconoclast,” through which Springfield’s brainiest second grader exposes the reality behind city founder Jebediah Springfield. It seems that he was not a noble, buffalo-taming hero in spite of everything, however reasonably a “vicious pirate” named “Hans Sprungfeld” who as soon as tried to homicide George Washington.
Not surprisingly, the city of Springfield opts to show a blind eye to this uncomfortable fact, forcing Lisa to seek for additional proof. So she urges city officers to exhume Jebediah’s physique with a view to see if it comprises Sprungfeld’s prosthetic silver tongue (the unique having been “bitten off by a Turk in a groghouse battle”).
We’ve talked earlier than about how a number of Simpsons storylines have been primarily based on true occasions, and “Lisa the Iconoclast,” it seems, was really impressed by actual life U.S. historical past. And, no, we’re not simply speaking about how most American historic figures have been actually whole dirtbags. In accordance with The Simpsons’ showrunner on the time, Invoice Oakely, the episode was particularly written in response to a information story from the early ‘90s involving President Zachary Taylor, and the girl who believed that “he’d been assassinated.”
Taylor, the twelfth president of america, handed away after simply 16 months in workplace. How? Nobody’s certain precisely. Apparently, he “gulped down a big amount of cherries and iced milk” following a Fourth of July celebration, obtained diarrhea, and, just some days later, died of what medical doctors on the time decided to be a “bacterial an infection of the small gut.”
Not content material with the entire “demise by cherries” rationalization, in 1991, Clara Rising, a “retired College of Florida humanities professor” theorized that Taylor had been poisoned. Though historians “disagreed” with the speculation, Rising was in a position to persuade Taylor’s descendants to “authorize an exhumation.” No phrase on whether or not or not anyone picked up his cranium and used it as a puppet.
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Checks analyzed Taylor’s fingernails, sideburns and pubic hair. (Let’s take a second to salute the patriotic forensic scientist tasked with accumulating a 141-year-old lifeless president’s pubic hair.) Whereas the assessments discovered no irregular ranges of arsenic, seemingly validating Rising’s critics, she remained unconvinced. “We might not have discovered arsenic, however by rattling, I nonetheless assume he was poisoned,” she instructed a reporter in 1993, declaring that different poisons may have been used.
Some of us within the press labeled her a “macabre crackpot,” and Oakley appeared equally skeptical. “You may’t go exhuming presidents simply because some outdated girl has an unpublished manuscript,” he mentioned through the episode’s DVD commentary monitor, declaring that “Lisa the Iconoclast” was simply “that story retold however Lisa was the outdated girl.”
After all, in The Simpsons, Lisa in the end seems to be proper. So who is aware of, maybe we’ll must dig up Taylor but once more in some unspecified time in the future sooner or later.
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