Cultural References
The Springfield Shopper headline from the day Lisa was born ("Mondale to Hart: Where's the beef?") uses the currently popular advertising slogan for Wendy's. Mondale, a candidate in the 1984 presidential election, used the "Where's the beef?" phrase at an election rally in 1984 while mocking one of his opponents. Marge begins telling her story of Lisa's first word by saying: "This story begins in the unforgettable spring of 1983. Ms. Pac-man struck a blow for women's rights and a young Joe Piscopo taught us how to laugh", making references to the 1981 arcade video game Ms. Pac-Man and the American actor Joe Piscopo. The episode features an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon called "100-Yard Gash," which uses the music from the 1981 film Chariots of Fire. Homer and Marge consider buying a houseboat from the Sea Captain; his pitch is cut short by a shark, which he proceeds to fight, in a reference to the film Jaws (1975).
The Olympic promotion by Krusty Burger is loosely based on a similar "scratch-and-win" promotion by McDonald's, in which McDonald's visitors could win a Big Mac, french fries, a soft drink, or even a cash prize up to $10,000 if Team USA won a medal in the visitor's listed event. McDonald's lost millions on the promotion, as happened to Krusty. At one point in the episode, Dr. Hibbert refers to Olympic gymnastic medalist Mary Lou Retton.
Read more about this topic: Lisa's First Word
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)