Oh, Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do… — The Love-Matic Grampa, “The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase”
The melodic death rattle of the Love-Matic Grampa after he is bludgeoned into a clinking, clattering, cacophony of caliginous cogs and camshafts is actually a brief snippet from “Daisy Bell”, a selection from the American popular songbook.
The reference, however, is to a certain 2001: A Space Odyssey, a Simpsons favorite and one which produced this memorable sequence:
Note that Kubrick & Co. erroneously refer to the song as plain-old “Daisy”. Hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
Anyway, the H.A.L. musical send-off is itself a reference to the work of IBM programmers in 1961, who imbued the IBM 7094 mainframe with the data necessary for the gearbox to become the first “singing” computer. Volume up:
Love the site – how about the reference to Comet Kohoutek in Bart’s Meteor?
Principal Skinner: Whoever discovers them. I’ve been hoping I could find something that would be named after me.
Bart: And you’ve never found anything?
Principal Skinner: Once… but by the time I got to the phone, my discovery had already been reported by Principal Kohoutek…
[a cloud covers the moon; ominous music plays]
Principal Skinner: I got back at him, though… him and that little *boy* of his.
Your wish is my command: http://mcgarnagle.com/2011/08/10/comet-kohoutek/
That singing IBM machine gives me the chills. But I can’t think of this song without thinking of this scene from Futurama: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu_9gADvmyg
Ah yes, and thank you for posting my suggestion. I will be thinking of it fondly during my real boy operation.
Once, back in college, way back, my roommate and I had a bicycle built for two. We found it on the side of the road in front of the Brighton graveyard. Oh how we would ride it around the neighborhood, around and around, up and down the local thoroughfare. Our friends would get drunk and take it for joy rides down the hill in front of the house. But the two of us, we were the only ones that ever got really got those gears a’grinding. Of how I miss that bicycle built for two.