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"I note that Benjamin's taste in music essentially obeys the Science Fiction Law of Threes. (As in, 'For lunch we're serving chicken, mashed potatoes, and Betelgeusean laser squash' or 'I'm familiar with all the great philosophers — Socrates, Descartes, Xaxxix'x of Denobulon IV.')"

When several examples of something are being listed in Speculative Fiction, a couple of them will be from our time (or timeline if it's Alternate History), and the final one will be one from the future (or post-divergence Alternate History).

The most common variant is to list famous scientists — Newton, Einstein, Johannes Kepler, Werner Heisenberg and Da Vinci being quite popular — followed, finally, by a scientist from the future. Occasionally their inventions are also listed: Newton's mechanics, Einstein's relativity, Zefram Cochrane's warp drive. The most common inversion is one where the person lists off several fictional figures and then tosses in a real-world one—the implication being that the real-world one is just as silly as the fictional one.

Usually the trope serves only as an antidote to Small Reference Pools, to remind us that it is, in fact, the future and people haven't stopped thinking and discovering things in between our time and story's setting. It would be odd if there hasn't been any new discoveries or geniuses worth mentioning, especially if the story involves something like Faster-Than-Light Travel. When someone or something we already know is used as such, then the author is just making a point: say, if Hawking is mentioned, that means people of the future in that verse think he is a genius equal to Newton and Einstein, meaning that readers also should.

Extremely prone to Rule of Three — meaning we go far enough into the future to see a new example, but not far enough that those we know currently aren't still on the short list. It is much harder to find an example which doesn't follow a "present, present, future" (or for added symbolism, "past, present, future") scheme. When there is a long list of examples, expect a third of them to be from the future. Particularly when the work is from the 1950s or 1960s, the third future example will often have a East Asian (or less commonly African or Indian) name, indicative of the the idea that these parts of the world would have a bigger part to play in the future in what at the time were still considered mostly European- and American-dominated fields like the sciences.

A variation occurs when it's alternate reality: say, when someone mentions Alexander, Bonaparte and Stalin as world dominators who failed, it means that in this reality the changing event is somewhere between the mid-18th century and the early 20th century, which made Stalin and not Hitler start World War II.

A subtrope of Cryptic Background Reference. Sometimes overlaps with Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick. A form of The Triple. Contrast with Plato Is a Moron, in which the fictional character usually personally boasts of being in the same range (or more likely being better) than the famous people.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • Used in DC One Million when a visitor from the 853rd century says how proud he is to be back in the 20th century, the time of such great scientists as Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, and Ayo Sotinwa. He then corrects himself, realizing that Sotinwa would still be a child at this point.
  • In the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip "Matildus", the Doctor placates the eponymous custodian of the Great Big Library of Everything after losing all the books he borrowed by offering her the first editions of The Iliad, Macbeth and the diary of Empress Goozoo the Quanteenth.
  • In the Doctor Who (Titan) Fourth Doctor miniseries Gaze of the Medusa, the Doctor says they're in 500 BC:
    Doctor: The Romans have just driven out their last king, the Olmecs are busy building pyramids in Mexico, some clever chap in China may be about to invent ice cream, and the great and terrible Beast-Emperor of the Third Crimson Collective marries a plant. No, wait. One of those is wrong, isn't it? Probably the ice cream one. How disappointing.
  • Inverted in Ex Machina: a traveler from an Alternate Universe arrives in the comic's universe (which is mostly identical to ours) and attempts to gather information by ordering his suit AI to connect to "gharity.com" and "skyvann.com". When both fail, he connects to ... Wikipedia.
  • In Superman #400 (1984), there is a vision of a future where Superman remembered as a legendary American hero alongside Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower and "Kuhan Pei-Jing, who slogged through the ricefields of Asia negotiating to head off a third World War in the 1990s."

    Fan Works 
  • Played for Horror in Danganronpa: Paradise Lost, when Junpei lists off three infamous crimes committed by the Japanese to explain his worldview: first the murder of Junko Furuta, then the atrocities of Unit 731, before concluding with the Tragedy instigated by Ultimate Despair.
  • Inverted in Red Fire, Red Planet when Meromi Riyal lists off various martial arts she's studied.
    "Klingon mok’bara. Andorian shan-dru-shaan. Human jujutsu. Any style relying more on finesse and leverage than brute force.".
  • In The Wrong Reflection Eleya has replica posters on her old bedroom's walls for The Fifth Element, Mass Effect 2, and something called Adrian's Curse.
  • To Date a Metamorph: Inverted when Johann lists off a number of wizard singers and ends with Beethoven.
    Johann: I'm not a "pretty good musician", Tonks. I'm one of the wizarding world's best musicians. Someday, my music will be more popular than the Weird Sisters, the Hexen Meistros, Beethoven... just as soon as I finish my composition.
  • Anthropology: Chapter 11, Lyra visits a book store and sees a rack containing a collection of various fantasy authors, including Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson, and Thomas Michelakos. Thomas is the important one, as he turns out to be Lyra's biological father.
  • Girl Days inverts this by having Loony Kenchuro Tojo protest insults to his self-designed martial art by bringing up Emilio Fernberster (Inventor of the solar-powered flashlight), Mao Khu Leng (A Chinese alchemist who attempted to take over China with an army of animated yams) and Emperor Norton.

    Film — Animated 

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey opens with Rufus bringing important historical figures to the future as guest lecturers for his class, including historical figures from 20 Minutes into the Future — one being a rock musician that was popular at the time, and the other being a futuristic historical figure.
  • Deception (1946): When asked in an early scene what composers he admires, Karel the concert cellist names Strauss, Stravinsky, and Hollenius. The first two are real while the third is the antagonist in the film, the former sugar daddy to the woman that Karel just married.
  • Lampshaded in The Last Starfighter, when Centauri brings up three people, but Alex doesn't recognize the last one.
    Centauri: Alex! Alex! You're walking away from history! History, Alex! Did Chris Columbus stay home? Nooooo. What if the Wright Brothers thought that only birds should fly? And did Galoka think that the Ulus were too ugly to save?
    Alex: Who's Galoka?
    Centauri: Never mind.
  • The Prophecy used it rather well when they had their villain the Archangel Gabriel explain his motives. The first two are taken straight from The Bible, the third one is the plot of the movie.
    Gabriel: I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.
  • In the Film of the Book A Sound of Thunder, Ben Kingsley's character is hamming up a speech for the Time Safari tourists, with the last name a Shout-Out to Capricorn One. This also counts as a stealth gag, since the Mars landing in that movie is actually faked.
    Charles Hatton: Today you stood shoulder to shoulder with Columbus discovering America. Armstrong stepping on the moon, Brubaker landing on Mars.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming
  • A show business example in A Star Is Born. When Esther Blodgett checks out the footprints in concrete at Grauman's Chinese Theater she sees the footprints of Jean Harlow, Harold Lloyd, and Norman Maine, the fictional actor played by Fredric March in the movie.
  • Starship Troopers: When the film was released, the accompanying website which contained a lot of character bios and historical information listed the Mobile Infantry alongside historically prestigious military units such as The Knights Templar, the Winged Hussars and the Navy SEALs.

    Literature 
  • Used a few times in works by Arthur C. Clarke:
    • Rendezvous with Rama, "Rama needed the grandeur of Bach or Beethoven or Sibelius or Tuan Sun, not the trivia of popular entertainment."
    • The Fountains of Paradise: "Having first made his name with a new cosmological theory that had survived almost ten years before being refuted, Goldberg had been widely acclaimed as another Einstein or N'goya."
    • 2010: Odyssey Two "All this had been known since the Voyager flyby missions of the 1970s, the Galileo surveys of the 1980s, and the Kepler landings of the 1990s." The book was published in 1982, when the Galileo probe was still being developed; due to delays it didn't arrive at Jupiter until 1995.
  • H. P. Lovecraft was a master of it, even a possible Trope Maker, though his are more like "Genius Bonus, Continuity Nod, fictional", such as the following example from "The Nameless City":
    "To myself I pictured all the splendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed."note 
  • In Hunter S. Thompson' Hell's Angels, Thompson lists some 'outlaws' who were welcomed into the mainstream - Frank Sinatra, Alexander King, Elizabeth Taylor, Raoul Duke. As anybody who has read (or seen) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas knows, Raoul Duke is Thompson's own fictional alter ego, although interestingly, Hell's Angels was the first time that name was ever mentioned in his writing.

  • In Alien in a Small Town, when Paul lists civil rights leaders from Earth history, he mentions Anthony, Gandhi, King, and... Stephenson, who was apparently involved in a civil rights movement for "biological androids".
  • Aurora Cycle:note  Tyler Jones studied the famous generals Sun Tzu, Hannibal, Napoleon, Eisenhower, Tankian, Giáp and Osweyo.
  • A borderline example in William Gibson's Count Zero, where Bobby Newmark recalls his mother trying to make him watch holograms of religious texts, remembering them as "Jesus or Hubbard or some shit", subtly hinting at a future where Scientology is considered a mainstream religion.
  • Diaspora by Greg Egan is a story of exploration and discovery by our virtualised descendants. It has physicists front and centre. The real-world Planck and Wheeler are joined in 2055 by Renata Kozuch. Wheeler suggested the vacuum is made out of a maze of microscopic quantum wormholes. Kozuch takes this idea and tranforms it into the foundation of particles physics: all particles are wormhole mouths. This is a rare example where the future member of the trio explicitly builds on the work of the real-world pair.
  • Twice in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Drosten's Curse by A.L. Kennedy. The Doctor thinks to himself that his tendency to run off and think in strange places annoyed Einstein, Feynman, Leonardo and Zogg the Remarkable. Later Putta's plan to help the Doctor is described as not the kind of plan Napoleon, Genghis Khan or Thraxtic would have thought of.
  • From Sisterhood of Dune: "The Discussion Chamber was one of the Mentat School's largest classrooms, an auditorium with dark-stained walls covered in statesmanlike images of the greatest debaters in human history, ranging from famous ancient orators of Old Earth, such as Marcus Cicero and Abraham Lincoln, to Tlaloc who had instigated the Time of Titans, to speakers from recent centuries, such as Renata Thew and the unparalleled Novan al-Jones."
  • Harry Potter's famous wizard cards have figures from mythology (Merlin, Circe), history (Agrippa, Paracelsus), and also characters unique to the Harry-Potter-universe, such as Alberic Grunnion and Hengist of Woodcroft.
  • In The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School, Knowles' collection of true crime books includes works on Jonathan Wild, Eugène François Vidocq, and Colonel Clay. Wild and Vidocq are real people (who each inspired several famous fictional characters), and Clay is a fictional conman created by Grant Allen.
  • Multiple examples from Robert A. Heinlein:
  • In The Hyperion Cantos, Hegemony CEO Meina Gladstone is said to be often likened to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill or Alvarez-Temp.
  • In Jubilee – 200 by Kir Bulychev, the founders of the experiment to create a sapient ape are listed as "Darwin. Mendel. Pavlov. Sosnora. Jacobson. Sato".
  • In Marooned in Realtime, the background music at the Robinsons' party ranges "from Strauss waltzes, to the Beatles, to W. W. Arai": two real musicians from the 19th and 20th centuries, followed by a fictional one from the 21st.
  • In The Night Mayor, the new form of public entertainment is a kind of hyperreal virtual reality. Susan notes that it is still waiting for a pioneer to really showcase its potential as an artform the way D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein did for film in the 20th century, or Chillmeister Freaze did for ice sculpture in the 21st.
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians inverts it, where the list of people who have entered Hades and returned includes Hercules, Orpheus, and Harry Houdini.
  • There's a bit in a Red Dwarf novel, where Lister realised he's returned to Earth when he sees Mount Rushmore. The faces are Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and "possibly America's greatest President, Elaine Salinger".
  • Combined with an Inspiration Nod as well as possibly Person as Verb in Red Rising: In reference to famous military geniuses and conquerors: "So this kid is what? A predestined Alexander? A Caesar? A Genghis? A Wiggin?" (Wiggin being the protagonist of Ender's Game). It's particularly funny/odd because the people of the series seem to otherwise know that fictional works are fictional.
  • In Ringworld, Louis Wu describes the voice of a Pierson's puppeteer as like "Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe, and Lorelei Huntz, rolled into one."
  • In The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School, a tract on reshaping human society along purportedly scientific lines is said to have drawn favorable critical notice from H. G. Wells, G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw, and Roderick Spode.
  • The Star Diaries: In "The Eleventh Voyage", among the media allegedly absorbed by the Calculator, there are the texts of the stone steles (apparently those from Earth), then there are fictional books that have a Historical Domain Character as the author (e.g. three fiction Agatha Christie murder mysteries) or the subject (e.g. the biography of Jack the Ripper), and finally there are gems such as "the meeting protocols of the cannibals' section of the Neanderthal writers' union".
  • This Perfect Day by Ira Levin has a nursery rhyme paying tribute to the four people who are considered the spiritual forefathers of the society in which the book is set. The pattern of the rhyme requires four names, so there's two past people and two future people:
    Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei
    led us to this perfect day...
  • John Barnes' Thousand Cultures novels do this all the time. "For almost everyone, the Slaughter was like Rome Falling, the Crusades, or the genocide of the Americans — unfortunate, vaguely remembered, nothing to do with the business of living now."
  • In David Brin's Uplift saga, it is mentioned that, as any animal may possibly become intelligent at some point in the future, making species extinct is a serious crime in galaxy, akin to genocide. Humanity managed to clear up their biology and history textbooks to prevent aliens from knowing what they did to lamantines, dodos and orangutans.
  • In the third The War Against the Chtorr book by David Gerrold, "The screams got louder, sounding like Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Show Low." (The Show Low incident isn't simply a Cryptic Background Reference; it was discussed in detail in book one.)

    Live-Action TV 
  • Angel: Inverted in Wolfram & Hart's introductory video, which explains it had a hand in the rise of two fictional companies (Yoyodyne and Weyland-Yutani) and one real one (News Corp).
  • Babylon 5:
    • In the episode "Infection", it's mentioned that Dr. Franklin aspires to become one of the great names of medicine, alongside Fleming, Salk, Jenner, and Takahashi. This may be a subversion, as Takahashi did develop the first Chicken Pox vaccine, but never achieved great fame for it.
    • In "Confessions and Lamentations", the Markab plague Drafa is compared by Dr. Franklin to earlier such plagues — Black Death, AIDS, Chalmers' Syndrome.
    • In "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place":
      Sheridan: When we've had wars back home sometimes one side would leave a few areas of enemy territory undamaged. That way you'd get maximum results when you finally hit them with something big. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, San Diego...
      • Although notably, the nuclear terrorist attack on San Diego had been mentioned on the show several times before and the ruins of the abandoned city had been shown on screen in a previous episode. (This was a production in-joke; series creator J. Michael Straczynski disliked San Diego, so he wrote in its destruction as a Take That!.)
    • In "The Exercise of Vital Powers", William Edgars asks Mr. Garibaldi how many people actually belonged to the Nazi Party, the Communist Party, the Jihad Party. He then almost immediately goes on to list historical examples of when "the people" have handed over power to people they thought could settle scores: the Germans in 1939, the Russians in 1917 and 2013, the Iraqis in 2025, the French in 2112...
    • In "No Compromises", Sheridan is threatened by someone who lists past Presidents — Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Kyoshi of the Eastern Bloc.
    • In "A Tragedy of Telepaths", this trope is first used, then stretched way out by Garibaldi when he points out we divide up our history by the wars — the Hundred Years War, the War of 1812, the first three World Wars... the Dilgar War, the War of the Shining Star, the Minbari War, the Shadow War. Of these "future" wars, only the third World War and the War of the Shining Star were not previously described in-series — the Dilgar War was mentioned first in "Deathwalker", and the last two were actually depicted in-show.
  • Batwoman (2019) does a "famous, fictional, fictional" variation when Julia Pennyworth tells Kate she tracked a hitman from Jakarta to Metropolis to Gotham.
  • The Opening Narration of the first-ever episode of Blackadder, "The Foretelling", does this:
    History has known many great liars. Copernicus. Goebbels. St. Ralph the Liar.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In one episode, Giles hangs up a banner in the Magic Shop reminding customers that Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and "Gurnenthar's Ascendence" are coming up.
  • Scorpion does a variation, listing two real Central American countries followed by a fictional one when listing potential landing places when the team finds themselves kidnapped and taken to a Spanish-speaking country, knowing that they've only been knocked out for 3.5 hours. Naturally, it's the fictional one that they're told they've been taken to. In reality, they never left the United States, and were only knocked out for one hour, during which time Sly's watch was reprogrammed.
  • At one point in Stargate Atlantis, John Sheppard needs to get into Rodney McKay's computer account. The password is a long, seemingly-random string of digits, but fortunately he knows the mnemonic:
    Sheppard: 1643 is the year Isaac Newton was born; 1879, Einstein; 1968—
    Teyla: The year Rodney was born.
    Sheppard: Never underestimate the size of that man's ego.
  • Many from the Star Trek universe. Given Trek's deep backstory, a number of the Fictional names are actually recurring references to well-developed characters or events, unlike most instances of this trope where the specific name chosen is essentially meaningless.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Convict's Piano", the notorious 1920s Chicago gangster Mickey Shaughnessy is compared to Dutch Schultz and Al Capone.

    Music 
  • Duane Elms: Dawson's Christian uses this when listing Ghost Ship legends from the future — the list starts with the Flying Dutchman and the Mary Celeste, before naming Barnum's Pride and "the Horseman and the Lady at his side", implicitly future ghost ship myths.

    New Media 

    Tabletop Games 
  • The novels for Battletech usually quote "Judas, Adolf Hitler and Stefan Amaris" as the worst traitors in human history. In the backstory of the series, Amaris tried to usurp the throne of the Star League, a huge empire ruling all of mankind. He caused a massive civil war that led to so many succession wars that mankind has been reduced to five warring houses using schizo tech (fighting in giant mecha while rediscovering the fax kind of schizo tech). Except for the defense forces of the Star League, who fled the fighting to avoid being destroyed and devolved to a group of marauding warrior clans that want to take over those houses.
  • In Android: Netrunner there are four ICEs (one per corporation), currently unreleased, that are named after a famous scientist. NBN (focus on information) has Gutenberg, Haas-Bioroid (focus on artificial intelligences) has Turing, Jinteki (focus on genetic modification) has Crick, and Weyland (focus on spatial colonization) has Meru Mati, the fictional engineer who made the space elevator possible.
  • A sample advertisement in the Cyberpunk sourcebook Home of the Brave claims that by going to Bram Jhonson New Life Clinic, the woman depicted in it gained better legs than Betty Grable, a better figure than Marilyn Monroe and a prettier face than Bes Isis; the last of the three is a famous in-universe musician.

    Video Games 
  • In a rare example where the universe is entirely fictional even though references to the real world are present, the city of Anor Londo in Dark Souls is strewn with real-world Renaissance portraits, engravings, and architecture. One of the few exceptions is a portrait of Princess Gwynevere, which is taken straight from her concept art. While the portrait itself is beautiful and doesn't clash too badly with the setting, Gwynevere has certain shapely attributes which make her painting instantly distinguishable from the real ones.
  • A variation with only two examples. Dr. Catherine Halsey in Halo: Reach mentions that the Forerunner artifact under the Babd Catha ice shelf might be a discovery on the level of the conical bullet or the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine.
  • Mass Effect has several examples:
    • The Armstrong Nebula is named after a famous astronaut — the first to walk on the moon — and each system is also named after other astronauts famous for firsts. These include Gagarin (first man to orbit) and Tereshkova (first woman in space), but also Vamshi and Grissom. There's also Hong as Odd Name Out, most likely being named after the People's Republic of China's first satellite. Vamshi is not elaborated on, but Grissom is debatable: he's either a reference to in-universe Jon Grissom, the first man to go through a mass relay and the commander of the Alliance Fleet during the First Contact War, or Gus Grissom, one of the Mercury Seven and the only one to die on-duty when Apollo 1 burned down.
    • Mass Effect: Andromeda: Several systems in the Heleus Cluster are all named after famous explorers from the histories of the various species present in the colonization effort. These include human examples (Eriksson after Leif Eriksson, Pfeiffer for the Austrian explorer and ethnographer Ida Laura Pfeiffer, Pytheas after the Greek geographer Pytheas of Massalia, and Zeng He after the eponymous Chinese navigator) and a number of alien ones exposited on in-universe (Dar'hegah for the first batarian astronaut, Kindrax for the first turian to cross one of Palaven's oceans in a balloon, and Tecunis for the first salarian expedition to reach the Citadel).
  • StarCraft has a slight variation with the four names of the ships that carried humans to the Koprulu Sector; each are named after a famous ship from the past: the Nagglfar (named after the Naglfar of Norse mythology, the Ship of Nails that carries barbarians to fight the gods during Ragnarök), the Argo (from Greek mythology), the Reagan (likely named after the modern aircraft carrier) and the Sarengo, which presumably is a ship from an unexplored part of StarCraft history.
  • In Horizon Zero Dawn, one of the audio logs contains a snippet where the speaker compares himself to the great killers of history.
    Genghis Khan, Hitler, Sorabella... none of them hold a candle to me.

    Visual Novels 
  • South Scrimshaw: While discussing how Brillo Whales don't actually lay eggs, an optional tangent mentions four known egg-laying mammals: the Platypus, the Echidna, the Snorb, and the Ribbonsnaw.

    Western Animation 
  • Futurama
    • Prof. Farnsworth lists his influences as Leonardo da Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, Euclid, and Braino.
    • The video parodying "Atlantis" by Donovan regarding the ancient history of Atlanta, and how all of its greatest citizens fled as it sank: "Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, the man who invented Coca-Cola, The Magician ..." Leela is unimpressed by the last addition.
    "The Magician!?"
    • The robot actor Calculon inverts the trope when he reveals that he was all of history's great acting robots, including Acting Unit 0.8, Thespo-mat, and David Duchovny.
  • A Huckleberry Hound cartoon where Huck was a noted gunfighter prefaced his appearance running down a short list of famous gunfighters:
    Narrator: Billy the Kid. Wyatt Earp. Wild Bill Hickok...Quick Draw McGraw??
  • The Simpsons:
    • A gag from "Sweets and Sour Marge" has Comic Book Guy buying Leonard Nimoy's biographical books, I Am Not Spock, I Am Spock, and I Am Also Scotty.
    • "Simpson Tide" mentions the films Blacula, Blackenstein and The Blunch Black of Blotre Blame.
    • In "Simpson Tall Tales", the episode's take on the legend of Paul Bunyan shows Paul (Homer) and his ox Babe traveling across America and leaving their mark, making the Great Smoky Mountains thanks to them smoking cigars, devastating a lush forest area into Death Valley, and also making the fictitious "Big Holes with Beer National Park" by drunkenly dancing, as well as an additional fictional moment of Paul and Babe battling Rodan.
    • "Moe Goes from Rags to Riches" is supposed to be about the history of Moe's bar rag, and it tells the story of numerous historical events it lived through. However, it includes the story of 1001 Nights with Scheherezade, which is fictional.
    • In "Alone Again, Natura-Diddly", when Homer lists off several men that Maude could be dating in heaven, he lists John Wayne, Tupac Shakur, and Sherlock Holmes.
    Ned: Sherlock Holmes is a character.
    Homer: He sure is! (growls)

Alternative Title(s): Newton Einstein Surak

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