Mark Kirkland recalls that when he attended the table-read for the episode, the staff thought it was "hilarious" and they could tell it was "going to be a good one."
Although John Swartzwelder wrote the episode, Dan Greaney was the one who came up with the idea for it. Greaney based Homer's intense obsession with Thomas A. Edison on the fact that when he himself would have an obsession with something in life, he would badger and bore people with details of it. "Homer's relationship to Thomas Edison's achievements is a version of my own experience of trying to communicate the experience of things you love by driving people crazy," Greaney said in a DVD audio commentary for the episode. Soon after coming up with the story, Greaney told it to Swartzwelder so that he could turn it into a script. Greaney said "it couldn't in my best dreams have turned out as good as it did if I had written it."
Homer's untippable chair was Dan Greaney's idea. While working on the episode, he was leaning back in his chair and fell backwards. He casually said it would be great if there were legs on the back of the chair and someone in the writing room said that would be a great invention for Homer.
This was the first and only time that William Daniels voiced KITT outside of Knight Rider (1982) and Knight Rider 2000 (1991). He recalls that "when I told my son in New York that I was going to be on The Simpsons, I think that was the first time that he was really impressed with what I was doing! The Simpsons is a great show and I'm glad they thought of KITT in one of their jokes."