The writers debated what name Homer would give his lobster. Hauge pitched that his name would be "Shelly", however they eventually settled on naming him "Pinchy". Hauge also pitched the name of the grocery store Eatie Gourmet's. At the end of the episode, when Homer is eating Pinchy, a lot of the dialogue was ad-libbed by Dan Castellaneta, who portrays Homer among other characters in the series. It took a long time for the writers to come up with an ending to the episode's main storyline. Eventually, they settled on an ending that parodied the 1973 caper film The Sting. In real life, lobsters are black in color, turning red after being cooked. However, in "Lisa Gets an 'A, Pinchy is red throughout the whole episode. The Dash Dingo video game was difficult to animate, according to Hauge, as the animators had to "make it look less than The Simpsons style". In order to achieve the desired effect, the animators decided to pixelate the video game. The episode features the second appearance of Gavin, who first appeared in the season seven episode "Marge Be Not Proud", and "Range Rover Mom", Gavin's mother. They were both voiced by Tress MacNeille. The false Comptroller Atkins was portrayed by series regular cast member Harry Shearer, while the real Atkins was voiced by Hank Azaria, who is also a regular cast member for the series. The name of the character was based on the name of Jacqueline Atkins, a writer's assistant on The Simpsons. The episode also features Marcia Wallace, Pamela Hayden, Maggie Roswell, Russi Taylor and Karl Wiedergott. The episode satirizes the "skewed priorities" sometimes associated with educational establishments. Even though Principal Skinner knows that Lisa cheated on her test, he "looks the other way" so that the school meets the requirements for government funding. In the DVD commentary for the episode, the episodes showrunner Mike Scully opined that "there is a lot of truth in this story[...] There are certain requirements that the school has to meet in order to get state funding, and there are things that they'd rather look the other way on if it's gonna cost them money. This does really happen." While staying home from school, Lisa plays a video game called Dash Dingo. The video game is a spoof of the 1996 platform video game Crash Bandicoot. In a scene in the episode, Lisa imagines that she