The Experiment is the fourteenth episode of the series George and Martha that aired on May 9, 1999. It's sister episode is The Trip.
Summary[]
Martha is looking through a microscope when George comes in to tell her that research shows that drinking tomato juice makes you smarter. Martha tells George that she is observing fleas, which she finds fascinating. She tells him facts about fleas, that make him itch. Martha wishes she could find something about fleas that can make her a great scientist, and even win a Nobel Prize like Madame Canary. She asks George to help and gives him a notepad. However, George can't stop scratching himself and thinks that there's a flea on him, but Martha says that the fleas are all under the microscope, so George sees for himself.
The flea he sees does a flip, but Martha says that those are scientific fleas, not circus fleas, and there's no such thing as a "flea circus". She pushes George out figuring she no longer needs his assistance. George brainstorms the idea of training the fleas and putting on a flea circus, that way Martha can win the Nobel Prize. That night, Martha puts the fleas away and goes to bed, and George sneaks in and takes the fleas. At his house, he shows them how to do a somersault, but hurting himself. Nevertheless, the fleas cheer anyway. He then asks them to jump through the hoop, which they do after he says they can bite his arm.
The next morning, Martha calls George after noticing that her fleas are missing. George tells her about the flea circus, making her hang up. She sits in front of George's circus performance along with a couple of other friends. Some of them get feared when they hear "fleas", although George says they will be under his control at all times. First the fleas stack on top of each other. Then they hop into a cannon which flies to the audience, scaring everybody away. Martha figures it's time to experiment to solve this. Martha places butter all over George, as the fleas will slide right off and will stop the itching. The butter makes George fall to the ground, and he is still itchy.
Martha tries another experiment, and bathes George in cold water hypothesizing that the fleas hate cold temperatures, but that also fails. George, still shivering, asks Martha for his tomato juice but he spills it on himself. However, he realizes that he stopped itching, solving that tomato juice repels fleas. They fill a whole pool up with tomato juice, that everybody hops into. Martha insists that she should stop studying fleas, and thinks that she should now study bees after one lands on her juice cup. Martha does so later, and learns that bees love flowers. She says to George to keep away, as she wants to study how busy a bee is, although she only wants him to stay away as bees are attracted to anything sweet, which is his chocolate ice cream cone. George gives Martha a strawberry ice cream cone, theorizing that bees like strawberry more than chocolate. When Martha drops her ice cream, she has a theory that best friends share with each other. George proves that is correct when he lets her lick her cone.