Production
"Dead Putting Society" was written by Jeff Martin and directed by Rich Moore. Martin was an experienced miniature golfer and based much of the golf-related scenes in the script on his own experiences. Parts of this episode are also based on the 1984 film The Karate Kid, including the way Bart practices for the miniature golf tournament by balancing on a trash can in a "crane position". For "Dead Putting Society", the animators went on a field trip to a local miniature golf course to study the mechanics of a golf club swing. Moore commented that the reason for this was that much of the humor on The Simpsons comes from making the scenery look lifelike; "The realism of the background serves as the straight man for the absurd situations."
This episode was the first to prominently feature Ned Flanders and the rest of the Flanders family, and contained the first appearances of Maude and Rod Flanders. Maggie Roswell was given the role of Maude, Ned's loving wife, and became a regular cast member with this episode. She had previously played supporting parts in the show's first season. Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart, commented on Roswell's acting: "Maggie has been blessed with a skill in creating one of the hardest things to create: the 'normal sound,' whatever that is. So she can easily slip into the gal next door ."
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)