Lisa The Iconoclast - Production

Production

The episode was written by Jonathan Collier and directed by Mike B. Anderson. The story was inspired by the real events surrounding the exhumation of President Zachary Taylor. In the late 1980s, college professor and author Clara Rising theorized that Taylor was murdered by poison and was able to convince Taylor's closest living relative and the Coroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky, to order an exhumation. On June 17, 1991, Taylor's remains were exhumed and transported to the Office of the Kentucky Chief Medical Examiner, who found that the level of arsenic was much smaller than would be expected if Taylor had been thus poisoned. The remains were then returned to the cemetery and received appropriate honors at reinterment. Then-show runner Bill Oakley said "Lisa the Iconoclast" is "essentially the same" story but with Lisa in the role as Rising. At the end of the episode there is an ode to Jebediah Springfield playing over the credits. The music and lyrics for this piece of music were all written by Jeff Martin.

Donald Sutherland voiced Hollis Hurlbut in this episode. The script was specifically written with him in mind playing that part. Sutherland wanted to do the voice recordings as one would do a film and start in the middle of the script, so that he could get to know the character, but that idea was abandoned. In the episode, Lisa joked she was getting over her "Chester A. Arthuritis", a play on the word "arthritis" and the name of Chester A. Arthur. Sutherland ad-libbed the line "you had arthritis?", and the producers liked it so much that they kept it.

The episode opens with an old documentary on Jebediah Springfield, starring Troy McClure as Springfield. The writers tried to make this documentary seem as lousy and low-budget as possible. One of these tricks was to have post-production add scratches to the animation. The animators added production errors that would come in a low-budget film. For example, a man in the crowd looks at the camera, some of the people have watches on, McClure's stuntman does not have the same sideburns as he does, and a boom microphone can be seen entering the frame. In the Historical Society, the animators spent a lot of time decorating the walls. Besides numerous historical references, they also decorated the walls with The Simpsons characters set in the 19th century. The first painting shows Otto Mann (Springfield's schoolbus driver) driving children in a horse-drawn carriage. Another painting shows Marge Simpson in silhouette. The last one shows Professor Frink holding a kite in the manner of Benjamin Franklin.