Production
The episode was written by John Swartzwelder, and directed by Susie Dietter. Dietter was not a comic book fan, so she got most of her inspiration for the episode from Batman: The Animated Series. When Dietter read through her first script, she did not find it very funny because of all the visual gags. Once the animatic was finished, her opinion changed, and she thought to herself: "Hey, this is really funny!"
This is the first episode of The Simpsons to be digitally colored. The duties of that task went to USAnimation, who would later work on "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular". Digital coloring would not be attempted again until season 12's "Tennis the Menace", and again when the show permanently switched to digital coloring in season 14 with "The Great Louse Detective".
Mickey Rooney guest starred as himself in the episode. Nancy Cartwright recalls in her autobiography My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy that Rooney recorded his lines with the other actors. Although he was late for the session, she comments that he was "so full of pep" and very enthusiastic about the role.
Read more about this topic: Radioactive Man (The Simpsons Episode)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“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)