Production
Although the majority of the season eight episodes were executive produced by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, former executive producers Al Jean and Mike Reiss had signed a deal with Disney that allowed them to produce four episodes of The Simpsons. The idea for this episode originated several years before its airdate when Jean and Reiss were the regular showrunners. The idea was pitched at a writers' retreat by Al Jean, but nobody had wanted to flesh it out. After being allowed to come back to produce some Simpsons episodes, Jean and Reiss decided to write this episode. At first, Mike Reiss was against the episode and had felt that it was a bad idea. He felt that the plot was slightly ridiculous and that the show should not feature any magic; except for a few moments, he largely kept magic out of the episode. He now considers it one of the best liked episodes that he co-wrote.
At the time, "Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious" had more music in it than any other episode. While writing, Jean thought that the songs would stretch out and make the episode the proper length, but it was considerably shorter than required. Several additional scenes, such as the Itchy & Scratchy segment, were added to pad out the episode. There was originally a sequence where Bart, Lisa and Shary Bobbins visit Patty and Selma who sing "We Love to Smoke", a parody of "I Love to Laugh". The song was cut because it wasn't getting any laughs, but the full version was included on the album Go Simpsonic with The Simpsons and a brief animated version was included as a deleted scene on the Season 8 DVD. During the end song, Homer can be seen dancing along but not singing; this was because the producers forgot to record Dan Castellaneta.
Many of the scenes were animated by Eric Stefani, a former member of No Doubt, who specialized in animation for musical numbers.
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“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)