Production
The episode uses the full opening sequence because the story came out short. Despite this, a large sequence was cut from the middle of the episode, with half of the episode having to be re-written after the animatic had been finished. The main plot of the episode came from an original idea that the family would be issued a credit card in the name "Hobart Simpson" and that Bart would use that. An original side-story was that Lisa would become addicted to the "Trucker's Choice" pep pills. Originally, instead of going to the dog park, the family took Laddie to a waterfall and he performed a series of dives, but it was scrapped as it had already been proven that Laddie was a form of "superdog". Likewise, Laddie rescuing Baby Gerald was originally a complicated rescue scene, but was cut into showing the aftermath.
Laddie was designed to resemble a real dog. The catalog Bart uses is a combination of the Lillian Vernon catalog and The Sharper Image. The opening stemmed from the fact that the show had not had a sequence where the family received mail, and the writers wanted to create a joke about the different types of mail each of the family get. After Bart's "dog burning" fantasy, when he hears a ship's horn in the distance, there was originally going to be a faint cry of "more dogs", but it was deemed that it took the joke too far. Hank Azaria ad-libbed the entire sequence during the credits in which Chief Wiggum and Lou sing along to "Jammin'".
Read more about this topic: The Canine Mutiny
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“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)