Production
The tenth season was the second that Mike Scully served as show runner for (he had previously run the ninth season). As show runner and executive producer, Scully headed the writing staff and oversaw all aspects of the show's production. However, as he told UltimateTV in January 1999, he did not "make any decisions without the staff's input. We have great staffs in all the departments from animation to writing. So I don't want to make it sound like a dictatorship." Scully was popular with the staff members, many of whom have praised his organization and management skills. Writer Tom Martin has said that he was "quite possibly the best boss I've ever worked for" and "a great manager of people". Scully's aim while running The Simpsons was to "not wreck the show." In addition to his role as show runner during the tenth season, he co-wrote the episode "Sunday, Cruddy Sunday".
In 1999, there were around sixteen staff writers working on The Simpsons. Many of them had written for the show for several years, including John Swartzwelder and George Meyer. The third episode of the tenth season, "Bart the Mother", was the last full-length episode written by David S. Cohen, a longtime writer on the show. He left to team up with The Simpsons creator Matt Groening to develop Futurama, a series on which he served as executive producer and head writer. The tenth season marked the full-time return of staff member Al Jean, who had departed from the show after the fourth season to create the animated series The Critic. Between seasons four and ten, he had only worked periodically on the show, writing four episodes.
The main cast of the season consisted of Dan Castellaneta (Homer Simpson, Grampa Simpson, Krusty the Clown, among others), Julie Kavner (Marge Simpson), Nancy Cartwright (Bart Simpson, Ralph Wiggum, Nelson Muntz), Yeardley Smith (Lisa Simpson), Hank Azaria (Moe Szyslak, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Chief Wiggum, among others) and Harry Shearer (Ned Flanders, Mr. Burns, Principal Skinner, among others). Up until the production of season ten in 1998, these six main voice actors were paid $30,000 per episode. In 1998, a salary dispute between them and the Fox Broadcasting Company (which airs The Simpsons) arose, with the actors threatening to go on a strike. Fox went as far as preparing for casting of new voices, but an agreement was soon made and the actors' salaries were raised to $125,000 per episode. Groening expressed his sympathy for the cast members in an issue of Mother Jones a while after the salary dispute had been settled. He told the magazine: "They are incredibly talented, and they deserve a chance to be as rich and miserable as anyone else in Hollywood. It looked for a while there like we might not have a show, because everyone was holding firm on all sides. That's still my attitude: Hold out for as much money as you can get, but do make the deal."
Other cast members of the season included Pamela Hayden (Milhouse Van Houten, among others), Tress MacNeille (Agnes Skinner, among others), Maggie Roswell (Helen Lovejoy, Maude Flanders, among others), Russi Taylor (Martin Prince), and Karl Wiedergott. Season ten also featured a large number of guest stars, including Phil Hartman in his last appearance on the show in the episode "Bart the Mother" that originally aired in September 27, 1998. Hartman had been killed by his wife four months before the episode aired and it was dedicated to his memory. Rather than replace Hartman with a new voice actor, the production staff retired two of his recurring characters, Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz. Hutz and McClure still appear in Simpsons comics, because a voice actor is not needed.
Read more about this topic: The Simpsons (season 10)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“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)