Production
The episode was written by John Swartzwelder, and directed by Jim Reardon. The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening thought it was a "quintessential" Swartzwelder episode, and executive producer/show runner David Mirkin said it was a "fantastic job by one of the most prolific writers of the show". The most important thing to Mirkin while making the episode was to make sure that the elephant would be a "bastard" and behave rudely, unlike other animals on the show. For example, instead of putting people on his back, Stampy would put them in his mouth. Mirkin said the elephant "never quite bonds because it's a very cantankerous animal, a concept that was very important to this episode". Stampy has since been used several times in jokes later on in the series. For example, Stampy made an appearance in the season nine episode "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace" in one of Bart's dreams, and in the season fourteen episode "Large Marge", where he is used by Bart in a stunt to help Krusty the Clown win back his popularity. Stampy appeared briefly in The Simpsons Movie, where he tries to break down the giant glass dome lowered over Springfield. The episode also introduces the character Cletus Spuckler. He is shown as one of the "slack-jawed yokels" gawking at Stampy in the Simpson family's backyard. Cletus is not named in the episode, so the staff simply referred to him as the Slack-Jawed Yokel.
Read more about this topic: Bart Gets An Elephant
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“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)
“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)
“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)