Production
"Bart the Fink" was written by John Swartzwelder, but Bob Kushell came up with the idea for it. The episode was based on the "big tax problems" that American country singer Willie Nelson had at the time. The idea of Krusty faking his own death was an idea the production team had wanted to do for a long time, and it was inspired by the rumored fake death of American actor Andy Kaufman. Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, the show runners of The Simpsons' seventh and eighth season, thought the beginning of the episode in which the family spends the night in a haunted house would have been "the cruddiest beginning of any cruddy thing", if they had not added the twist that the family did not encounter any ghosts in the house and had their "best night's sleep ever". The twist was Oakley's idea and he thought it "worked out great".
The episode was directed by Jim Reardon. Consultant David Mirkin suggested that the animators should add "some funny things" to the episode to "spice it up", such as the gorilla suit that one of the bank employees wear. After the audio recording of the script by the Simpsons cast, the episode ended up too long. Weinstein said one of the reasons for it was that Krusty talks very slowly, which drags out the time. They were only allowed to send twenty minutes worth of audio to Film Roman for them to animate, but the audio track for the episode was twenty-six minutes long. American actor Bob Newhart guest starred in the episode as himself. Oakley said Newhart also talked very slowly and they had to cut out more than half of his recorded lines. Many of the writers were big fans of Newhart and everybody wanted to see him record his lines. Oakley and Weinstein decided to shut down production so that the whole writing staff could go to the recording studio. The episode was recorded in a big room so everyone had to be really quiet. It took Newhart two and a half minutes to record his first take, and, as no one was allowed to laugh during that time, there was an "explosion" of laughter in the room when he finished. Parts of Phil Hartman's appearance as Troy McClure were also cut from the episode due to time limits.
Read more about this topic: Bart The Fink
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“[T]he asphaltum contains an exactly requisite amount of sulphides for production of rubber tires. This brown material also contains “ichthyol,” a medicinal preparation used externally, in Webster’s clarifying phrase, “as an alterant and discutient.””
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)