Production
"Homer Simpson in: 'Kidney Trouble'" was written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Mike B. Anderson. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on December 6, 1998. Although it was written by Swartzwelder, the idea for the episode was pitched by former staff writer George Meyer. Nevertheless, the episode still contains several "classic Swartzwelder moments" according to executive producer Ian Maxtone-Graham, including Homer escaping on a handcart and the line "this is everybody's fault but mine." Because the episode contained several scenes of the Simpsons driving, the animators "orchestrated" the scenes by using several different backgrounds. At one point in the episode's setpiece, an arranged gunfight is seen. In the gunfight, there would originally be a man saying "Look, up on the roof, it's a prostitute" and shoot her. Although he thought the gag was funny, Mike Scully, an executive producer and the showrunner for the episode, cut it because the word "prostitute" had already been uttered "at least a dozen times in the episode." According to Scully, the Fox censors objected to showing Grampa giving Homer NyQuil in order to sleep. Scully compromised it by not showing the NyQuil label in the episode. The music that plays during the establishing shot of Springfield Hospital is based on the theme music from Ben Casey, an American medical drama series from the 1960s.
The sequence involving the "Ship of lost souls" was also pitched by Meyer. It was the last part of the episode to be animated, and was completed in one week. The Simpsons staff were split on whether to include the sequence in the episode at all, with series creator Matt Groening being notably hesitant. "I was very worried about that when I saw the script," he said in the DVD commentary for the episode. Meyer was also unsure of the sequence: "You don't see it coming at least," he said, "I don't know if it was totally successful." Scully thought fondly of it however, calling it "very inspired." The French man and the tuxedo-wearing man on the ship were both portrayed by main cast member Dan Castellaneta, who also plays Homer among other characters in the series. The woman on the ship was voiced by American voice actress Tress MacNeille. Honeybunch, the name of the sea captain's boat, was pitched by Scully's brother Brian Scully. The name came from Scully's father, who used to call his wife Honeybunch as a term of endearment.
Read more about this topic: Homer Simpson In: "Kidney Trouble"
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“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)
“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)
“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)