Production
The idea of Lisa dating Nelson had been around for a while, with several different versions being pitched. The writers wanted a "silly" Homer story to balance the episode out, and the idea of using the telemarketing scam for this had also been around for a while. By this time, the show had begun to have episodes revolving around secondary characters. This was the first episode to revolve around Nelson, and was done to partly explain why Nelson acts the way he does. The words to Nelson's song were contributed by Mike Scully's daughters. The scene in which Milhouse passes Lisa's note to Nelson was written by Bill Oakley, with the line "He can't hear you, we had to pack his ears with gauze" being George Meyer's line. There was a debate as to how injured Milhouse could look without it looking disturbing, and the drop of blood coming from his nose was decided to be enough. Milhouse liking Vaseline on toast was based on a child from Josh Weinstein's school days who everyday would get on to the bus with a piece of toast, which had Vaseline on it.
Read more about this topic: Lisa's Date With Density
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“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)
“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)