Production
The episode was written by George Meyer. It is one of The Simpsons creator Matt Groening's favorite episodes of the earlier seasons because he thought it took the show to another level. Meyer said he has a "deep suspicion of social institutions and tradition in general," which affected the way he wrote the episode. Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who had written for The Simpsons since the start of the show, took over as show runners for the third season. Their first episode as show runners was "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" and they felt a lot of pressure about running the show. Jean and Reiss were so pressured that they did six to seven rewrites of the script to make it funnier. Jean said "one reason for doing all these rewrites is because I kept thinking 'It's not good enough. It's not good enough'," and Reiss added that "we were definitely scared. We had never run anything before, and they dumped us on this."
Wes Archer directed "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington", which was one of the first episodes to feature the Simpson family traveling to a real-life location. Because much of the episode takes place outside of Springfield, new background and character designs had to be animated. The Simpson family visits several real-life landmarks in Washington, which the animators were able to draw with the help of photographs from the animation studio's library. The Simpsons director David Silverman grew up in the Washington area so he was able to help out with the designs. Marge's voice actor, Julie Kavner, said she loved the charm of the family "just being on a trip and experiencing the hotel room they're staying at, and the integrity of Bart's character. You know, you just want to kill him for doing all those tricks and pranks." Jean believes this is one of the secrets of show's success, the fact that it is about a family and the writers can use experiences from their own or their family's life as an inspiration in their writing. He thought "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" was a perfectly constructed episode in that sense.
Read more about this topic: Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“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)
“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)
“The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)