Production
"Much Apu About Nothing" was written by David S. Cohen and directed by Susie Dietter. Joe Mantegna guest stars in the episode as Fat Tony. Much of the inspiration for the episode came from news reports of bears roaming streets in Southern California around the time when the episode was in production. Cohen said that when a bear swims in somebody's pool or goes in somebody's garbage can, it becomes a popular news item in California. The show runner of The Simpsons at the time, Bill Oakley, commented that the news reports often create an anti-bear hysteria, and that is one of the inspirations for the episode.
Another inspiration for the episode came from California's Proposition 187, which proposed the rescinding of employment rights and benefits from illegal immigrants. Cohen decided to name the referendum "Proposition 24" because 24 was the number he had on his Little League Baseball uniform. Cohen commented that "the main theme of the episode is illegal immigration and anti-immigration sentiment, which is a big issue here in California. So both the intro with the bear and the main theme are yanked from the California headlines."
The final script of the episode was "very close" to Cohen's first draft. "I was looking at the old drafts and this episode probably changed as little as any script I've written from the original inception to the final aired version," Cohen said. Oakley commented that some writer's scripts get rewritten many times but Cohen's "usually do not get rewritten that much because they are so good". Oakley added that Cohen has a very distinctive comedy style so there are certain jokes in the episode that "just really sound like Cohen".
Something Oakley and his partner Josh Weinstein wanted to do while they were show runners of The Simpsons was to explore side-characters, such as Apu, "a little deeper". Apu's origin is revealed in this episode, and Oakley is proud of being the one who suggested that. Another character that was explored deeper in their period as show runners was Ned Flanders in the episode "Hurricane Neddy".
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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)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“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)