Simpson Safari - Production

Production

"Simpson Safari"'s setpiece shows some of Springfield's citizens mistreating the bag boys in a grocery store, prompting the bag boys to go on strike. The sequence was inspired by an Albertsons store in Los Angeles, whose employees went on strike at the time the episode was written. The idea to have the Simpsons visit Africa was pitched by former staff writer Larry Doyle. Former staff writer John Swartzwelder was then assigned to write the first draft of the episode's script. Because of his involvement with the episode, "Simpson Safari" contains several "classic" Swarzwelder-type jokes, according to staff writer Matt Selman. Examples on these include the cover of the Animal Cracker box and Homer and Dr. Joan Bushwell's discussion about the smell of feces in the doctor's hut. After Swarzwelder wrote the first draft, the writing staff rewrote the script. When writing the episode, the writers deliberately included factual errors to annoy viewers who wanted the series to seem realistic. Commenting on the episode, Selman said "It's kind of a combination of really nice, observational designs and then just things that are deliberately wrong. To anger people who care about things being real."

Mark Kirkland, who had visited Africa before, served as the director for "Simpson Safari". When he was sixteen years old, Kirkland spent six weeks in Kenya with a film crew that was making a documentary film called A Visit to a Chief's Son. When he first read the script, he found that the episode was "all over the place" geographically. "It would be like in the United States, saying: 'I walked out of Grand Central Station and then I turned left and was standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.' The locations are just all over the place" he said in the episode's DVD commentary. Still, Kirkland strove to make the episode look as realistic as possible by drawing influence from his experience in Kenya. For example, the steering column on Kitenge's Land Rover is placed on the right side of the car. At one point in the episode, the Simpsons visit the Maasai people, a Nilotic ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. The way that some of the Maasai people in the episode are dancing is also true to a traditional dance performed by Maasai people in real life, and although the drinking of cow blood is faithful to the Maasai people's culture, the use of lip plates and neck rings are not. "That was kind of fun for me to try to make this stuff as crazy as the story is, make it realistic", Kirkland commented on directing the episode.

In a scene in the episode, the Simpsons are floating down a river on a shield. At one point, the family is seen by two Africans, who speak in a foreign language. Although the language that the two Africans speak is made up, the song that Kitenge sings when driving the Simpsons ("Wé-Wé" by Angélique Kidjo) was a popular song in Africa. In order to make it sound accurate, Hank Azaria, who portrays Kitenge in the episode, was taught to sing the song phonetically by a professor in Swahili in the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Joan Bushwell, the "Jane Goodall-type" character in the episode, was portrayed by American voice actress Tress MacNeille, who also voices Lindsey Naegle among other characters in the series. All animals' noises (except for Santa's Little Helper, who is voiced by main cast member Dan Castellaneta) were done by American voice actor Frank Welker.