Production
"The Front" was written by Adam I. Lapidus and directed by Rich Moore. In the early 1990s, Lapidus saw a news report on television about some children who had written a script for their favorite show, Tiny Toon Adventures. The show's creator Steven Spielberg liked the script so much that he brought the children to Hollywood to work with the show's writing staff. Upon seeing the report, Lapidus thought, "That would really be a neat idea for Bart and Lisa." He wrote a spec script, which made its way via executive producer James L. Brooks to the Simpsons staff, who hired Lapidus to write the episode. "The Front" is the only Simpsons episode written by Lapidus, causing some dispute among the show's fans as to whether he actually exists or was perhaps a pseudonym. Lapidus' mother-in-law came upon one such debate on an Internet forum.
The initial running time for "The Front" was "way, way short", and the writers had to use "every trick in the book" to make the episode reach the minimum length. Even after greatly expanding the original script and adding an extra-long couch gag during the opening sequence, the episode was still one minute too short; "The Adventures of Ned Flanders" was added to address the problem. The segment, which plays at the end of the episode, was designed purely to fill time and had nothing to do with the other events of the episode. Showrunner Mike Reiss later commented, "As always, when we try something bold and new the general reaction is, 'What the hell was that?'" The scene was also an homage to Archie Comics, which sometimes used a similar technique to fill a final page; the font used in the scene's title card is similar to the font used by Archie. The short inspired writers Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein to produce the season seven episode "22 Short Films About Springfield".
The Fox network censors had two objections to "The Front". The first issue was with a dream sequence in which Bart points a machine gun at Santa Claus and hijacks his sleigh. The second objection was to a scene not included in the finished episode, in which Itchy & Scratchy animators are seen observing a cat, and then putting a stick of dynamite in the cat's mouth and lighting it. As Meyers, Bart and Lisa continue down the studio's corridor, an explosion emanates from the room. The scene was cut because of the implied animal abuse, but is included as a deleted scene on the show's The Complete Fourth Season DVD boxset.
Marge and Homer's high school classmate Artie Ziff makes a brief appearance in the episode; his conversation with Homer inspired the season 13 episode "Half-Decent Proposal". Artie's usual voice artist Jon Lovitz was not available, so regular cast member Dan Castellaneta provided the voice instead. The school principal, Dondelinger, was named after someone Sam Simon knew.
Read more about this topic: The Front (The Simpsons Episode)
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—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
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