Production
As the episode is the 200th, at its first table reading David Mirkin joked that the show was "half way there." At the time of the DVD commentary's recording the production team had "just done the 400th ("You Kent Always Say What You Want") about two weeks ago."
The production team wanted the episode to be about trash, and Mike Scully pitched the idea that Homer should run for office. Writer Ian Maxtone-Graham had a friend who had made their way in Chicago politics, through the Sanitation Commission, and so he decided that Homer should run for Sanitation Commissioner. They then spent a lot of time trying to get to the point that Homer would have an "over filled trash can", and through its extensive use of packaging, the concept of Love Day was formed. Originally the episode saw Homer running for mayor, but this idea was abandoned. The ending was talked about for a while, with the original idea being that the whole town would be raised up and the rubbish be swept underneath. The ending was not intended to carry an environmental message, but it played well and is what the staff believe won the episode an Emmy.
U2 contacted the show about doing a guest spot, rather than the other way around. The writers immediately wrote them one, in case they changed their minds. The band's head of Principal Management Paul McGuinness and Susie Smith, an employee of Principal Management also make brief appearances in the episode. U2's drummer Larry Mullen Jr. appears in the episode, although he has no dialogue. Steve Martin guest stars as Ray Patterson.
The episode marked the first appearance of Costington's department store, whose slogan is "Over a Century Without a Slogan". It took "a lot of wasted man-hours" to come up with both the name and slogan.
The scene where Ray Patterson is reinstated (to which he enters and exits to the Sanford and Son theme song) was a reference to a moment that occurred during a stand up show of comedian Redd Foxx (who starred on Sanford and Son). During a show in Vegas, Redd Foxx came on stage to the Sanford and Son theme song, only to find that there were very few people in the audience. Foxx angrily stated that he refused to do a show with such a small audience and walked off the stage. The house orchestra, puzzled by Foxx's leaving, simply played him off with the Sanford and Son theme song again. The same incident was the basis for the joke in "The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons" where Moe Szyslak walks onto the stage and, without breaking his stride, walks off.
Read more about this topic: Trash Of The Titans
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Perestroika basically is creating material incentives for the individual. Some of the comrades deny that, but I can’t see it any other way. In that sense human nature kinda goes backwards. It’s a step backwards. You have to realize the people weren’t quite ready for a socialist production system.”
—Gus Hall (b. 1910)
“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 production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)