Production
"The Mansion Family" was written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Michael Polcino as part of the eleventh season of The Simpsons (1999–2000). It was the first of many episodes of the series that Polcino directed. Executive producer Mike Scully was the one who received the idea for the first part of the story. He explained on a DVD audio commentary for the episode that his grandmother was the oldest citizen of his hometown West Springfield, Massachusetts, and "they had a ceremony where she was awarded a cane that had a golden head on it. And the weird thing of the ceremony is her name wasn't on the cane, and the mayor of the town stood up and he says: 'And now, of course as soon as Hazel passes away, her name will be engraved on the cane.' So she would never live to see it happen. But nonetheless, she was given the cane."
The subplot of "The Mansion Family", where Mr. Burns gets a medical examination, was inspired by Swartzwelder's own visit to a Mayo Clinic. George Meyer, an executive producer on the series, has said that "John, I don't think is a guy who goes to the doctor very often. And every 20 or 30 years, he decides he needs to get a tune up. So he went to the Mayo Clinic, had them give him an entire battery of tests. And as John tells it, they said that his constant smoking had done no harm to him whatsoever. Might even be benefiting him." While writing the parts of the episode that involve international waters, the writers did research and found that the actual laws of international waters are more complex and ambiguous compared to what they had already written in the story, but they decided to ignore that.
Many scenes in "The Mansion Family" were inspired by popular culture. For example, there is a painting hanging on one of the walls in Burns' mansion that depicts Burns playing poker with dogs, referencing the oil paintings series Dogs Playing Poker. Another painting, showing a nude Burns, is a callback to a previous episode of the series, "Brush with Greatness" (1991), in which Marge produced the painting for Burns. Featured in the episode is also a joke that makes fun of the Grammy Awards. During the awards ceremony, Homer complains, "Why won't anyone give me an award?" When Lisa points out that "You won a Grammy," Homer says "I mean an award that's worth winning." At this point the screen freezes and a message scrolls across the bottom of the screen reading "LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Mr. Simpson's opinions do not reflect those of the producers, who don't consider the Grammy an award at all."
American pop singer Britney Spears guest starred in the episode as herself. According to Scully, she was seventeen to eighteen years old when she recorded her lines, and "She was a lot of fun to work with. She was a fan of the show, and she was willing to do all the lines. It was all the people around her that were crazy, the management and all that. We originally had her introduce herself as 'I'm teenage songbird Britney Spears.' And she recorded a few takes and they were fine. And suddenly, all these guys come rushing in 'She can't say songbird.' what's wrong with songbird? And they were somehow convinced that it was some sort of slam or an insult." The staff members were therefore forced to change her opening line to "I'm teen sensation Britney Spears."
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“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 growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)