22 Short Films About Springfield - Production

Production

The episode's principal idea came from the season four episode "The Front", which featured a short scene entitled "The Adventures of Ned Flanders" at its conclusion. The scene had no relevance to the main plot of the episode and was designed solely to fill time. The staff loved the concept and attempted to fit similar scenes into other episodes, but none were short enough to require one. Show runners Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein decided to make an entire episode of linked short scenes involving many of the show's characters, in a similar style to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The title "22 Short Films About Springfield" was decided upon from the start of the episode's production, even though there are not actually twenty-two stories in it. Originally there were more scenes, but several of them had to be cut out for time. To decide who would write each of the segments, all of the writers chose their top three favorite characters and put them into a hat, the names were drawn out and the writers were assigned their parts. Oakley wrote the Superintendent Chalmers story, Weinstein did the Comic Book Guy and Milhouse scene, David Cohen penned the Reverend Lovejoy sketch, as well as the deleted Krusty scene. Brent Forrester wrote the Krusty Burger scene, while Rachel Pulido wrote the Bumblebee Man one. Richard Appel wrote a deleted "elaborate fantasy segment" revolving around Marge, the only remnant of which is her cleaning the sink during the first Lisa scene, and also did a scene with Lionel Hutz that was dropped as well.

The episode's first draft was 65 pages long and needed to be cut down to just 42, so numerous scenes were cut for time or because they did not fit into the overall dynamic of the episode. To solve this problem, a scene before the second act break, where the townspeople go to the Simpsons house to provide advice of how Lisa can get the gum out of her hair, was created to include every character that did not appear anywhere else during the course of the episode. Weinstein and writing supervisor Greg Daniels was responsible for ordering and linking together the episodes, and director Jim Reardon had the challenge of segueing between each section in a way that did not make the change seem abrupt. Those that were hard to link were put before or after an act break or were given a theme song, one of which was cut from the Apu story, but was included as a deleted scene on the DVD.

Bill Oakley wrote the Chalmers scene because he is his all time favorite character from the show. The main reason he loved him was that, until Frank Grimes was created for the season eight episode "Homer's Enemy", Chalmers was the only character that "seemed to operate in the normal human universe." In previous episodes, Skinner and Chalmers' scenes together revolved around one joke: Skinner tells Chalmers an unbelievable lie, but Chalmers believes him anyway. So, their scene in this episode is made up of a string of thirteen interconnected lies. The dialogue between him and Skinner was something that had never been done before, in that it is just a long relaxed conversation with nothing important being said at all.

In the Mr. Burns story, every single word he yells at Smithers is real and used correctly. To maintain accuracy, the writers used a 19th century slang thesaurus to look up words. Many of the Spanish words used in Bumblebee Man's segment are easily understood cognates of English and not accurate Spanish; this was done deliberately so that non-Spanish speakers could understand the dialogue without subtitles. The very tall man was a caricature of writer Ian Maxtone-Graham, and the barber was based on one from the Tracey Ullman shorts. The crowd on the street who laugh at Nelson includes caricatures of Matt Groening, Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein. Oakley wrote in the script that the street was filled with Springfield's biggest idiots and so the animators drew him, Weinstein and Groening into the scene.