Cape Feare - Production

Production

Even though the episode aired during the beginning of the fifth season, it was produced by the crew of the fourth season. A large part of the original crew left the show after season four to pursue new challenges. This led to the addition of several scenes, which normally would not have been considered, because the mentality of the departing crew was "what are they going to do, get us fired?" Although most of the episode was completed by the staff of season four, the end was rewritten by the team of season five.

Wallace Wolodarsky had seen the 1991 version of Cape Fear and pitched the idea of making a spoof of the film. Jon Vitti was then assigned to write a spoof of the original Cape Fear film from 1962 as well as the remake. Instead of using the spoof as only a part of the episode, which could have contained a B-story, the entire episode was devoted to this parody. Sideshow Bob was cast as the villain and Bart became the main victim. The episode followed the same basic plot outline as the films and used elements from the original film's score by Bernard Herrmann (which was also used in the 1991 version), which, after this episode, became Sideshow Bob's theme. This episode marked the first time a Sideshow Bob episode was not a mystery.

There were difficulties getting this episode up to the minimum length of an episode and many scenes were added in post-production. The episode starts with a repeat of a couch gag that was first used in the episode "Lisa's First Word", which is considerably longer than the typical couch gag. The crew added an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon and a few misleads as to who was trying to kill Bart. Even with all of these additions, the episode still ran short of time. This led to the creation of the rake sequence, which became a memorable moment of the episode. Originally, Sideshow Bob was only supposed to step on one rake after he stepped out from the underside of the Simpson family's car, but this was changed to nine rakes in a row. According to executive producer Al Jean, the idea was to make the scene funny, then drag the joke out so that it is no longer funny, and then drag it out even longer to make it funny again.

Additions to the end musical number, including visual gags such as Bob appearing in uniform, were added after the animatics. The crew felt that watching the character singing would not be interesting enough and they had to include these gags to make it work. The Simpsons creator Matt Groening was surprised when he saw the additions, because he originally thought they were silly and would not appear in the final cut, but he has grown to like them.

American actor Kelsey Grammer was brought in to guest star as Sideshow Bob for the third time. At that time, Grammer had become a household name as the lead of the television series Frasier, which was in production at the same time as this episode. Grammer did not know that the rake scene was extended, because he had only done the moan once and was surprised when he saw the final product. The show's writers admire Grammer's singing voice, and try to include a song for each appearance including this episode. Alf Clausen, the primary composer for The Simpsons, commented that " is so great. He's just amazing. You can tell he has this love of musical theater and he has the vocal instrument to go with it, so I know whatever I write is going to be sung the way I've heard it."