A Scene from The Simpsons
Saturday, September 11. 2010
The season 9 premiere episode of The Simpsons was the "The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson," in which Homer's car is illegally parked and booted in the plaza between the Towers. The DVD commentary track for this episode is unique in that there is an emotional resonance as well as the standard "behind-the-scenes" type material. Executive producer Bill Oakley provides most of the narration, and tells us how he had sent Dave Silverman to New York to take reference photos of the buildings and surrounding areas to make the scenes in NYC as realistic ("though Simpson-ized") as possible. Lance Wilder and the design department then used those photos to depict as startlingly accurate depiction of the Towers, down to the appropriate guest signs in the lobby and observation deck. It was the first time The Simpsons worked with a more realistic setting like this, and many of the new techniques used here would later become mainstays of animated programming (such as the use of computer rendering for the bridge in the episode's closing sequence).
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