Al Jean on Sports Icons
Friday, August 10th, 2007The LA Times recently ran an article where a Simpsons creator, Al Jean, talks about working with many of the sports icons that have appeared on the Simpsons. Some of the highlights are:
Jose Canseco
Canseco is the one guest star in the history of 400 guest stars that I didn’t enjoy directing. We went down to Anaheim because the Athletics were playing the Angels. We did two recordings of his line and he said, ‘OK, that’s enough.’ The other thing was, we had written a parody of ‘Bull Durham,’ where he was in a bathtub with Bart’s teacher, the way Susan Sarandon and [Kevin Costner] were in the tub in that movie. And he didn’t want to do it because his wife at the time was mad about him being depicted in a tub with another woman, even though it was a cartoon, so we had to completely rewrite it at the last minute.”
and Joe Frazier
We wrote him into a script where he had a fight with Barney at the bar and Barney won. He said, ‘I’ll do the script, but I have to win.’ So we had him knock out Barney. He did not want to lose the boxing match to Barney Gumble. He was in [another episode] where he was a spokesman for a smoke-damaged outlet. He said, ‘You just wanted me because my name was Smokin’ Joe, right?’ ”
Of course, there’s lots of other interesting tidbits in the article itself.
