Homer Parody of on the Road Again
Every year, come the tricked-out, treat-packed time of Halloween, The Simpsons lets its shriek flag fly with "Treehouse of Horror." These typically terrific terror trilogies let the blithe family comedy to unshackle from approved chains and get full-gore with its parodies and parables (R.I.P., every Simpson family member, many times). Merely on Oct. 29, 1995, following the "Attack of the 50 Human foot Eyesores" and "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" segments from "Treehouse of Horror 6," things went from ghastly and harrowing to… well, extremely trippy and unsettling.
The formidable undertaking titled "Homer³" (referred to as "Homer Cubed" or "Homer three-D" or "three-D Homer") sent the Simpson patriarch into new dimensions via CGI magic, which may look amusingly outmoded at present but was rather stunning and visually innovative at the time. In this parody of The Twilight Zone episode "Piddling Girl Lost" that besides riffed on the burgeoning state of estimator blitheness, Homer discovers a "mystery wall" backside the bookcase and passes through the portal to enter a freaky new dimension that looks like what would happen if Tron and Battlezone had sex on Good Volition Hunting's chalkboard. Discombobulated all the same intrigued past these environs — also as his more fully formed body — Homer's mouth leaks a beautiful drop of drool every bit he marvels at fish in a pool ("Mmmm, unprocessed fish sticks"). His new-world trance is broken when a cone (Shapes! They are the future!) pokes him in the derriere, prompting him to angrily fling it abroad, simply the cone punctures the gridded ground, creating a black hole. When Bart tries to rescue him from this math-y techscape, Homer falls into the black hole — and into our existent-world realm — bringing united states of america the first live-action Simpsons moment: CG Homer pulls himself out of the trash and walks downwards an L.A. street in fear and disorientation. Suddenly, though, an erotic cake shop captures his interest, and he wanders in as the credits ringlet, thus concluding an utterly bizarro run a risk into the outer limits of 1995 technology. (And one whose triumph of tech was somewhat trumped a month afterward with Pixar'due south release of the starting time CGI feature-length movie, Toy Story.)
"I wouldn't rank this as the funniest thing that I've written, considering that wasn't entirely the goal," says David Ten. Cohen, a former Simpsons producer who penned the segment. "It was the most ambitious episode I've worked on, requiring the most people to endure the virtually to go information technology on the air…. I believe at the time that nosotros ourselves were and so dazzled by the graphics that we just wanted to linger on them with a little bit of suspenseful music and just kind of prove off. We slowed down a little bit simply to say, 'Hey, world, nosotros're doing this matter that no one else tin practice correct now!'"
Offers David Mirkin, longtime Simpsons producer who directed the live-activity portion of Homer³: "People loved it dorsum then considering it was having fun with engineering at the moment, and now it looks like a piece of history, of being amazed at technology that'due south no longer amazing. And then, it works funny in both ways." Adds Simpsons director and producer David Silverman: "Information technology hadn't really been done — certainly not for Boob tube. Information technology's very difficult to explain information technology to people. It'south like, 'Well, you know, my friend, yous kinda had to be there…'"
On the eve of "Treehouse of Horror XXIX" (Sunday, 8 p.m., Pull a fast one on), permit's have you back in that location as best we can, given that we don't have the time-machine toaster from "Treehouse of Horror 5". Here, several key players in the cosmos of "Homer³" rifle through their dumpster of notes and unearth a few ideas that never made it to the screen — and share assorted tales with EW about the segment that stands as ane of the well-nigh outlandish and colorful moments in the show's xxx-season run.
Clay d'oh!
The genesis of the thought traces back to Bill Oakley, who was serving equally co-showrunner of The Simpsons with Josh Weinstein at the fourth dimension. He remembers a lightbulb illuminating over his head while leafing through a Twilight Zone companion volume that was lying around the office. "I found 'Little Girl Lost,' and I somehow made the connexion: 'Hey, what if nosotros pretended that the Simpsons were in the 2nd dimension and they went into the third dimension?'" he recalls. Initially, Oakley and his fellow writers were planning to have the characters embark on a journeying through all sorts of animation formats, but that notion didn't concluding long. "We were similar, 'What can nosotros actually do likewise newspaper cutouts?'" he says. "We could do claymation, simply that was third dimension [too]. Also, it dilutes the conceptual purity of going from second to third dimension. In The Twilight Zone, a trivial girl goes into the 4th dimension. So we said, 'Let'southward dispose of all that other crud.'"
Oakley tapped Cohen (who would keep to co-develop Futurama with Simpsons creator Matt Groening) to write this segment based on his impressive academic pedigree. (Cohen boasts a physics degree from Harvard and a computer science caste from UC Berkeley.) "Because they were setting information technology in three-D, Bill thought it might be cool to put some mathematical jokes in the background," says Cohen. "And that's where I came in. Of the many nerds on the Simpsons staff, I was the one with the detail math and science bent to of my nerdiness. So it was up to me to write it." (More on that nerdiness in a bit.)
Diving into uncharted waters
Pacific Information Images, a computer animation product visitor that had worked a chip on Batman Forever and Terminator 2 — and did the digital rendering of the Pillsbury Doughboy in commercials — was looking to extend its attain into Hollywood at the time. Then when the Simpsons producers contacted the company virtually producing the segment, there was bliss… followed past hesitation. "The opportunity to piece of work with arguably one of the greatest boob tube serial of all time — i of the all-time-written, with the well-nigh characters — was what you were dreaming to do in those archaic days of computer blitheness," recalls Tim Johnson, the head of PDI'south grapheme blitheness group who directed and oversaw all the cutting-edge CG imagery in that segment. "We turned to [PDI founder] Carl Rosendahl and we said, 'Here's the good news: The Simpsons has this amazing script, and nosotros tin participate.' Carl just got up out of his chair and paced the room — he was so excited. I said, 'Well, here'south the bad news: They don't have any coin to pay for information technology.' And so Carl sat back down and ran the numbers. [The Simpsons] wrote us a cheque for something embarrassing — like $6,000 — and we got to work on information technology."
Longtime Simpsons director Bob Anderson, who helmed the segment and created the concept art too as the storyboards while working at Movie Roman (the Simpsons' product company at the fourth dimension), recalls bringing a small poster carte du jour to an early meeting with PDI (as seen below). "On this small piece of illustration board, I adhered a sheet of black construction newspaper," he says. "I ruled some perspective lines for a grid with a Wite-Out pen, which I subsequently shaded with a green highlighter. After masking that off, a toothbrush and a little more Wite-Out helped to create a splattering of stars for the nighttime, black sky. Ii color-penciled, textured shapes ready the neighborhood for the smallest of details — a tiny representation of Homer trapped in his 3-D environment." The grid was fifty-fifty more than detailed than can be seen in the photo here. "Within each foursquare of the grid is some other smaller grid. Inside each square of that smaller grid would be another tiny grid, and so on," he says, adding, "Everyone seemed to similar that, then that's the direction it took."
PDI was supplied with two layouts: one that indicated what each background shot should expect like, and another that illustrated Homer's interim. "I recollect thinking I would break all the barriers that pretty much confined u.s.a. to our traditional animation, existence that nosotros could rotate the camera around Homer every bit he'southward walking considering he'd be in iii-D," he says. "There was an initial shot where we really pull out away from him and spin all the way effectually him and encounter his unabridged environment…. Everything was pretty well figured out, and they rendered everything pretty much exactly as I had hoped it would come out."
Cohen recalls that, given the project'southward ambition and tight deadlines, "There was a discussion of, 'Can we apply whatsoever pre-existing 3-D models that the visitor already had to save time and money?'" Indeed, Johnson took advantage of the models and simulations that PDI had been creating over the years. "I came at it with the improv comedian'due south mantra of, 'Yes, and,'" he sums upwardly. "They would have these funny ideas, and I would say, 'Yes, and… did you realize that a teapot — which is really easy to make, and nosotros already have — is an icon of computer animation? Perhaps we could steer away from that crazy, incommunicable thing, and also have our cake and consume it too, by existence a little truer to that kind of in-joke and mocking the land of estimator blitheness.'"
Take, for instance, Homer's "Mmmm, unprocessed fish sticks" line. "They were saying, 'Well, we know h2o's expensive,' but somebody on our team had simply done a really interesting h2o simulation," continues Johnson. "And I believe we were able to offer the shot of Homer's glistening drool falling in the water, creating gorgeous sine-wave ripples. That was our big product-value-add to their fish sticks joke." (Speaking of that water scene, "I got some good notes from Brad Bird [who] at the fourth dimension was our storyboard consultant," says Anderson of the hereafter director of The Incredibles. "Looking up from inside the little pond with the goldfish and seeing Homer through the water — that was ane of Brad's shots.")
Like Anderson, Johnson recalls pouring long hours into the segment. "I was still animating a Pillsbury Doughboy commercial, and we were doing that in the mean solar day, but mind, at that place'due south non a single bad retentivity involved with that," he says. "Those nights and weekends spent on the show were done with accented glee." (The nearly gratis work — a value that Johnson conservatively estimates at many hundreds of thousands of dollars — proved to be a smart investment, equally the segment served equally a calling carte for the company. Shortly thereafter, Dreamworks bought a significant share of PDI, and Johnson would proceed to co-direct Antz; PDI co-produced Antz equally well as Shrek. )
Formulas to confound and intrigue math-minded fans
As mentioned, Cohen was asked by Oakley to geek out by slipping all sorts of numbers and formulas in the techno-scape, which also included a Myst temple reference. (Y'all may have noticed that the number 734 spells out PDI on a telephone keypad, while a different prepare of numbers and messages above Homer interpret in ASCII code to "Frink rules," a reference to Professor Frink.) Cohen's original notes for the segment included this line: "In the groundwork, several equations are floating around that will daze and charm the scientific community." To achieve that purpose, Cohen says he planted a physics equation which indicates that "the universe is going to one twenty-four hours plummet in on itself, and that was to represent the fact that the iii-D earth collapses in on itself at the end." (This question remained open to physicists at the time, although "astronomers now believe that our universe will not collapse back in on itself," Cohen helpfully points out.) Another equation, P = NP, which centers on the nigh famous unsolved problem in computer science, was "a brazen statement in computer science that says, 'Yes, these difficult issues actually have an piece of cake solution — we only haven't institute information technology yet.' That was supposed to represent the thought that we can do these fancy 3-D computer graphics that no ane else could on TV at that time."
His pièce de résistance, still, involved Fermat's Last Theorem. (Effectually the time that the episode was being written, Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles claimed to take a proof, which turned out to be flawed, simply he ultimately corrected it simply before the episode aired, thus ending a dilemma that had been confounding academics since the 17th century.) "What I set to do in the background was to disprove it, contradicting the centuries of work leading upwardly to this monumental math proof equation," says Cohen. "Whereas he was saying there were no numbers that brand that equation true, I decided to write a programme that would look for numbers that made the equation nigh true, and were correct to [plenty] decimal places that people who checked on an ordinary hand calculator would find that it seemed to exist true. My goal was to outsmart people who had an eight-digit calculator, which was the standard at that time.… This was in the early years of the internet, so I was able to lurk afterward and see people posting, 'What the hell is going on here? This thing seems to disprove Fermat's Last Theorem!' And that was really one of those career highlights where I was similar, 'Yes! I screwed with iii nerds' heads!'" (He'd screw with a few more than when he reworked his disproof of the theorem in season x'southward "The Magician of Evergreen Terrace" so it could fool the so-standard 10-digit calculators.)
Past the way, hither'due south how Johnson recalls that prank of the highest academic order: "David Cohen and one of our programmers got to laughing so difficult that everybody began to back out of the room, because nobody understood the joke."
NEXT Page: Discover out how the scene with Homer in the real world was pulled off
Flanders was roped into action
In the final version of the segment, Bart — who is attached to a rope secured in the second dimension — tries to save Homer. Originally, though, at that place was a third character in the scene who was attempting the rescue. "The [portal] had a xl-inch circumference and [Chief] Wiggum couldn't fit through that, so they had to look for somebody skinnier," remembers Cohen. That somebody skinnier? Ned Flanders. Marge was also slated to cross dimensions, and according to Cohen's notes, "Marge's hair will look not bad." Alas, PDI had the time and resources to return only 2 characters. "We were already getting a lot of free work from Pacific Data Images, so we couldn't push them besides difficult," says Cohen. "Numerous plans went out the window at that point." Johnson shivers at the notion of adding Flemish region into the mix: "In Homer's case, he had 1 zig-zagging line for hair. And in Bart'southward case, it was some type of atomic Brillo pad on pinnacle. Simply if we had to do Ned'south mustache, I think it would've killed us."
Credit: Courtesy Tim Johnson
Indeed, like Homer, PDI was inbound unchartered territory, taking its computers to the limits with renderings that at the time were extremely circuitous. "This is a perfect example of ignorance being bliss," says Johnson. "If we had known exactly what we were biting off, we never probably would have showed the appetite. It begins correct away with how delightful and simple David Silverman's drawings of The Simpsons are, and yet y'all never run across them, except for 1 or two angles. So right away, nosotros realized that to laurels the characters and be true-blue to them, and have an audience get, 'Yeah, that is Bart, that is Homer,' it'd be way harder than we thought to create a 3-D version of characters that not merely were 2-D — and I mean this as a compliment — but were incredibly simple and limited in the angles in which they were portrayed and drawn. Right from the very first step in that process, edifice the characters, we already were laughing at, 'Oh, this is not a cakewalk. This is really going to be very, very challenging on the creative and the technical side.'" I thing working in their favor: The third dimension that they were creating was a fairly unproblematic plane populated with primitive objects. "Thank goodness for that, because if the backgrounds were as complicated equally the characters, nosotros never could've done the job," continues Johnson. "We were saved from our complex characters by our comically simple backgrounds."
Silverman recalls an early on desire on the producers' part to have the portal to the third dimension await more elaborate, simply that never materialized. "We were trying to do something more than complex with the hole, a more complex vortex," he says. "It was fine for what information technology was, only we wanted something more swirling and more dynamic." He was specially pleased, though, with the shot of Homer running from two-D into 3-D animation. "That was a shot I was actually looking frontward to," he says. "I recall talking to Bob [Anderson] almost a nice, slow transitional bit of animation: 'Allow'south brand the amount of black space slightly dimensional — a chip on a diagonal equally opposed to being flat on the side.'" Johnson, meanwhile, all the same has a tinge of regret about the 3-D blackness hole that fractured Homer into many pieces. "I'g not sure nosotros were e'er thrilled with the result of that," he says. "But we at to the lowest degree conveyed the notion in a kind of vague, science-y way of that vortex opening upwardly an infinite hole below."
Bart was choked up in i gag
By flavour 7, scads of Simpsons jokes had entered the zeitgiest, including a visual (and very literal) 1 in which Homer becomes angry with Bart and chokes him while exclaiming, "Why, you piddling!" The recurring flake drew disapproval from some critics who likened it to child abuse, though the show's producers sought to remind everyone that this was simply a cartoon. Call it "internal guilt possibly poking through," quips Cohen, just an early on version of the story was even going to comment on the concerns over these frequent throttlings. "Nosotros thought it might exist fun to comment on why the many chokings hadn't killed him by that bespeak," he explains. "Nosotros were going to excuse ourselves by saying that in the second dimension, it wasn't really hurting him."
The idea was this: Entering the third dimension, Bart scares his dad by flight toward him with his pointy pilus, which now resembles a meat tenderizer. Homer is at kickoff scared of this attacking kitchen instrument, and tries to swat information technology away with a 3-D cone. Realizing that it's but his son, he becomes upset and yells, "Oh, so I tin't even get a lilliputian peace and quiet in my own dimension? Why, you lot niggling!" and when he reaches out to grab Bart as his son flies by over again, Homer is carried off with him. Recalls Cohen: "Then Bart was going to beginning screaming and say, 'Ow, Dad! Stop it! In hither that really hurts for some reason!'"
The segment was seen as a trial balloon for a large-screen adventure
The Simpsons hitting theaters in 2007 with The Simpsons Movie, but there had long been discussions nearly a film. The promise of Homer three-D "was sort of dipping a toe into what could be a movie," says Mirkin. "Nosotros were always pressured to think well-nigh a moving picture forever, so perhaps this was one of the ways nosotros could limited it every bit a motion picture — simply beginning and experimenting. 'Let'south meet what these characters look similar in CGI in case we're leaning toward a CGI motion picture,' which was where the industry was going at that indicate." While these possibilities intrigued the show'south writers, the response from the network — at least from the production side — wasn't almost equally enthusiastic. "It's very possible that other executives at Trick would have been excited, merely the physical production people and the people that are looking at our budget for the bear witness, it was the opposite," Mirkin says with a chuckle. "It was like, 'Aw, geez, you lot know how expensive that'due south going to be? It's such a pain in the ass, and yous're going to accept to practise this and that.' I take a very, very cynical point of view of bear witness business. When you're trying to do art and you're faced with business people, [that] is only the nature of information technology, and you brand friends with that. Only this nevertheless surprised me. It was really quite hilarious."
In that location was well-nigh a cause for cosplay
In figuring out how to depict Homer walking downward a live-action Fifty.A. street — and correct into Erotic Cakes — the producers considered the rather lo-fi option of putting voice-of-Homer Dan Castellaneta in a costume. But in its beginning meeting with The Simpsons, PDI said information technology likewise could tackle that CG version of Homer, much to the producers' surprise. "I don't recall I'd e'er seen annihilation like that, peculiarly on a TV budget, where they animated CGI in live-activeness," says Oakley. "I don't think nosotros were aware that that could be washed. They were like, 'Oh, yeah, we could exercise that too.' That was when we decided, 'Forget the costume.'"
The writers likewise tossed around the idea of having the Simpsons cast members play the passers-by whom Homer encounters on the street, merely "It became logistically hard to get everybody together to practice that for a full solar day," recalls Mirkin. Cohen remembers some discussion about a costumed Homer strangling Nancy Cartwright (who voices Bart), as well as a nod to Homer's onscreen wife with Julie Kavner (who voices Marge). "Julie was to shudder in revulsion when Homer thought he recognized her," he says. According to Cohen's notes, the full exchange would involve Homer tentatively saying to Kavner, "Marge…?" and Kavner responding, "Stay away from me." (Another abased meta-joke featured a second storefront that would catch Homer's heart. "Oh my God, I'm in a horrible, horrible earth," he would say every bit he passed a store selling Simpsons merchandise.)
The animators at PDI were very concerned near Homer's harsh entrance into the man realm. Maybe overly so. "When we driblet Homer from the skies into our live-activeness world, I asked the animators to make it really fast and violent," recalls Johnson. "Yet, when the get-go animation test was shown, Homer sort of 'floated' downwardly to a reasonably soft landing in the alley dumpster. 'Nope,' I said. 'Harder. Faster.' It took iii tries to get the animators to really crunch Homer into the trash. Turns out, they but simply liked him so much, they 'didn't want to injure him.' That beingness said, when we finally got information technology to the speed you see in the show, we were all howling with laughter. I started to worry it would exist too much for our Simpsons evidence folk. Merely David Silverman saw it and laughed himself silly. We looped the animation so it ran over and over without pause, and every time we would all burst into laughter again."
In filming this live-action-meets-animation sequence, a truck drove alongside the action with a ping-pong ball attached to a long pole to direct the actors' eyes to where CG Homer would be digitally inserted. "The whole time, I'k thinking, 'Oh, God, now we're stuck with the ping-pong ball, which nosotros have to cover up or erase,'" says Johnson. "And nosotros take to brand Homer move at the pace of a truck that's zagging along the road.'" After several takes, he suggested that he walk aslope the passers-by off-camera, guiding them with his vocalization. This was the have that the producers used. "We didn't have to remove any wire," continues Johnson. "Homer could stumble along, at whatever pace we used, with the eyeline as the guide, which was more organic than the pace of the ping-pong ball."
Producing this segment was no cakewalk, but speaking of cakewalks…
Homer's archway into the sexy broiled dessert institution as an otherworldly version of the show'southward theme music takes us into the credits serves an eerie, disquieting push button to this… experimental experience. "We wondered whether it would leave people scratching their heads, only I don't think it did," opines Oakley. "I think some people were still not quite sure what was going on with the erotic cakes, simply ultimately it was a pretty easy matter to do. He had to go somewhere. Information technology only required a neon sign and a couple of cakes. We had to get him off the street somehow."
Though he'due south pleased with the segment, Mirkin is still haunted by the crane shot that ends the episode: Homer wanders into the Erotic Cakes store (which the producers recall was a much more innocent photography studio in real life). "They gave me the oldest crane that you could possibly find and not plenty people to control traffic, or even the permits to command traffic, so it was very downwardly and dirty," says Mirkin. "That's a perfect example of, I wanted something to wait very cinematic and big-time, and they but wanted it to exist handled and quick," he says. "Normally for something like that, you'd be able to periodically stop traffic for a single shot on one side of Ventura Boulevard, simply that would take been too expensive, then we could only stop traffic in one lane for a brusque period of time. It really compromised the crane shot because unremarkably the crane would have to swing out into the street to go back far enough to make information technology a very absurd and interesting shot. Instead information technology has to very unnaturally swing out and back in as it goes up. I've talked to people well-nigh this for years; I said, 'Practise you notice that shot?' and they said, 'No, information technology looks fine.' But to me, it's a comedy in itself."
In instance you lot've e'er wondered what became of that Erotic Cakes sign, expect no farther than Simpsons HQ on the Fox lot in L.A. "I see that sign once a week at least when I go in to The Simpsons because it's still sitting there," says Mirkin. "It used to be lit up and nosotros used to take information technology plugged in, and now it's in a corner. I don't remember it really works. If we plugged it in, we would all dice in a fire."
Related content:
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- 20 Simpsons writers pick their all-time favorite "Treehouse of Horror" segments
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Source: https://ew.com/tv/2018/10/19/the-simpsons-homer-cubed-treehouse-of-horror-vi/
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