Simpsons writer Michael Price noted on Twitter that the Lego Star Wars special he wrote, “Lego Star Wars: The Padwan Menace,” finally has an air date in Canada: tomorrow (Friday) at 6:30 p.m. on Teletoon. The show, which doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of build-up here or in the U.S. (when it aired on Cartoon Network), got me to thinking a bit about the fact that there have been quite a few animated projects over the years created by Simpsons writers who are still working on the show.
Simpsons writer Michael Price noted on Twitter that the Lego Star Wars special he wrote, “Lego Star Wars: The Padwan Menace,” finally has an air date in Canada: tomorrow (Friday) at 6:30 p.m. on Teletoon. The show, which doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of build-up here or in the U.S. (when it aired on Cartoon Network), got me to thinking a bit about the fact that there have been quite a few animated projects over the years created by Simpsons writers who are still working on the show.
This was particularly common during the internet cartoon era – I mean the late ’90s, when the tech bubble caused a lot of money to be invested in webisodes. For example, Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who were both working on The Simpsons at the time (Jean full-time, Reiss part-time) did the Critic webisodes. In Jean’s first season as sole showrunner, the episode “I Am Furious Yellow” is a sort of capsule history of that internet cartoon boom and the experiences of the Simpsons writers who worked for those dot-com companies.
I was just thinking about this because the Simpsons seems to be notable for having a lot of writers do side projects on their own time, sometimes for other companies, or briefly leave and then come back. (And because the shows are made over such a long period of time, a writer might leave and then return without the credits reflecting exactly when that happened.) They have a lot of part-time writers and consultants – so many that they rarely even use the term “consultant” or “consulting producer” any more – and other writers who take leaves of absence but then return to the show in some capacity. On live-action shows, the commitments sometimes seem more rigid, despite the longer down time (animated shows can’t have much down time because production overlaps on two seasons at once).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyM3HVdH1Kw