Al Jean

This episode is, uh, it's directed by, uh, Jim Reardon.

And, uh, uh, the writers are Al Jean, Mike Rice, Jeff Martin, George Meyer, Sam Simon, and Jor- John Swartzwelder.

Um, now, uh, it's, uh, and these, uh, if you remember, they all have, like, nicknames, like, you know.

In, in the credits it wouldn't just be Al Jean, it would be Atrocious Al Jean, or, you know.

Oh, right, right.

Yeah.

That's always fun, yeah.

Written by Al Jean and Mike Rees and directed by Carlos Beza.

Beza? Beza? B-A-E-Z-A? I'd say Beza.

B-A-E-Z-A.

[laughs]

Moving on, I believe we are breaking this news unless you are out there reading Al Jean's Twitter account, or X account rather.

So this happened last month, and I forgot to put it in our notes, so I apologize for that.

But apparently, and this is big, shocking news for the production of The Simpsons, as of August 4th, The Simpsons writing staff has moved offices from the very familiar Fox bungalow where they started writing the show in, like, late '88, early '89.

And when Disney merged with Fox, they didn't buy the property of the Fox lot.

Like, Disney just rented it out or that was part of the deal too, to lease the Fox lot so everybody doesn't have to move off it immediately.

But that lease doesn't last forever, and there was a question of when's it gonna happen? And you have Al Jean packing up his stuff saying like, "I've been here for forever." [laughs] And he hasn't had other offices other than the time he was at Disney.

That was for, like, a five-year period.

Yeah.

So Everybody Loves Raymond was like, Al Jean says on the commentary and it's easy to forget that it was a very, very popular sitcom.

Its finale that aired two weeks after this [laughs] but was a big, big hit.

It's still big in reruns.

Okay, I'm looking into this.

Yeah.

The [laughs] And I think that Al Jean was just so used to in the '90s, if something won Best Picture, you could make fun of it for like, you could parody it for five years and it would be a fresh movie.

But by 2005, even a film that won at the 2002 Oscar event was seen as an old movie-

But, you know, I even...

And we had Al Jean, the executive producer, on many times on my syndicated radio show.

But at some point, you're kind of like...

What else can that family go through? Like, what else can happen in Springfield? Now, they're not real people.

I've definitely seen some episodes that I thought, "This was on par with some of the episodes I thought were mid that we have already watched."

I mean, it is just kind of interesting to note that I think, like, the general consensus of the decline is somewhere between, like, Seasons 10 and 13, and Al Jean took over in Season 13 specifically.

Okay.

And remained running the sh- he was in charge of the show for 20 years.

Right.

And it's only since st- Season 33 that people have been like, "Oh, it's getting a bit better now, isn't it?"

Oh, so it's just all on Al Jean.

[laughs] It might be all on Al Jean, yeah.

We saw him playing with the format back in things like Trilogy of Error from a few years ago.

So it feels like he is definitely more into playing with that Al Jean-ness moral of the, like, no traditional television three-act structure.

That's what he is attached to.

This is a helpful one too because it is the only episode in Season 16 that I could actually find original scripts for on Internet Archive.

Now, originally, the picture was going to be of football star Johnny Unitas, but they couldn't get the rights to his image.

So producer Al Jean, a Red Wings fan, suggested Gordie Howe instead.

When Gordie was contacted, he was hesitant, but Colleen thought it would be great.

The episode ended with a display of Gordie's NHL and WHL statistics.

The writers have explained that the $9 price was chosen because it was meant to be a ridiculously cheap price.

But even Al Jean, which is one of the show's writers, has described the image as being eerie.

Yeah.

Right? This one does feel particularly uncomfortable because the episode does contain an entire storyline involving New York and the World Trade Center.