Smack to the Future
Chapter 8: A Tale of Two Lisas (...cont'd)
Excerpt from The Bongo Beat: The Odd Journey of Matt Groening by Nathanial "Nate" Reptorr
Now, a Nuclear Family movie had long been on the agenda for Groening and co., even before George RR Martin had come to Groening and Wayward with the story of a girl and her dragon. The special Escape From Camp Deadly had grown out of a treatment for a movie, as had some of the Halloween specials. And, as previously stated, a Nuclear Family movie had been Groening’s main ace up his sleeve in his plans to get Oakley and Weinstein’s treatment for The Ice Dragon made – most studios would be eager to be distributing Bart, Lisa and Maggie’s big-screen debut, and, if The Ice Dragon were to flop, the almost guaranteed success of a Nuclear Family movie would cushion the blow.
Whilst many stories were passed around – from the Earth being invaded by recurring aliens Kang and Kodos’ species to a Fantasia-style collection of shorts[1], ultimately, up-and-coming Bongo writers Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, asked to co-write and Povenmire to direct after Groening was impressed by their work on both Bartman and the special Bart & Lisa’s Haunted Mansion (and who would go on to greater and greater things… read on[2]) came up with a time travel storyline, with the siblings slalomed throughout history after stealing a malfunctioning time machine, encountering (and annoying) various historical figures and hoping that the next leap… will be the leap home.
However, the film hit one massive stumble early on – Bongo weren’t quite set up to make a feature, with their longest productions being the 44-minute Nuclear Family Halloween specials. According to Groening, “Right from the beginning we knew we’d need a lot more studio space and animation teams to get the movie off the ground, whilst doing all our TV work. Whilst the size of our operation had increased pretty quickly in a few years… we knew we’d need to really up the ante if we were going to get the movie done and looking good”.
Bongo, with Disney’s financial assistance, bought extra studio space in Santa Monica and temporarily incorporated some Disney TV animation staff – some of whom had previously worked on Bart & Lisa’s Haunted Mansion and several of whom would join Bongo permanently – to increase staff numbers, enabling Povenmire and Marsh to spin off a team to work on the film (with Jay Stephens taking over as showrunner on Bartman). These early production delays (or “pulling everything together” as Povenmire later put it) would gradually push the planned late 2003 release date into summer 2004 (Raptor Red ended up taking the original release spot… which makes a scene later on in the film doubly hilarious).
According to Povenmire, the extra manpower helped with both the grand scope they were planning and the quality of the film’s animation, “On any given episode of the show, we’d have to pick and choose which sequences we could lavish our attention on… in the movie, we could do that for every single scene.” And it certainly shows – the movie used a far wider colour palette than the show, the characters have shadows throughout the movie (a technique used sparingly in the show) and certain sequences (for instance, Bart, Lisa and Maggie flying Da Vinci’s flying machine over Renaissance Florence) could be animated more fluidly than would ever be possible before. Bongo animation directors Mike B. Anderson, Lauren MacMullen, Rich Moore and Steven D. Moore each directed the animation for a quarter of the scenes, under Povenmire’s supervision.
According to Povenmire, playing with time travel was an entertaining prospect. “From the very earliest conversation we had about the movie, we had the idea of going to more than one location –we really wanted to do sort of a tour, a travelogue to a bunch of different kinds of places, mostly because we really wanted to see Bart, Lisa and Maggie meeting Cleopatra or da Vinci. Whilst of course we looked at things like Bill and Ted, Doctor Who, Back to the Future, one of the key inspirations was, actually, Mr. Peabody and Sherman.”
A cameo from the dog-and-his-boy duo had even been scripted, owing to many of the Bongo crew (including executive producer Matt Groening) being Jay Ward fans, but was ultimately cut (much o their consternation) due to possible legal issues with Warner Bros, who had recently acquired Jay Ward Productions and were working on a Mr Peabody and Sherman movie, which would be (in what most are sure was a complete coincidence, given the new boss at Warner Bros[3]) releasing at roughly the same time.
And finding the right destinations – from Ancient Egypt to Renaissance Italy – was key to telling the story, as Marsh recalls, “It was about finding the right places and how to tell the story – we really wanted to convey the idea that human nature doesn’t really change and history is its story. Basically, the great figures of history weren’t exceptional people – they were just people, with the same foibles as us. It wasn’t just picking the funniest places… well, it was a bit.”
By nature, the film was stuffed to the gills with cameos from famous historical figures – with everyone from Boudicca to Catherine the Great to Robert Oppenheimer appearing (and being annoyed by) Bart, Lisa and Maggie in their madcap voyage across time and space. According to Povenmire, “Often the thought process was about what historical figure would be the most interesting to include, once we had decided on what locations we’d be featuring. We did a lot of research and put a lot of obscure people in along with the famous ones – we were most kids’ first introduction to Count Caligostro, for one.”
Among the most unusual of these cameos was one from within the Disney family - the titular character of Raptor Red, which had been released the year before. Red appears in a brief scene when Bart, Lisa and Maggie end up in dinosaur times and are met by the titular Utahraptor – which quickly segues to Maggie, in a PG-rated “aren’t you going to ravish me” gag, ending up angry that the increasingly befuddled Red isn’t going to eat her. This gag met the approval of Raptor Red author (and executive producer on the Disney/Amblimation film) Robert Bakker who, reportedly, “laughed himself breathless” watching the sequence.
Another notable cameo, this time from within the Bongo family, was Bartman villain Master Mind (once again voiced by Corey Burton), who appeared as the Skynet-esque ruler of a dystopian future caused by the siblings’ meddling in history, with Mr. Burns as the benefactor of a human resistance against the tyrannical AI.
His appearance, according to Povenmire, tied into a theme common to time-travel stories that the film had to tackle, “We really wanted to convey the idea that there are very specific rules to time travel and that, if you break those rules, bad things happen. It’s been done so commonly in time travel stories – and obviously we had to do it in a way that didn’t end up giving audiences a headache trying to work out all the paradoxes. So Bart, Lisa and Maggie meddling in history – by accident or design – and coming back to this dystopian future enabled us to insert that concept into the story in a way that didn’t break up the rest of the film.”
Whilst Burns as the benefactor/leader of a resistance movement remained consistent, who exactly would be ruling this dystopian future and what form it would take, went through multiple permutations. As Povenmire recalls, “We thought it would be funnier if the dystopian overlord was somebody we knew – and we went through a lot of candidates. At one point, the overlord was Flanders who was ruling this sort of Stepford Wives thing[4], where you had to be happy all the time or you’d be lobotomised, simply because of the ludicrousness of the juxtaposition of Flanders as an Orwellian overlord. However, we ultimately picked Master Mind, obvious Terminator homage aside, pretty much because we always thought he was a great character on Bartman.”
According to Povenmire, they didn’t need to go far for inspiration or this sequence, “We cannibalised elements from a Bartman script that we’d written, but ultimately never got produced, where, through a time-travel accident, Bart ended up accidentally creating a future where Master Mind had taken over. Obviously, since this was Nuclear Family, not Bartman, we made it a bit more comedic, but…”
Bart, Lisa and Maggie actresses Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith and Jude Barsi, all having done voice acting for feature film, were all eager to reprise their characters for a movie, as Barsi recalls, “When I found out we were getting a movie, I thought ‘It’s about fucking time!’ Pun intended.” Recording their dialogue together, as they had done in the series, they improvised a lot of their lines, as Povenmire recalls “We all knew that when you get Nancy, Yeardley and Jude in a room together, they’ll be ad-libbing for days. When they’re recording together, they make a bit of a game out of it to try each take several times with the unspoken agreement that they’re just going to go further next time. By the end of each session, the whole crew are just pissing themselves laughing.”
“There was one scene where Bart, Lisa and Maggie end up witnessing the fall of Troy and Maggie goes ‘Just goes to show you should beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ – your basic historical in-joke. They decided to take that line and run with it. So by around take four, you had Jude as Maggie saying, ‘Tale as old as time – you meet a charming Greek guy, he gives you a gift, you let him penetrate your walls… then the Trojan breaks and seamen come pouring out.’
“… and then Nancy as Bart said ‘Woah! I was just gonna say ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, but you… you went there! Can we even say that?!’
“… and then Jude replied with a ‘Weeelll, we just did…’
“And the whole crew is just rolling on the floor laughing.”
And, in grand NF tradition, Cartwright, Smith and Barsi were rubbing shoulders with a seemingly endless list of celebrity cameos, many of whom were playing real historical figures - these included Scarlett Johansson as a spoiled Cleopatra, Tom Hanks voicing his third cousin-quadrice-removed Abraham Lincoln, Derek Jacobi as a prissy Leonardo da Vinci and Joan Jett as a hard-rockin’ Boudicca. A cameo from Walt Disney was briefly considered, as a bit of biting-the-hand-humour, but was ultimately decided against.
What’s even more remarkable is nearly every guest star was Povenmire and Marsh’s first choice to play the characters, to which executive producer Groening credited to how far the show had come in its popularity, “In the early days of the show, we used to have to ring guest stars we wanted and beg them to do the show… for Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure, they were calling us.”
However, some had conditions, as Povenmire recounts, “We originally had Derek [Jacobi] as William Shakespeare – however, Derek asked if he could play somebody else, since he’s a supporter of a theory that states that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and that somebody else did[5]. So we put him in as da Vinci instead… and that gave us the scene where Bart, Lisa and Maggie steal Da Vinci’s flying machine and end up flying over Florence.”
However, the king of the cameos was, without a doubt, Tim Curry[6], playing the infamous occultist Count Alessandro di Caligostro as a PG-rated Dr. Frank-n-Furter with all the flamboyant scenery-chewing that implied. In a bonus for the adults in the audience, there were several explicit references to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the sequence – in particular, Caligostro’s butler is voiced by Richard O’Brien and portrayed as a pastiche of Riff-Raff.
According to Povenmire, they had written the Count in with Curry in mind, “We found out about Count Caligostro during our research and thought that he seemed like a really fun guy to include. And since Jeff and I are big Rocky Horror fans, we wrote him as basically Frank… well, obviously as close to Frank as we could get on a PG-rating. It was at that point we thought ‘it would be so awesome if we could actually get Tim Curry to play this character’ – fortunately, we did.”
You see, in a bit of serendipitous timing, Curry was on site that day recording audio pickups for his part as Oberon the Goblin King on Bartman. Once he had finished recording, Povenmire and Marsh asked him if he could voice Count Caligostro – and, according to Povenmire, not only did Curry say “yes with remarkable speed”, he even put them in touch with Richard O’Brien so they could cast him as Caligostro’s butler.
Aware that they were writing for a series that basically had obscure jokes aimed at the nerds in the audience as a key pillar of its humour, Povenmire and Marsh wrote the script with several jokes aimed specifically for any historians who may have been watching. For example, in the scene where Bart, Lisa and Maggie are trolling Martin Luther by dressing up as angels (long history), Maggie says, after Bart’s “95 feces” joke, “And speaking of which… He wants to tell you that it’s meant to go out of that hole at the back, not in the one at the front!”, a joke based on Luther’s long-suspected coprophagy. Marsh chuckles, “In our research, we found out that Martin Luther ate a spoonful of his own crap every morning… so we made a joke out of that. Basically, we made a piece of toilet humour out of a little-known historical fact – basically encapsulating that unique mixture of highbrow and lowbrow that makes Nuclear Family what it is… You’d almost think these things were thought through.”
Released on June 10th, 2004 (with a premiere in Springfield, Illinois – the winner of a competition from the many US cities of that name), Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure was a box-office hit, grossing almost $600 million worldwide[7], ending up as the most successful Disney animated film since The Lion King and 2004’s highest-grossing animated film, steamrolling most of its competition. The song "Back In Time", written specifically for the film by the UK pop-punk band The Termites[8] was a chart-topper.
Critically, the film was mostly positively received, with Roger Ebert describing it as “an enjoyably deranged time-travel romp that should entertain young and old alike”. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2005 Oscars, but ultimately lost to The Further Life Of Toys – however, Bart, Lisa and Maggie did host NBC’s coverage of the Oscars. The film did gangbusters on home media and remains a popular direct-view title to this day.
The film remains popular among animation fans and is often cited as the one case where ‘television IP brought to the big-screen’ was good, with Animation Nation later writing, “Normally, ‘big-screen version of television IP’ movies are words enough to strike terror into anyone’s heart – the Hanna-Barbera films of the 90’s, which were (with few exceptions) so-so at best and dreadful at worst, abundantly proved that. However, most animation fans (except those purists who insist – loudly – that Groening ‘sold out’ after Bunyans) would agree that Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure represents an honourable exception – a television IP movie that keeps the show’s unique qualities, without feeling like something that really should have been released straight-to-video.”
With the film’s success, Bongo demonstrated that they were the up-and-coming players on the feature film block. In the same article, Animation Nation wrote, “You wouldn’t think it, but Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure was actually quite the hat-trick for Bongo – even with a dynamite IP like Nuclear Family, a studio’s feature debut done by an untested director ending up as Disney’s biggest commercial success since The Lion King is something that sounds too amazing to be true. This was enough to prove that Bongo were a studio to keep an eye on”.
The film has become very popular with history teachers in the almost two decades since its release, with teachers often showing scenes from the film, often to introduce kids to obscure historical figures. With a fond smile, Barsi says, “My son came home from school a few days ago and told me that they’d shown one of the scenes from Bart and Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure in his history class. I just thought ‘Wow’ – I’ve done something constructive.’”
The film is also significant for another reason – it is the last animated film that Jim Henson greenlit as Disney CCO (with The Space Between Us being the last live-action film[8]), which, as the man has acknowledged multiple times in the almost two decades since, is a hell of a note to end a career spanning almost two-decades on.
And, with the film’s success Bongo knew where they wanted to go next. Before the film a five-minute short called A Flight With Appa played. The short, co-storyboarded and directed by Bongo up-and-comers Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko[9], which depicted three kids seeing a polar landscape from the back of an enormous flying bison set to a cover of Walking in the Air, charmed audiences with its beautiful, Ghibli-esque visuals. Roughly a month later, Groening would reveal at Comic-Con that the short had only been a teaser for a show called Avatar, which Groening promised would be “Bongo’s biggest work yet”.
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[1] - These were both suggestions for a Simpsons movie OTL - the former ended up as the episode "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner", whilst the latter was apparently, Groening's initial idea for the '07 movie.
[2] - More on these to come!
[3] - This is, of course, Jeffrey Katzenberg - who, as you probably know, ended up as Chairman/CEO of WB. The release of Mr. Peabody and Sherman is partly Katz's old "dueling" strategy - and WB Animation acquiring Jay Ward Productions is because (out-of-universe) Disney and Universal had "all the good shit" when it came to animated IPs. (I mean there's going to be a future post which explores the two's relationship as the "Big Fish" of feature animation, but...).
[4] - This is was very nearly the case when I was writing this. I decided to use a Bartman villain for some Bongo Brand synergy.
[5] – This is actually true OTL - he did the introduction for Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (which is, in my view, a terrible, terrible movie) for that exact reason.
[6] - Hat-tip to my dad here - who's a big Rocky Horror fan and who I can well imagine laughing his ass off, whilst the TTL versions of me and my sister (7 and 8 at the time) look at him in confusion. In addition, Povenmire and Marsh are apparently big Rocky Horror fans OTL - that's why Richard O'Brien voiced... Richard in Phineas and Ferb.
[7] – Slightly better than the OTL Simpsons movie. Couple of reasons for this – the first reason is it’s being distributed by Walt Disney Feature Animation, so there's obviously greater name value. The second reason is that, rather than being the cause of a brief cultural renaissance, as the OTL Simpsons movie, Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure is the culmination of it. Here, Disney have spent the past several years making NF their “hot new IP” (sort of what Disney are doing with OTL Simpsons now), which will be explored in a future post.
[8] - Believe it or not, that's not a fictional band - they're known iOTL as Busted. Their cover of "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News also appears on the soundtrack.
[9] - And that's the reason why this is paired with The Space Between Us post- yup, this was a classic, @Geekhis Khan-ian pairing. Both of these are the last two films greenlit by Jim in his tenure as Chairman/CCO - the last live-action film and the last animated film respectively. They are, tonally, light and day from each other.... and yet are both pure Jim Henson in their own ways.
[10] - You might have seen him mentioned in the Bongo Studios post and as doing The Ice Dragon. As for Avatar... more to come on this!
Excerpt from The Bongo Beat: The Odd Journey of Matt Groening by Nathanial "Nate" Reptorr
Now, a Nuclear Family movie had long been on the agenda for Groening and co., even before George RR Martin had come to Groening and Wayward with the story of a girl and her dragon. The special Escape From Camp Deadly had grown out of a treatment for a movie, as had some of the Halloween specials. And, as previously stated, a Nuclear Family movie had been Groening’s main ace up his sleeve in his plans to get Oakley and Weinstein’s treatment for The Ice Dragon made – most studios would be eager to be distributing Bart, Lisa and Maggie’s big-screen debut, and, if The Ice Dragon were to flop, the almost guaranteed success of a Nuclear Family movie would cushion the blow.
Whilst many stories were passed around – from the Earth being invaded by recurring aliens Kang and Kodos’ species to a Fantasia-style collection of shorts[1], ultimately, up-and-coming Bongo writers Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh, asked to co-write and Povenmire to direct after Groening was impressed by their work on both Bartman and the special Bart & Lisa’s Haunted Mansion (and who would go on to greater and greater things… read on[2]) came up with a time travel storyline, with the siblings slalomed throughout history after stealing a malfunctioning time machine, encountering (and annoying) various historical figures and hoping that the next leap… will be the leap home.
However, the film hit one massive stumble early on – Bongo weren’t quite set up to make a feature, with their longest productions being the 44-minute Nuclear Family Halloween specials. According to Groening, “Right from the beginning we knew we’d need a lot more studio space and animation teams to get the movie off the ground, whilst doing all our TV work. Whilst the size of our operation had increased pretty quickly in a few years… we knew we’d need to really up the ante if we were going to get the movie done and looking good”.
Bongo, with Disney’s financial assistance, bought extra studio space in Santa Monica and temporarily incorporated some Disney TV animation staff – some of whom had previously worked on Bart & Lisa’s Haunted Mansion and several of whom would join Bongo permanently – to increase staff numbers, enabling Povenmire and Marsh to spin off a team to work on the film (with Jay Stephens taking over as showrunner on Bartman). These early production delays (or “pulling everything together” as Povenmire later put it) would gradually push the planned late 2003 release date into summer 2004 (Raptor Red ended up taking the original release spot… which makes a scene later on in the film doubly hilarious).
According to Povenmire, the extra manpower helped with both the grand scope they were planning and the quality of the film’s animation, “On any given episode of the show, we’d have to pick and choose which sequences we could lavish our attention on… in the movie, we could do that for every single scene.” And it certainly shows – the movie used a far wider colour palette than the show, the characters have shadows throughout the movie (a technique used sparingly in the show) and certain sequences (for instance, Bart, Lisa and Maggie flying Da Vinci’s flying machine over Renaissance Florence) could be animated more fluidly than would ever be possible before. Bongo animation directors Mike B. Anderson, Lauren MacMullen, Rich Moore and Steven D. Moore each directed the animation for a quarter of the scenes, under Povenmire’s supervision.
According to Povenmire, playing with time travel was an entertaining prospect. “From the very earliest conversation we had about the movie, we had the idea of going to more than one location –we really wanted to do sort of a tour, a travelogue to a bunch of different kinds of places, mostly because we really wanted to see Bart, Lisa and Maggie meeting Cleopatra or da Vinci. Whilst of course we looked at things like Bill and Ted, Doctor Who, Back to the Future, one of the key inspirations was, actually, Mr. Peabody and Sherman.”
A cameo from the dog-and-his-boy duo had even been scripted, owing to many of the Bongo crew (including executive producer Matt Groening) being Jay Ward fans, but was ultimately cut (much o their consternation) due to possible legal issues with Warner Bros, who had recently acquired Jay Ward Productions and were working on a Mr Peabody and Sherman movie, which would be (in what most are sure was a complete coincidence, given the new boss at Warner Bros[3]) releasing at roughly the same time.
And finding the right destinations – from Ancient Egypt to Renaissance Italy – was key to telling the story, as Marsh recalls, “It was about finding the right places and how to tell the story – we really wanted to convey the idea that human nature doesn’t really change and history is its story. Basically, the great figures of history weren’t exceptional people – they were just people, with the same foibles as us. It wasn’t just picking the funniest places… well, it was a bit.”
By nature, the film was stuffed to the gills with cameos from famous historical figures – with everyone from Boudicca to Catherine the Great to Robert Oppenheimer appearing (and being annoyed by) Bart, Lisa and Maggie in their madcap voyage across time and space. According to Povenmire, “Often the thought process was about what historical figure would be the most interesting to include, once we had decided on what locations we’d be featuring. We did a lot of research and put a lot of obscure people in along with the famous ones – we were most kids’ first introduction to Count Caligostro, for one.”
Among the most unusual of these cameos was one from within the Disney family - the titular character of Raptor Red, which had been released the year before. Red appears in a brief scene when Bart, Lisa and Maggie end up in dinosaur times and are met by the titular Utahraptor – which quickly segues to Maggie, in a PG-rated “aren’t you going to ravish me” gag, ending up angry that the increasingly befuddled Red isn’t going to eat her. This gag met the approval of Raptor Red author (and executive producer on the Disney/Amblimation film) Robert Bakker who, reportedly, “laughed himself breathless” watching the sequence.
Another notable cameo, this time from within the Bongo family, was Bartman villain Master Mind (once again voiced by Corey Burton), who appeared as the Skynet-esque ruler of a dystopian future caused by the siblings’ meddling in history, with Mr. Burns as the benefactor of a human resistance against the tyrannical AI.
His appearance, according to Povenmire, tied into a theme common to time-travel stories that the film had to tackle, “We really wanted to convey the idea that there are very specific rules to time travel and that, if you break those rules, bad things happen. It’s been done so commonly in time travel stories – and obviously we had to do it in a way that didn’t end up giving audiences a headache trying to work out all the paradoxes. So Bart, Lisa and Maggie meddling in history – by accident or design – and coming back to this dystopian future enabled us to insert that concept into the story in a way that didn’t break up the rest of the film.”
Whilst Burns as the benefactor/leader of a resistance movement remained consistent, who exactly would be ruling this dystopian future and what form it would take, went through multiple permutations. As Povenmire recalls, “We thought it would be funnier if the dystopian overlord was somebody we knew – and we went through a lot of candidates. At one point, the overlord was Flanders who was ruling this sort of Stepford Wives thing[4], where you had to be happy all the time or you’d be lobotomised, simply because of the ludicrousness of the juxtaposition of Flanders as an Orwellian overlord. However, we ultimately picked Master Mind, obvious Terminator homage aside, pretty much because we always thought he was a great character on Bartman.”
According to Povenmire, they didn’t need to go far for inspiration or this sequence, “We cannibalised elements from a Bartman script that we’d written, but ultimately never got produced, where, through a time-travel accident, Bart ended up accidentally creating a future where Master Mind had taken over. Obviously, since this was Nuclear Family, not Bartman, we made it a bit more comedic, but…”
Bart, Lisa and Maggie actresses Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith and Jude Barsi, all having done voice acting for feature film, were all eager to reprise their characters for a movie, as Barsi recalls, “When I found out we were getting a movie, I thought ‘It’s about fucking time!’ Pun intended.” Recording their dialogue together, as they had done in the series, they improvised a lot of their lines, as Povenmire recalls “We all knew that when you get Nancy, Yeardley and Jude in a room together, they’ll be ad-libbing for days. When they’re recording together, they make a bit of a game out of it to try each take several times with the unspoken agreement that they’re just going to go further next time. By the end of each session, the whole crew are just pissing themselves laughing.”
“There was one scene where Bart, Lisa and Maggie end up witnessing the fall of Troy and Maggie goes ‘Just goes to show you should beware of Greeks bearing gifts’ – your basic historical in-joke. They decided to take that line and run with it. So by around take four, you had Jude as Maggie saying, ‘Tale as old as time – you meet a charming Greek guy, he gives you a gift, you let him penetrate your walls… then the Trojan breaks and seamen come pouring out.’
“… and then Nancy as Bart said ‘Woah! I was just gonna say ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’, but you… you went there! Can we even say that?!’
“… and then Jude replied with a ‘Weeelll, we just did…’
“And the whole crew is just rolling on the floor laughing.”
And, in grand NF tradition, Cartwright, Smith and Barsi were rubbing shoulders with a seemingly endless list of celebrity cameos, many of whom were playing real historical figures - these included Scarlett Johansson as a spoiled Cleopatra, Tom Hanks voicing his third cousin-quadrice-removed Abraham Lincoln, Derek Jacobi as a prissy Leonardo da Vinci and Joan Jett as a hard-rockin’ Boudicca. A cameo from Walt Disney was briefly considered, as a bit of biting-the-hand-humour, but was ultimately decided against.
What’s even more remarkable is nearly every guest star was Povenmire and Marsh’s first choice to play the characters, to which executive producer Groening credited to how far the show had come in its popularity, “In the early days of the show, we used to have to ring guest stars we wanted and beg them to do the show… for Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure, they were calling us.”
However, some had conditions, as Povenmire recounts, “We originally had Derek [Jacobi] as William Shakespeare – however, Derek asked if he could play somebody else, since he’s a supporter of a theory that states that William Shakespeare did not write the plays and that somebody else did[5]. So we put him in as da Vinci instead… and that gave us the scene where Bart, Lisa and Maggie steal Da Vinci’s flying machine and end up flying over Florence.”
However, the king of the cameos was, without a doubt, Tim Curry[6], playing the infamous occultist Count Alessandro di Caligostro as a PG-rated Dr. Frank-n-Furter with all the flamboyant scenery-chewing that implied. In a bonus for the adults in the audience, there were several explicit references to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the sequence – in particular, Caligostro’s butler is voiced by Richard O’Brien and portrayed as a pastiche of Riff-Raff.
According to Povenmire, they had written the Count in with Curry in mind, “We found out about Count Caligostro during our research and thought that he seemed like a really fun guy to include. And since Jeff and I are big Rocky Horror fans, we wrote him as basically Frank… well, obviously as close to Frank as we could get on a PG-rating. It was at that point we thought ‘it would be so awesome if we could actually get Tim Curry to play this character’ – fortunately, we did.”
You see, in a bit of serendipitous timing, Curry was on site that day recording audio pickups for his part as Oberon the Goblin King on Bartman. Once he had finished recording, Povenmire and Marsh asked him if he could voice Count Caligostro – and, according to Povenmire, not only did Curry say “yes with remarkable speed”, he even put them in touch with Richard O’Brien so they could cast him as Caligostro’s butler.
Aware that they were writing for a series that basically had obscure jokes aimed at the nerds in the audience as a key pillar of its humour, Povenmire and Marsh wrote the script with several jokes aimed specifically for any historians who may have been watching. For example, in the scene where Bart, Lisa and Maggie are trolling Martin Luther by dressing up as angels (long history), Maggie says, after Bart’s “95 feces” joke, “And speaking of which… He wants to tell you that it’s meant to go out of that hole at the back, not in the one at the front!”, a joke based on Luther’s long-suspected coprophagy. Marsh chuckles, “In our research, we found out that Martin Luther ate a spoonful of his own crap every morning… so we made a joke out of that. Basically, we made a piece of toilet humour out of a little-known historical fact – basically encapsulating that unique mixture of highbrow and lowbrow that makes Nuclear Family what it is… You’d almost think these things were thought through.”
Released on June 10th, 2004 (with a premiere in Springfield, Illinois – the winner of a competition from the many US cities of that name), Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure was a box-office hit, grossing almost $600 million worldwide[7], ending up as the most successful Disney animated film since The Lion King and 2004’s highest-grossing animated film, steamrolling most of its competition. The song "Back In Time", written specifically for the film by the UK pop-punk band The Termites[8] was a chart-topper.
Critically, the film was mostly positively received, with Roger Ebert describing it as “an enjoyably deranged time-travel romp that should entertain young and old alike”. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 2005 Oscars, but ultimately lost to The Further Life Of Toys – however, Bart, Lisa and Maggie did host NBC’s coverage of the Oscars. The film did gangbusters on home media and remains a popular direct-view title to this day.
The film remains popular among animation fans and is often cited as the one case where ‘television IP brought to the big-screen’ was good, with Animation Nation later writing, “Normally, ‘big-screen version of television IP’ movies are words enough to strike terror into anyone’s heart – the Hanna-Barbera films of the 90’s, which were (with few exceptions) so-so at best and dreadful at worst, abundantly proved that. However, most animation fans (except those purists who insist – loudly – that Groening ‘sold out’ after Bunyans) would agree that Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure represents an honourable exception – a television IP movie that keeps the show’s unique qualities, without feeling like something that really should have been released straight-to-video.”
With the film’s success, Bongo demonstrated that they were the up-and-coming players on the feature film block. In the same article, Animation Nation wrote, “You wouldn’t think it, but Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure was actually quite the hat-trick for Bongo – even with a dynamite IP like Nuclear Family, a studio’s feature debut done by an untested director ending up as Disney’s biggest commercial success since The Lion King is something that sounds too amazing to be true. This was enough to prove that Bongo were a studio to keep an eye on”.
The film has become very popular with history teachers in the almost two decades since its release, with teachers often showing scenes from the film, often to introduce kids to obscure historical figures. With a fond smile, Barsi says, “My son came home from school a few days ago and told me that they’d shown one of the scenes from Bart and Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure in his history class. I just thought ‘Wow’ – I’ve done something constructive.’”
The film is also significant for another reason – it is the last animated film that Jim Henson greenlit as Disney CCO (with The Space Between Us being the last live-action film[8]), which, as the man has acknowledged multiple times in the almost two decades since, is a hell of a note to end a career spanning almost two-decades on.
And, with the film’s success Bongo knew where they wanted to go next. Before the film a five-minute short called A Flight With Appa played. The short, co-storyboarded and directed by Bongo up-and-comers Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko[9], which depicted three kids seeing a polar landscape from the back of an enormous flying bison set to a cover of Walking in the Air, charmed audiences with its beautiful, Ghibli-esque visuals. Roughly a month later, Groening would reveal at Comic-Con that the short had only been a teaser for a show called Avatar, which Groening promised would be “Bongo’s biggest work yet”.
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[1] - These were both suggestions for a Simpsons movie OTL - the former ended up as the episode "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner", whilst the latter was apparently, Groening's initial idea for the '07 movie.
[2] - More on these to come!
[3] - This is, of course, Jeffrey Katzenberg - who, as you probably know, ended up as Chairman/CEO of WB. The release of Mr. Peabody and Sherman is partly Katz's old "dueling" strategy - and WB Animation acquiring Jay Ward Productions is because (out-of-universe) Disney and Universal had "all the good shit" when it came to animated IPs. (I mean there's going to be a future post which explores the two's relationship as the "Big Fish" of feature animation, but...).
[4] - This is was very nearly the case when I was writing this. I decided to use a Bartman villain for some Bongo Brand synergy.
[5] – This is actually true OTL - he did the introduction for Roland Emmerich's Anonymous (which is, in my view, a terrible, terrible movie) for that exact reason.
[6] - Hat-tip to my dad here - who's a big Rocky Horror fan and who I can well imagine laughing his ass off, whilst the TTL versions of me and my sister (7 and 8 at the time) look at him in confusion. In addition, Povenmire and Marsh are apparently big Rocky Horror fans OTL - that's why Richard O'Brien voiced... Richard in Phineas and Ferb.
[7] – Slightly better than the OTL Simpsons movie. Couple of reasons for this – the first reason is it’s being distributed by Walt Disney Feature Animation, so there's obviously greater name value. The second reason is that, rather than being the cause of a brief cultural renaissance, as the OTL Simpsons movie, Bart & Lisa’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure is the culmination of it. Here, Disney have spent the past several years making NF their “hot new IP” (sort of what Disney are doing with OTL Simpsons now), which will be explored in a future post.
[8] - Believe it or not, that's not a fictional band - they're known iOTL as Busted. Their cover of "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News also appears on the soundtrack.
[9] - And that's the reason why this is paired with The Space Between Us post- yup, this was a classic, @Geekhis Khan-ian pairing. Both of these are the last two films greenlit by Jim in his tenure as Chairman/CCO - the last live-action film and the last animated film respectively. They are, tonally, light and day from each other.... and yet are both pure Jim Henson in their own ways.
[10] - You might have seen him mentioned in the Bongo Studios post and as doing The Ice Dragon. As for Avatar... more to come on this!
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