spoilers below for The Simpsons“Treehouse of Horror: Not IT” is special, so be careful if you haven’t seen it yet!
for the first time in 34 seasons, The Simpsons I was finally given double the trick potion and dealt with it Two featured episodes of “The Tree House of Horror”with the first film being a full-length Simpsonification of Stephen King’s epic horror book He. She And the Detail feature adjustments, The second is the traditional three-story installment. But as viewers no doubt witnessed, Not IT was less of a downright parody and more of a storytelling exercise that dumped Springfield residents on the clown-inhabited streets of Kings Maine grounds.
CinemaBlend spoke with a long time Simpsons Writer, producer, and co-showrunner Matt Salman on upping the ante for “Treehouse” in 2022, getting a stand-alone addition to the show’s bizarre Halloween series, and how they treated King differently than fans expected. In addition to being a prolific novelist, past Simpsons Star guest Anaglyph rejected the second animation.
Why the Simpsons IT wasn’t a reference parody
By and large, when The Simpsons Aiming to parody something, the parodies are clear, present, and effective, with references piling throughout, especially the “Tree House of Horror” parodies. But the creative team took a turn around that methodology with Not IT, instead gluing characters to the bones of King’s double timeline narrative and placing more emphasis on Homer’s Marge-man comic book love triangle. Here’s how Matt Salman put it:
IT is not really an IT parody. It uses an IT story, as if it were an IT exploit. A kind of parody implies that we take into account the original story that is critical of IT, or that we are making fun of IT, but we are not really parodying it. We’re just saying, “Hey, thanks for the great story, IT. We’re going to work with her here. And our great writer who wrote the episode, Cesar Mazarigo, did a great job of trying to jam all the IT stuff.”
Although the episode clearly adheres He. SheThe most familiar tunes, with Krusty the Clown’s adorable performance on Pennywise to anchor it all (not to mention other great music), there aren’t nearly as many Stephen King gestures one might expect. The low turnout is clearly not due to a lack of source material, but rather a specific approach that avoids comparisons to other shows known to weigh in on King’s references. Salman continued:
Honestly, we haven’t actually gone the Easter egg route very often with this IT. Because there’s this Castle Rock show – which I’ve never seen, but I’m sure it’s a lot of fun – it’s like the expanded Stephen King universe. You know, every dinner refers to three books, every sandwich, and every car, right? Every radio station is a groove tune made by Stephen King in the 1950s or whatever, men in yellow coats everywhere, gunslinger somewhere. There are definitely Stephen King references in the episode, but it wasn’t like other things we did in the past where we were like, “Okay, let’s post as much Stephen King as we can.”
Matt Salman definitely wasn’t there, abundant references scattered all the time castle rocks2 seasons (both available with . extension) Hulu اشتراك subscription), although it is clearly not of the exact same type The Simpsons will deliver. I dare the canceled drama was never to go to try the Doctor Sleep Mattress Store gag. While Salman amusingly acknowledged the scandalous king of the setting, Salman said the writers were more interested in praising the novelist’s themes and tools than in providing blindfolds.
Yes, everything that happens in Kingfield was definitely a reference. delicate. And, you know, we really tried to take his storytelling and borrow that, because he’s so good at telling stories about friendships of kids and adults whose lives didn’t turn out the way they wanted them to. In addition to being the master of the terrifying, he is a kind of master of shattered childhood, the kind of terrible adulthood. The man is a scientist, he is a whole world.
The showrunner also explained how they reversed Stephen King’s world by having Krusty take Pennywise as a real threat at times, rather than always playing the joke, but then purposely rehash some He. SheThey plan to best fit the story they were aiming for. One particular example of this is how he treats the love poem, and below, Salman talks about adjusting the adult schedule as a reflection of their past. In his words:
In this, all adults, they think they have overcome their fears, and thus have specifically adult careers built on fears. The degree to which he conquered them, like Carl is afraid of aliens and then becomes an astronaut, Moe is afraid of ventriloquist dolls and then becomes rock ‘n’ roll, Chris Angel-style, Vegas badass, heavy metal ventriloquist. Marge is afraid of Seltzer, and becomes a soda water tycoon. So, kind of, I think, that’s a nice twist on Stephen King’s thing that they really thought they were clear, and in fact they’ve been given this great life that came from overcoming their childhood fears. This is different, Stephen King.
The fact that Corrupt Water Marge specifically uses the verb “drown” in its marketing campaign is a particularly excellent choice and obviously would have been too broad for the source material, but downright intimidating. I also loved the way Bart and Lisa’s characters were swapped with Comic Book Guy as their father, but that’s for another time.
It was the turn of The Simpsons, which Stephen King turned down
Given that Stephen King threw his subtle tones at the powerful fox that reappeared in the Season 12 episode “Insane Clown Poppy,” fans might have expected the author to reappear in the “Not IT” special. And that was clearly the plan the writers and producers were interested in, but it wasn’t meant to be. Matt Salman revealed that King refused the request, and she ponders whether the author realizes how much power and charisma he has.
Well, you know, former guest star Stephen King refused to take part in this show. Yes, he didn’t want to do that. I don’t know what his problem is. I don’t quite think it – some of these authors, they don’t understand that they have all the power. It is the brand. He should know that; It’s Stephen King. Very creative. Like, I don’t think I have time to read all the books he’s written in the rest of my life, let alone one person to write all those books.
I doubt anyone would wonder how busy Stephen King was from day to day, so he could have been working on any number of projects in that time The Simpsons reached out. It doesn’t look like he’s been put off ostensibly by the role they asked him to play either. Salman went back to explaining the role they assigned to him, saying:
We wrote a segment for Stephen King as a creepy gravedigger who turns out to be a monster, and he said no. Which was fine for us in the end, because we didn’t have time for that scene. I don’t know what we were going to cut. Despite the fact that we only tell one story in the allotted twenty minutes and forty seconds, we hardly fit it all. We hardly fit the first part into the ambiguous past and the second part into the ambiguous present.
For Stephen King it would have been a form of non-poetic justice as a cameo for his cut from a special novel dedicated to one of his most famous novels. But you don’t have to worry about that now. Perhaps the author will return more to the show if Kang and Kodos bring in some of it Tomeknockers Madness next year.
The Simpsons Broadcasts Sunday nights on Fox 8:00 p.m. ET (or when NFL coverage ends), with epic “Treehouse of Horror XXXIII” premiering on October 30. While waiting for it to arrive, head over to our site 2022 TV premiere schedule To see what else is on the horizon, check out all Upcoming Stephen King Movies & TV Shows This is on the way too.
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