Talking Simpsons - Rebecca Sugar Bonus Interview

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

We hope you enjoyed our recent Selma's Choice podcast as much as we did, and we decided to share even more of our chat with our amazing guest, the creator of Steven Universe, Rebecca Sugar! Hear almost 20 more minutes of conversation with Rebecca about her new album, Spiral Bound, (out now!), as well as some new details on how some Simpsons productions compared to Steven Universe, what classic Simpsons says about gender, more of Sugar's thoughts on her Simpsons-inspired comic "Don't Cry For Me, I'm Already Dead," and so much more! Support this podcast and get over 150 bonus episodes by visiting Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and becoming a patron! And please follow the official Twitter, @TalkSimpsonsPod!

Good morning, afternoon. Good morning, afternoon. I didn't think that I'd be seeing you so soon. Wasn't it just 11? Ahoy, ahoy, everybody, and welcome to some special Talking Simpsons bonus content. I am one of your hosts, the JubJub lover, Bob Mackie. And who is here with me today, as always? Henry Gilbert, a lover of Steven Universe and JubJub. And yeah, this is an exciting bonus we have spinning right out of our recent Selma's Choice podcast. Yes, if you can believe it, at times a Talking Simpsons episode can be too long and we decided that we would offload some of

the interview content with rebecca sugar into its own little bonus episode for you all to enjoy outside of the discussion about selma's choice yes we had so many questions about rebecca's career and work on steven universe and and all that and if you listen to the podcast all the way she even asked us like you know cut this down cut it down like even she was feeling like she was slightly self-conscious about how long it was but we we loved every second of it but yes we wanted to to give people another chance to to hear some of the extra stuff we chatted with rebecca about as well as you know i uh to to boost up again to let people know uh they should really be checking out the brand new album of music she just released spiral bound which again is is so so good and as she said you know on the main podcast too you can find that on spotify on youtube on bandcamp on

pretty much all places like officially that you can find music and give it a listen to like it's six brand new songs the first music she's written you know know, for herself and released ever. Like she had a great story on the podcast saying like she she'd been writing songs for cartoon characters to say. And now she is, you know, finally having herself say them and sing them. And it's it's really exciting to hear. And not only that, but Rebecca even let me know that we could plug in here a little bit of one of her songs just in case you guys haven't heard it yet so right here is the one i mentioned on the podcast uh that was one of my favorites on the album adams morgan 1991 and maybe at the end you'll even hear a little bit of another one of my favorite songs from the album good morning afternoon uh and remember again that's

spotify youtube most places you find music check check it out spiral bound is the album and without further ado here's a bit of adams morgan 1991 as we roll into the interview with rebecca sugar blackberries growing on a chain link fence cool breezes blowing through an open door sidewalks are cracking in the midday sun Adams Morgan 1991 Cold pizza waiting in the kitchen fridge Blue pilly carpet on an endless floor Warm light is streaming where the children run Adams Morgan, 1991

Rebecca, in Don't Cry For Me, I'm Already Dead, I was just rereading it again, and it's like, obviously, you know, it reminds me a lot of my own 20s. I was a Jim or an Alan, I think. Me and Bob are a Jim and Alan, I'd say. And Bob better cry in my deathbed too. Okay. It's going to happen.

I promise on this very podcast, it will happen. Well, now we're just saying Henry's going to die first, and I'm uncomfortable with that. No, no. But also, I think my favorite great use of a Simpsons reference in it was when Alan is Jim's best man at his wedding. And he is quoting what Abe says to Homer about time travel that he did say at his wedding in Treehouse Five. And I was like, oh, that is such like a great like layered reference. That was that was the one that was the one that's a Twilight Zone reference. But it's the Simpsons that that's that's the one that I was called out for as being like that's not really from the Simpsons but yeah I thought that it's very well observed Rebecca because my

wife and I have Simpsons references inside of our wedding ring we have we have the words good waffles inside of our wedding rings you can't see it on camera but uh just because we love that scene so much we love that joke so much and we're gonna stick together that's what good waffles do that's I love that that's the thing that I really wanted to be at the heart of that was, you know, I feel like when, this is something I've also realized kind of over the last decade too, is like watching things together, it just is my family's love language. And I think that that has laid the foundation for my relationship with all of my friends and my romantic relationships. We connect over pop culture, media, animation, and The Simpsons so much when I was younger. And what I really

wanted to do with that comic was just talk about how if that's your way of connecting with someone, that that's legitimate, that that's beautiful, and that's incredible. And maybe that's, I don't know, I was frustrated at the time, And I continue to be about how it's somehow seen, you know, as as sort of silly, if that's the thing that you're connecting over, you know, I wanted to show that that would be as I was reading a lot of like, I read a lot of Oliver Sachs and stuff, too. You know, it's like, oh, people will retain music in their minds, sometimes when they lose everything else. And it's like, you know, when you have these deep memories and deep connections over a piece of media, you know, it becomes a part of your life and it becomes real. And as I was making a TV show, I really wanted to keep that in mind the whole time that, you know, I hope that this can,

and the power of it isn't so much what we were making, but the fact that it could become part of someone's life and part of their relationships and something that you can connect over. To me, that's where all this power and beauty is. And I wanted to explore that. I think I went a little hard back then in terms of the, this is dark. I'm sorry. That's what makes it so memorable. I mean, while watching this episode for research, I did think of your comic, Rebecca, the Don't Cry For Me, I'm Already Dead comic, because just the tiniest things are the things my wife and I will repeat to each other from The Simpsons. And I forgot it was in this episode where my wife, she wears a hat most of the time when she goes out. And often she'll leave it it sitting behind on a chair or, you know, on a table at a restaurant.

And I will repeat the guy saying, forgot my hat when she forgets her hat. Right. So it happens maybe like once every two months. And then I remember like I say, forgot my hat. And I forgot it's in this episode. It's just a random guy. I don't know why that's stuck in my head, but it did. Yeah.

This episode is full of a lot of quotable lines. I think I am the lizard queen is one of the most quotable from this episode to me that stands out. But there's so many good. The lines from Surly at Duff Gardens are- All the Surly lines, yes. Yeah, every one transcends.

I wasn't taping all of these episodes like henry was i i couldn't get blank tapes that easily so there were there were huge gaps but this is one i definitely re-watch a lot as a kid and i loved as a kid and watching as an adult i'm just wondering why did i like it so much is it just the five minutes of theme park stuff and maybe that was it but i realized i don't know 17 minutes of this show are about Selma and coming to terms with aging as a woman and wanting to have a family and things like that. Things that a 10-year-old at the time, a 10-year-old boy can't really come to grips with or understand. Oh, yeah. When I was returning to this, I was like, oh, they write the Deaf Gardens episode.

Lisa drinks the water. That's what I wrote. Lisa drinks the water. Lizard Queen. Homer eats a sandwich. Yes. I remembered Homer's's sandwich but i forgot that was also in this which i think is kind of funny that there's two pale hallucinating sick people in one episode it's like it's like that's a little bit of a double beat but uh different reasons so i suppose it's all right oh so what were you were saying previously i i forget where i read it but wasn't the thing that james. Brooks always wanted Marge does something or Marge has an even better for the sisters that actually like usually James L. Brooks, who is the final say on whether you do an episode or not, at least back then, he would really buy into a pitch from from a woman's perspective, which totally makes sense. Like his Brooks, you know, he won Oscars based on his writing for women and the Mary Tyler Moore show. Like he he was very into telling

stories of women in his stuff right yeah and all but also conversely there was a trend around this time on the show where new writers were kind of punished in quotes by having to write Marge episodes because they were the hardest that's why Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein their first episodes are Marge Gets a Job and Marge and Chains because it was easy to write Homer and I guess easy to write Bart but they were I mean they were all a group of middle-aged men and they they weren't as into writing Marge lines as the driving force of a story right well it's funny too listeners would have just heard it but I was just thinking about this with we're preparing for Marge versus the monorail as we record this and it's called Marge versus the monorail and you know framed as marge

discovers the secret of the monorail and then in act three homer just steals it and he saves the day and like marge doesn't really do anything and actually yeah that was conan what conan's second episode for the show right that one feels really conan o'brien-y to me yeah yes yeah no maybe that was his final extra push on it of just like oh and uh and Marge, she's the one who saves the day. And then they sneak in in Act 3. It's like, actually, Homer saves the day. Right. Oh, man.

That one's eternal. Well, yeah, Rebecca, too. Do you guys, you know, this era of The Simpsons really has a lot of like changing dialogue at the last minute and re-editing mouth movements to fit a new line. How often did you guys change dialogue late after, say, after it comes back from overseas animation? We would do it. If we really needed to, we could make a new scene. We could create an entirely new scene with retakes and slip it in. We definitely added a lot of...

I mean, it was always a godsend when you'd have a scene with the back of someone's head because it meant that you could ADR. And yes, we would manipulate. I mean, also, like I'm very particular as an animator, like if we did get an ADR line, you know, we could go in and manipulate the lip sync to try and get it to look, to try to get it to match because we'd be in the edit base slipping the line in. We didn't do it a huge amount. And usually when we did it would be for clarity. It wouldn't be for punch up. If we're watching this thing down and we're

just like, oh, we totally forgot to mention this thing you need to know within this episode, especially about lore or characters. I'm trying to think of some of the times that we would do it. But yeah, it's wild going back to Simpsons because the writers would be involved up until the last second. And so you'd see a lot of ADR jokes. And the fact that the lip sync won't hook up, it's fun to just wonder, oh, what was this going to be? I definitely couldn't, I didn't spot that when I was young. There's the whole Froger exchange, which is a big part of Don't Cry. When I went back to see that, I was like, oh, this scene is a Frankenstein. I think they just fabricated this entire thing. Stuff looks like it's played and then extended and some things are reversed and mouths are being manipulated. I didn't know how

to see that when I was younger, but now I like being able to see how these things are kind of collaged together. Yeah. Well, it's something in HD too2 that you can really it's easier to tell the because they edited on vhs back then unlike today's editing right yeah yeah we can get we could get really particular and we could we could isolate mouths and hold other parts of the body and we did like a lot of our camera shakes and posts and gels for different well we had we had a after effects department as well which only later on in the show we campaigned for years and years to have an effects department because we did it really traditionally i mean we would like if you needed a certain time of day like you couldn't just throw a color on something like you'd have to build every palette for everything every prop

and every character had to be in a certain lighting and then you'd send all those blueprints to the studio so yeah but we definitely had some flexibility for like holding holding mouths and and changing that you guys wouldn't have references to like you know say a pop culture figure who might die before the episode come out that wasn't a danger for you guys you know what happened once it was that was kind of like this oh my gosh i'm like should i even tell this story there was this there's a scene in an episode right right after steven finds out about pink diamond where he's talking to Amethyst and he's sitting in the pizza parlor. And he's kind of folding all of his pizza toppings into a napkin and tying them as he's nervously talking about all these different aspects of his mother.

And he had a line where he was talking about how he could see how she was good and bad to both sides. And it was exactly when there was a both sides comment from Trump, like weeks before we were finalizing this episode, where just even saying the words both sides was just so upsetting. And we cut it, we changed the line at the last second. I'd say that's probably the closest thing. It wasn't a pop culture reference. But it was just like, no, no, no, like that's not what we're trying to do here. You know, and similarly, I think, you know, we did the whole gem harvest episode, which was completely recontextualized when it when it came out weeks after because that because at the time that we made it, it was like, Oh, Uncle Andy is completely stuck in the past, like, like this,

people don't agree with this way of thinking anymore. And he needs to he needs to realize that and he needs to sort of join all of us in the present. And it was just like, the second it came out, it was like, this doesn't mean this at all anymore. And, you know, trying to figure out right before it comes out, I know how to really clarify what that was. Because that episode aired Thanksgiving 2016. Yes. Which was a very fraught time that you did not, couldn't have anticipated. No, because we're writing it a year before, you know, and at the time we were writing it, it was like, what a lonely person, you know, nobody agrees with him. I mean, it a year before, you know, and, and at the time we were writing it, it was like,

what a lonely person, you know, nobody agrees with him. I mean, it's just so, it was so different. I mean, it also, you know, obviously it was real as well. And it was something that we were, so much of the show, you know, we're, we're about things and kinds of people that we had experienced and, you know, these, these things were all real, but that was just not, the conversation was not active in that particular way when we were writing, if you know what I mean. So yes, in that case, yeah, there were times where at the very last second, usually because of just a conversation that was suddenly emerging and we could finesse the lines a little bit to just make sure that our stance was actually clear and that we weren't trying to make a reference to something that had just been um that had just become a big point of discussion

yeah i mean i don't know if you want to include that that's that's like neither here nor there but yes we would have to jump in and do that sometime i do like it's funny how uh or interesting how like after a few months past you might even forget that uh oh somebody said something similar because i was looking back at my original notes for this episode we covered it originally in november of 2016 at the end so similar story in my notes, I don't even know what this is referenced to. We get to the end of the episode and we're going to talk about Murphy Brown. But in my notes, I have compared to Trump getting mad over Hamilton. And I'm like, I have no idea what that means. Oh my gosh. It's seven plus years later. I have no idea what that means, but I know

I'm sure everyone was talking about it when that episode went live but i i forget what i mean i know mike pence went to a hamilton thing and maybe the the cast talked to him i for i i have no idea again but it's it's weird how much these things occupy our brains oh go ahead right they all stood and they and they protested the yeah i i vaguely remember yeah i think you really have to remember it's like you look at those words and you're like, oh, yeah, something like what I mentioned happened. But yeah, I think I remember that. Yeah, that's great. So we cover this when that Gem Harvest episode aired.

Apparently the last time we did this was November 30th, 2016. Oh, Selma's Choice? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Wild. Also, there's another great bit on the commentary of Groening pointing out

that like, oh, there's another that kid. There's a foreground or background character that just is Bart that they drew in there, which is much more of a season one kind of deal. And yeah, I mean, Rebecca, you guys were pretty watchful over your background characters, right? Yeah, yeah. We had a lot of go to extras. I mean, we kind of designed a cast of especially of boardwalk boardies, who we would always return to be like mushroom shirt guy is there. A lot of them were crew members as well. I remember we had an issue when we there's a party that Kevin is throwing in an episode later, and we and we put a lot of our of the Stephen crew at the party, but we had to take people's

glasses off because like, I'd say 98% of us wore glasses. And when you looked at this shot, it's just like, everyone, everyone has glasses. It's like quite samey. So we, um, we had to modify some of our self inserts there. Was this a nerd party that Kevin's throwing here? But, um, but yeah, yeah. And they all had, they all had their different little, little names, but yeah, it's, it, crowds are tough. It's tough. It's funny. I've been rewatching a lot of old Looney Tunes with Ian.

And looking at those old cartoons, there's a maximum of two characters on screen at a time. They just don't do crowds. And when there are crowds, it's just shapes of paint and sound effects. Because crowds are really, really hard. And then doing them for television you know that's challenging and and to to do a shot with like 16 characters in it and to do a shot with one character in it like nobody there's no the pay is the same there's no extra time you know it's just really punishing to do so yeah it makes sense you got to just you find a way to reuse whatever you can with characters too also with locations we were

always trying to find ways to do clever reuse there's a story um uh because we would we would use all the time the stage that they would set up on the beach and we'd find different ways to repurpose it it's like there's a concert or there's like a political debate and it's like it's all we would always get to use the stage and um the stage and then the same crowd you know it's like these are the people live here they're showing up at the concert or they're using the same stage and then one year they actually made that stage for comic-con so and you can go up and do karaoke on it and stuff and i was talking to to the steven universe writers ben and matt who went on to create craig of the creek we would do it at the writing stage we'd be like we have to figure out a way to

reuse these characters or reuse this reuse this location uh we walked into comic-con and they saw the stage and and ben said his first thought was like oh good reuse like they didn't have to build this thing from the it's like they had to build this from the ground up there's nothing that was economical about doing that but it's just like it's such an impulse like yes we can use this again we can use this place again we can use mushroom shirt guy again it's like just yeah we have it so yeah it makes sense it's like yeah sometimes you just have to find you just have to throw an extra bard in there you know sometimes an extra part shows up i mean macaraning i mean he's not an animator of course but he would tell the animators or the

director make it like dumbo put the crowd in the dark less detail that way the problem is the show had too many riots during the day in springfield. You couldn't always have a crowd politely sitting in the dark. Yes. Schoolyard graffiti of the Scooby gang Wild secret garden with a chlorine

pool Long rule how shadows when the day is done Adams Morgan 1991 Long children's faces when the day is done Adams Morgan 1991