Why The Simpsons Probably Won't Have A Planet Of The Apes-Style Episode Again

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In the 1996 "The Simpsons" episode "A Fish Called Selma," the long-beleaguered actor Troy McClure (Phil Hartman) finds himself at the DMV where Marge's sister Selma (Julie Kavner) works. He takes her to dinner in exchange for a passing grade on his eye exam, and the dinner is caught on film by the paparazzi. Troy's agent finds that the actor can stage a massive comeback if he continues to date and even marry Selma. Selma eventually learns the relationship is a sham, but she agrees to keep seeing Troy because, well, she has always been lovelorn and kind of lonely, and he will treat her well. "I'll make you the envy of every sham wife in town," Troy replies. 

One of the first gigs that Troy lands after dating Selma is the lead role in a stage musical adaptation of the 1968 movie version of "Planet of the Apes," itself the result of several wild pitches from the "Simpsons" creative team at the time. The musical is titled "Stop the Planet of the Apes. I Want to Get Off!" and features a song set to the tune of Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" about the orangutan Dr. Zaius. It's very amusing and imminently hummable. And, of course, all good "Simpsons" fans can sing about how they hate every ape they see, from chimpan-A to chimpanzee.

Vulture published an oral history of "A Fish Called Selma" in 2017, and the episode's creatives were all very proud of their work on the comparatively late addition of "Stop the Planet of the Apes." However, longtime "Simpsons" music editor Chris Ledesma noted that extended song sequences like that aren't possible on "The Simpsons" anymore because commercial breaks have gotten longer. There's too little time in half-hour shows now to squeeze in a two-minute musical number. 

Commercial breaks have gotten too long to accommodate musical numbers on The Simpsons

Chris Ledesma noted that "A Fish Called Selma" was part of what a lot of "Simpsons" fans like to refer to as the show's golden era (read: its first eight seasons), and he agreed that the episode is certainly golden. More modern seasons of "The Simpsons" have even tipped their hat to its "Planet of the Apes" parody. Be that as it may, sequences like this are now a thing of the past on the series. As Ledesma observed:

"This is not to say that the show's music has declined in any way, but the show is different. The approach to songs in the show is slightly different. We have 90 seconds more of commercials in the show today than we did 20 years ago. Think about it: a two-minute song, which by song standards is very short, but a two-minute song in 'The Simpsons' today would represent nearly 10 percent of the entire air time. You're not going to get a two-minute song like you did back then."

Perhaps the reason "A Fish Called Selma" works as well as it does, and why its in-episode musical is so spot on, is that its creatives at the time were actively trying to emulate previous seasons of the show. Bill Oakley, who was splitting showrunner duties with Josh Weinstein on "The Simpsons" when "A Fish called Selma" aired as part of Season 7, admitted that he had been trying to recreate the magic that the series had back in its third season, which he felt was the greatest season of TV ever produced.

That is the season that features famous episodes like "Stark Raving Dad," "Treehouse of Horror II," "Flaming Moe's," and "Homer at the Bat."

The Simpsons Season 7 sought to recapture the magic of Season 3

To quote Bill Oakley directly: 

"When we took over, we said, 'What was it about Season 3 that made it so good?' We reverse-engineered it and said, 'Well, a lot of the stories were pretty grounded, but they took a couple of crazy leaps out into space with, like, 'Homer at the Bat.' They did seven Homer episodes, three Lisa episodes, a Sideshow Bob, an Itchy and Scratchy, so we did exactly the same thing. Now as far as the Selma episode, there was an episode in Season 3 where she's going to marry Sideshow Bob."

So, "A Fish Called Selma" all came from the structural demands of the "Simpsons" showrunners at that point. It seems that it was one of the series' supervising producers, Steve Tompkins, who had the idea to feature a "Planet of the Apes" musical in the episode, and everything snowballed. The show's Falco fans tracked that "Amadeus" fit with "Dr. Zaius," and David X. Cohen wrote the line about chimpan-A through chimpanzee. 

Of course, the Vulture oral history goes very, very deep into detail over the songwriting and animation of "Stop the Planet of the Apes. I Want to Get Off!" (a title derived from the stage musical "Stop the World — I Want to Get Off"). Needless to say, everyone was on their A-game for this one. And now, very few of us can hear Falco's "Rock Me, Amadeus" without singing the "Dr. Zaius" version. It looks like they finally make monkeys out of all of us.