page_title: The Mansion Family
section_title: Production
hierarchical_section_title: The Mansion Family / Production
caption_attribution_description: English: Britney Spears, Carson, California on May 11, 2013 - Photo by Glenn Francis of www.PacificProDigital.com
context_page_description: "The Mansion Family" is the twelfth episode of the eleventh season of the American animated sitcom The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on January 23, 2000, and was watched in around 11.3 million homes during the broadcast. In the episode, Mr. Burns goes to the Mayo Clinic for a check-up after being declared the oldest man in Springfield at an awards ceremony. He leaves the Simpson family to house-sit his mansion for him. When Homer throws a party on Burns' private yacht in international waters, the party goers are captured by Chinese pirates.
  American pop singer Britney Spears guest starred in "The Mansion Family" as herself. She appears as the host of the awards ceremony. The episode, which was written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Michael Polcino, features several cultural references. Many parts of the story were inspired by real-life events experienced by some of the staff members of the series.
  Since airing, the episode has received generally mixed reviews from critics. It was released on the DVD collection The Simpsons Gone Wild in 2004, and The Simpsons – The Complete Eleventh Season in 2008.
context_section_description: "The Mansion Family" was written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Michael Polcino as part of the eleventh season of The Simpsons (1999–2000). It was the first of many episodes of the series that Polcino directed. Executive producer Mike Scully was the one who received the idea for the first part of the story. He explained on a DVD audio commentary for the episode that his grandmother was the oldest citizen of his hometown West Springfield, Massachusetts, and "they had a ceremony where she was awarded a cane that had a golden head on it. And the weird thing of the ceremony is her name wasn't on the cane, and the mayor of the town stood up and he says: 'And now, of course as soon as Hazel passes away, her name will be engraved on the cane.' So she would never live to see it happen. But nonetheless, she was given the cane."
  The subplot of "The Mansion Family", where Mr. Burns gets a medical examination, was inspired by Swartzwelder's own visit to a Mayo Clinic. George Meyer, an executive producer on the series, has said that "John, I don't think is a guy who goes to the doctor very often. And every 20 or 30 years, he decides he needs to get a tune up. So he went to the Mayo Clinic, had they give him an entire battery of tests. And as John [jokingly] tells it, they said that his constant smoking had done no harm to him whatsoever. Might even be benefiting him." While writing the parts of the episode that involve international waters, the writers did research and found that the actual laws of international waters are more complex and ambiguous compared to what they had already written in the story, but they decided to ignore that.
  American pop singer Britney Spears guest starred in the episode as herself. According to Scully, she was seventeen to eighteen years old when she recorded her lines, and "She was a lot of fun to work with. She was a fan of the show, and she was willing to do all the lines. It was all the people around her that were crazy, the management and all that. We originally had her introduce herself [in the episode] as 'I'm teenage songbird Britney Spears.' And she recorded a few takes and they were fine. And suddenly, all these guys come rushing in [saying] 'She can't say songbird.' [We asked] what's wrong with songbird? And they were somehow convinced that it was some sort of slam or an insult."  The staff members were therefore forced to change her opening line to "I'm teen sensation Britney Spears."
  Many scenes in "The Mansion Family" were inspired by popular culture. For example, there is a painting hanging on one of the walls in Burns' mansion that depicts Burns playing poker with dogs, referencing the oil paintings series Dogs Playing Poker. Another painting, showing a nude Burns, is a callback to a previous episode of the series, "Brush with Greatness" (1991), in which Marge produced the painting for Burns. Featured in the episode is also a joke that makes fun of the Grammy Awards. During the awards ceremony, Homer complains, "Why won't anyone give me an award?" When Lisa points out that "You won a Grammy," Homer says "I mean an award that's worth winning." At this point the screen freezes and a message scrolls across the bottom of the screen reading "LEGAL DISCLAIMER: Mr. Simpson's opinions do not reflect those of the producers, who don't consider the Grammy an award at all."
caption: Singer Britney Spears appears in the episode.
exif: {}