Crave Online: Is Spider-pig in ride?
James L. Brooks: No.
Crave Online: What is coming up next season on The Simpsons?
James L. Brooks: We've just started to work and we feel pretty good about the season coming up. Everybody wants to talk about how long we've been on but we're always guys sweating the next season.
Crave Online: The Jim Jarmusch cameo was classic. How do you keep it fresh after all this time?
James L. Brooks: I have no explanation for this but up until the 10th year, we were just going crazy with "We've done that, we've done that" to crack stories. Then we got over a hump where suddenly it's less and less of a problem and I have no explanation for it. It's just absolutely true what I'm telling you.
Crave Online: How involved were you in the ride?
James L. Brooks: I was pretty involved. It worked like everything works. It was a lot of trial and error. About six months ago, we rode a rough version and we felt that we had to make a lot of changes and we had to almost invent a process to make those changes because it was late in the game as these things go. Universal was great and they're sort of fun and working with a different culture. You sort of get that treat on The Simpsons, like suddenly you're working with the people who make your game and it's very interesting because it gets you outside yourself and outside your own box. So it was a ride working on the ride.
Crave Online: Did you get any backlash from the Back to the Future fans?
James L. Brooks: We were very worried about that. I love Back to the Future. I love that ride. It's my favorite ride at the park but I never go on all the blogs because there's going to be some kid who says something where you feel bad that night. So all my colleagues go on it and apparently the blogs are going nuts over this ride.
Crave Online: Why will this ride be a hit?
James L. Brooks: It's funny, it's scary and it's a ride. It's a real ride and there's storytelling in it and there's unexpected things happening in it. There's fun. I think it has the spirit of the show.
Crave Online: Is it a little futuristic too?
James L. Brooks: Yeah, people wonder how you did it. That's great and it's always stupid to talk about it because everybody talks about it and never has any real texture when you just say the words, but mixing the two cultures is tricky. It took everything each of us had to pull this off.
Matt Groening was happy just to draw his pictures. Now he's got his own theme park ride on top of his TV show, movie and all the licensed Simpsons products. He seems like a happy guy.
Crave Online: What's your favorite Simpsons episode?
Matt Groening: My favorite episode of The Simpsons is one that we just had one in which Homer ends up dressing up in a cow suit. That's all I can say, just Homer in a cow suit being led to a slaughterhouse is very funny.
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