The Real Reason 'The Simpsons' Parodied 'Planet Of The Apes' (2024)

The Simpsons was (and still is) a pop-culture juggernaut. While the show may not be as beloved as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, it still has healthy ratings that havemade its cast members a lot of money. But, more importantly, it's also shaped the way we view the world. This is, in part, due to all of the nerve-racking and accurate predictions the show made of the future.

Then, of course, there were all of the times that celebrities such as Conan O'Brien and Seth Rogan shaped the show and found new ways of it shedding light onto the way we interact with our family, our businesses, and our society as a whole. In between all of that were touching stories, ridiculously hilarious (and often stupid) comic gags, and a heap of pop culture references. Perhaps most famously, this includes The Planet Of The Apes musical number.

Here's the wonderful truth of how the "Dr. Zauis, Dr. Zauis" number became one of the most memorable references in the show.

Creating This Moment Was Surprisingly Easy

The musical number and Planet Of The Apes reference aired in the seventh season in an episode called "A Fish Called Selma". While this is one of the thousands of pop culture references in the show, which includes other moments from The Planet of the Apes movies, it's certainly one of the most memorable. At least, according to a fantastic Vulture oral history of the show, it was for the show's showrunners and writers.

Why? Well, because it came together in a surprisingly easy manner.

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"Usually, we sit around and think for hours and hours until our brains are smoking," David X. Cohen, a longtime Simpsons writer, told Variety.

But for the "Dr. Zauis" moment, things just came together. And this is pretty remarkable given that it had so many moving parts including old vaudeville jokes, '80s Austrian-pop, break dancing, and, of course, monkeys.

Giving Troy McClure His Big Apey Musical Moment

Given that everyone in America had pretty much heard about Planet of the Apes, and even the film's ending, it made sense that writer-producer and season seven co-showrunner Bill Oakley pushed for it.

Somewhat ironically, the other co-showrunner of that season, Josh Weinstein, had never seen Planet of the Apes but loved the pop culture osmosis that was taking place.

Josh and Bill also wanted to take one of the secondary characters and feature them in the episode since by the seventh season they had room to play with them. They chose Phil Hartman's Troy McClure (a TV personality) who, in the episode, was trying to resurrect his career and squash rumors about himself by marrying one of Marge's sisters, Selma. And he did this by having a big moment in a musical for Planet of the Apes.

"The musical wasn’t even in the first draft!" Bill Oakley told Vulture.

"We needed Troy to have a big comeback. That was the big question: What is his big comeback gonna be?" Josh Weinstein added.

Luckily, a supervising producer named Steve Tompkins had the original idea for the musical for Planet of the Apes... a ridiculous notion that was just perfect for the satirical tone of The Simpsons.

"I was out of the room and I came back and the whole thing had been written. I can recall a rare sense of electricity. I wasn’t gone for more than a few hours!" Bill described.

When it came time to decide which song would be featured, the writers referred back to their love of "Rock Me, Amadeus"... And, of course, it took on the name of a character in the movie, Dr. Zaius. Then, the song basically wrote itself...

"I know David Cohen had one of the best Simpsons lines ever, which is “I hate every ape I see from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z," Josh Weinstein claimed.

Usually, there will be 20 minutes of the writer's room working in silence trying to come up with a funny line. But, in this case, everyone was feeding off of each other.

The scene ended up being so strong it was barely edited after that one day.They all saw it as a"creative burst of brilliance".

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Then, Simpsons composer Alf Clausen pushed his team to create the music that sounded almost identical to the original "Rock Me, Amadeus" song without infringing on copyright issues. Luckily, they never had any copyright issues with it or basically any other music on the show.

Ultimately, the moment went down as one of the best in Simpsons history. Like most of the show's best satirical moments, the "Dr. Zaius, Dr. Zaius" moment took itself incredibly seriously. This was especially true of the show-within-a-show moment when Troy McClure parodied the usually stoic Charlton Heaston.

It was wonderfully ridiculous. Essentially, it was The Simpsons at its finest.

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