Mike B. Anderson Jogged with Donald Sutherland Before Racing with John Waters
When legendary actor Donald Sterling passed away last week at age 88, the Twittersphere’s go-to tribute fodder among Simpsons enthusiasts was his ten-second tirade as Springfield Historical Society curator Hollis Hurlbut, the one-off key cog in Season 7’s “Lisa the Iconoclast.”
Having none of his would-be apprentice’s unflattering revelations on town founder Jebediah Springfield, Hollis expels Lisa plus her bloodline’s next two generations from the museum. A two-second beat follows before he appends a quicker, calmer clarifier, “for three months.”
One user, Tom Hartig, declared that middle-segment capper, “one of my top 5 Simpsons jokes of all time.”
If he had it entirely his way, Sutherland would have recorded that scene a little sooner. As Nathan Ditum noted in a 2009 Games Radar piece ranking the show’s top 20 guest spots among cinema standouts, Sutherland had initially asked to record his role in the episode’s middle segment first, thereby aping the standard pattern for shooting a movie.
That approach, however, was not feasible to small-screen animation, so the guest settled for what the Romans did. In turn, he enhanced a celebrated Mike B. Anderson’s directing debut, which premiered on February 18, 1996, and launched the series-long Simpsons crew staple’s most accolade-magnetic capacity.
Per his Internet Movie Database credits, Anderson has since directed another twenty-five teleplays. He had already been a fixture in the show’s animation department, starting as a cleanup artist with the tenth overall episode — “Homer’s Night Out” — in 1990. He subsequently assumed the titles of character layout artist, animation timer, and storyboard artist, balancing the latter with his directing duties on “Lisa the Iconoclast.” He was later a storyboard consultant and revisionist plus, starting in 2008, supervising director.
Those promotions have implicitly lessened his outright directing duties, which he has not reprised since Season 27’s “Halloween of Horror” in 2015. By the same token, they represent mounting credentials that crested in earnest when he had his most prolific directing season right after he first tried the role with Sutherland and company.
After “Lisa the Iconoclast,” seven other individuals combined to direct Season 7’s remaining nine episodes. But Anderson’s turns immediately picked up in frequency the next year, as he directed four stories on Season 8.
In terms of premiere dates, he double shifted to start with “Treehouse of Horror VII” and “You Only Move Twice.” The former gave him his second turn directing the late friend of the series Phil Hartman — who showed up in “Lisa the Iconoclast” as Troy McClure. The latter gave him the privilege of directing Albert Brooks’ third one-off Simpsons character, Hank Scorpio.
As an episode director, Anderson started two-for-two on his all-time Emmy ballot.
Along with those installments, Anderson bookended the eighth season by overseeing the performers in “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson.” There he embraced the challenge of another one-timer in Willem Dafoe and the honor of modeling for a minor character.
And in between, on February 16, 1997 — precisely fifty-two weeks to the date of Sutherland’s episode — Anderson made his next great career stride when “Homer’s Phobia” debuted.
That story garnered special mention in Anderson’s interview with the 2017 book Homer’s Odyssey: An Embiggened Simpsons Guide. The title for that tome comes from a neologism uttered by Hartman within Sutherland’s episode. In the book, Anderson was set up for one question with namedrops of Dafoe, Sutherland, and John Waters of “Homer’s Phobia” fame.
His take on working with outsiders in specialized roles, as quoted in the book: “I always want to study the guest celebrities’ work and try to get it right. Even if they are doing a voice for an entirely new character, you can use their known traits to help realise (sic) the personality of the new character.”
He subsequently expressed his wish for a “Homer’s Phobia” sequel, citing his sustained friendship with Waters. But the proposition also entails building on a critical foundation in his resume.
For the episode that sees Homer soften his stance on homosexuality, Anderson won an Annie for “Best Individual Achievement” and the 1998 World Animation Celebration title of Best Director for Primetime Series. With his crew, he earned his first of seventeen shared Emmy nods and first of four victories for it.
As an episode director, Anderson started two-for-two on his all-time Emmy ballot. “Homer’s Phobia” preceded “HOMR” — the first episode to premiere in the new millennium on January 7, 2001 — as the show’s first two victories with his imprint. Two more (“Mad About the Toy” in 2019 and “Treehouse of Horror XXXIII” in 2023) have come amid his much more consistent and protracted tenure as supervising director.
That said, through Season 35’s conclusion last month, he has amassed 356 teleplays — or the equivalent of roughly fourteen full seasons — in that capacity. He has accumulated essentially one season’s worth of episodes as director, and the same volume of Emmy wins as in other roles.
And he’s still talking about the project and guest that helped him garner the first, along with his only accolades from any other academy to date. Just as practically everyone continues to resurface Waters and Sutherland’s steps into Springfield — Anderson’s most awarded and very first swing at directing, respectively.
