BONUS! Man at Moe's and Richard Sakai
Added 2024-03-19 09:00:01 +0000 UTCWe have one more character to cover before we wrap this episode up, but we're gonna skip ahead briefly to spotlight these two background characters.
The guy on the left has no interesting trivia and we will ignore him immediately.
The guy on the right is Richard Sakai. Sakai has been a producer on The Simpsons since the very beginning, having worked with James L Brooks since 1977. He's been with Gracie Films since the very start, meaning he also has producer credits on things like "Jerry Maguire" and "As Good As It Gets"*. You may think it's strange to even suggest that Simpsons caricature could match up to a real man, but that moustache is undeniable:
Sakai appears a few more times in the show, and his design even gets a speaking role eventually, so we'll be seeing him again. I'll save his further appearances for then. Maybe by then I'll have figured out what a producer actually does.
Sakai is currently the president of Gracie Films, which is a company mostly in The Simpsons business, but I did experience a surreal "huh?" moment when their logo popped up at the start of "Are You There God? It's Me Margaret." from last year. Their logo is so closely associated with the end of The Simpsons that it's very strange to see it anywhere else these days.
*Fun fact, these are the same two films I referenced when I last talked about Gracie Films. Apparently I haven't seen much else of their filmography.
This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.
