Mr. Burns and Homer being trapped and going insane in a cabin partially refers to "In a Far Country" by Jack London, in which two men came from so different backgrounds that they had nothing in common and they soon began to get on each other's nerves.
Homer's hallucinatory army is made up of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Zedong Mao (Mao Tse Tung), Mohandas K. Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), and Ramses.
This is so far the only episode to have the main cast with no "Also Starring" and no "Special Guest Voices".
The episode was written by John Swartzwelder, although the script underwent many rewrites. According to Josh Weinstein, "a Swartzwelder script is like a finely tooled crazy German machine and if you have the wrong engineers try to fix it, it blows up. And that's the thing, 'cause it had great jokes but we sort of changed the story and went through a bunch of drafts." The story was completely rewritten and as a result, the plot became odder and quirkier with the scenes of paranoia deriving from this.
Josh Weinstein feels that this was one of the first episodes to really feature the duo of Lenny Leonard and Carl Carlson and developed them more.