In high school, Greg Daniels encouraged a bully to sell him his soul for 50 cents, and then convinced classmates to frighten the bully into buying his soul back for an inflated price. Daniels repeated this ploy, but stopped when he realized that the only other person in history who has profited off others' souls was Satan, and that "scared" him.
When the church congregation is singing along with "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", as time passes a subtitle appears reading "seventeen minutes later." That song actually does run just over seventeen minutes long.
Nancy Cartwright stated this as one of her top three episodes together with Lisa's Substitute (1991) and Bart the Mother (1998).
Following this story, young people across the country began selling scraps of paper to each other upon which they had inscribed their names and souls.
Wesley Archer was disappointed with the dream sequence in which Bart sees his friends playing with their souls. Archer said that he had forgotten to tell the animators to make the souls transparent, so they were painted blue instead.