"Rhapsody in Blue" is the first "Fantasia" segment with music from the American composer George Gershwin. It originated in 1992 when director and animator Eric Goldberg approached Al Hirschfeld about the idea of an animated short set to Gershwin's composition in the style of Hirschfeld's illustrations. Hirschfeld agreed to serve as artistic consultant and allowed the animators to use and adapt his previous works for the segment. Goldberg's wife Susan was art director. Duke is named after jazz artist Duke Ellington. The bottom of his toothpaste tube reads "NINA", an Easter egg referencing Hirschfeld's daughter Nina. Rachel was designed after the Goldbergs' daughter and John is based on animation historian and author John Culhane and Hirschfeld's caricature of Alexander Woollcott. Goldberg took Hirschfeld's original illustration of Gershwin and animated it to make him play the piano. Featured in the crowd emerging from the hotel are depictions of Brooks Atkinson and Hirschfeld, along with his wife Dolly Haas. The segment was completed two months ahead of schedule from February 1999 to April 1999. The animators from the production hiatus of "Kingdom of the Sun" were reassigned to work on the segment. Despite this, the sequence was so chromatically complex that the rendering process using the CAPS system delayed work on "Tarzan".