The Simpsons voice actor Pamela Hayden, who has voiced Milhouse and several other characters on the show for over 35 years, has announced that she is retiring.
Hayden has voiced Milhouse Van Houten – the blue-haired best friend of Bart Simpson – for almost 700 episodes since the show first began in 1989.
Her final episode will be Treehouse Of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes, which airs on November 24.
As well as Milhouse, Hayden also voiced characters including school bully Jimbo Jones, Ned Flanders’ son Rod, Chief Wiggum’s wife Sarah and Lisa’s friend Janey Powell.
“People come up to me and they quote Milhouse lines,” Hayden said in a video announcing her retirement. “People are always saying what a nerd he is. But one thing that I love about Milhouse is he’s always getting knocked down, but he keeps getting up. I love the little guy.”
The video included clips of Milhouse as well as footage of Hayden early in her career in which she described working on The Simpsons as “the greatest job in the world.” You can watch the video here.
As per Variety, Hayden’s other acting credits include 2007’s The Simpsons Movie, Lloyd in Space and Pound Puppies.
In other Simpsons news, the series’ showrunner Matt Selman recently explained why he thinks the show is very good at predicting the future.
The animated series has famously foreseen several major events throughout its run, notably Donald Trump’s presidency, Disney’s takeover of Fox and iPhone autocorrect – to name a few.
Asked by People why the series has been great at such predictions, Selman responded: “Well, the sourpuss answer I always give that no one likes is that if you study history and math, it would be literally impossible for us not to predict things.
“If you say enough things, some of them are going to overlap with reality, and then that’s the math element. And then, the history element is if you make a show that is based on studying the past foolishness of humanity, you are surely going to anticipate the future foolishness of humanity as it sinks further into foolishness fair. So we don’t really think about it.”
However, he did stress that the list of things is “completely unregulated,” and that the writers “hate” when fans “put obviously fake images online and say, we predicted things that we didn’t”.
“It was nicer when the predictions were just predicting real horrible events, not people pretending we predicted horrible events,” Selman added, admitting it’s “very depressing and dispiriting that people want the magic to be true so bad that they just start” making up predictions that they never aired.
The show’s current 36th season recently kicked off with a fake “series finale”, which saw the return of Conan O’Brien – who wrote some of the show’s most iconic episodes in its earlier days.
The series is yet to be renewed for a 37th season, which comes amid speculation about the animated show’s future.
English (US) · 