- Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer is 64.
- Julia Kavner, the voice of Marge is 71.
- Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart is 64.
- Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa is 57.
- 32 years
- 33 seasons
- 722 episodes
The Simpsons has been around for decades, but despite everything, the voice cast has remained almost entirely unchanged.
The show also doesn’t seem happy to recast characters of deceased actors.
Phil Hartman who voiced Lionel Hutz and Troy McClure died in 1998 and the show retired both characters.
Marcia Wallace who voiced Edna Krabapple died in 2013 and the show retired the character.
The only time they didn’t retire a character when the actor died was Martin Prince after voice actress Russi Taylor died in 2019 and even that was difficult for the show to do, where they debated it for a year.
For voice actors, many people believe they are expendable and for a while, it seemed that way.
- Bugs Bunny has been voiced by seven people.
- Mickey Mouse has had five voice actors, with the first being Walt Disney.
- Scooby Doo has had nineteen voice actors.
That makes replacements seem easy, but Futurama just proved it gets trickier.
Disney just announced they’d be bringing back Futurama to Hulu in a new series, but it was announced John DiMaggio wouldn’t be returning to voice Bender over salary issues.
It was rumored Mark Hamill was being asked to replace him as the voice of Bender, but Hamill came out DiMaggio’s support for a raise.
After internet backlash, Disney and DiMaggio reworked the deal and got him back.
That was one iconic voice and it seems like other studios could be in a similar jam to what Disney dealt with on Futurama and it wont just be over the Simpsons.
- Tom Kenny has voiced Spongebob for 23 years.
- Sean Schemel has voiced Goku for 24 years.
- Seth MacFarlene has voiced Peter, Brian & Stewie Griffin for 23 years.
All of these studios have made billions, where the Simpsons have made 15 billion since launch and Spongebob is over 20 billion.
They can’t beat death and it seems unpopular to just recast people, so that does lead to another option.
Computers
James Earl Jones is 91 years old and has voiced Darth Vader for 45 years.
Disney tried bringing in new actors to play younger versions of the original Star Wars cast with Solo and it lost 100 million.
On Disney+, they are just using deepfake tech to recreate actors like Luke Skywalker and even using computers to recreate the voice.
I don’t see Disney ever wanting to replace James Early Jones, so I feel it likely, they arrange the ability to recreate his voice forever with some ongoing royalty for his estate, adjusted for inflation.
Which if Disney can do that, why not do it for the cast of the Simpsons?
I don’t believe even the best Homer Simpson impersonator can do it as well as Dan Castellaneta. Why not just keep the show going after he leaves as well as everyone else and pay the estates each $100,000 every single time they use those voices?
This is obviously a big jump from where I started writing this, but clearly Disney won’t let the Simpsons end, Viacom won’t let Spongebob end and other examples exist.
Do computers eventually just replace iconic voices and do we get to a point voice acting isn’t even a thing anymore from that?
Interesting thing to think about.