Friday, 25 May 2012

Milhouse Van Houten And The Simpsons---The animated television series The Simpsons featured a fictional character, Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten, which is , voiced by Pamela Hayden. He is Bart Simpson’s best friend in Mrs. Krabappel’s fourth grade class at Springfield Elementary School. Milhouse was designed by Matt Groening for a Butterfinger commercial, and it was decided to use the character in the series.

Milhouse was named after US President Richard Nixon, whose middle name was Milhous. The name was the most “unfortunate name Matt Groening could think of for a kid”.Years earlier, in a 1986 Life in Hell comic entitled “What to Name the Baby”, Groening listed Milhous as a name “no longer recommended”.


Milhouse is a favorite among the staff as Al Jean noted “most of the writers are more like Milhouse than Bart”. His last name was given to him by Howard Gewirtz, a freelance writer who wrote the episode “Homer Defined”. He got the name from one of his wife’s friends.

Milhouse is smart, studious boy, but he is unpopular and deeply insecure. He is also very gullible; he is constantly led into trouble by Bart, who is not shy about taking advantage of his naïve and trusting nature. Milhouse is one of the few residents in Springfield with visible eyebrows. He has a little Lhasa Apso dog, as revealed in the episode “Lisa’s Date with Density”.

The Simpsons’ seventh season’s fourth episode is ‘Bart Sells His Soul’. Bart Sells His Soul was written by Greg Daniels, who was inspired by an experience from his youth where he had purchased a bully’s soul. Director Wesley Archer and his team of animators visited Chili’s for examples to use in Moe’s family restaurant.

Bartholomew JoJo “Bart” Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the Simpson family.

Bart Sells His Soul first aired in the United States on the Fox network, on October 8, 1995. In the episode, while being punished for playing a prank at church, Bart declares that there is no such thing as a soul and to prove it he sells his to Milhouse for $5 in the form of a piece of paper with “Bart Simpson’s soul” written on it.

Lisa warns Bart he will regret this decision, and Bart soon witnesses odd changes in his life. Believing he really has lost his soul, he becomes desperate to get it back. Lisa eventually acquires it and returns it to a relieved Bart.

Bart Sells His Soul” was the second episode to be executive produced by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein. Oakley and Weinstein wanted to start the season with episodes that had an emotional bias in an effort to center the Simpson family. The episode was written by Greg Daniels, who originally had an idea for a plot that dealt with racism in Springfield.

In its original American broadcast, “Bart Sells His Soul” finished 43rd in the ratings for the week of October 2–8, 1995, with a Nielsen rating of 8.8, equivalent to approximately 8.4 million viewing households. It was the fourth highest-rated show on the Fox network that week after The X-Files, Melrose Place, and Beverly Hills, 90210.

Bart’s character traits of rebelliousness and disrespect for authority have been compared to that of America’s founding fathers, and he has been described as an updated version of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, rolled into one. In his book Planet Simpson, Chris Turner describes Bart as a nihilist, a philosophical position that argues that existence is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.

In 2003 the episode was listed by The Simpsons creative team as among the top five best episodes of the series, including “Last Exit to Springfield”, “Cape Feare”, “22 Short Films About Springfield”, and “Homer at the Bat”. In a 2005 interview The Simpsons creator Matt Groening commented “I don’t have a single favorite. There’s a bunch I really like,” but cited “Bart Sells His Soul” and “Homer’s Enemy” as among episodes he loves. Bart’s voice actress Nancy Cartwright stated “Bart Sells His Soul” is one of her top three episodes together with “Lisa’s Substitute” and “Bart the Mother”.

The episode has been used in church courses about the nature of a soul in Connecticut and in the United Kingdom, and was shown by a minister in Scotland in one of his sermons. A 2005 report on religious education in secondary schools by the UK education watchdog group Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) noted that the episode was being used as a teaching tool.

Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, revealed to Smithsonian magazine which of the United States’ Springfields inspired the location for Fox’s iconic animated hit show.

Springfield was named after Springfield, Oregon, Groening told Smithsonian that simply. The town is located in western Oregon near Eugene. Groening, 58, grew up in Portland, Oregon.
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