The Simpsons Voice Actor Pamela Hayden Leaving After 35 Years

“Here’s to everyone who made this terrific ride I've been on possible,” Pamela added in her statement. “Thanks for 35 years!! Be well and happy. My best to you all. P.S. I'll always have a special place in my heart for that blue-haired 10-year-old boy with glasses.”

Milhouse, Bart Simpson’s best friend, is known for his insecure and gullible attitude. The character has been a staple among the series’ ensemble since the very beginning. And Pamela has expressed her love for her character in more ways than one.

“One thing I love about Milhouse is he’s always getting knocked down,” Pamela said in a social media post shared by the official Facebook account for The Simpsons. “But he keeps getting back up.”

And The Simpsons’ crew loves the voice behind the character just as much. 

“Pamela gave us tons of laughs with Milhouse, the hapless kid with the biggest nose in Springfield,” Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons said in a statement, per The New York Times. “She made Milhouse hilarious and real, and we will miss her.”

Keep reading for insight into more of your favorite animated characters. 

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Many fans were left purrrrrfectly confused after this revelation.

“Hello Kitty is not a cat,” Jill Cook—an executive at Sanrio, the company behind the character—explained to Today July 18. “She’s actually a little girl born and raised in the suburbs of London. She has a mom and dad and a twin sister Mimmy who’s also her best friend. She enjoys baking cookies and making new friends.” 

While the news may have surprised some, Cook wasn’t the first to share this insight. As a matter of fact, Christine R. Yano—a professor of anthropology who penned the book Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific—had also previously confirmed that Hello Kitty isn’t a feline.

“Hello Kitty is not a cat,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2014. “She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”

Other fun facts about Hello Kitty? According to Sanrio, she is five apples tall, weighs three apples, was born on November 1 (making her a Scorpio) and dreams of being a pianist or poet. 

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Goofy is "not a dog, but he's a canine," the voice actor said on an August 2024 episode of Popcorn Podcast with Leigh Livingstone and Tim Iffland. "So it's kind of like a wolf is not a dog but it's a canine—same thing. Goofus canis, that's what he is. Or, he's a MOG—he's a man-dog."

However, Pluto, he added, is a "regular dog"—a blood hound as it turns out.

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You'll want to get to the (bikini) bottom of this discovery.

SpongeBob SquarePants' creator Stephen Hillenburg once revealed that Squidward Tentacles is actually an octopus—not a squid.

"This is Squidward the Octopus, SpongeBob's grumpy next-door neighboor," he shared in the 2005 Case Of The Sponge 'Bob' video resurfaced by BuzzFeed. "I like the octopus for this character because they have such a large, bulbous head, and Squidward thinks he's an intellectual so, of course, he's going to have a large, bulbous head."

But if you're wondering how Squidward can be an octopus when he has only six legs instead of eight, Hillenburg had an answer for that, too—noting "it was really just easier for animation to draw him" with fewer tentacles.

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Break out your handy dandy notebook and jot this one down.

But according to the special, Nickelodeon was already working on a series about a cat—leading animators to toss out the original idea and redesign Blue as a dog.

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Now this really isn’t funnie, er, funny.

But as it turns out, Doug Funnie from the cartoon series Doug was almost named Brian. As for what led to the change?

"I just thought Brian was too fancy of a name," Doug creator Jim Jinkins told HuffPost TV in 2014, "So, I geared it down, and started calling him Doug. If you think about what that sounds like, it sounds incredibly average, and that’s what I was trying to do: express from that point of view.”

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This fact is so good it’s scary. 

In Monsters, Inc.: An Augmented Reality Book, the name of Boo—the little girl who accidentally ends up in Monstropolis and befriends monsters Mike and Sulley—is revealed to be Mary Gibbs, according to BuzzFeed. And if the name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the real-life moniker of the actress who provided the voice of Boo. 

Need more proof? In the movie, there’s actually a scene where Boo is sorting through some of her drawings and fans can spot the name “Mary” scribbled at the top of one of the pieces of paper.

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