Character
The Simpsons creator Matt Groening named Nelson after the wrestling hold of the same name. Cast member Nancy Cartwright voices the character, which first appeared in the fifth episode of the first season, "Bart the General" (1990). American voice actress Dana Hill was first supposed to provide Nelson's voice, and attended the read-through of the episode. However, as Cartwright wrote in her autobiography My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy, "the producers were still putting together this ensemble of and, come Monday, at the recording, she was nowhere to be found and the part was assigned to me. I didn't have time to ask why and I still don't have a clue." Cartwright also commented that when she first found out she would be voicing Nelson, "I asked myself, 'What does a bully sound like?' Well... what you hear is what you get. When I first uttered, 'I'll get you after school, man!' I let out a sigh of relief when I got through the line and a double-sigh when it got a laugh."
By the eighth season of The Simpsons, the writers had begun to explore the secondary characters of the show. "Lisa's Date with Density" (season eighth, 1996) was the first episode to center around Nelson and was used to explain why he acts the way he does. The idea of Nelson dating Lisa Simpson had already been around for a while but this was the first time that the staff worked it into the show. Cartwright said in 2012 that she thinks Nelson "has evolved the most out of all the characters I do. There's a soft spot in him that the writers have found. He's got this special attraction to Marge, and he sings these songs, and he's got a crush on Lisa. There's something about this poor kid – his mother works at Hooters, his dad went out to buy milk and never came back. I wouldn't want him to come over for dinner, but I really love doing his voice."
Read more about this topic: Nelson Muntz
Famous quotes containing the word character:
“The truth and regularity of a character is not, in justice, to be looked upon as broken, from any one single act or omission which may seem a contradiction to it:Mthe best of men appear sometimes to be strange compounds of contradictory qualities.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The character of the logger’s admiration is betrayed by his very mode of expressing it.... He admires the log, the carcass or corpse, more than the tree.... What right have you to celebrate the virtues of the man you murdered?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of conversation, though with a Friend, are commonly the most prosaic and trivial of facts. The universe seems bankrupt as soon as we begin to discuss the character of individuals. Our discourse all runs to slander, and our limits grow narrower as we advance. How is it that we are impelled to treat our old Friends so ill when we obtain new ones?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)