In May 2015,
The Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer – who plays a number of key characters including, quite incredibly, both Mr Burns and Waylon Smithers – announced that he was leaving the show.
By then, the animated series had been running for more than 25 years, and the pay of its vocal cast had risen from $30,000 an episode in 1998 to $400,000 an episode from 2008 onwards. But Fox, the producer of
The Simpsons, was looking to cut costs – and was threatening to cancel the series unless the voice actors took a 30 per cent pay cut.
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Most of them agreed, but Shearer (who had been critical of the show’s declining quality) refused to sign – after more than two decades, he wanted to break out of the golden handcuffs, and win back the freedom and the time to pursue his own work. Showrunner Al Jean said Shearer’s iconic characters – who also include Principal Skinner, Ned Flanders and Otto Mann – would be recast.
Microsoft Landed a Patent to Turn You Into a Chatbot
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Photo: Stan Honda, Getty Images
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What if the most significant measure of your life’s labors has nothing to do with your lived experiences but merely your unintentional generation of a realistic digital clone of yourself, a specimen of ancient man for the amusement of people of the year 4500 long after you have departed this mortal coil? This is the least horrifying question raised by a recently-granted Microsoft patent for an individual-based chatbot.