Before ‘The Simpsons,’ Milhouse Was Part of Matt Groening’s Rejected Kids’ Show

Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten has been in the news a lot lately following the announcement that legendary Simpsons voice actress Pamela Hayden is retiring. While the future of Bart Simpson’s best friend is uncertain (hopefully he will avoid getting two spaghetti meals in one day, regardless of whoever is providing the voice), we’d like to take a brief look at his past.

Obviously, Milhouse went on to become one of the funniest characters in the history of the entire show, but his origin story is far from glamorous. Milhouse made his first appearance alongside Bart in a commercial for Butterfinger back in December 1988. This was a full year before The Simpsons even premiered.

To be clear, Milhouse wasn’t a part of the popular Tracey Ullman Show shorts that spawned the commercial, he was purely created to help a massive corporation sell chocolate. And for that reason, it seems as though not a whole lot of thought was put into the design of Bart’s new buddy.

As longtime Simpsons director David Silverman has mentioned in the past, the Milhouse character was actually a leftover design from a rejected Matt Groening project.  After all, why take the time to come up with a whole new character for some candy bar ad? According to Silverman, Groening had just pitched a Saturday morning cartoon show about a group of kids to either ABC or NBC that ultimately didn’t get picked up. “Essentially, it would have been Recess,” Silverman explained.

Simpsons fans did a little digging and were able to turn up some info about this unproduced cartoon series. As Simpsons fansite Rubbercat pointed out, it seems as though Groening’s pitch was for a show called Melvin’s Inferno. In 1993, Groening told Wizard magazine that it was about a kid named Melvin, “the precursor to Bart,” who he first created back when he was a child himself. Importantly, Melvin was also “SuperMelvin,” a superhero that Groening admitted was just “the same character in a cape.”

Over the years, a number of sketches that appear to be character designs from Melvin’s Inferno have popped up online. We can’t say for sure whether they’re genuine or not — nor can we explain how the character of “Potter” wouldn’t immediately asphyxiate. 

After perusing Groening’s sketches, Silverman and fellow Simpsons director Wes Archer liked one bespectacled character the best, so he was plucked from the brink of pop-culture obscurity and shoved into the Butterfinger commercial. With some slight modifications, of course. 

Come to think of it, the proto-Milhouse looks even more like “The Dud.”