Robin Williams Was Going to Guest Star on ‘The Simpsons’ Before ‘Aladdin’ Ruined Everything
Over the course of the past 36 years, The Simpsons has invited a staggering number of celebrities to guest star on the show, from Elizabeth Taylor to George Harrison to all the garbage people who we’d just like to pretend never visited Springfield.
Weirdly, there was one all-time great comedy superstar who never once lent his voice to the series: Robin Williams. But the Mrs. Doubtfire star apparently came pretty close to co-starring opposite Homer and the gang.
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On the most recent episode of Nancy Cartwright’s podcast Simpsons Declassified, the voice actress chatted with actor and impressionist Jim Meskimen, who has been the voice of Aladdin’s Genie since 2008. Prior to Meskimen, the role originated by Williams in the 1992 animated film was played by Dan Castellaneta, who of course voices Homer Simpson.
“Did you know, Robin Williams, he was a fan and he was a friend of The Simpsons,” Cartwright noted. “And I was told that he almost voiced a character on our show before he was cast as the Genie… We never had him and I think they wanted to cast him, but then he got the Genie and we missed out on him.”
Cartwright didn’t specify why accepting the role in Aladdin precluded Williams from joining The Simpsons for one episode, but his non-Disney animated projects were a point of contention at the time. Williams agreed to be in FernGully: The Last Rainforest prior to the Aladdin deal, but that didn’t prevent then-Disney chair Jeffrey Katzenberg from trying to stop it from happening. “Katzenberg did not want him voicing two animated characters in two animated movies at the same time, and tried to force Robin not to do it,” screenwriter Jim Cox told Vanity Fair. “Robin was steaming, like, ‘It’s my voice! You can’t stop me.’”
While The Simpsons never featured Williams’ actual voice, the show did reference him more than once. Like in Season 11’s “The Grift of the Magi,” when Kent Brockman reported on a hole in the ozone layer that required people to stay inside unless they had a “class nine, or Robin Williams, level of hair coverage.” And in Season 23’s Inception parody “How I Wet Your Mother,” Williams pops up in Homer’s subconscious, interrupting his childhood memories of his mom, Mona.
While it’s disappointing that he never worked on The Simpsons, no Williams is still better than A.I. Williams.
