Difference between revisions of "Hans Moleman"

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Hans Moleman is a fictional character on The Simpsons and is voiced by Dan Castellaneta. He normally appears in a running gag, where he usually suffers unfortunate, nearly always tragic, events.

Biography

Hans Moleman is the retconned name of the character. He is a 4 ft 4 in, 140 lb mole-like man with extremely bad luck. Although apparently elderly, he claims to be only 31 years old (his driver's license says he was born August 2, 1961; this episode aired in the early 1990s, and birth years have been changed in the series to keep characters the same age), but due to his heavy drinking, he appears much older. He has cataracts and is almost entirely blind(which has severely impaired his reading ability) and has used medical marijuana. He carries a brown cane with him everywhere, which has once been shown to contain a hidden sword.

Hans usually drives a 1977 AMC Gremlin, although in "Marge Simpson in: "Screaming Yellow Honkers"" he drives a 1995 Ford Contour and in The Mook, the Chef, the Wife and Her Homer he drives a pickup truck.In "Treehouse of Horror IV", when Bart tells Otto Mann about a monstrous gremlin on the side of the bus, Otto mistakes Moleman's AMC Gremlin vehicle for Bart's claims, and rams it off the road - it veers towards a tree, but stops at a perfect distance, which then only leads the car to exploding, parodying the vehicle's alleged shoddiness). When the Department of Motor Vehicles (where Patty and Selma work) is shown, Moleman is often getting his driver's license approved or voided.

His home address is 920 Oak Grove, Springfield, USA 90701. (In reality, 90701 is the zip code for Artesia, California.) He has also been seen living at the Springfield Retirement Castle.

Careers

He runs an early morning radio show, on Springfield's jazz station KJAZZ-FM, in which he introduces himself as "This is Moleman in the Morning, Good Moleman to you". One of his other jobs was driving a truck filled with sugar (which he subsequently flipped onto its side, spilling its contents, much to Homer's delight.) He is often seen driving other types of trucks as well. In another episode ("Homer's Triple Bypass"), he is seen transporting the birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe in a truck. He also teaches an orange-eating class at the Adult Learning Centre in Springfield. On another occasion, it is implied that he works at a bird sanctuary, as he has to order a bird seed bell ("No, that's too big"). He once worked as a postal worker. He once worked as a janitor at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and received a severe head wound ("Oh no, my brains.") from Mr. Burns when Moleman asked Burns for seventeen dollars for a push-broom rebristling; Burns, high on ether, mistook him for the Lucky Charms leprechaun and went to his skull with a power drill. He has also been seen representing a Solar Power company in The Last Temptation of Homer. In Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder, in a reference to the supervillain Mole Man, Homer stumbles across Hans Moleman as the leader of a race of Mole People in an underground fortress complete with earthquake machines ("There is no escape from the fortress of the Moles!").

Most recently, he has been sighted working as a teller at the First Bank of Springfield.

Accidents

Hans has escaped death innumerable times, usually highly improbably. He survived his car blowing up, catching on fire due to the powerful magnifying effect of his glasses, Montgomery Burns drilling into his brain, capital punishment (in a local jail) after Homer eats his last meal, being buried alive, and being engulfed by the "anti-escape bubble" that was attempting to catch Marge (a parody of a similar device from the 60s show the Prisoner). Many times people will totally disregard him, usually leading to something like death, or simply imprisonment, but since he appears, even after "dying", those later appearances could indicate he survived. He has also had several accidents where he was not severely injured. He further angered the crowd at Bart and Lisa's junior hockey final because he fell down the steps then shouted 'We paid for blood!'. He also crashed his 1959 Cadillac into the side of Springfield's Planet Hype restaurant (which Marge mistook for a clever decoration).

Character origins

Moleman first appeared as a character model for the season two episode "Principal Charming", but he looked so shrivelled and unrealistic that some one proclaimed to look like a "mole man". However, he was used in several episodes and later became a recurring character.According to the episode "Principal Charming", his name was Ralph Melish, which is a reference to the Monty Python sketch "The adventures of Ralph Melish: Hot Dog and Knickers" from The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief.According to a DVD commentary for one episode, some number of viewers were offended by Moleman's appearance, and he was reused in order to annoy people of such a viewpoint.^{[citation needed]} Matt Groening has claimed that Hans Moleman was inspired by Tex Avery's Droopy Dog, who shares many of Moleman's deadpan and unassuming mannerisms.^{[citation needed]}