Professor Frink - Character

Character

Frink first appeared in the season two episode "Old Money" that aired on March 28, 1991. In that episode, Grampa Simpson inherits $106,000 from his girlfriend when she dies. He eventually decides to spend it on people who are in need of money and holds interviews. In one of these interviews, Frink introduces Grampa to his latest invention, the Death Ray, claiming that "it is just a prototype. With proper funding I’m confident this little baby could destroy an area the size of New York City!" Grampa responds with "But I want to help people, not kill ‘em!", to which Frink replies "Oh. Well, to be honest, the ray only has evil applications. You know my wife will be happy, she’s hated this whole Death Ray thing from day one."

In the original script, Frink appeared more evil. However, when cast member Hank Azaria ad-libbed a voice for Frink, he did an impression of Jerry Lewis's character Julius Kelp from the 1963 film The Nutty Professor, and the writing staff started making Frink more of a parody of that character. Julius Kelp is a nerdy, mad professor, albeit not evil, and is often unsuccessful with his experiments, so Frink became more like that as the show progressed. The Simpsons creator Matt Groening told TV Guide that "He was just written as a mad scientist character until Hank did the voice, and suddenly he became this nutty professor persona. What I love about Hank is that, you give him a single line — and most of these characters have very few lines — and he just brings it to life. Every time." Frink was originally animated without his buckteeth; they were added later on to make him look even more like Lewis's character. He was named after television writer John Frink, who was later hired on The Simpsons. The nonsensical utterances that Frink makes are written in the scripts as "Frink noise".

Azaria has voiced Frink ever since the first appearance of the professor. Out of the many characters for which Azaria provides the voice, Frink is his favorite to do because he was a fan of Lewis in his younger years and he enjoys imitating the voice of the nutty professor. He has said that "once you start talking like it’s very hard to stop. On each take, I’ll make it sillier, I always have. I’ll add more and more stupid noises and sounds to it. If they let me keep going, it gets ridiculous."

As an homage to Lewis, Azaria conceived the idea of the "Treehouse of Horror XIV" segment in which Frink revives his dead father, with Lewis guest starring as the father. In a review of that episode, which aired around Halloween in 2003, Robert Bianco of USA Today wrote that it is hard to tell Frink and his father's voices apart: "Azaria voices Frink with such a spot-on Lewis imitation that it's sometimes hard to tell which one of the two nutty professors is talking." In addition, The Knoxville News-Sentinel's Terry Morrow commented that "to hear Lewis doing Azaria doing Lewis is a mind-bending gut buster, the kind of pay-off that die-hard Simpsons fans live for."