David Cooper
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0278 - Kodos
🕑 Added 2023-11-09 09:00:01 +0000 UTCThe Simpsons has a few duos that are hard to keep track of. Here's a cheat sheet so you can differentiate:
Patty and Selma - after a few appearances you can tell which has which hairstyle. Additionally, Selma has S-shaped earrings occasionally.
Rod and Todd - they look different and are different ages so it should be easy, right? Right?
Sherri and Terri - Sherri is the evil one.
Lenny and Carl - Lenny is white, Carl is black.
Kang and Kodos - Kang is voiced by Harry Shearer, Kodos by Dan Castellaneta.
They actually do sound quite different side-by-side, despite identical appearances. So what we need is some sort of convoluted way to differentiate between them based on this. Here goes:
Kang shares a name with Kang the Conqueror, commonly a Fantastic Four villain. This character appeared in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania earlier this year, a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Marvel Universe also has actors Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who starred in the 2014 Godzilla film. You know who else appeared in a Godzilla film, in 1998? HARRY SHEARER.
There you go, simple, you hear Shearer's voice and work backwards through that to get to Kang. Don't get confused by the fact that Hank Azaria was also in the 1998 Godzilla. Or that Dan Castellaneta was in the 2015 Fantastic Four film. Hope I've cleared everything up for you.
This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.
Comments
David Cooper
I love this deep dive. I think you may have put more thought into it than the writers - which obviously we are ALL ABOUT round here! I'm gonna keep an eye out for if their differences are consistent (although let's face it, they're barely in most Treehouses as more than a cameo.)
Alexander Hale
I always think of Kodos as being thinner, and Kang as having more of a tendency to have his/her* mouth open. And yeah, the Shearer voice - whenever Shearer plays an 'announcer' character he uses this voice (see the film 'Mascots') - I feel like there's a bit of Skinner in there too. I've always thought Kang is the more evil of the two (perhaps only due to the final line of Citizen Kang?) *Both Kang and Kodos have been referred to with male and female pronouns at some point - Kodos more prominently in Hungry are the Damned. In Simpsorama, they visit Lrrr (of the Planet Omicron Persei 8) and Ndnd, and Lrrr requests that 'whichever of you is the female' go and calm Ndnd down - both oblige. They're also given a surname in this segment; Johnson!
