Groundskeeper Willie
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Groundskeeper Willie (AKA - G. K. Willington, Esq.) is a Scottish fictional character in the animated television comedy The Simpsons, voiced by Dan Castellaneta. He is the school groundskeeper for Springfield Elementary School. Willie is easily identifiable by his head of flaming red hair and beard, as well as an exaggerated Scottish accent. His alias was invented by Lisa Simpson in episode "My Fair Laddy" from season 17.
Although Willie is a stereotypical Scot, The Times reported in late 2005 that "he is the most instantly recognizable Scot in the world: better known than Billy Connolly or Ewan McGregor, even Sean Connery." The same article quotes Simpsons creator Matt Groening as saying "We wanted to create a school janitor that was filled with rage, sort of our tribute to angry janitors all over the world".
In many ways, Willie is an unpleasant character, although he's fairly harmless. He has claimed to originate from several different places in Scotland (including, but not limited to: Glasgow, Loch Ness and North Kiltown), and frequently gives contradictory accounts of his past life before arriving in Springfield. A darker side to Willie emerges when Homer Simpson hires a private investigator to spy on Lisa, who, on seeing Willie, remarks on his resemblance to "The Aberdeen Strangler," at which Willie nervously gulps and scurries away. Willie has been seen to instigate a soccer riot with some previously unseen Scottish friends. He has also betrayed Milhouse Van Houten by allowing the boy to confide in him, and then donning his distinctive spectacles and performing unkind impressions of him behind his back, much to the merriment of the school staff. One of Lisa's main motivations for doing well at school is so that she does not end up like Willie.
Willie's limited ambitions in life are beautifully captured in one episode. We see a sleeping Willie snoring in his cold and empty shack with an empty whisky bottle next to him. We then see that the "real" Willie is actually sleeping in a puddle, dreaming of the above scenario.
His years of heavy work have given him amazing strength and a very muscular physique, which has been observed many times; for example when he digs into a well to save Bart Simpson, who had fallen in, and the time he rescues Bart from a marauding timber wolf by wrestling it into submission. On an occasion when he has to crawl through narrow ventilation shafts to retrieve Bart's dog, Santa's Little Helper, Willie turns to Lunchlady Doris and asked "Have you got any grease?" She replies by saying, "Yes, yes we do". Willie (while ripping off his clothes) bellows "Then grease me up, woman!", to which she replies, "Okey-dokey."
Bart is not the most grateful child, however. He is more than willing to make Willie the butt of frequent jokes. One of these pranks, involving creamed corn and a pump, actually destroyed Willie's tarpaper shack on the edge of campus and broke his leg; Willie sought a violent revenge, but Lisa smoothed things over.
For the most part, Willie gets very little respect from anyone. Principal Skinner attempted to punish Nelson for theft by getting him to perform what he refers to as the most degrading task ever, janitorial work, Willie expresses that he is right there listening. Nelson has also taken shots at Willie, using a rake to launch a beehive at Willie yelling, "Hey Willie, catch the football!" Willie apparently believed it was a football until the last minute.
Sometimes, Willie wears a kilt, usually due to a formal occasion. As a true Scotsman, he does not wear anything under the kilt. At Scotchtoberfest, Bart attaches a number of balloons to Willie's kilt, which leads to the kilt flying up. The gathered crowd gasps and a woman faints. In response, Willie cried, "Ach! 'Tis no more than what God gave me, you puritan pukes!" This is a reference to the song "The Scotsman," by Bryan Bowers. In the second part of "Who Shot Mr. Burns?", Willie has his kilt on while being interviewed by the police. During the interview Willie uncrosses and then recrosses his legs. In response, the officers point a gun at Willie with a warning to stop doing that. The scene was a spoof of Sharon Stone's character's interrogation scene in the feature film Basic Instinct.
In the episode "Monty Can't Buy Me Love", Willie is re-united with his mother and father on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland, where Mr. Burns leads a successful expedition to catch the Loch Ness Monster and bring it to Springfield. Willie tells Homer Simpson that his parents own a pub which still has the same pool table on which he was conceived, born, and educated. However, in the episode "I Love Lisa", Willie says his father was hanged for stealing a pig, and in the first part of "Who shot Mr. Burns?" he says his father's body was thrown in the bog, instead of receiving a proper burial. Willie has come from a long line of underachievers as shown in the episode My Fair Laddy when he reveals his grandfather's job was to check the safety of mines before the canary was sent down.
According to Superintendent Chalmers, Willie is an escaped patient from a mental hospital that Principal Skinner hired. According to Willie, he has worked at the school for 20 years, just as long as Principal Skinner, so he was likely hired soon after Skinner began his job.
In another episode Willie was asked by Skinner what he had done in the summer vacation and he replied that he had made a fortune building a software company but blew it all.
At one time, Willie was engaged to Shary Bobbins (a parody of Mary Poppins), until she recovered her eyesight—at which point, in Willie's words, "suddenly the ugliest man in Glasgow wasn't good enough for her anymore."
Perhaps Willie's oddest piece of history, was that he has apparently died before. When talking to Skinner and Chalmers about a strike, he says that he and a group of miners went on strike because they wanted little lights on their hats. He then tells that there was a horrible mine collapse and that "...nobody made it out. Not even Willie." at which point he nervously looks around the room. Of course, this could be explained by the fact that Willie is not very smart and might be getting confused about what he meant.
Willie's hobbies include videotaping couples in cars, something which proves to the benefit of Homer Simpson when he is later wrongfully accused of sexual harassment. He says America thinks it's wrong but "every single Scottish person does it!"
Willie often drives a tractor called "Duchess", the make of which is also a Willy. However he also owns a James Bond-esque sports car that runs on high octane fuel and has a built in television transceiver.
Willie's nationality is also hinted to be the cause of his hostility. An example from the episode Milhouse Doesn't Live Here Anymore:
- Willie: "Brothers and sisters are natural born enemies! Like Englishmen and Scots! Or Welshmen and Scots! Or Japanese and Scots! Or Scots and other Scots! Damned Scots! They ruined Scotland..."
- Skinner: "You Scots sure are a contentious people."
- Willie: "You just made an enemy for life!"
In "Lard of the Dance" Homer pretends to be a Scot to distract Willie. When Homer claims to hail from "North Kiltown", Willie responds, "Noo fooling, I'm from North Kiltown! D'ye know Angus McLeod?". This goes on until Homer accuses Willie of not being Scottish. At that point, Willie realizes what Homer is up to and, enraged, physically attacks Homer, accusing him of stealing his "retirement grease". In this episode he is also seen bathing with nothing but Ajax and steel wool.
Willie claims to be deaf from a mishap with a boiler and reads lips (though somewhat unsuccessfully). He has also revealed that he wears contact lenses and has crippling arthritis in his index fingers, which he got "from space invaders" in 1977, Willie was surprised when chief Wiggum pointed that Space Invaders is a videogame (which was released in 1978), posssibly Willie meant other kind of "Space Invaders".
One of his best-known quotes is "There's nary an animal alive that can outrun a greased Scotsman!". He was also responsible for labeling the French as "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys!". This is in a way quite ironic, considering the fact that the French and the Scots have quite a long friendship.
Willie was once featured as a Freddy Krueger-like killer in the episode "Treehouse of Horror VI" . In the episode, he stalked Springfield Elementary students in their dreams. In another episode which parodied The Shining, he was killed by an axe blow to the back by Homer (like Scatman Crothers' character in the film). Later on that very episode, he was axed in the back again in a skit parodying A Sound of Thunder by a talking Maggie. Finally, in the third segment, Principal Skinner axed Willy in the back, leading him to announce (as his last words) that he's "getting bad at this."
He is 6 ft 0 in (183 cm) tall.
External links
- [The strange world of Oor grown-up Wullie]
- [SNPP.com] - a Simpsons fansite
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