13. Until the 17th episode of the second season, Fox and the production crew kept which characters the voice actors performed a secret, going so far as to close recording sessions while refusing to publish photo of the recording artists. With “Old Money,” however, the network revealed which roles each actor played because the producers decided their cast should receive credit for their work.
14. Until 1998, the six main actors were only paid $30,000 per episode. After a pay dispute, in which the network threatened to replace them with new actors until Groening stepped in to support his cast, they were bumped to $125,000 an episode. After a month-long strike in April 2004, in which the cast stopped showing up to cast readings in the hopes of getting a bigger piece of the show’s rising revenue, their salaries were increased to somewhere between $250,000 and $360,000.
15. In 2011, the show was almost canceled by Fox unless production costs were cut, forcing the cast to accept a 30 percent pay cut from their then-$400,000 per episode, reached through contract negotiations in 2008, resulting in their current pay of just over $300,000 per episode.
