Ten years ago today a great actor was cruelly taken from us. His characters live on to this day…
“Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You might remember me from such movies as ‘Today We Kill, Tomorrow We Die’ and ‘Gladys The Groovy Mule.’”
“I’ve argued in front of every court in this state- often as a lawyer!”
“Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor…DAMN!”
“Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.”
This list is endless…but it ended too soon.
Has it been ten years already? Wow. 
Ugh, I feel old now.
I still can’t believe he isn’t around anymore. What a great talent, cut short.
Holy crap…if you’d asked me, I’d have guessed it to be four, maybe five years ago. Then I’d have thought a little harder and revised my guess to seven or eight.
Either way, what a fricking waste.
I’m gonna break the other way, actually. I would’ve guessed he died in 1996. Regardless, I had just “discovered” him a year or two before his death and he was my favorite funnyman at the time. Truly a great loss.
I Netflixed all five seasons of Newsradio this winter. Great, great stuff.
Unfrozen caveman lawyer! I miss you Phil!
He was a graphic artist and designed Crosby, Stills and Nash’s logo. That guy had a lot of talent.
I still remember hearing about this. I was a novice Simpsons fan at the time and probably hadn’t seen too much of his SNL stuff, but over time Hartman has become one of those few comedians I really wish were still around, and he stands out as one of the most versatile and consistently funny performers I’ve seen. It’s hard to overstate how much he contributed to the early years of the Simpsons - the writers relied on him really heavily because they really believed he made everything funnier. None of Troy’s stuff has aged at all, at least as far as I can tell. The movie titles are still among the most quotable things in the history of the show ten years later, and his performance as that ultimate self-important ham is just untouchable. Make a list of your favorite few Simpsons lines or moments and it’s a lead-pipe cinch Troy - or Lionel Hutz, or Lyle Lanley - is on there at least once. [Unless you’re a much younger fan, it’s pretty hard not to include either the Dr. Zaius song or the Monorail song on the list, just for starters.]
I think my favorite Hartman role on SNL was Frank Sinatra, but any serious attempt at finding a favorite sketch would probably take ages. Who else could have done all this stuff?
RIP Phil – still miss you.
Don’t forget, he was the original Captain Carl on PeeWee’s Playhouse.
Don’t forget Lyle Langley: “I’ve sold monorails to Brockaway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum it put them on the map!”
Or when Lionel Hutz became a real estate agent: “Cubicles are for closers, Marge!”
Or the episode when Troy McClure (star of such educational filmstrips as “Mommy, What’s Wrong With That Man’s Face” and “Here Comes the Metric System!”) turned out to have a perverted sexual attraction to fish.
It really struck home the first time the Simpsons did a filmstrip after Hartman’s death and had to use a generic narrator instead of Troy McClure. Such a shame.
Oh: and while I’m probably in a distinct minority, I think Hartman did a better impression of Bill Clinton than Darrell Hammond.
Don’t forget Lyle Lanley.
Hartman was interested in doing a live-action movie of Troy McClure, according to Wikipedia. Now that would have been something!
KGS beat me to Lyle!
The character of Zapp Brannigan on Futurama was originally written for Hartman. Billy West did a wonderful job mixing Hartman and William Shatner on the series.
What kind of universe do we live in where Phil Hartman is dead and Andy Dick still lives?
Same here. I think it was the episode where Marge has a road rage incident and has to go to traffic class where she watches a movie on the subject. When the scene with the movie started, I automatically thought, “Now this is where Troy McClure usually comes in and introduces himself as ‘the star of such traffic safety films as **The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot ** and Alice’s Adventures Through the Windshield Glass’ or something like that.” Of course, he didn’t and the scene felt noticeably empty as a result.
That happened to me many years later, for some reason. It was the home video [they don’t seem to do filmstrips anymore] where Gary Busey gives Bart a lecture about restraining orders. Busey rides into the video on a motorcycle and he’s wearing a helmet, so you can’t tell who it is, and it must’ve reminded me of Hartman’s role as Tom in Brother from the Same Planet. So I really expected Troy for a minute there, and it was only when Busey took the bike helmet off that I remembered why that wasn’t going to happen.
“Smoke Yourself Thin” … I was actually on that diet for a little while.
It must be the same one I woke up in a few years back where Kurt Cobain was long dead and Green Day was the most popular rock band in the world.
Phil Hartman was very talented, and I miss him too. I still wonder about him. Some performers – Hugh Laurie comes to mind – are good because their complex inner life is apparent in whatever they do. But Phil was a mystery. I had no sense of the real man under the roles at all, which in a way made him more compelling, because just when there would be some flicker of his real face, it would transform into another disguise.
What films of the last ten years would have been better with Phil Hartman?