And the women were also weak, whiny, indifferent or overzealous--

Everyone is flawed on that show, even ol' Painty Can Ned.

There are some flattering male characters, too. Smithers is loyal, smart, ultra-competent, and his only real (albeit gigantic) flaw is being utterly blinded by love. Doctor Hibbert finds humor in unfortunate situations and is sometimes a bit of a mercenary, but he's highly competent and generally kind. Apu is a successful and extremely hard-working businessman whose catchphrase involves being polite to his customers, although he also tends to screw them over.

Most of the male (and female) characters are ridiculous, because the show is fundamentally about ridiculous people. But that's not the only kind of character they have.

Smithers is literally the archetypal sycophant.

I don't think that's true. A sycophant is motivated by the desire for advancement, and is typically insincere. Smithers is sincere and motivated by love, which makes him much more interesting.

Apu is a stereotype. Now granted, he's on a show filled with stereotypes, and he's not always portrayed negatively, but he is still a stereotype. (In all honesty, sitcoms are all filled with stereotypes.)

Smithers in the archetypical yes-man.

Dr. Hibbert isn't so much a stereotype as much as a parody of Dr Huxtable.

Even if they had their own flaws, Lisa and Marge being morally superior to Homer and Bart is a long-running premise of the show.

> morally superior

I'd say, totally superior, this was in 2000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_to_the_Future

"Lisa has become the (first female) President of the United States and tries to get the country out of financial trouble."

And I don't consider that "morality" was the major aspect of Lisa's superiority.

Bart becomes chief justice of the Supreme Court in the episode "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie".

I guess so? Marge and Lisa both have major ticks/obsessions that kick in, just like the other two.

When the plot is about Home and Bart, the other two play counterpoint. But the opposite is true. Homer just ends up getting the main role so often that we assume that to be the default state of the universe.

And Maggie

I believe this cuts right to the heart of the matter; Simpsons is a humorous show, and stupid characters who say stupid things are humorous.

Not to mention the voice cast is mostly male, made even more lopsided by the fact that the female voice actresses mostly do only one voice, whereas the male voice actors do TONS.

Which is just how it goes. It's unfortunate but you can't strike a 50/50 balance. Even for side-characters written as female in the script, they're going to become male during production because you don't have female voice actresses who can make a "different" voice; it would just sound like Lisa or Marge. Really only Bart's voice actress can do it (she does Nelson, too, who sounds very different).

What are you talking about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Simpsons_cast_memb...

In no way does it look like the cast is "mostly male", or that the women are cast into single roles.

The Simpson's were kind of famous for Bart being voiced by a woman, meaning the Simpson family has 3:1 Female:Male voice actor ratio.

Most of the pupils in the school are voiced by either Nancy Cartwright or Yeardley Smith too

curious, is it a biological neccesity that female voice actresses can't do as many voices as a mail voice actress, or is there something else going on?

In Japanese anime, the vast majority of characters, male and female, are done by female voice actors.

Interesting. This depends on the expected audience of the anime, and whether most of the characters are young, right? I'm not an anime fan, but the movies I've watched (Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh, Mononoke Hime) have very distinct male voices. I've even heard from one reviewer that the Japanese love deep bass male voices in their anime, an observation which is true in my experience. They go as far as using deep male voices for characters who are visually or nominally female, such as the Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell (pre the awful 2.0 remastered Blu Ray edition) or Moro in Mononoke Hime.

The Japanese language is fairly different from English, so much so that it can be synthesized so well that they have entirely virtual pop music stars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid#Singer_Library

Vocaloid's English support has gotten absolutely fantastic. If you're curious, here are a couple of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMc4kw45e5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmifuQvFu8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQKGUgOfD8U

They're not for everyone, and the voices are still mechanical, but I've become a huge fan of English Vocaloid, especially Gumi.

I don't think it's biological. I think maybe the industry was just bigger for males.

Take Tara Strong. Sure, lots of her voices sound a little similar (you might hear Timmy Turner, then hear the girl in Batman, and think "oh yeah, they do sound similar" once you knew they were the same voice). But she can definitely "transform" her voice.

The male voice actors on The Simpsons have incredibly transformative voices, which I think comes from lots of practice in the industry. The first time I saw a chart of all the voices for each character they play, I couldn't believe it. After paying very VERY close attention, I can kind of hear Mr. Burns in Moe, but just barely.

Harry Shearer often does voice impressions on his weekly radio show - http://harryshearer.com/le-show/

Edit: he also did a made-for-YouTube miniseries wherein he re-enacts actual transcripts from the Nixon White House tapes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9HtoWea72A