This list is a pretty impressive display of Simpsons trivia.  It’s real deaths of real people that changed the way The Simpsons went.  Doris Grau and Phil Hartman I knew about, but the other four were news to me.  Go read the whole thing, it’s quite good.

This deserves special notice as a further illustration of how horrifyingly soulless Zombie Simpsons truly is:

Doris Grau died from lung cancer (who could have guessed?) on December 30, 1995, a scant eight days before the aforementioned “Team Homer” aired. The episode was dedicated to her memory and the character of Lunchlady Doris was retired out of respect…until 2006, when “The Simpsons” was so desperate to be good again they let Tress MacNeille take a crack at Doris’s smokey voice.

Zombie Simpsons brought back Lunchlady Doris in 2006?  They are fucking evil, no two ways about it.

Everyone should love Doris Grau.  In addition to Lunchlady Doris she also voiced regular Doris on The Critic and was one of the nice old Jewish ladies who ran Eddie Murphy for Congress in The Distinguished Gentlemen:

(Skip to the 6:20 mark and you can see her make an Alzheimer’s joke and scold Murphy in Yiddish.)