0281 - Dave Shutton

It's been a while since we've had one of this very specific type of character - someone who was designed for bigger and better things but kind of fizzled out and disappeared. I think our last person to fit this criteria was Miss Phipps, although we had a bunch in season one. I think if the show had made more room for humourous skewering of print media, we may have seen more of Dave Shutton.

Dave appears right at the start of the episode to report the discovery of Blinky the three eyed fish, setting this episode's events in motion, and then again at the end to report how Burn's dinner at the Simpsons residence went:

Neither are particularly flashy appearances in which he makes a large impression, but I can see how the writers may have been eager to seed in an investigative reporter character like this to use in future stories. Had he caught on as a popular C-list character, we'd trace his origins back to this episode as much more significant.

He makes a few more appearances in crowds and whatnot, but his most significant appearances after this are as a victim of Bart's "boy trapped down well" prank in "Radio Bart":

taking pictures of King Homer in "Treehouse of Horror III":

asking Smithers "who are you, where are you going?" in "Who Shot Mr Burn Pt. 2":

and taking a picture that is very important to the plot of season 14's "Old Yeller Belly":

He appears elsewhere (his hat makes him easy to spot) but not in any way worth mentioning. Like Scott Christian, he's the sort of character that is kind of redundant when you have Kent Brockman - if you're wanting your comedy show to make a commentary on the news media, it's probably more fun to do it with an arrogant anchorman than a fairly indistinct investigative reporter.

We probably won't have anywhere else to mention it for a while, so we might as well cover the fact that Shutton works for the Springfield Shopper, the most consistently used newspaper in the show:

This is not the first appearance of the Springfield Shopper (Homer makes it's headlines in "Homer's Odyssey"), but it's the first time we've met anyone who works for it.

PS Fun trivia time! It's my birthday today, and this is the first character we've seen that shares my name. Strange! Anyway, send me presents (large quantities of gold only.)

This post is part of my "Every Simpsons Character Ever" series. For a list of my rules in this project, click here.