Santa's Little Helper reason he stopped performing as Santa's Little Helper was because "The producers thought... 'Hmmm, Dan barks pretty good, and we are already paying him and he seems to like doing the dog thing... why do we need to pay Welker who comes in here, spends less than an hour, eats all the doughnuts, refuses to come to rehearsals... let's just give the damn dog to Dan!'" Santa's Little Helper has become a well-known dog because of his appearances in the series. A writer for "The Grand Rapids Press" wrote in 2002 that "we all know who Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa
The Simpsons longest-running sitcom (animated or live action) in the United States. In 2009, "The Simpsons" surpassed "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet"s record of 435 episodes and is now recognized by "Guinness World Records" as the world's longest running sitcom (in terms of episode count). In October 2004, "Scooby-Doo" briefly overtook "The Simpsons" as the American animated show with the highest number of episodes (albeit under several different iterations). However, network executives in April 2005 again cancelled "Scooby-Doo", which finished with 371 episodes, and "The Simpsons" reclaimed the title with 378 episodes at the end of their seventeenth season. In May