Kids Most Admire Bart Simpson
May 5, 1997 ©1999 ABC News Internet Ventures.

Children Now and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation polled children ages ten to seventeen on who they most admired on television, and not surprisingly, athletes and funny folk dominate the list. For boys, basketball star Michael Jordan is tops; for the girls, the Fresh Prince’s Will Smith is number one. Home Improvement’s Tim Allen placed second among boys, but more interesting is a third-place tie between troubled actor Martin Lawrence and animated Simpsons star Bart Simpson. More cartoons tied for fifth place, with Bart’s dad, Homer, in a dead heat with movie star Jean-Claude Van Damme. The most admired list was dominated by men, even in the girls’ category. The girls’ top five: Smith, Lawrence, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Allen, and Tom Cruise. But women did start to turn up in the girls’ sixth-place tie: Brandy, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O’Donnell, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jim Carrey were all deadlocked in sixth.