Like so many other Simpsons characters, Maggie is fully realized and comes with her own unique
set of quirks. Although she can't walk more than a few steps without falling and rarely speaks,
she is one of the show's most beloved characters. Here are just some of Maggie's many great moments.
One of the biggest television news stories of 1995 parodied the biggest television news story
of 1980. The sixth season of The Simpsons ended on a cliffhanger: who shot Mr. Burns?
And the seventh-season opener promised to end months of speculation, much like the
"who shot J.R.?" publicity stunt pulled by the primetime soap Dallas more than a decade earlier.
It's assumed that Burns' loyal assistant, Smithers, committed the act.
Before descending into a boozy stupor, Smithers remembers feeling the need to stop Burns,
and he later finds a discharged pistol in his coat pocket. Police only have two witnesses to
the crime — Santa's Little Helper and baby Maggie, who reveal nothing in an interrogation because,
well, they can't talk. However, that may be out of a desire to not self-incriminate.
Mr. Burns emerges from a coma and identifies the shooter as Maggie Simpson. What happened
was that the awful old guy literally tried to steal candy from a baby. In this case, it was
Maggie with a lollipop. He fought her for it, and in the struggle, his gun fell out of its holster,
landed in Maggie's hands, and accidentally went off. While recovering in his hospital bed,
Burns insists that Maggie be arrested. However, Chief Wiggum knows better…
"Yeah, right, Pops. No jury in the world's gonna convict a baby. Hmmm, maybe Texas."
Each member of the Simpson family has a few distinguishing characteristics. For example,
Bart is a troublemaker, Marge is totally square,
and Maggie doesn't speak. That's partially a function of her being a baby, but a whole lot
of comedy can be mined from a character who's very intelligent but stays silent.
However, Maggie does speak from time to time, and it's on such rare occasions that when it
does happen, it's a certified TV event, with a big celebrity lending their voice to the role.
The 1992 flashback episode "Lisa's First Word" features Lisa as a newborn baby,
and it ends with Homer putting Maggie to bed and quipping that he hopes she never talks
so that she'll never talk back to him. After he leaves, Maggie delivers the magic moment…
"Daddy" (puts pacifier back in)
Making Maggie's first word even more impressive is that it was voiced by guest star Elizabeth Taylor.
Then, in the 1994 "Treehouse of Horror" segment "Time and Punishment," Homer careens through
different realities, landing in one where Maggie kills Groundskeeper Willie with an
axe. And that's when she speaks again, only this time in the voice of James Earl Jones...
"This is indeed a disturbing universe."
Marge finally cracks under the stress of managing a household and raising three kids with no help
from her husband in the 1992 episode "Homer Alone," necessitating a trip to Rancho Relaxo.
"Remember, you can't spell 'Relaxo' without 'relax’."
But Marge doesn't trust Homer to watch the children for even a couple of days,
and she shuttles Bart and Lisa off to the sad apartment of aunts Patty and Selma. However,
Maggie is smart enough to know that's a bad scene, and she refuses to leave home.
Despite Marge's reservations, Maggie stays with Homer. She was right to worry, though,
because Homer and Maggie are lost without her. Maggie is just a baby, after all, and she doesn't
understand why her beloved mother suddenly disappeared, albeit temporarily. So after Homer
puts her to bed and almost immediately trashes the house with Barney, she crawls out of her crib,
out through the doggy door, and into the Springfield night in search of Marge.
On the surface, this is a plot about a baby wandering the streets in the wee hours,
but it's not too troubling because The Simpsons is a family cartoon, and Maggie is surprisingly
self-sufficient. The running gag for most of the episode is that Springfield is full of
things and people that look like Marge and get Maggie's hopes up, including a shrub, a giant
ice cream cone sign, and a guy in a beefeater hat working at a British-themed quick lube business.
"Lube job while you wait?"
"Don't touch me."
As the youngest, least mobile, and almost completely silent member of the Simpson family,
Maggie is rarely the center of a main plot or subplot of an episode of The Simpsons,
a show that, despite being animated and where time doesn't pass and people don't age,
trades in realism. However, Maggie gets her rare chance to take center
stage in a delightfully surreal way during the 2015 episode "Puffless."
Closer in form to one of the Simpsons-themed theatrical shorts, the episode's secondary
plot — known as "Maggie's Extraordinary Animal Adventure" — is a self-explanatory,
self-contained lark in which Maggie makes friends with a squirrel outside of her bedroom window,
which is her entry into a secret world of adorable critters, including an owl,
opossum, and Duffman's pet parrot. Maggie takes charge and saves the day when local
yokel Cletus traps the opossum so he can cook him up and feed him to his large family.
"Hey, Brandine! I caught us a possum! You want to name it before we eat it or after?"
"During."
Thanks to Maggie, the friendly opossum is freed after a full-on assault from
the Springfield animal community. And it's all done without anybody speaking a word,
which is great news for Maggie and the animals but it's a serious disappointment for Cletus's kids.
"Okay, well, uh, possum's gone.
But you got fingernails to chew on. Who knows what's under them?"
The 1992 episode "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" staged a reunion between Homer
and his half-brother, Herb Powell. He was left homeless and eating out
of garbage cans after Homer's failed car design bankrupted his automobile company.
So how does Maggie play into this narrative?
Well, The Simpsons was barely into its third season, but it hit so big and thoroughly that
fans were already clamoring to find out what was on the mind of the baby of the family.
They got their chance when Uncle Herb, in an attempt to restore himself to a
wealthy lifestyle, invents a machine that translates baby talk into plain English.
He does it with the help of a $2,000 investment from Homer.
The almost always silent Maggie talks a lot in this episode, or at least
she babbles like a typical baby. But thanks to Herb's brilliant invention,
everyone can finally understand the complexities of Maggie's deepest thoughts.
(Maggie babbles)
"I have soiled myself. How embarrassing."
Through a series of strange events and misunderstandings, a 1995 Simpsons episode
finds the county visiting Homer and Marge's home and deciding that they're unfit parents.
The kids are immediately placed in a child welfare van and driven to a foster home.
"Yay!"
"Heydilly-ho. Welcome to your new home, neglect-areenos."
While the episode is primarily a Bart and Lisa adventure, focusing on the two older
Simpson kids as they miss their parents and struggle against the creepy vibe of Flanders'
TV-restricted environment, Maggie shines in a big way throughout the story. She's the reason
government agents ultimately decide to reassign the Simpson kids, as she's found wearing a sign
Bart originally placed on Lisa's back reading "I'm a Stupid Baby." And one of the big twists
of the episode is that Maggie really responds well to her new lifestyle, relishing in the attention
bestowed on her by the Flanders. At one point, she even removes her pacifier so she can babble
and call Ned "daddily-doodily." Luckily, the spell is broken when she finally sees her mom.
"Oh, Maggie, you're a Simpson again."
(burps)
1992's "A Streetcar Named Marge" finds Marge starring in a community theater's musical
version of the extremely dark Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire.
But because Homer is such an oafish lout, she has to bring Maggie along to rehearsals. After Maggie
disrupts an intense scene between Marge and Ned Flanders, the play's director Llewellyn Sinclair
forces Marge to drop her off at his sister's daycare center, the Ayn Rand School for Tots.
Inspired by the philosophies of Rand, Sinclair runs a harsh school that promotes stark
individualism and encourages children to "develop the bottle within," which
includes confiscating all pacifiers. That's a big problem for pacifier-addicted Maggie,
who tries sucking on her thumb, crayons, blocks, and anything else she can get her little hands on.
Eventually, she attempts to break into the locker where the confiscated pacifiers are stored.
However, she gets caught in the act and thrown in "the Box" — a playpen equating solitary
confinement. The centerpiece of the B-plot, a grand parody of The Great Escape, soon commences.
Maggie brilliantly sneaks into the daycare center's vent system and lowers herself into
Ms. Sinclair's office with the string from a talking Krusty the Clown doll, she then grabs
the keys to the pacifier locker, and uses a makeshift zipline of her own devising to
access the forbidden treasure. Despite the odds, Maggie's plan works even better than expected.
"Maggie, time to go to the (screams).”
(babies with pacifiers)]
A 1997 episode of The Simpsons, "My Sister,
My Sitter," looks into how funny it can be when Maggie acts like an actual baby.
At the beginning of the story, Lisa proves herself to be such a
dependable and mature kid that she becomes a successful babysitter.
"What do you say, Homer? Can Lisa babysit for my kids?"
"Please, please, please."
"Eh, I'll have to ask her."
Homer and Marge even trust her to look after Bart and Maggie when they head off
to the fancy grand opening of Springfield's South Street Squidport shopping district.
The idea of younger Lisa in charge enrages Bart, and he sets out to make the night as
bad as possible for his babysitter, refusing to eat dinner and getting ice cream all over himself.
That fake tantrum provokes a real one in a stress-sensing Maggie, and Bart gives her ice
cream to calm her down. One problem — it's coffee ice cream. It jacks up Maggie into a twitching,
grinning, wide-eyed caffeine monster who crawls on the shower curtain rod,
sprays talcum powder on Lisa, and runs off. After Bart knocks himself out,
Lisa has to safely get the whole crew across town to Dr. Nick Riviera's sketchy clinic.
Since Maggie is so thoroughly and hilariously agitated from the coffee, Lisa puts her in a cat
carrier because she won't stop sticking her fingers in passed-out Bart's face.
"And as a grim finale, she intends to drown that poor caged baby."
Maggie often seems to be off doing her own thing,
as she's mentally and physically separated from her older, verbal family members.
That idea persists in the many future-set episodes of The Simpsons, in which Maggie is the only one
in the family who's both successful and at peace with herself. Homer seems to die an awful lot,
Bart winds up a destitute bar musician, Lisa is president but stuck in bad relationships,
all while Maggie is off living the life she wants to live and doing so as early as age nine.
In "Future-Drama," she isn't home on Bart and Lisa's prom night. Instead,
Marge shows off a moving photo of Maggie waving from a beach in Alaska. She doesn't speak a word,
as is The Simpsons' way with Maggie. Audiences also don't hear a sound from 30-something Maggie
in "Holidays of Future Past," by which point she's become a world-famous rock star. Amusingly,
future Maggie is also the eventual mother of a quiet baby who looks exactly like her mom.
"So, who's the father? Eh...it doesn't matter.”
Disney welcomed The Simpsons to its Disney+ service in 2020 with a short titled "Playdate
with Destiny." In this completely dialogue-free story, Marge takes Maggie to Not Responsible for
Injuries Park where she meets a cute boy that viewers learn is named Hudson, at least that's
the name written on his diaper. It's love at first sight. As they hit the various park attractions,
Maggie and Hudson imagine they're engaged in grand romantic activities — horsey spring
riders become real horses, a drinking fountain doubles as champagne for two,
and dining in Paris is, in reality, sharing sand in the playground.
It all ends during a game of peekaboo, when Maggie is surprised and heartbroken to see Hudson's mom
loading him into their car. After a Goodnight, Moon-themed dream in which everything turns
into Hudson's face, Maggie preps for her next playground date, only to find to her horror that
Homer is on kid duty. Unfortunately, he takes her to a skate park because they've got a taco truck.
The next day, Maggie doesn't take any chances and wrestles control of the car away from Homer and
drives them to Not Responsible for Injuries Park. It's there that she finally reunites
with Hudson for their first kiss. Well — more like a baby version of a first kiss.
(Puckering up, then exchanging pacifiers)]
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