Of all the interesting cartoon characters designed by Matt Groening and his Simpsons team, only one is interested in figuring out what a cornfield looks like.
When Groening first started working on finding a distinct art style and making strong design choices for his cartoon segment on The Tracey Ullman Show, one of his brilliant artists came up with the bright idea to make every (Caucasian) person on The Simpsons bright yellow, so that, “When you’re flicking through channels with your remote control, and a flash of yellow goes by, you’ll know you’re watching The Simpsons.”
Today, The Simpsons art style and character design principles are the most iconic in animation, and, with almost 6,000 total characters throughout 35 seasons to choose from, picking the best-designed Simpsons character is a daunting task — so we’re just going to choose the one with the kick-ass Monkees lunch box.
A recent Twitter thread asked animation fans to post character designs that they enjoy, and by far the most viral response to the poll came from popular Simpsons fan account @Criminalsimpson who suggested Little Marge. I’d go so far as to say that the childhood flashback version of Marge Simpson is the single best-designed character in the whole show.
little Marge https://t.co/0GkgqkZXix pic.twitter.com/HQits7Xjbc
— Criminalsimpsons (@Criminalsimpson) June 6, 2024
For starters, the design principals at play in the creation of Little Marge are distinct from all the other child versions of characters to whom we’re introduced as adults. In Homer’s flashbacks, he sports a full head of thick brown hair, and his round belly and protruding, stubbly lips are shrunk to normal sizes. On top of that, kid Homer didn’t dress in a plain white polo shirt, blue pants and the basic, boring dark gray shoes of a working stiff from Sector 7-G. Before he was a father and a safety inspector, Homer was a svelte, “with it” teenager who wore colorful, period-appropriate clothes when he rocked out.
Little Marge, on the other hand, was just a miniature version of Marge, only with a stubby beehive instead of the elongated blue behemoth branching off the scalp of the mother of two-and-a-half. Little Marge has the same red shoes, the same bright green dress and even a little string of pearls befitting a tiny Bouvier baby. And in the episodes when other characters from The Simpsons canon are shown as their younger selves, none of them wear the exact same clothes and hairstyles as their adult versions, making this visual gag unique to Little Marge.
While the point of young Homer’s distinct difference in appearance from paunchy, bald grown-up Homer was to show how Homer let himself go and squandered what little potential he ever had, Little Marge simply being a little Marge is both adorable and hilarious to look at as she flees from aircraft fire while clutching desperately onto her mother’s hand.
Clearly, the trauma of Little Marge’s childhood couldn’t age her quite as poorly as Homer’s years of unhealthy living did to him — she kept it together even after learning that her father was a flight attendant.