It’s hard to think about it after more than 700 episodes, but there was a moment in the history of The Simpsons when the creators of the series wondered how it would end. For Matt Groening, the last great joke would also be the surprise with which the family would jump the shark before disappearing forever.
margin was going to reveal that it hides enormous bunny ears under her hair, thus giving meaning to its characteristic elongated shape in a tremendous gag that, as you may have imagined, ended up discarded and locked in a drawer. The only remaining visual evidence of that end of The Simpson It is a Konami arcade machine from 1991.
Marge Simpson’s Big Secret
We are at the dawn of the 90s and, like so many other animated series, The Simpson they’re at that point where they keep scrapping ideas by cutting scenes or changing characters from week to week. That moment in which Homer Simpson and Krusty were going to be the same person -hence their resemblance- or in which Smithers was black and had a wife and children.
It is very common that initial ideas end up being adapted or discarded after the first test broadcasts, after seeing how the public breathes based on different ideas or how the story progresses once they sit in the script room. Some pass the cut and others end up in a drawer.
Apparently that was something quite common working with Matt Groening because he often came up with insane ideas that his peers Sam Simon and James L. Brooks had to channel or, in extreme cases like Marge’s ears, invite him to abandon. This is what Groening explained in one of the additional contents of The Simpsons DVD:
“My plan, very early in the series, was that she was actually going to be a rabbit from my Life in Hell comic strip, but then it seemed to me… I said, ‘Look, forget it. There are no bunny ears under there.’
The origin of Marge’s bunny ears
Life in Hell was Matt Groening’s first big hit and the work that catapulted him to The Simpson. It was a black humor comic strip that mocked work, love and sex through some anthropomorphic rabbits that were born as a fanzine and ended up occupying pages in more than 200 newspapers in the United States and Canada.
When they approached Matt Groening to create an animation series was with the intention of moving to the small screen life in hell, but that quick agreement led to the creation of a new family with which the public could be more identified: The Simpsons.
The tributes to life in hell in the form of stuffed rabbits or paintings are constant in the series – also in Futurama, but the last great bow to those beginnings had to be Marge’s secret. The reason why the only sane and sensible person in The Simpson she had surreal blue hair.
Although the idea was discarded over time, it was actually present enough in the series that, when the time came to monetize the success with video games, Matt Groening used it as a letter of presentation of the character. Among the few references that The Simpsons Arcade Game would take from the series, Marge’s ears were very present.
The Simpsons Arcade Game
With a video game released with more haste than usual due to a fight for the rights to the series between Acclaim and Konami, the latter took advantage of the engine of their Ninja Turtles beat’em up to bring the yellow family to life.
A few months after Bart vs. the Space Mutants by Acclaim, Konami would earn the honor of having created the best game based on a cartoon by the hand of The Simpsons Arcade Game, the arcade machine that would bequeath us the only graphic proof of Marge’s bunny ears.
Both in her main attack and when she was electrocuted, the character’s sprites would show in a very evident way that under that hair there were some rabbit ears. In the case of the first, the vacuum cleaner that he carries as a weapon was hooked on his hair, revealing part of the secret, while in the second, it would be shown that his bone structure went beyond the usual.
Over the seasons and years, Marge has seen enough situations and hairstyle changes that the idea of ears is more than discarded. But who knows, maybe one day, when life on Earth is about to disappear and the series of The Simpson have to say goodbye, Marge reveals her biggest secret.