Malibu Stacy, a decades-old spoof of an even older iconic toy, reentered the public discourse this year in one of the most flamboyant and bizarre ways imaginable. It happened on Tuesday, April 4, 2023, the day former president Donald Trump (go with us on this) was arraigned in a Manhattan criminal court after being indicted by a federal grand jury. (Trump pleaded not guilty.) On the very same day, a trailer for Margot Robbie and filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s feverishly anticipated new Barbie movie dropped.
The two incidents might not seem equal in magnitude, but the internet convulsed nonetheless with obsession over both events—especially when a clip from The Simpsons began circulating. It came from from “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” which originally aired in 1994. In it, news anchor, Kent Brockman finds himself unexpectedly captivated by the empowering new doll Lisa has created. “Though it was unusual to spend 28 minutes reporting on a doll, this reporter found it impossible to stop talking,” Brockman concludes. “It’s just really fascinating news, folks. Goodnight!” As he shuffles his papers and the closing theme music begins to play, he adds a rushed afterthought: “Oh…and the president was arrested for murder. More on that tomorrow night!”
Veteran Simpsons scribe Josh Weinstein, who wrote “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” with his partner Bill Oakley, says they were trying to come up with a news event that would seem much more consequential than a new doll. “At the time, the president of the United States being indicted for anything seemed insane. And the joke is how insane it is,” Weinstein says. “A lot of jokes make you laugh because they’re pointing out the truth, whether it’s about human nature or politics or whatever. The laugh is the reaction to the truth. And The Simpsons is just so good at being perceptive about people that it feels like we predicted stuff when obviously we didn’t.”
Ahead of Barbie’s release on Friday—as well the potential other indictments that may be coming Trump’s way—Weinstein, Oakley, and Kathleen Turner, who did a guest spot on the episode as the voice of Malibu Stacy’s cynical creator, spoke with Vanity Fair about the legacy of that now iconic and uncanny episode, which goes way beyond the spooky Barbie/Trump connection.
“There’s hundreds of Simpsons episodes that don’t stick in people’s minds, many of them excellent. But that one seems to,” Oakley says of “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy.” “It particularly seems to resonate with women, I would say. When I meet a female Simpsons fan, that is often the one they cite as their favorite.”
Even The Simpsons couldn’t have predicted the synchronicity with the Barbie movie. The cast first rehearsed “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” on July 15, 1993. “We had the table read for this episode exactly 30 years ago this week,” Weinstein says.
The thematic connection goes even deeper than coincidental anniversaries. Gerwig’s Barbie confronts the cultural pros and cons of an iconic doll; so does “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy.” In the film, Barbie herself (Robbie) becomes aware of the real world and ruminates over whether she’s set harmful expectations for the countless young girls who idolized her over the decades.
That same theme manifests in The Simpsons when Lisa gets a new talking Malibu Stacy doll. Lisa imagines her speaking before other toys at the United Nations, but is beyond disheartened to pull Stacy’s string and hear the doll recite airhead phrases like, “I wish they taught shopping in school!” and “Let’s bake some cookies for the boys.” The overachieving young girl whispers, “Come on, Stacy…I’ve waited my whole life to hear you speak. Don’t you have anything relevant to say?”
“Don’t ask me, I’m just a girl!” Malibu Stacy giggles when Lisa pulls the string again.
The episode was inspired by an actual news story from 1992, when toymaker Mattel introduced its own talking doll, Teen Talk Barbie. The toy spouted a few empowering phrases such as, “I’m studying to be a doctor.” But they were overshadowed by more superficial statements like, “Will we ever have enough clothes?,” “Let’s plan our dream wedding,” and most memorably, “Math class is tough!” Parents, teachers, and pretty much anyone who believed there should be more to a young girl’s hopes and dreams objected to Teen Talk Barbie’s banality.
“A couple things were going on at the time. One, my wife had become a Barbie collector—a serious Barbie collector,” Oakley says. “She'd been collecting mainly vintage Barbies from the late '50s and '60s, so I had become incredibly immersed in the Barbie culture because we were going to Barbie conventions regularly.”
His wife, Rachel Pulido, would later become an writer on The Simpsons as well (“she wrote the one where Principal Skinner and Ms. Krabappel fall in love,” her husband notes). But at the time, Oakley and his friend Weinstein were still new to the staff. Oakley saw a comedy mother lode in Barbie culture, and the Teen Talk controversy seemed like the perfect hook.
Oakley was particularly fascinated by the Barbie Liberation Organization, a group of pranksters who were particularly incensed by Teen Talk Barbie and her vapid messaging. “The Barbie Liberation Organization objected to that, and they clandestinely went around to places like Toys“R”Us and switched the voice boxes between the G.I. Joes and the Barbies,” Oakley said.
This detail appears in the episode as well, when a downhearted Lisa asks some of her classmates, “Don’t you people see anything wrong with what Malibu Stacy says?” One fretful little girl agrees, pulling the string on her doll to make it bark in a deep, gruff voice: “My Spidey sense is tingling! Anybody call for a webslinger?”
“We often looked for things that came from current events,” Oakley says. This tactic was encouraged by The Simpsons leadership, even though it often took more than a year for a finished script to be animated and appear on the air. “I specifically remember being told, ‘Take the social trends from now and then in 10 months when people have forgotten about it, they’ll think you made the whole thing up,’” Oakley says.
As The Simpsons had repeatedly demonstrated, the same clashes and controversies actually tend to resurface in the culture, making the show look like it is written by time travelers or soothsayers. Weinstein attributes this to any parallels between their script and the new Barbie movie. “It sounds like it’s the modern answer to questions asked 30 years ago,” he says.
As the episode continues, Lisa Simpson seeks out Stacy Lovell, the reclusive creator of Malibu Stacy, hoping that the entrepreneur will listen to reason and mass produce a plaything with a more uplifting message. Lisa motivates her by playing into her sense of vengeance, since she was long ago forced out of her own company. Then Lisa plays on her pride, pointing out that the original doll is modeled on Stacy herself. “I’d be mortified if someone ever made a lousy product with the Simpson name on it,” Lisa declares, in a sly jab at her own show’s merchandising enterprise.
To play Stacy Lovell, The Simpsons looked to the A-list, recruiting Body Heat and Romancing the Stone star Kathleen Turner. “David Mirkin was hired to become the showrunner,” Oakley says. “I think he brought it up in the room and said, ‘How does Kathleen Turner sound?’ And I’m sure we were like, ‘That's perfect.’
Turner, an Oscar nominee for Peggy Sue Got Married, had also lent her smoky voice to the animated bombshell Jessica Rabbit in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. She said yes to The Simpsons in part because the story resonated with her own upbringing.
Turner’s father was a diplomat with the US Foreign Service, and some of her childhood was spent in Venezuela, far from American pop culture and the Barbie craze that overtook her generation. “I didn’t come back to the States until university, so I missed all that growing-up girl shit,” Turner tells Vanity Fair, in an interview conducted before the SAG-AFTRA strike. “But I never had dolls. Anytime somebody tried to give me a doll—which my family stopped trying to do—all I would do is rip their heads off. I didn’t want any stupid dolls.”
The Teen Talk Barbie controversy is one Turner had forgotten about until now, although the description makes her bristle anew. “I hope I did know that then,” she says. “It must have been rage. I must have been so angry.”
The Simpsons intrigued her, but she wasn’t convinced just by the offer. A bona fide movie star, she hadn’t appeared in a television series since the late 1970s, when she got her breakthrough on the soap opera The Doctors. “They asked me, but the first thing anyone always has to do is to send me a script because I don’t say yes to anything without reading the material,” Turner says.
Weinstein and Oakley’s teleplay struck a nerve. “I have to say that I really loved that show. I really did,” she recalls. Stacy Lovell was the perfect counterweight to Lisa Simpson’s sunny idealism. “Her skepticism, her cynicism, and then being converted, being compelled by the girl…” Turner says. “It was just deliciously funny. And sad.”
When Stacy Lovell is finally won over by the little girl’s insistence, the reclusive toymaker rises from her high-backed chair and hurls a glass full of liquor into the fireplace, creating a momentary inferno—which quickly flares out. It foreshadows the failure to come, and the perils of buying into hype.
“I mean, the woman was right. She was a good businesswoman,” Turner says. “Her saying ‘We won’t sell a single doll’ of course becomes true.”
Yes: Despite their best efforts, and the runaway enthusiasm of news broadcaster Kent Brockman, the hype for the motivational doll “Lisa Lionheart” fizzles instantly when the Malibu Stacy company releases their old doll again, this time with a new hat.
The failure actually vindicates Stacy Lovell’s original vision for Malibu Stacy—and validates her ensuing passivity. “She didn’t want to do it. I think if anything, she wanted to prove to Lisa that she was out of time, out of step,” Turner says. “Every really intelligent woman who shows her intelligence, who shows her abilities, has a target on her back. And you’re certainly not supposed to be attractive and intelligent. Heaven forfend! So yeah, I could feel this woman going, ‘Oh, God, more people I have to fucking convince.’”
Instead, Stacy Lovell gets to comfortably retreat back to her self-imposed complacency—but the episode does not have an entirely pessimistic outcome. Lisa savors a moment of reassurance when she sees one pigtailed child choose “Lisa Lionheart” over all the other toys in the store. “You know, if we get through to just that one little girl, it will all be worth it,” Lisa says.
“Yes,” Turner’s character replies. “Particularly if that little girl happens to pay $46,000 for that doll.”
Another amusing but sometimes uncomfortable truth is that the most successful marketing often plays on the lowest common denominator. Oakley and Weinstein experienced this themselves when the Fox network began promoting “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” during the run-up to its broadcast in 1994.
“The TV Guide ad for this episode is so unbelievably wrongheaded,” Oakley says, disavowing it completely. “We didn’t have any control over the Fox network and what ads they did. Google it and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It says, ‘Springfield gets a sexy new doll,’ and it has a drawing of Bart pulling up the doll’s skirt. And he says, ‘All in the name of research, man.’ It boggles the mind.”
The equally aghast Weinstein has a theory that the ad resulted from sloppy internal communication. “We’re pretty sure that someone said to some promo person, ‘It’s a sexist new doll,’ and they heard ‘sexy new doll.’ Or…it’s a horrible gross perversion of what [the show] is. It’s literally the opposite message that we’re trying to get across.”
They were also irked that the ad featured Bart rather than Lisa, since the episode is centered mainly around her. Yeardley Smith, who has voiced Lisa since The Simpsons began as shorts in 1987 on The Tracey Ullman Show, always tends to be the voice of reason and humanity on the show, but this episode remains one of the character’s standout moments.
“Yeardley's performance is so perfectly real and heartfelt,” Weinstein says. “It elevates the episode because it feels real. You feel like Lisa is a real kid. And I can't say for sure, but Yeardley, I know, was a precocious, really smart kid. So it hopefully spoke to her in some way. She’d have to tell you herself.” (Smith had agreed to be interviewed as part of this story, but had to withdraw due to the ongoing actors strike. Weinstein and Oakley, who haven’t worked on The Simpsons for many years, are only constrained by the writers strike from doing interviews about current work, not past writing.)
With the Barbie movie poised to reignite the conversation about the impact of toys on the hearts and souls of young people, “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” remains as relevant now as it was three decades ago.
“I remember writing this and thinking, If I have a daughter someday, I want her to watch this episode and like it,” says Oakley. He went on to have two daughters, now aged 16 and 25. They’ve complimented him on it, but unlike the rest of the internet, they aren’t obsessed.
“They’ve both seen that episode, and I know that they have both enjoyed it,” Oakley says. “But it’s not like they harp on it.”
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