The Simpsons are heading back to the big screen with a 4½ minute short shown before Ice Age: Continental Drift, which opens July 13.
“The Longest Daycare” stars Maggie Simpson, who returns to the Ayn Rand School for Tots featured way back in the season 4 episode “A Streetcar Named Marge.” The strict school hasn’t improved since her last visit when she lead an uprising.
“They put each baby through an airport security-style testing machine to measure their future and hers says ‘Nothing Special’, so they put her in an area that’s not great,” Executive producer Al Jean told EW. “If they put her in a good area, it wouldn’t be much of a plot. For a four-minute plot, it has a number of twists and turns… It’s very sweet but funny.”
In this time out hell she encounters her arch-nemesis Gerald Samson AKA Unibrow Baby, who kills her only friend a butterfly. Slapstick ensues.
“It’s hard to do a 20-minute Maggie episode, but in four minutes it’s great,” Jean explains. “She’s like Charlie Chaplin.”
The short has a proportionally length trailer dubbed “the summer’s shortest trailer.” It comes in at just 12 seconds long and that’s counting the green band intro and the 20th Century Fox logo.