TV URBAN LEGEND: Homer Simpson nearly had a daughter with another woman before he married Marge!
The Simpsons has famously been willing to be daring with the back stories of some of their characters, even if the choices have not always gone over well with fans (like the revelation in Season 9 that Principal Seymour Skinner was born Armin Tamzarian and had taken the identity of his sergeant during the Vietnam War). One of their bolder ideas was to reveal, in Season 11, that Homer Simpson had a THIRD daughter, from a relationship he had before he married Marge!
The idea was initially conceived as a plot for the short-lived series, The Critic, and was adapted to The Simpsons by the writing team of John Frink and Don Payne, who made their debut on the series with this episode (amusingly, Frink had already had a character named after him on the show, Professor Frink, before he ever wrote for the series).
However, Mike Scully, the showrunner of the series at the time, decided that it was just TOO big of a change to the series. They thought it would be fascinating to see how the Simpsons dealt with such a major change to their family, but it was probably just TOO major.
Thus, Scully decided that the daughter would be changed to being Krusty the Clown's daughter that he didn't know he had...
Sophie Krustofsky (after introducing herself to Krusty, she ended up taking his last name) was voiced by Drew Barrymore (note that obviously the change to the character occurred early on, so it wasn't as if Sophie was going to be Homer's daughter. They were just going to go with a completely different daughter character, likely older than Bart).
The episode was not particularly well received and Sophie was mostly dropped as a character after this episode, but she has made a few different appearances since then, like in a Christmas episode in Season 28...
and when she is one of Bart's teammates when Bart becomes an e-sports player in the recently-completed Season 30...
Interestingly, the episode ended up being possibly a little too much for The Simpsons' themselves, as the episode was produced for Season 11 but not actually aired until Season 12 (so Frink and Payne's first episode to make it to air was the Season 12 Treehouse of Horror, with this episode airing later in the season).
The legend is...
STATUS: True
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