Peebles (voiced by Howard Morris and later by Don Messick) frequently marks down his price considerably, but he is invariably only purchased for a short time, typically by some thieves who needed a gorilla to break into a bank or by an advertising agency looking for a mascot for their new product.

[2] The only customer truly interested in owning Magilla was a little girl named Ogee (voiced by Jean Vander Pyl and pronounced "Oh Gee!").

Magilla drinks Professor Skiball's anti-gravity formula, making him float up in the air, and some advertisers take advantage of this.

Peebles sells Magilla to a mad scientist who takes the gorilla to his laboratory to perform some sinister experiments on his brain.

As pointed out on the Rhino Records' CD liner notes for their collection of Hanna-Barbera theme tunes, part of Magilla's purpose was to sell likenesses of himself.

[3] According to Christopher P. Lehman, the trials of Magilla mirrored the attitudes that some American citizens had towards racial integration during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

In his 2007 book American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era: A Study of Social Commentary in Films and Television Programs, 1961-1973, Lehman writes that The Magilla Gorilla Show perpetuated the idea that non-whites should be segregated, with Peebles selling Magilla (the gorilla iconography thus evoking a reference to 19th-century racist artwork portraying blacks as subhuman primates) to white customers who would invariably return him to the pet shop by the end of each episode.