7 times The Simpsons predicted the future
Oscar Wilde wrote that, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”. Sometimes we can see scary real-world situations and events that echo those of fiction (show of hands – who watched The Handmaid’s Tale?), and will remark on the similarity of the two. Then there are the times when The Simpsons writers straight-up predicted the future.
1. President Trump
In the 2000 episode, “Bart to the Future”, we see that Lisa Simpson has become President of the United States. Her predecessor? Donald Trump. According to Lisa, Trump left office after bankrupting the country. According to the episode’s writer, the joke was meant as “a warning to America”, as a Trump Presidency seemed like “the logical last step before hitting bottom.”
2. Tiger attack
In 1993, the episode “$pringfield (Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)” lampooned Siegfried and Roy with their characters Gunter and Ernst. Though Siegfried and Roy had never had an incident during their famous tiger act, their yellow-hued counterparts were not so lucky, and were attacked by their own big cat. Ten years later, Roy Horn was mauled by the duo’s white Bengal tiger.
3. Faulty voting machines
In 2008, the “Treehouse of Horror XIX” showed Homer attempting to vote for Barrack Obama, only to have the voting machine he was using switch his vote to Obama’s rival John McCain. When Obama was running for re-election in 2012, a voting machine in Pennsylvania was taken out of commission for switching Obama votes to Mitt Romney.
4. Government spying on us
In the long-awaited cinematic debut of the Simpsons, the family go into hiding from the government, only to be found by the US NSA (National Security Agency), who listened in to their conversations. In 2013, Edward Snowden became a whistle-blower, revealing that the US Government was using its citizens’ phone and internet records as surveillance tools.
5. Disney owns Fox
In the 1998 episode “When You Dish Upon A Star”, Homer’s screenplay is pitched at 20th Century Fox. A sign on the lot reveals that the company is “A Division of Walt Disney Co.” Almost 20 years later, in 2017, news broke that Disney was acquiring more than $66 billion worth of Fox.
6. Nobel Prize winner
In 2010, Lisa and some of her classmates ran a betting pool predicting the winners of upcoming Nobel Prizes. Milhouse’s pick for the Nobel Prize for Economics was Bengt R. Holmström. In 2016, Holmström really did win the Nobel Prize for Economics.
7. Three-eyed fish
In 1990, The Simpsons introduced the world to Blinky, the three-eyed fish Bart pulled from the water close to Springfield’s nuclear power plant. In 2011, a fisherman in Argentina landed his own Blinky in a reservoir fed by a nearby nuclear power station.
Which Simpsons episode do you wish would come true?