While The Simpsons has kept people around the world entertained for over 30 years, the antics of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie have also proven to be strangely prophetic at times.
Some major world events have been ‘predicted’ by the series and this include Donald Trump’s presidency and COVID pandemic.
Though the show did not predict Joe Biden’s presidency, however the 2000 episode Bart To The Future did see Lisa, as the first female president of the United States, taking over from Trump and picking up a whole lot of debts.
Lisa was seen in the Oval Office, saying ‘As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” When she asks Secretary Van Houten (aka the grown-up Millhouse) how bad it is, he tells her: ‘We’re broke’.
The riots at the Capitol in Washington DC in January 2021 shocked the world, but Simpsons viewers couldn’t help noticing the resemblance to one of the storylines from a 2020 Halloween special.
In The Simpsons’ 31st Treehouse Of Horror episode, the Fox show made a pretty damning projection revealing how bad the US could turn out, after Homer fails to cast his vote. When he wakes from a long slumber, he realises he’s missed out on his vote but asks ‘how bad can it be?’
The cartoon then fast-forwards to Inauguration Day on January 20th 2021, where Springfield is thrown into the apocalypse, with Homer sitting on the roof of 742 Evergreen Terrace dressed in body armour made from household utensils, while the town burns.
Recall also that Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021 was a low-key affair following concerns over the Capitol riots and the pandemic. It turns out however that The Simpsons may have predicted that too, with Oscar-winning legend Tom Hanks appearing in a scene in 2007’s The Simpsons Movie, in which he delivers a similar address to the nation. ‘The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine,’ he proclaims in a TV advert screened after Springfield has been placed under a glass dome.
That same inauguration saw Kamala Harris sworn in as the first-ever female Vice-President, with the new second-in-command wearing a smart purple suit and necklace for the occasion. Fans were also quick to point out that it bore a stark resemblance to the purple two-piece and necklace Lisa wore when she was sworn in as President in Bart To The Future. Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
A week before his 71st birthday in July, Richard Branson successfully flew aboard the VSS Unity, which touched down at Virgin Galactic’s New Mexico hub Spaceport America after offering its passengers a view of Earth and four minutes of weightlessness.
However, it wasn’t long before Simpsons fans realised a Branson lookalike did the same in season 25.
It has also been suggested that The Simpsons predicted the COVID-19 pandemic with the ‘Osaka flu’ which swept through the episode Marge In Chains in 1993. Howver it is speculated the show’s creators may also have been on the money about the Omicron variant.
The theory started after one social media users sliced together news montages alongside a scene from The Simpsons which shows an alien stating they are from the planet Omicron Persei 8.
The clip comes from Matt Groening’s other show Futurama, rather than The Simpsons but that didn’t stop fans suggesting The Simpsons had something to do with it.