The Simpsons Predicted the Future For Us
Nostradamus is well known for his amazing predictions that came true. Even Mystic Meg will not be left out for her signature Mystic Meg’s Wheel of Destiny. And while we’re not taking the famous predictions away from the originals, but there’s a newer player in the game: The Simpsons. For more than three decades now (since 17 December 1989), the Simpsons have revolutionized modern television comedy with well over six hundred episodes. But in between their biting satire, they’ve unwittingly (or deliberately?) managed to guess some things that really have come true. From predicting presidents all the way to the ending of Game of Thrones – these guys must be time travelers. Starting from as far back as 1990 all the way through the present, check out what they’ve been able to predict thus far.
The Three-Eyed Fish
It’s one of their more grim predictions, warning about the dangers of nuclear runoff. In the year 1990, The Simpsons predicted in the 4th episode of their 2nd season, “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”, the mutated three-eyed fish: Blinky.
This character became prolific many years after when Argentine fishermen truly did manage to catch a real live wolf fish with three eyes in a reservoir feeding on a nuclear plant. In this case, life imitates art, and it sure is ugly.
Censorship Will Affect Michael Angelo’s “David”
In the year 1990, the first prediction by this popular comedy sitcom was presented in season 2. It just goes to show that even in their infancy, when the show was excellent yet still finding its voice, it was able to make some astonishing predictions.
In “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge”, authorities in Springfield make a censorship attempt on the David statue by Michelangelo. This prediction came true two decades after, in 2016 precisely. Russians ran a poll on whether or not a copy of the famous statue should be covered up. For a moment, it seemed as though this were genuinely up for debate!
The Washington Redskins Win The Super Bowl
This was predicted in the 14th episode of season, and all things considered, this was a rather amazing prediction. What makes it so special? Well, this is the prediction that became a reality in less than a week after the episode was aired.
Lisa in this episode had made a prediction that the Washington Redskins would be the winners of the edition of the competition. And this was the case. This is probably why this episode was given the title, “Lisa the Greek”.
And Then There Were Apps
In the same year (1992), the 3rd season of the cartoon sitcom had another prediction in its 24th episode, “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?”. In this episode, the titular role of Herb (the rarely seen half-brother of Homer) was played by Danny DeVito.
Homer’s brother was able to make an amazing invention gaining from the inspiration of Thomas Edison. He created a tool to make sense of the cries of infants, just like the “Infant Cries Translator App” that was later invented 24 years later in 2016.
False Advertising Lawsuits
In the 8th episode of the 4th season of The Simpsons, “New Kid on the Block”, notorious over-eater Homer Simpson was chased out of an all-you-can-eat restaurant. He, therefore, decides to sue the restaurant and take them to task for false advertising.
This same action was repeated several decades later. It happened in Massachusetts where Albert Flemming, twenty-five years later in 2017, sued an all-you-can-eat restaurant for false advertising just as Homer had done with his role in this episode. Wonder if Flemming had seen the show?
The Use of Blood Splash To Advertise Thrillers
In the year 1992, another prediction came from The Simpsons. It all came from a brief moment in their 4th season in the “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie” episode. In the episode, a new thriller film, “Itchy & Scratchy” was just released in Springfield’s theaters.
The movie’s advertisement had a billboard splattering a liquid substance that looked like blood into unsuspecting passing cars that had their windows opened. This infamous advertising style was brought into reality by the promoters and marketers of the 2003 thriller, Kill Bill Vol. 1.
A Holiday for Snake Assassination
This must have sounded ridiculous when the prediction was made in 1993. The episode came up with a new and amusing holiday invention. The holiday was called “The Whacking Day”, where Springfield residents beat snakes to death with sticks, much to Lisa’s horror.
This snake-killing holiday went on to be a real thing in Florida as Florida’s Python Challenge. Just as it was done in this episode of The Simpsons, the holiday would come up as a means to reduce the large population of invasive pythons in Florida.
A Tiger Will Attack Roy Horn
In 1993 some foreign visitors came into Springfield. Both were magicians and they also just happened to have thick German accents. These visitors ended up suffering a rather undesired turn of events when they were attacked by two white tigers.
This incident was not one to be remembered. But true to this prediction, in 2003, there was a sequentially exact repeat of this incidence. This time it happened to a member of the Siegfried and Roy magic duo, Roy Horn.
The Coronavirus Outbreak
In 1993, an episode of the famous TV comedy predicted what will be the prediction of the present pandemic, which originated in China, that’s changing the course of world history. The virus that has now engulfed the globe had been predicted 27 years before now by The Simpsons.
In this episode of The Simpsons, there was a raging flu, known as the Osaka flu. It spread in Springfield after some of the residents ordered juicers from a source in Japan. The juicers containing the flu can be likened to the swift spread of the current disease.
The Orbit Will Welcome an Average Joe
In season 5 in an episode entitled “Deep Space Homer”, there was a plot point that predicted an average Joe visiting the orbit of the planet. The episode storyline ran through the event of NASA selecting an average person to take a trip down into space.
Of course, decades later, some countries in the world began to adopt the idea for themselves and allow ‘average people’ to get a taste for the space program. The United Kingdom was the first country to make strides in 2013 with Oliver Knight.
Horse Meat
The lunch lady on The Simpsons is known for being a less than savory character, and one early episode truly proved her nastiness. In this episode, she was found to have used parts of horse meat including the testicles as side dishes for her meal.
Back then it sounded nasty enough, even for a quick sight gag, but then comedy became reality. It was a clear depiction of an infamous scandal that rocked the whole of Europe, 19 years later (the horsemeat scandal). The Simpsons already saw it coming.
Autocorrect Reigns
The Simpsons were at it again the same year with their episode “Lisa On Ice”. Here, Dolph the Bully, a character in the sitcom, composes a memo where it was revealed that there were issues with the auto-correct feature on the Apple keyboard.
With this, The Simpsons aimed a dig at the Apple company and this inspired them to do more on their keyboard. The prediction here actually ended up helping Apple to design an efficient keyboard for iPhone users. Finally, a prediction that was actually nice!
The Coming of Video Chat
The famous 1995 episode, “Lisa’s Wedding”, which was the 19th episode of their sixth season, made quite a number of predictions. This episode of the sitcom took a peak into the future and revealed different present-day inventions. One of these was the coming of video chats.
In this episode, characters had their dialogues through screens at different points. This took a glance into the future and revealed what will now become an essential part of the present day. Video chats! They probably didn’t know this would come to be a reality — and they almost certainly didn’t imagine Zoom!
Smart Watches Will Be a Reality
Who would have thought that this would even be a thing at all? At this time it was definitely just a mirage. The prediction came in the year 1995, same as the previous one, in the same episode and the same season.
The episode presented among its futuristic technologies the use of these smartwatches as phones by most of the characters. This is one present-day technological advancement that has now become a favored part of our lives, albeit in a somewhat less clunky format.
Robot Librarians
This was another prediction in one single episode. Thrilling! The episode “Lisa’s Wedding” was so on target that it’s practically epic. In its imagining of what future society might look like, the episode managed to fit three different prolific predictions into a few short minutes.
The use of robot librarians came up in this episode. These librarians will automatically help you locate whatever you want in a library. Creepy or scary? Probably both. Just hope they don’t malfunction on you. You wouldn’t want to get on their bad side.
The Shard Skyscraper Building and Location
The resemblance is too similar to be ignored. In “Lisa’s Wedding”, which was the 19th episode of their sixth season, in 1995, a joke was made of London’s Big Ben having a digitally enabled face. The digital vision revealed on the left side a skyscraper that stood out when viewed across the skyline of the city.
This skyscraper holds a striking resemblance to the Shard, a modernist tower that was completed in London the year 2012. What’s especially puzzling is not only the mysterious outline of the building, but also the similarity of their location when compared.
9-11 Was Also Predicted
Here is one of the most grim predictions of the entire TV show, and also one of the first ones diehard Simpsons fanatics might know about. In “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson”, the use of a $9 coupon was revealed.
On the coupon for the New York transport, the Twin Towers were portrayed in the background. With that, the advert seemed like it read, “New York $9 11″. This led to the allegations that this reflected conspiracies surrounding the painful historical event.
The Beatles Responded
The following year, 1991, there was another prediction from The Simpsons, this time a rather famous one. This was in the 18th episode of the same season 2, titled “Brush With Greatness”. This time, the superstar headlining the episode is Ringo Starr.
Marge is a huge fan, who sends a mail to her beloved superstar. She gets a response also, even though it came very late. Twenty-two years later (2013), two Essex women also revealed that they got a response from Paul McCartney, fifty years after they had sent the Beatles a mixtape.
The Emergence of Ebola
This disease outbreak was also well predicted by The Simpsons in the year 1997, the same year they predicted what would happen on 9/11. Episode 3 of the same season, “Lisa’s Sax”, featured mom Marge as the vehicle for this prediction.
In that episode, she offered to read a book titled “Curious George and the Ebola Virus” to her son Bart. This quick sight gag of a bedtime story came onto screens years before the largest outbreak of this virus occurred, not just to a monkey but all around the world.
The Theft and Sale Of Cooking Grease By Crooks
“Lard of Dance” was earmarked by another prediction set to be a reality sometime later. In the episode, the less than brilliant family patriarch Homer Simpson had taken up a new hobby of going around stealing in order to get wealthy in no time.
He was stealing cooking grease, which he would sell later on to gather up so much profit. This prediction proceeded to become a reality, over a decade later in 2013, when thieves were caught doing exactly the same thing. What motivates these people?
The Higgs Boson Particle’s Mass Equation
In the episode after the last prediction on the theft of grease for profitable sales, another time bomb was released. This time, The Simpsons decided to take their predictions in a far more academic direction than usual — and frankly, we’re stunned.
In that same year, when episode 2 of the same season was aired, Homer Simpson makes writing on a blackboard that reads out some equation at the bottom corner. This equation had been stated in 1964 but did not get proved until 15 years later, in 2013. It was then that this prediction made by Homer Simpson on the episode got validated.
The Purchase of 20th Century Fox by Disney
At the start of the fifth episode in the tenth season, The Simpsons showed the logo of 20th Century Fox, the production house that makes this great sitcom. Not just that, there was another part on the display picture that read “A Division of Walt Disney Co.”.
With this, it meant that both Mickey Mouse and The Simpsons will be produced by the same company. And as hungry enterprises constantly seek to outbid each other, they ended up foreseeing the future precisely. This prediction came true two decades after in 2018.
The Universe Is In the Shape of a Doughnut
In the 22nd episode of the 10th season of The Simpsons, there was a guest appearance in the form of none other than Stephen Hawking. The plot, however, had the smartest man and the dumbest colleague talk over a cup of booze.
While they conversed over a beer at Moe’s Tavern, Stephen Hawking commended Homer’s idea that the world is doughnut-shaped. He even made a comment that he could steal it from Homer. Even though there had been such speculations earlier, the popular news resurfaced in the 21st century.
Mutated Tomatoes Will Come to Be
In yet another one of his usual harebrained schemes, in this episode, Homer had decided to take up farming. But there was a twist. By doing this, he decided to include nuclear inputs in his germinations, and the results got nasty.
This did not go too well as what he could harvest at the end of the day was just “tomacco”, an effect of the mutant hybrid of both tobacco and tomato. This event later happened in Fukushima Daiichi in Japan, where mutated veggies were harvested after a nuclear plant had a meltdown in 2011.
The Albuquerque Isotopes as a Baseball Team
Like any good old American dad, Homer Simpson is absolutely mad about the sports teams he follows. In this prediction. Homer revolts against the Springfield Isotopes, who were his favorite baseball team. He was against their relocation to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Not long after this, a minor team also found their way into the Southwest and really did have their name changed to Albuquerque Isotopes. It’s a reality dub of what exactly had happened just a little while before when that episode of The Simpsons was aired — though, in fairness, they were probably aware of the reference.
The Sale of Rodents as Poodles
The following year, 2002 saw The Simpsons heading on strong into the release of their thirteenth season. The villain, Fat Tony (likely related to the show The Sopranos, which was popular at the time) attached cotton to rodents. He then sells them as toy poodles to unsuspecting families.
This sinister act became a sad reality eleven years later in 2013. A middle-aged man from Argentina, out of his ignorance, purchased big ferrets on steroids in the guise of toy poodles. He even got them for as much as $150.
The Spying Plot of NSA
The Simpsons in 2007 unraveled a huge secret through one of their predictions. Marge was on a mission to reveal a dirty secret hidden by the governmental agency, NSA. The episode was set in the headquarters of this security agency.
The Simpsons revealed the fact that the National Security Agency was prying into a lot of people’s privacy, their personal phone calls, and what have you. The action was revealed to be a reality by Ed Snowden. He exposed a lot of these undercover spying programs by the agency in 2013.
Faulty Voting Machines Used In the US Election
In this political episode, Homer had attempted to vote for one candidate. But, instead, his vote was overturned repeatedly, as the ballot machine instead falsely reflected that he had voted for the opponent, leaving Homer more than a bit flustered.
The error from the voting machine in the episode was unpalatable and should have been avoided through smarter technology. Yet, it became a reality, probably out of negligence, in 2012. The voting machine in question was in the great state of Pennsylvania.
Winning Over the Swedes At The Olympics
The same year in their 21st season, The Simpsons made yet another impending revelation on their 12thepisode, “Roy Meets Curl”. Homer Simpson and wife Marge engage in the curling sport. The duo made their way up to represent the country against the Swedes at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
They successfully achieved a great feat by defeating their opponents to claim the gold medal. This also happened ten years later, in 2018, when the men’s team of the United States went on to claim the gold against the same opponents at the Olympics.
The Economics Nobel Prize Win for Bengt Holmstrom
We have to hand it to the wizard-like writers of The Simpsons, this one took some research to get right. In this episode, there was a prediction by young lovable bespectacled nerd Millhouse that Bengt Holmstrom would win a Nobel Prize in Economics.
At that point, this would have come across as a wish to anyone who saw it. But not so long after, this was a reality, as just several short years later, in 2016, Bengt R. Holmstrom went on to achieve this feat.
Economic Meltdown in Greece
The Simpsons also predicted an economic meltdown to befall Greece in their 23rd season. The 10th episode, “Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson”, showed Homer Simpson reading out headlines from a news ticker. The news ticker read, “Europe puts Greece on eBay”.
The impending financial breakdown of Greece was predicted in this episode. And as recently as 2019, Greece was unable to repay a loan that had been taken from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an event that’s especially jarring seeing as Greece is a developed nation.
Lady Gaga’s Performance in The Super Bowl Match
Here, Mother Monster gladly made a guest appearance with everyone’s favorite yellow family in an episode where she played the role of herself. She had a performance of her own work, “Poker Face”, showcasing the hit song in a bombastic spectacle for Springfield fans.
The prediction came true with a strikingly accurate resemblance in 2017. Lady Gaga had a performance that year at the Super Bowl. In this performance, she performed a similar choreography to the one she had in the episode, five years earlier.
FIFA Corruption Saga
Sometimes The Simpsons‘ predictions are so wildly specific, even if we see them for a second in passing by way of a sight gag, that we have to wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. A year before the highly-talked about FIFA corruption saga in 2015, The Simpsons had seen it coming.
Homer Simpson, who got the job of a referee in the episode, was later arrested and prosecuted for charges of corruption. This strikes very similarly to the event that raged through the worldwide football governing body in 2015, a year after the episode was aired.
The Concluding Part of Game of Thrones
The enormously popular HBO TV series Game of Thrones had one of the cataclysmic events of its final season predicted by a show of a vastly different genre, The Simpsons. This happened in the 1st episode of the 29th season, “The Seasons”.
The entire Simpsons family had dressed uniquely in period garb, to view from a distance, a dragon razing down their entire village. This episode was aired just a little while before a similar event took place in Game of Thrones, the burning of King’s Landing by Daenerys.