Over its twenty five year run on the small screen The Simpsons has made some very wise and very accurate predictions. And we’re not talking Derek Acorah on Most Haunted style ‘predictions’, we’re talking about forseeing things that have actually come to pass. There are only two explanations for this. Either all The Simpsons writers are psychic, or more likely, there has been so many episodes that eventually they we were going to have a few coincidences. Either way, it’s pretty fascinating to imagine the yellow cartoon family as bringers of our destiny. Here are 12 of the weirdest things the Simpsons got right.
12) Long before Edward Snowden spilled the beans in 2013, The Simpsons predicted the NSA were spying on American citizens. Proof of this can be seen in this screen grab from El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer), which is as far back as 1997.
11) In the 1995 episode ‘Lisa’s Wedding’, which is set 15 years into the future, Lisa’s fiance Hugh Parkfield owns a watch with which he uses to verbally communicate. In 2015, Apple and Samsung have both released a type of watch that can also be used as a mobile phone.
10) In the same episode, The Simpsons also predicted that we would one day have the technology to videocall on our phones.
9) In the 1994 episode ‘Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song’, The Simpsons accurately predicted the 2013 horsemeat scandal, where food products from several stores tested positive for containing undeclared horsemeat.
8) In a really bizarre turn of events, The Simpsons predicted the mauling of Roy from Siegfied and Roy. Well, sort of. The cartoon’s own parody of Siegfied and Roy called ‘Gunther and Ernst’ were attacked by a tiger in the episode ‘$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)’.
7) In the 1998 episode ‘Lard of the Dance’ Homer and Bart steal used cooking grease from the school to make a quick buck. In 2011, real thieves would make off with roughly $2000 of cooking oil from a restaurant in St Louis. A complete coincidence? Or were they actually inspired by The Simpsons?
6) In the opening scene of 2008 episode ‘Tree House of Horror XIX’, Homer has problems with a rigged electronic voting machine. This turned out to be an accurate prediction, as four years’ later dodgy electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania would change people’s votes from Obama to Mitt Romney.
5) Unlike most of the scarily accurate predictions in the Simpsons, which are far into the future from when the episode is set, this subtle gag in the 2013 episode ‘Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson’ predicted the Greek financial crisis not long before it actually happened.
4) In the classic 1999 episode E-I-E-I (Annoyed Grunt) Homer pours plutonium onto the fields at his old family farm when nothing grows, which causes the food to glow green. This supposedly happened for real in 2011, when reports emerged claiming crops were being deformed in Japan due to the Fukushima nuclear disaster (although the validity of this has since been questioned).
3) In the 1990 episode ‘Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish’ Bart hooks a three-eyed fish he names Blinky from the lake near Mr Burns nuclear power plant. In 2011, a real life three-eyed fish was caught in a reservoir in Argentina – near a real nuclear power plant.
2) In September of 1997, The show premiered the episode ‘The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson’, which featured this scene. After the terrorist attack on the Twin towers in 2001 many were creeped out by this screen shoot, which appears to have accidentally predicted the tragedy.
1) In the 1994 episode ‘Lisa on Ice’, bully Jimbo’s cronie Dolph tries to take a memo on his now old school Apple Newton and gets autocorrected. This groundbreaking moment may perhaps be the first example of autocorrect on TV ever.
