"Revelations" from The Simpsons
As modern conspiracy theorists say: "If you want to know the future, just carefully watch all the seasons of The Simpsons." It's not the first time that plot twists from the series come true in reality, either in a satirical or dramatic manner, with an accuracy that would make Nostradamus envious. For instance, in a 2000 episode, Lisa Simpson becomes the President of the United States wearing an outfit that closely resembles Kamala Harris's attire at Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration. Moreover, Lisa's competitor in the series is a "real estate mogul president," easily recognizable as Donald Trump.
While Kamala Harris's outfit could be seen as a calculated move by her image-makers and political strategists trying to create the effect of a "self-fulfilling prophecy" (where people manipulate events and signs to fit an existing prediction), predicting Trump's presidency is a more complex task. And beating the real Trump in the unpredictable 2024 presidential race seems almost like Mission Impossible.
The cult series The Simpsons has long been reputed as prophetic, at least according to fans of the satirical animated show. On the other hand, having started in 1989 and boasting 35 seasons and around 800 episodes, any series might "predict" some future events, based on the minimal predictive abilities of its writers, their knack for noticing new trends and cultural preconditions, and ultimately, the law of large numbers and the cyclic nature of human history. "If you make a bunch of predictions, 10% might turn out to be true," say the showrunners.
"But some things did come true!" conspiracy-minded viewers will argue. Yes, some things did come true, due to the reasons mentioned above.
For example, in episode 10 of season 23 (2012), when Homer visits a news channel, the news ticker reads that Europe has put Greece on eBay - and in 2015, Greece indeed faced a severe economic crisis and the European Union's (particularly Germany's) reluctance to pay off the country's external debt.
In episode 5 of season 10 (1998), 20 years before the actual events, Homer Simpson brings his script to 20th Century Fox, where a sign indicates that the studio is owned by The Walt Disney Co. Given the inner workings of the film business and Disney's greed and prudence, this merger of two film giants could have been anticipated.
The appearance of the three-eyed fish Blinky, shown in episode 3 of season 1 (1990), could also be foreseen by observing the rate at which the environment is being polluted. It took 21 years and three Argentine fishermen who caught such a mutant in the lake Chorro de Agua Caliente, into which waste from a local nuclear plant was dumped, for this "prophecy" to come true.
The attack in episode 10 of season 5 (1993) by a white tiger on trainer Roy Horn, which eventually happened in 2003, is purely statistical - any trainer of wild animals is sooner or later attacked by their charge because, as you know, there are no humane training methods. Circus animals suffer and, if given the chance, will retaliate against their tormentors.
However, there's no clear explanation for the Higgs boson equation written on the blackboard by the irrepressible Homer Simpson in episode 2 of season 10 (1998). It was only in 2012 that physicists managed to discover and calculate the mass of the Higgs boson, and it's unlikely that The Simpsons' showrunners enlisted the help of eminent scientists for this episode. Let's chalk it up to a... coincidence. After all, as the saying goes, if you give a thousand monkeys typewriters, they will eventually write a Shakespearean sonnet.
As for the eerie apocalyptic prediction by The Simpsons about a terrible catastrophe in 2024, which surfaced online at the end of 2023 and raised panic and eschatological sentiments in an already tense society, it turned out to be a fake. The video's creator merely took a few frames from episode 9 of season 24 (2013), where Homer goes to a survival school, added his own voiceover, mentioned a "solar superstorm" that would burn everything on Earth - and voila, a new "prophecy," picked up by social media users not inclined to fact-checking.
Those who particularly believe in the mystical aura surrounding the satirical series about the Springfield family should listen more often to the show's creators, like Bill Oakley, who stated again in a 2020 interview with Reuters: "When people say The Simpsons predicted something, it's just that we satirized real events of the past, and since history keeps repeating itself, it seems like we predicted something."
Still in doubt? Well then, The Simpsons are coming to you.