Top 10 Predictions from "The Simpsons" TV Show That Ended Up Coming True
The television show "The Simpsons" is widely recognized as one of the best sitcoms, and one of the greatest TV shows overall for that matter, ever produced! Since it's debut in 1989, there have been well over 600 episodes featuring the Simpsons family of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa & Maggie, and the show is now the longest-running US sitcom ever! The series illustrates the absurdity of middle-class American life and pop culture, with a hint of cynicism and loads of general dysfunction! Over the years that the series has aired, there have been a wide range of topics covered from the mundane to the absurd! At times it seems as though The Simpsons was so ahead of its time that the events of the show were predicting the future! Here's my list of the Top 10 Predictions from "The Simpsons" that ended up coming true!
1) Apple Watches
In the episode “Lisa’s Wedding” from 1995, Lisa's fiance is wearing a cell phone watch on his wrist. While the appearance differs from the modern Apple Watches, the functionality was spot on!
2) Auto-Correct
In an episode of "The Simpsons" that aired in 1994, school bullies Kearny & Dolph write a memo to "beat up Martin" on an Apple Newton device. The memo gets quickly translated to "eat up Martha" - an early foreshadowing of modern day frustrations with auto-correct that we have all experienced!
3) The Ebola Outbreak
The 1997 episode titled "Lisa's Sax" featured Marge coaxing a sickly Bart to read the book "Curious George and the Ebola Virus", which featured George laying in bed sick (maybe even dead?) on the cover! Just over a decade later, fears of an Ebola outbreak in the US dominated the news, although most of the fear and panic that ensued was unfounded and over-hyped, as Ebola never progressed beyond a few sporadic cases in the US.
4) Bengt R. Holmstrom Winning a Nobel Prize for Economics
In the 22nd season, The Simpsons episode "Elementary School Musical" has a scene where Lisa, Martin & Millhouse form a betting pool to pick the Nobel Prize winners in several categories. Bengt R. Holmstrom, an economics professor at MIT, was picked by Millhouse to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, which did in fact come true in 2016!
5) The Siegfried & Roy Tiger Attack
In the 1993 episode "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)," Mr. Burns hires a duo with "trained" white tigers that eerily resembled the performance due of Siegfried & Roy. The tigers proceed to attack and eat the duo, foreshadowing the harrowing attack on Roy Horn roughly 10 years later in 2003!
6) Disney Buys 20th Century Fox
The 1998 episode titled "When You Dish Upon a Star" featured Homer visiting Fox Studios to make a movie. In the background of one of the scenes, there is a 20th Century Fox sign with the tagline "A Division of Walt Disney Co" along the bottom! Years later, Disney did in fact buy 20th Century Fox, marking this as one more prediction that came true!
7) Lady Gaga Performing at the Super Bowl
Back in 2012, The Simpsons featured an episode centered around Lady Gaga titled "Lisa Goes Gaga". Although it wasn't explicitly stated that Lady Gaga was performing at the Super Bowl in the episode, CNN and other media outlets explicitly used language correlating the opening animated performance where Gaga is flying through the air on elevated wires to her performing at the Super Bowl!
8) Election Voting Machine Errors
In the annual "Treehouse of Horror" special from 2008, Homer goes into the voting booth and votes for Barrack Obama, only to have his vote recorded as being for John McCain! A short 4 years later in 2012, we saw this prediction come to fruition as well with the voting machine errors and discrepancies during the presidential election featuring Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney!
9) Mass of the Higgs Boson Particle
In the episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace" from 1998, Homer, lamenting his lack of accomplishments, begins admiring and studying Thomas Edison's works. In one scene, Homer is writing equations on a blackboard, and it turns out that the formulas shown are very near to the accepted scientific findings that were agreed upon 15 years after the episode aired! At first, that seems incredibly unbelievable, until you realize that some of The Simpsons' writers are extremely intelligent and versed in science, and that the original formulas were proposed in the 1960's. It just took over 50 years for the scientific community to prove the equations valid!
10) Donald Trump Elected as President of the USA
The episode "Bart to the Future" from 2000 features a glimpse of the future where Bart is shown as a bum and Lisa is elected as the first female president. Lisa goes on to mention that "We’ve inherited quite the budget crunch from President Trump," foreshadowing the events of the 2016 US presidential election where Trump was indeed elected President! At the time, it seemed like such an absurd and insane event that it would never come true, but alas life does in fact imitate art (specifically comedy in this instance)!
If you have any other predictions from "The Simpsons", please feel free to comment below with any others you may have!
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