The Simpsons: Pop-Culture Prophets?

The troublemaker sees into a future where sister Lisa takes over from the entrepreneur in the White House and is forced to fix all the issues he caused. The idea of Trump climbing his way to the top of the political ladder was undoubtedly considered a joke at the turn of the century.

A week after the shock result, The Simpsons team decided that the chalkboard joke that appears in each credits sequence should read, “Being right sucks.” It’s fair to say, then, that the gag wasn’t exactly wishful thinking.

This was a bid to quell fears that the foodstuff was no longer safe to eat after radioactive wastewater had been released from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.  

Here, a three-eyed fish is discovered by Bart close to the town’s nuclear plant. Its owner, Mr. Burns, insists that there’s no threat to public safety. But he’s then served up Bart’s mutant find to eat live on television by Marge.

Here, after finding inspiration in the works of Thomas Edison, Homer decides to reinvent himself as an inventor. And one of his equations inadvertently ended up coming eerily close to a major scientific development. 

The particle physicist went on to add, “It’s kind of amazing, as Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered.” Who knew the lovable schlub was such a genius?

And the titular Simpson’s boyfriend Hugh, voiced by Mandy Patinkin, can be seen talking into his watch after flubbing his wedding proposal. This was, of course, a full 18 years before the voice recognition smartwatch was announced.  

This was something of a pipedream at the time. But of course during the lockdown stages of the pandemic, video chat platforms such as FaceTime and Zoom became one of the main ways everyone stayed in touch.

Yes, in a visual joke about one of London’s most famous landmarks, Big Ben, now possessing a digital clock face, there was also a mysterious pointed spire that could be seen to its left-hand side.

Not only did it look identical to the building in that 1995 episode of The Simpsons, it was also situated on the same side of Big Ben. Could London’s architects have taken inspiration from the Fox animation’s flash-forward?

Here, the gangster rap icons known as Cypress Hill end up performing their signature hit, “Insane in the Brain,” with some highly unlikely collaborators: none other than the London Symphony Orchestra.

And the band acknowledged how a certain show may have given them the brainwave. In a statement, they said, “It’s a dream come true, a collaboration only The Simpsons could have predicted.”

In the Season 22 episode “Elementary School Musical,” Lisa and her studious pals all make guesses about who will win the Nobel Prize. And although Milhouse’s was wide of the mark in the cartoon, it wasn’t in real life.

There was one aspect of his victory that The Simpsons didn’t manage to predict, though. Holmstrom also had to share the prize in Economics with his fellow genius Oliver Hart. 

The fact that the winter sport formed the basis of a season 21 storyline was unusual in the first place. The fact that its result was then echoed eight years later was even weirder.

But at the 2018 Winter Olympics, the men’s U.S. team caused a shock when they won gold, the first time their homeland had ever achieved such a feat in the stone-sweeping sport.

Nearly 20 years later, this particular merger very much happened in real life, which explains why you can now watch the adventures of Bart, Homer, and co. on Disney’s streaming service.

Here, Dolph is asked by fellow Springfield Elementary School tormentor Kearney to set up a “Beat up Martin” reminder on one of Apple’s early digital assistants, the Newton. But thanks to the quirks of the pesky auto-correct function, it ends up reading as “Eat up Martha.”

He said, “If you heard people talking and they used the words ‘Eat up Martha,’ it was basically a reference to the fact that we needed to nail the keyboard. We needed to make sure the text input works on this thing, otherwise, ‘Here comes the Eat up Marthas.’”

In one particular scene, Marge tries to comfort Lisa about her paranoia over the advent of tech surveillance. She says, “It’s not like the government is listening to everybody’s conversation.”

Six years later, whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former employee of the CIA, famously leaked information that had been deeply classified which proved that Lisa had been right all along to be so paranoid. 

The man who has written for the show since its 1989 debut said, "With the Trump one in 2000 we were looking for a funny celebrity who would be President.”

He said, “If you make enough predictions then 10 percent will turn out to be right.” Fellow writer Stephanie Gills added, “We are sort of futurologists in that we write ten months ahead, so we're trying to guess what is going to happen.”

He stated, “The guy whose episode predicted Donald Trump as President said it best. ‘If you write 700 episodes, and you don’t predict anything, then you’re pretty bad. If you throw enough darts, you’re going to get some bullseyes.’”

The scholar, whose writings on the hit animation are taught at the University of California, told The New York Times, “When that many smart people produce a television show, it’s bound to make some startling ‘predictions.’”

The Harvard University mathematicians argued, “With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is apt to happen.” The Simpsons, of course, now has more than 760 episodes to its name.

The University of Missouri’s ex-psychiatry department chairman said, “Under the right conditions, we can know things that we don’t know we know, and we can sometimes predict events or attract what we are thinking.” This aligns with his concept of a “psychosphere,” a collective state of mental atmosphere.

And its price tag of $9 just happens to be positioned next to an image of the Twin Towers. “It was totally coincidental,” Jean insisted about the fact this appeared to spell out “9/11.”

He did acknowledge, though, that the coincidence was a little spooky “given that it’s on the only episode of any series ever that had an entire act of World Trade Center jokes.”

Later that same year, the same country did win the same tournament. But the Germans were one of the favorites beforehand and had achieved the same feat no fewer than three times before.

But it wasn’t exactly much of a stretch to suggest that an international pop superstar would perform in such a manner. In fact, by this point, Pink had already been putting the likes of Cirque du Soleil to shame for a good two years.

He said, “Stanley Kubrick made the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and there’s Zoom and iPads in it — but that’s because he had futurologists helping him construct what the world might look like in 30 years’ time.”

Apparently, David Schiminovich, a notable astronomer at Columbia University, was consulted to help devise the Higgs boson mass equation that Homer scribbled on the blackboard and which essentially beat the Cern physicists to the punch. 

Its presenter stated, “Unlike most other shows, The Simpsons’ writing team consists largely of writers who are extremely educated in fields ranging from mathematics to social sciences; because of this they are also really connected to those that are on the cutting edge.”

Want an example? See the third season episode “Baby Translator” in which Homer’s brother invents the titular device. You might find it hard to believe, but a real-life firm named Zoundream claims that the use of A.I. has allowed them to devise a product which interprets crying babies’ demands.

In another truly bizarre case of life imitating art, experimental firms including AeroBanquets RMX are now offering people dining digital experiences in an attempt to reshape how society experiences food.

And apparently this traffic-beating method of travel could soon be available to the public. Oregon-based company Samson Sky is reportedly set to launch its flying car in 2025 some 15 years after it began development.

Thankfully, that hasn’t quite happened in real life yet. But Google engineer Blake Lemoine did get his marching orders in 2023 after claiming that the conglomerate’s newest form of A.I. had developed sentience.

Of course, the cartoon is now confirmed to last until at least its 36th season, achieving its remarkable milestone of 800 episodes in the process. So will any other show ever surpass its reputation as TV’s greatest soothsayer?