Five Times The Simpsons Predicted The Future

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The only entertainment story bigger than the news that Disney is buying a large part of 21st Century Fox is that The Simpsons - owned by Fox - predicted the sale almost 20 years ago.

As details of the multi-billion dollar deal broke, the longest-running prime-time show posted a still from the 1998 episode When You Dish Upon A Star.

A line underneath the 20th Century Fox logo in the shot clearly reads "A division of Walt Disney Co."

 

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But it's not the first time The Simpsons has correctly predicted the future; from technological advancements to American presidents, the cartoon has an impeccable record for picking what's right around the corner.

5. Season 22, Episode 1: The Nobel Prize
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Six years before Bengt Holmström won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2016, Milhouse bet that the MIT professor would scoop the world's most prestigious award. Unsurprisingly it was MIT that picked up on the tiny detail.

4. Season 6, Episode 19: Facetime

Close to 15 years before we were granted the ability to video chat on our phones, Lisa Simpson was using The Simpson's version of FaceTime to talk to Marge on her wedding day. Smartwatches also feature in the same episode, two decades before we actually started using them in real-life.

3. Season 23, Episode 22: Lady Gaga's Super Bowl Performance
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The Simpsons were back at it with the fortune-telling in 2012, not only predicting that Lady Gaga would one day play the Super Bowl half-time show but also that she'd be suspended from a wire and wearing a silver ensemble to do so.

 

2. Season 25, Episode 16: FIFA's Corruption Scandal

As well as calling Brazil's defeat by Germany in the 2014 World Cup, this episode also had uncanny parallels to the corruption scandal that rocked FIFA the following year. The arrest of the world football federation representative who asks Homer for help was echoed in real-life in 2015 when FIFA bigwigs were charged with corruption.

 

 

1. Season 11, Episode 17: Donald Trump's Presidency

 

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Anyone watching Bart to the Future in 2000 probably had a hearty chuckle at the idea of Donald Trump ever being US president. But the storyline was eerily accurate and, in a 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, writer Dan Greaney confessed that it was supposed to be a warning.

"That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom," he said. "It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane."

 

15 December 2017




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