The Simpsons has been a lot of things: hilarious, heartwarming, brilliant, biting and satirical. But The Simpsons has never been clairvoyant.
People have a lot of spare time on their hands lately. I suppose that because of that it has lead them to do some pretty silly things, like claim that The Simpsons predicted the COVID-19 pandemic back in the 1990s. It’s the latest rumor that’s sweeping the internet and it’s 100% stupid and 200% false.
Here’s the image that people have been posting on various social media sites. It’s proof, they say! Proof that The Simpsons saw into our current crisis decades ago!
Okay, but here’s the thing: that image is manipulated. The first three frames are from the episode “Marge In Chains” which features a brief storyline about a flu infecting residents of Springfield. But the flu comes from Japan, not China, and bares no resemblance to the 2020 coronavirus epidemic aside from a few symptoms. As for that fourth and final frame, that’s actually from a completely different episode and has been Photoshopped to say “Corona Virus.”
So The Simpsons did not predict the COVID-19 disaster. Far from it. They wrote an episode about a flu that happened to originate in an eastern country. That’s it.
But this isn’t the first time people have claimed that Fox’s hit animated show can see into a crystal ball. In fact, there is another coronavirus rumor about The Simpsons floating around right now. People state that The Simpsons Movie alluded to Tom Hanks getting ill with COVID-19. Why? Because in one scene, Hanks (in a brief cameo role) says “This is Tom Hanks saying if you see me in person, please, leave me be.” This, some say, shows that Hanks would eventually come down with a contagious, deadly disease. To say it’s a stretch is an understatement. There is no reference to illness in The Simpsons Movie, no mention of any disease. This was just a fun little joke thrown in the end credits. But some take it as The Simpsons looking ahead again.
Why do so many people think Matt Groening’s classic show correctly calls the future? A lot of it comes from the show predicting Donald Trump’s run for and win of the presidency of the United States.
Only that isn’t entirely true either...
You’ve surely seen this:
It’s an image that made the rounds after Trump shocked the world with his successful run for commander-in-chief. The Simpsons called it, folks said. Not only did they know Trump would run but they even accurately depicted how he’d run, down to the most minor details like his signage and the way he descended down an escalator in his announcement speech. And they did it back in 2000! Amazing!
Okay, but no. No, no, no. Not even close.
The images above are not from a Simpsons episode from 2000 but are instead from a short made for Fox from...2015, after Trump announced his run for the presidency. Why did the show capture such precise detail about Trump’s announcement? Because the images were drawn after it. This instance is open-and-shut, an obvious fake. But somehow the internet gobbled it up and believe that a television show was able to envision everything, even down to the font Trump used.
Come on, people. I know we can be a silly nation but this is a bit much, right? And yet people fall for it again and again. There are countless other instances of The Simpsons seeing the future but they’re all coincidental or flimsy at best. People want to believe it’s true so they find the tiniest coincidences and blow them up into massive predictions. And The Simpsons has been on the air for a long time, they’ve made many jokes about many things. There are ample episodes to pull “predictions” from. But none of them are concrete, none of them are more than humorously ironic.
Yes, the show did say that Trump would be president in a throwaway joke from a 2000 episode. An adult Lisa Simpson, now president of the US, says “we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” There you go! That’s a legitimate reference to Trump being president all the way from the year 2000. However, Donald Trump had publicly flirted with the idea of running for president several times, including in 1999. Of course the idea of him winning was preposterous then too. So The Simpsons was making a joke about Trump somehow claiming the highest office in the land. They weren’t foreseeing what was ahead, they were poking fun at something that seemed ridiculous and far-fetched.
This rash of “Simpsons predictions” has gotten so bad that Snopes.com has dedicated an entire section of their site to debunking the myths. But that doesn’t stop new Simpsons claims from popping up whenever a major world event happens. It’s exasperating and now sadly reliable.
In its prime, The Simpsons was one of the best shows on TV. It really was. It deserves recognition for so many things. But it has never told the future. It has never predicted events that have yet to unfold. It got lucky a couple of times by making silly jokes that, sadly, became reality. But the writers of The Simpsons don’t have some sixth sense that allows them visions of years ahead. Sorry, Internet, but the case is closed.