Featured Image Credit: Fox
Topics: The Simpsons
William Morgan
There have been a number of great prophetic texts throughout human history, the apocalypse-predicting Mayan Calendar, ancient Rome's civilization-guiding Sibylline Books, and, of course The Simpsons.
But while the Mayan's impressive calendar basically just predicted the movement of the sun, moon and stars, and Rome's prophetic book could only be read by a few priests and solved every problem with an animal sacrifice, The Simpsons has managed to actually divine the future on a number of occasions.
Created by Matt Groening in 1987 and first airing on Fox in 1989, the hugely influential animated sitcom has racked up a record-setting 805 episodes across 37 seasons, and one of its original writers has even explained how they managed to get so many things right - from Donald Trump's presidency to space tourism and smart watches.
Many fans of the show have even pointed out recently that the show's creators even predicted that AI would start replacing jobs, in a 2012 episode where Mr Burns hires robots to run his nuclear plant. But writer Al Jean has said their prophetic power is quite simple.
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Even though The Simpsons' writers team has a tonne of successful predictions under their belt, Jean has previously claimed there's a pretty simple explanation for the show's accuracy.
Speaking to NME, he said: “One of our writers, 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'."
And when your show is the biggest on Earth for years, there's even a chance that The Simpsons has started subtly influencing reality. With no better example than the crazy 2024 collaboration between stoner rap group Cypress Hill and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Amazingly, this was actually a joke in a 1996 episode of The Simpsons. In the show, a roadie at a music festival could be seen calling out for one of the performers to own up to who ordered an orchestra to arrive.
He shouted, "Hello bands, who is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra? Come on people somebody ordered a London Symphony Orchestra...possibly while high.
"Cypress Hill, I'm looking in your direction."
But while this is a cool collab, both the rap group and the orchestra were inspired by The Simpsons joke, rather than the show making an insanely accurate prediction.
So as much as we might like to believe otherwise, it seems the writers don't have some secret time machine or crystal ball at their disposal.
Jean has still admitted that some of the predictions are eerie, though.
"The 9/11 one is so bizarre," he said. "In the World Trade Center episode, there was a brochure reading $9 a day with an 11 styled up like the towers. That was in ’96, which was crazy, like this insane coincidence. But mostly it’s just educated guesses."
He added: "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.”
I guess we'll have to just wait and see which of The Simpsons' storylines are yet to come true.