- “The Simpsons” has built a reputation for predicting the future.
- The show predicted the election of Donald Trump.
- A 2017 episode also seemed to preempt Daenerys Targaryen’s big plot twist on the penultimate episode of “Game of Thrones.”
Three-eyed fish — Season 2, Episode 4
In 2008, “The Simpsons” showed Homer trying to vote for Barack Obama in the US general election, but a faulty machine changed his vote.
Four years later, a voting machine in Pennsylvania had to be removed after it kept changing people’s votes for Barack Obama to ones for his Republican rival Mitt Romney.
The censorship of Michelangelo’s David — Season 2, Episode 9
An episode from 1990 titled “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge” showed Springfieldians protesting against Michelangelo’s statue of David being exhibited in the local museum, calling the artwork obscene for its nudity.
The satire of censorship came true in July 2016, when Russian campaigners voted on whether to clothe a copy of the Renaissance statue that had been set up in central St Petersburg.
Letter from The Beatles — Season 2, Episode 18
In 1991, an episode of “The Simpsons” saw The Beatles’ Ringo Star diligently answering fan mail that had been written decades ago.
In September 2013, two Beatles fans from Essex received a reply from Paul McCartney to a letter and recording they sent to the band 50 years ago. The recording was sent to a London theatre the band was due to play at but was found years later in a car boot sale by a historian.
In 2013, the BBC’s “The One Show” reunited the pair with their letter, plus a reply from McCartney.
The sideburns of MLB great Don Mattingly — Season 3, Episode 17
In the 1992 episode “Homer at the Bat,” Mr. Burns recruits Major League Baseball players for his softball team, including the then-New York Yankees first baseman Don Mattingly.
Mr. Burns ends up benching Mattingly for not following the policy he has for the length of a player’s sideburns. This actually happened to the Yankee captain in real life.
In 1991, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner fined him $250 and Mattingly was benched for not adhering to the boss’ rule on hair length.
Siegfried and Roy tiger attack — Season 5, Episode 10
The Simpsons parodied entertainers Siegfried & Roy in a 1993 episode called “$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling).” During the episode, the magicians are viciously mauled by a trained white tiger while performing in a casino.
In 2003, Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy was attacked during a live performance by Montecore, one of their white tigers. Roy lived but sustained severe injuries in the attack.
Horsemeat scandal — Season 5, Episode 19
In 1994, Lunchlady Doris used “assorted horse parts” to make lunch for students at Springfield Elementary.
Nine years later, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland found horse DNA in over one-third of beefburger samples from supermarkets and ready meals, and pig in 85% of them.
Autocorrect — Season 6, Episode 8
School bullies Kearny and Dolph take a memo to “beat up Martin” on a Newton device in an episode of “The Simpsons” that aired in 1994. The memo gets quickly translated to “eat up Martha” — an early foreshadowing of autocorrect frustrations.
“The Simpsons” was lampooning Apple’s underwhelming Newton — the iPhone’s ancient ancestor — that had just been released, and included shoddy handwriting recognition, according to Fast Company.
Nitin Ganatra, former director of engineering iOS applications at Apple, told Fast Company that this particular moment on “The Simpsons” served as inspiration to get the iPhone keyboard right.
Smartwatches — Season 6, Episode 19
“The Simpsons” introduced the idea of a watch you could use as a phone in an episode aired in 1995, nearly 20 years before the Apple Watch was released.
The invention of The Shard — Season 6, Episode 19
The “Lisa’s Wedding” episode from 1995 came with a lot of unexpected predictions. During Lisa’s trip to London, we see a skyscraper behind Tower Bridge that looks eerily similar to The Shard, and it’s is even in the right location.
Robotic librarians — Season 6, Episode 19
In “Lisa’s Wedding,” we discover that librarians have been replaced with robots in the “Simpsons” universe.
More than 20 years later, robotics students from the University of Aberystwyth built a prototype for a walking library robot, while scientists in Singapore have begin testing their own robot librarians.
The discovery of the Higgs boson equation — Season 8, Episode 1
In a 1998 episode called “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” Homer Simpson becomes an inventor and is shown in front of a complicated equation on a blackboard.
According to Simon Singh, the author of “The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets,” the equation predicts the mass of the Higgs boson particle. It was first predicted in 1964 by Professor Peter Higgs and five other physicists, but it wasn’t until 2013 that scientists discovered proof of the Higgs boson in a £10.4 billion ($13 billion) experiment.
Ebola outbreak — Season 9, Episode 3
Some people maintain that “The Simpsons” predicted the 2014 outbreak of Ebola 17 years before it happened. In a scene from the episode “Lisa’s Sax,” Marge suggests a sick Bart read a book titled “Curious George and the Ebola Virus.” The virus wasn’t particularly widespread in the 1990s, but years later it was the top of the news agenda.
Ebola was first discovered in 1976, and though this latest outbreak has been the worst yet, it killed 254 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 and 224 in Uganda in 2000.
The Simpsons Disney buys 20th Century Fox — Season 10, Episode 5
In the episode “When You Dish Upon a Star” that originally aired in 1998, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer produce a script Homer pitches. The script is being produced at 20th Century Fox, and a sign in front of the studio’s headquarters reveals that it is “a division of Walt Disney Co.”
On December 14, 2017, Disney purchased 21st Century Fox for an estimated $52.4 billion, acquiring Fox’s film studio (20th Century Fox), in addition to a bulk of its television production assets. The media conglomerate also has access to popular entertainment properties like “X-Men,” “Avatar,” and “The Simpsons.”