I know you know The Simpsons: Homer, Marge and their three lovely children, Bart, Lisa and Maggie. Springfield’s very own family of prophets, apparently.
And in this edition of Weekend Vines, let’s take a dig at what’s actually going on with these people and the ‘prophetic’ episodes we’ve seen.
On y va?
UFOs, aliens, mystical creatures. Apparently, Hollywood is their favourite destination.
But across the internet, there are people who can identify aliens. And you know what? They’re on a secret mission to reveal the truth: they live among us. The internet feeds us enough ‘reasons’ to support this theory. The Simpsons keeps churning out episodes, and these ‘researchers’ connect all the dots!
Ask Susan Dell, the businesswoman, or Kelly Loeffler, the former US senator from Georgia. Both have come under scrutiny from online conspiracy theorists searching for evidence of reptilian beings among America’s powerful.
Then, one fine day, someone stumbles upon The Simpsons. They open WhatsApp and forward it to everyone they know:
“See? It’s in the cartoon!”
But when you ask these ‘scholars’ for a source, they’ll probably say, “Trust me, bro!” and then vanish.
It was a fine December day in 1989 when the world first met Homer Simpson and his family. Look at them now! The Simpsons is the longest-running scripted prime-time series in American television history. I mean, how can we not love those yellow-headed people with the big eyes?
But somewhere along the way, a cartoon family became a family of prophets. At least, that is what the internet would have us believe.
A seemingly ordinary episode of The Simpsons from 2000, Bart to the Future, had a surprise in store. For the aforementioned theorists, it was practically a landmark discovery.
During a meeting with her advisers in the Oval Office, President Lisa says her administration has inherited a serious budget crisis from “President Trump”. Her advisers explain that the country is broke.
When Trump won the presidential election in 2016 and took office in 2017, the WhatsApp groups went into overdrive. More theorists, students and enthusiasts joined the discussion. For the link, DM me!
But that was neither the beginning nor the end.
The episode did not introduce a completely unknown political figure to the world. Trump had already flirted with the idea of becoming president and explored a Reform Party bid in 2000. The writers were likely making a joke about an existing political ambition. The line was real and predated his presidency, but it was satire that later acquired an uncanny resemblance to reality.
In 1998, the cartoon offered another curious glimpse of the future: a sign identifying 20th Century Fox as “A Division of Walt Disney Co.” Disney announced its agreement to acquire major 21st Century Fox entertainment assets in 2017 and completed the deal in March 2019. Ironically, The Simpsons itself ended up under Disney’s ownership. But Disney was already a giant in the entertainment industry, and the sign was a satirical gag that landed remarkably well in hindsight.
In the 2010 episode Elementary School Musical, Milhouse picks economist Bengt Holmström in a Nobel Prize betting pool. Holmström won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016. It was a specific and striking coincidence, although Holmström was already an established economist.
Then there’s Lisa’s Wedding (1995), which imagines a future with video calls and wrist-based communication. Look at us now. We have it all.
Except video calling wasn’t a Simpsons invention. The idea had existed for decades, and the technology was already being developed and used before the episode aired. Science fiction had long imagined people seeing and talking to one another from a distance. What the episode captured was a future in which such technology would become part of everyday life.
And in a 2012 episode, Lady Gaga performs while suspended above Springfield. Five years later, Gaga made an aerial entrance at the 2017 Super Bowl halftime show. Coincidence? Or had Springfield’s resident pop-culture oracle been taking notes? The visual resemblance is striking, but it doesn’t establish that the show predicted the performance or that Gaga copied it.
And then come the manipulated edits. In some viral clips, Homer appears to have predicted events ranging from a bridge collapse to major political and global incidents. He even seems to have picked the 2026 World Cup winner. But these claims often rely on fabricated images, edited clips or scenes taken out of context. Sometimes, the supposed prediction surfaces only after the event has happened.
Springfield may be full of surprises. But apparently, it has a very active fan-fiction department, too.
And dear reader, just say, ‘It’s AI’, and move on!
So, what does it actually take to get a job at The Simpsons? A time machine, perhaps, with unrestricted access to the future.
But do the creators actually have one? Do they employ agents from the future who slip them classified information? Or has the world quietly started taking notes from Springfield before deciding what to do next?
Because, at this point, it’s getting difficult to tell who is copying whom.
The theories, study classes, reels and WhatsApp forwards have made The Simpsons more than a cartoon. Those WhatsApp groups are always watching, waiting to catch the next clue. They seem convinced that something is not right with the yellow-headed people.
One screenshot, three red circles and a caption beginning with “They don’t want you to know this” — and suddenly, Springfield has a research department.
And then there are the self-proclaimed experts who believe Matt Groening, the show’s creator, has some extraordinary connection to the future, as though he could make the world revolve however he pleases.
Perhaps they could give a lecture on what too much time on the internet and unemployment can do to a person.
There is a distinction worth noticing. Sometimes, The Simpsons made a surprisingly specific joke that later matched reality. Sometimes, its writers extrapolated from trends already visible around them. And sometimes, the internet took an image, stripped away its context and gave it a prophecy-shaped caption.
The show has not predicted everything its fans claim it has. But after decades on television, it has accumulated an enormous catalogue of jokes, characters and imaginary scenarios for the internet to revisit whenever reality produces something vaguely familiar.
Perhaps the creators do not need a time machine after all. They have sharp writers, decades of American pop culture to satirise, and an audience that will archive an episode, launch a search party and hunt for a time machine in the creator’s room.
Somewhere in Springfield, Homer Simpson is probably sitting on the sofa, eating a doughnut and watching the internet give him credit for things he never did.