If you've ever tuned in to Fox on a Sunday night and wondered whether you were watching
a long-running animated sitcom or a cartoon prophecy, you're not alone. Here are some
super freaky times that The Simpsons has apparently predicted the future.
The Simpsons began life back in 1987 as a segment on The Tracey Ullman Show, one of
the Fox network's first shows. That means the yellow-hued family has been a staple of
the network since the beginning, and as such frequently pokes fun at its corporate overlords.
"And we can't watch Fox 'cause they own those chemical weapon plants in Syria."
The 1998 episode "When You Dish Upon a Star" found Homer working as a very annoying personal
assistant to the then-married couple of Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, who voiced themselves.
There are numerous jokes at the expense of celebrities and Hollywood in general, thus
allowing the show another chance to slip in another joke about Fox's business practices.
There's a brief shot of the entrance to the 20th Century Fox lot, which a sign says is
"A Division of Walt Disney Co." Nearly two decades later, the actual Walt Disney Company,
flush with cash from numerous successful blockbuster flicks, acquired 21st Century Fox for a cool
$71.3 billion. So now Disney actually does own Fox, and The Simpsons.
"Ay caramba!"
Curling is a unique sport that involves the careful pushing and sweeping of a large stone
on an ice rink. It's been a regular event at the Winter Olympics since 1998. Teams from
cold, snowy countries like Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland usually dominate the medal
count. Before 2018, Team USA had reached the medal podium only once, when the men's team
won bronze in 2006.
The relative lack of American presence in the sport added an extra air of unlikelihood
to the 2010 Olympics-themed Simpsons episode "Boy Meets Curl," in which Homer and Marge
become a mixed doubles curling duo for Team USA. They wind up winning the gold medal,
an achievement that was improbably matched by the real American men's curling team in
2018. Even weirder about this Simpsons prediction is that the show foresaw mixed doubles curling
being an Olympic event in the first place, as it wasn't part of the Winter Games lineup
until 2018.
"U-S-A! U-S-A! oops"
The recurring character Fat Tony is the big man in charge of Springfield's "Legitimate
Businessman's Social Club." In other words, he's the local organized crime boss. He's
been involved in a number of shady and illegal activities, and the 2002 episode "Poppa's
Got a Brand New Badge" involved one of his weirdest schemes ever. Homer's security company
SpringShield busts Fat Tony for gluing cotton balls onto ferrets, with plans to sell them
to a pet store by passing them off as far more expensive toy poodles. Despite the unusual
nature of this plot, it was remarkably similar to one a real-life criminal actually attempted.
"With this latest arrest, Springfield is now free of crime, although overrun with ferrets."
In 2013, a retiree visited the massive La Salada outdoor bazaar in Buenos Aires, Argentina,
and purchased two poodles. He took his new pets to a veterinarian for a checkup, only
for the doctor to discover that they weren't poodles at all. They were ferrets given steroids
to appear poodle-size.
Bart and Lisa Simpson love "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," the cartoon segment on The Krusty the
Clown Show that features the unspeakably gory antics of a Tom & Jerry-style cat and mouse.
In the 1992 episode "Itchy and Scratchy: the Movie," the promoters of the duo's feature
film have to pull out all the stops. So they install a billboard in Springfield showing
Itchy using a movie camera to chop off the Scratchy's head. Blood spews out of the billboard
with every chop, to the delight of drivers below.
“Ha ha.”
Then in 2008, when Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1 a work almost as violent as "Itchy
& Scratchy," made its Australian TV debut the network TV2 contracted the advertising
firm Saatchi & Saatchi to inform the public. It did so with a billboard-meets-art-installation
in which Uma Thurman's character The Bride held a katana that unleashed so much blood,
it exploded beyond the printed panels and onto the side of a building, all over the
street, and onto white cars parked below.
The 2010 episode "Elementary School Musical" begins with Lisa and her friends watching
the announcement of that year's batch of Nobel Prize winners. They're more than a little
bit nerdy, so they've all made predictions and printed them out. The Simpsons' writers
really do their research for these scenes, as they aim to get the details just right
for even the briefest of sight gags.
The friend group's little chart lists 20 possible Nobel winners across five categories, and
all of them are real people and outstanding members of their respective fields. Milhouse's
pick to take home the big prize in Economics is Bengt R. Holmstrom, a Finnish economist
and MIT faculty member. Amazingly, the usually hapless Milhouse got it right, as Holmstrom
really did win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2016.
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