by Jacqueline Kate Goldblatt
Cartoons have always held a special place in the collective consciousness of the American public. From the Saturday morning classics our parents watched growing up to the more modern, readily-accessible content on streaming services and channels like Cartoon Network, animation has solidly embedded itself into the fabric of our culture. However, what if I were to tell you that those little figures dancing across our TV screens were more than just junk food for the brain? Would you believe me if I said that a little show called “The Simpsons” was trying to tell us the future?
Due to the sheer number of times “The Simpsons” has successfully foretold events to come, it is difficult to nail down exactly the first instance of this strange phenomenon. The earliest recorded case that I was able to find, however, is “$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling),” the 10th episode of season 5. The contents of the episode are standard Simpsons fare, comedic and carefully constructed to just skirt the edges of propriety without offending anyone. One particular detail stands out however; two magicians meant to parody Siegfried and Roy, Gunter and Ernst, perform at the new casino in Springfield. In the middle of their show, their white tiger attacks them. 10 years after the episode aired, Roy was attacked during a Las Vegas show by Montecore the tiger, who bit Roy in the neck and ended his career. While this could easily be written off as mere coincidence, the amount of instances similar to this one are staggering, and the variety of the subject matter of the predictions spans the gamut.
Take for example the prediction’s foray into science and politics. During episode one of season 22 entitled “Elementary School Musical,” a betting pool over who would win the various Nobel Prizes occurs. Millhouse bets on Finnish economist and MIT professor Bengt Holmstrom. Six years after the episode, Holmstrom indeed went on to win the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel alongside his work partner Oliver Hart. As for affairs of state, in the season 11 episode “Bart to the Future,” Lisa becomes president and inherits a massive amount of national debt from her predecessor. Who was this previous president? Donald J. Trump. Sixteen years later, well…as Bart went on to write in the usual chalkboard gag four days after the election, “Being right sucks.”
They say that art imitates life, and vice versa. Still, it’s a little disconcerting that out of all the media life has to choose from, it picks a cartoon where everyone is yellow and lives next to a nuclear power plant. Let’s just hope that some of the more positive events come true, and that we won’t have to, as Kent Brockman says in the episode “Deep Space Homer,” “welcome our insect overlords.”