- Election of Donald Trump, coronavirus, champion team of the 2014 World Cup ...
- For several years, montages and excerpts from The Simpsons have been presented on social networks as “predictions” made in the series long before these events actually happened.
- If several gags or certain intrigues have preceded future news, most of these predictions are either false or overinterpreted. 20 Minutes takes stock.
It became a commonly accepted idea, according to memes and other viral tweets on the subject: The Simpsons would have predicted many events in the course of their episodes, long before they actually happened.
But if the series broadcast since 1989 has imagined certain news a few years in advance - its longevity playing for it -, it is also wrongly given false expectations, when they are not simply overinterpreted.
We sort out the true from the false among the cases most often cited as examples.
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What is true
This is the Simpson's most famous prediction : the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, staged in an episode aired in March 2000, 16 years before it actually happened.
In this story imagining Bart's life when he became an adult, his sister Lisa, who became the first woman president of the United States, briefly evokes his predecessor when she deplores the budgetary problems left by "President Trump".
Interviewed on this subject in 2016, the screenwriter Dan Greany confided to the Hollywood Reporter that it was a "warning" and that the idea had been retained because it "was consistent with a vision of the United States becoming weirdo. Trump's presidential ambitions at the time were also used as inspiration for the teams by Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons .
Neymar's injury and Germany's victory at the 2014 FIFA World Cup
At the end of March 2014, a few months before the Football World Cup in Brazil, Homer found himself the referee of a fictitious final between Brazil and Germany, during which the star player of the Brazilian selection, "El Divo", is injured on a bad fall ... without being whistled for a penalty by Homer, while mafia counted on him to win Brazil.
The episode ends with a victory for Germany, prefiguring the Germany-Argentina final won 1-0 by Mannschaft, who had already beaten Brazil in the semifinals 7-1, in the absence of Neymar, injured in the Brazil-Colombia quarter-final.
If The Simpsons were quite right with a few months in advance, the failings of Neymar (his tendency to simulation and his fragile health) having served to design the parody "El Divo" made this possibility all the more plausible. A year later, however, the corruption scandal at FIFA will make headlines around the world.
Disney's purchase of 20th Century Fox
The Simpsons again predicted right - this time 20th Century Fox would be bought by Disney.
We all should all watch the show as a documentary into our future. pic.twitter.com/fzDxqfK5At
By an ironic stroke of fate, the writers of the Simpsons had predicted the acquisition of the studio 20th Century Fox by Disney with 22 years in advance.
Episode 5 of season 10, "Homer made his cinema", broadcast in November 1998 in the United States, showed, around a plan of a few seconds, the emblematic Fox logo - The Simpsons being broadcast on Fox's television branch - labeled "A division of the Walt Disney Company".
In 2019, after long months of negotiation, the studio has indeed joined the Disney empire ... which however acted on this change by removing the mention "Fox" from the logo, now bearing only the name "20th Century Studios".
Questionable "predictions"
Was the 2014 Ebola epidemic predicted by The Simpsons from an episode aired in October 1997? This is what certain internet users affirm by citing as proof an episode in which Marge advises Bart to read a children's book entitled "Curious George and the Ebola virus".
3: the simpsons had also predicted the ebola virus before its arrival as you can see (the episode dates from the end of the 90s therefore more than 10 years before the appearance of the virus) pic.twitter.com/2imprGkdCf
- اين (@uchiwamleh) May 30, 2020This “prediction”, however, deserves to be highly nuanced since the Ebola virus, known since the end of the 1970s, had already given rise to series of cases in several African countries during the 1990s… which could have all simply to inspire the scriptwriters when designing this gag.
Auto-correction on smartphones
Although it was not part of our daily life, for the use of a smartphone or any digital input tool, the auto-correction function would have first emerged in The Simpsons , at to believe this other "prophecy" very often taken.
This #Simpsons reference was one of the first autocorrect fails, and it actually inspired #Apple to redesign the #iPhone from their failure of their Newton product.
To this day, internally, Apple uses the term "eat up Martha" when a text input problem occurs. pic.twitter.com/0gVTBD8Abi
In 1994, a gag of the sixth season indeed showed two characters finding themselves in embarrassment when the message which they sought to grasp on an electronic device was replaced by a sentence in a very different sense. But The Simpsons thus parody the Apple Newton, an apparatus of the mark with the apple left a year earlier, mocked by the public for its disappointing capacities and its defects.
This gag on the other hand marked the spirits at Apple since it notably incited one of the engineers in charge of the development of the virtual keyboard of iOS to make sure of its good functioning to save this type of mockery, as it recently told the Fast Company website.
False predictions: the deaths of Kobe and George Floyd, the Covid-19 epidemic and the fire at the Minneapolis Police Station
In recent months, several false predictions have been attributed to the sitcom, on topical subjects could not be more varied.
Shortly after the tragic death of former basketball player Kobe Bryant in a helicopter accident, some Internet users saw the announcement of his disappearance in a montage of the series showing a helicopter crashing into a building and then Kobe, in a separate scene, falling to the ground after being punched. However, these two extracts roughly compiled are taken from two separate episodes, as detailed by our colleagues from AfricaCheck in January 2020.
More recently, another montage of excerpts from the series wrongly suggested that The Simpsons predicted the coronavirus epidemic in 1993 - when it is not, as we explained in early March.
Finally, the images of the burnt-out Springfield police station did not foreshadow the fire at a Minneapolis police station allegedly immortalized in photos - which actually showed a housing complex still under construction. As for the illustrations showing George Floyd drawn in the typical style of the series and alongside some of his characters, they are taken from a tribute paid by an Italian artist.
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