In the whopping 30 years that The Simpsons has graced our TV screens, the show has predicted some pretty interesting stuff, including Trump’s presidency.
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The show has predicted everything from Roy of Siegfried and Roy’s tiger attack (S.5, E.10) and rigged voting machines (S.20, E.4) to the stolen lemon tree (S.6, E.24) and Bengt Holmström’s Nobel Prize win (S.22, E.1). But nothing compares to that time The Simpsons predicted Trump’s presidency.
So how the hell do they do it? Is Matt Groening some sort of time-traveller?
Well, no.
But Lisa Simpson – IRL name Yeardley Smith – discussed the theory in a recent news.com.au interview to celebrate the show’s 30th anniversary.
The wild prediction first surfaced in the beloved Season 11 episode, ‘Bart to the Future.’
First airing on March 19, 2000, the episode predicted Trump’s presidency long before we ever thought it could be a reality.
‘Bart to the Future’ was the show’s second ever futuristic episode, depicting a world in which President Lisa Simpson (we could only hope) was undoing a budget crunch inherited by President Trump.
So, what does it take to predict one of the most outrageous news stories in recent history?
“They literally thought, ‘What’s the silliest, most outrageous, dumbest idea for a president we can possibly think of?’” Smith said in an interview with news.com.au.
The idea came to mind because “he was doing The Apprentice at the time,” so it’d be absolutely unthinkable for him to become the leader of the free world.
Imagine that! A world in which Donald Trump has access to nukes and the power to build a wall along the Mexican border. *nervous laughs*
Smith then went on in the interview to discuss how the show’s creators “predicted” the now-viral escalator shot. However, this clip is in fact part of the 2015 Trumptastic Voyage YouTube short that aired almost a month after the real deal.
“He (Donald Trump) was doing The Apprentice at the time. What’s really uncanny though is they animated him coming down the escalator,” she falsely recalled.
“Now, Donald Trump is not a fan of the Simpsons. We’re not his cup of tea, so we don’t think he watched it and thought, ‘I’m going to copy and do it that way’.”
Despite being proven to be false, the clip is now synonymous with the theory that The Simpsons creators can predict the future.
Although this specific clip wasn’t a prediction, I’m still convinced that The Simpsons creators are some sort of time-travelling, psychic geniuses.
The escalator shot may be fake, but ‘Bart to the Future’ predicted the grim reality of Trump’s presidency well before we ever even considered it.
If you’re keen to binge-watch the last 30 years of The Simpsons, it’s now available on Disney+ for you to stream your little heart out.
