Times The Simpsons Freakishly Predicted The Future

After being on the air for nearly 30 years and producing more than 600 episodes, there really aren't many things that haven't been made fun of by The Simpsons. The show's razor-sharp satire has taken aim at politicians, American life, human behavior, big business, parenting, education, pop culture, science, and more—and with such accuracy that it's even been able to predict the future from time to time. Here are a few occasions when The Simpsons knew what was going to happen before the rest of us.

On "New Kid on the Block," a 1992 episode of The Simpsons written by Conan O'Brien, Homer sees a TV commercial for an all-you-can-eat seafood restaurant called the Frying Dutchman. (It's the first appearance of the Sea Captain.) Homer goes and proceeds to eat until closing, and is then kicked out...while still hungry. He then sues the restaurant for false advertising, and Homer and the Sea Captain come to an agreement: He can shove gobs and gobs of fried fish down his craw if he does it in The Frying Dutchman's window under a sign labeling him "Bottomless Pete: Nature's Cruelest Mistake," so as to draw more customers.

In 2012, Bill Wisth went to a Mequon, Wisconsin, restaurant called Chuck's Place for its weekly Friday night fish fry buffet. After a few trips, he wanted more, but the restaurant claimed they'd run out. Wisth refused to pay and planned on picketing Chuck's Place, telling reporters, "if the people who run the restaurant put up signs that say all you can eat, but then selectively not want to fill that promise, that's false advertising." The owner of Chuck's Place claimed Wisth had eaten more than 20 pieces of fish...and was violating the buffet's "no sharing" policy.

The 1997 episode "Hurricane Neddy" is all about Ned Flanders' spiritual and mental breakdown. A hurricane hits Springfield—specifically Ned's house, reducing it to rubble. The people of Springfield come together to rebuild it for Ned, because he's such a great guy...and, as his wife Maude remarks, they had no homeowners' insurance to cover the damage because Ned equated insurance with gambling. Ten years later, Darul Uloom Seminary of Deoband, an influential institution for the Sunni Muslim community of India, issued a fatwa, or edict, that decreed buying life insurance was—you guessed it—akin to gambling.

In a handful of early Simpsons episodes, Homer meets his long-lost brother Herb, but then leaves him in financial ruin after he bets his whole car manufacturing business on a ridiculous car Homer designs. Left destitute, he moves in with the Simpsons, and gets rich again when, with Maggie's help, he creates and markets a baby translator that turns an infant's cries and sounds into English. As Marge says in the episode, "every mother in the world" would want one—and in 2004, Japanese high-tech company Takara developed a real-life prototype that analyzed a baby's sounds along with its facial expression and body temperature to alert parents that the baby was hungry, tired, or needed to go to the bathroom, among other needs.

At the end of "They Saved Lisa's Brain," a 1999 episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa and her local MENSA chapter attempt to rule Springfield with their superior intellect, the smartest guy in the world makes a cameo: physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking. He remarks to Homer, "Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is intriguing. I may have to steal it." In scientific parlance, "donut-shaped" is torus shaped. And yes, as it turns out, the universe may actually be donut- or torus-shaped. Four years after Homer Simpson "proposed" the theory, cosmologists noticed radiation patterns in space suggesting that the universe was round and tube-like, but "empty" in the middle. Mmmmm...space donut.

In the 1997 episode "Homer's Phobia," the Simpsons befriend a kitsch shop owner named John (voiced by director John Waters). Homer loves the guy...until he finds out he's homosexual. Eventually, Homer gets over his fear and distrust of John when John is the bigger man and saves Homer from being gored to death by a bunch of reindeer. A very similar lesson was learned by Baljit Koonar in 2010. Koonar's home in Birmingham, England, was next door to Bryn and James Tudor, who in 2005 became the first same-sex couple in the city to obtain a civil partnership. Koonar publicly harassed and terrorized the couple...until they saved his life. Koonar's house was on fire early one morning, and the smell of smoke awakened James Tudor, who got Koonar and his family away from the house to safety.

While first proposed in 1964, it wasn't until 2013 that physicists discovered the Higgs boson, the field (and particle by which it could be detected) that basically holds atoms together—in other words, the very fabric of existence, and a key to understanding how the universe and matter work. Oddly enough, Homer Simpson, of all people, predicted the discovery of the Higgs Boson. On the 1998 episode of The Simpsons called "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace," Homer attempts to become a scientist and inventor, and is seen messing around with some formulas on a chalkboard. His math actually gets pretty close to the one that determines the molecular weight of the Higgs particle.

The Simpsons began life as a segment on The Tracey Ullman Show back in 1987, 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. (For example, Homer gets annoyed with Lisa because she won't let the family "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 then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger (voicing themselves). The installment cracked numerous jokes at the expense of celebrities and Hollywood in general, allowing them 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 also "A Division of Walt Disney Co." Nearly two decades later, the Walt Disney Company, flush with cash from numerous successful Star Wars and Marvel movies, bought out competitor 21st Century Fox for a cool $71.3 billion. Disney now owns Fox ... and The Simpsons. 

The 1995 Simpsons episode "Lisa's Wedding" is the first of many Simpsons episodes set in the future. This one takes place in the far-off year of ... 2010. Lisa, 23 years old and attending college, falls in love with a charming British man named Hugh (voiced by Mandy Patinkin), and they decide to get married. There's a lot of future-now-current technology on display in this installment. Lisa tells Marge of her big news via a Skype-like video call, while other characters wear wrist computers which resemble the Apple Watch. But video phones and two-way wrist communicators are old tropes for stories set in the "future." The truly eerie prophecy from "Lisa's Wedding" is the prediction of a new building on the London skyline.

When Lisa flies to England to meet her new potential in-laws, viewers get a glimpse of the updated London skyline — Big Ben has gone digital (and flashing "12:00") while a narrow, spire-oriented building stands out in the distance. It looks remarkably like a narrow, spire-oriented skyscraper called The Shard, an edifice that wasn't even proposed until the year 2000.

Bart and Lisa Simpson love "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," the cartoon segment on The Krusty the Clown Show featuring the unspeakably violent and amazingly gory antics of a Tom & Jerry-parodying cat and mouse. In the 1992 Simpsons 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 (the mouse) using a movie camera to chop off the head of Scratchy (the cat). Blood (or presumably fake blood) spews out of the billboard with every chop, to the delight of drivers below who get splattered with the stuff.

When Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 1, a work almost as violent as "The Itchy & Scratchy Show," debuted on TV in Australia in 2008, network TV2 contracted 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 the 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. As Lisa and her friends — Martin, Milhouse, and Database — are just a little bit nerdy, they've all made predictions and printed them out. The Simpsons' writers really do their research, aiming to get the details just right for even the briefest and most esoteric 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 field, including Vera Rubin (Physics), Richard Zare (Chemistry), Umberto Eco (Literature), and Piedad Córdoba (Peace). Milhouse's pick to take home the big prize in Economics: Bengt R. Holmstrom, a Finnish economist and MIT faculty member. Amazingly, the usually hapless Milhouse got it right: Holmstrom really did win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2016.