After hundreds of episodes, The Simpsons has naturally produced plenty of scenes that resemble later headlines. Some came from writers noticing where politics, technology, or popular culture seemed to be heading. Others were oddly specific coincidences that became much stranger with time. None of the examples below were created by people deliberately attempting to recreate a joke from the show.
1. Donald Trump Became President
In “Bart to the Future,” which aired in March 2000, Lisa becomes president and discusses the financial trouble left by the previous administration. “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” she tells her advisers. Trump had already considered running for office by then, so his name was not chosen randomly. Still, his victory in the 2016 election turned a deliberately unlikely scenario into one of the show’s most famous coincidences.
2. A White Tiger Attacked a Las Vegas Performer
The 1993 episode “$pringfield” featured Gunter and Ernst, an obvious parody of Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried & Roy. During their casino act, the pair’s white tiger attacked them in front of the audience. Ten years later, Roy Horn was critically injured when a tiger named Montecore grabbed him during a performance at the Mirage. Horn survived, but the incident ended the duo’s long-running stage production.
3. Disney Bought Most of 21st Century Fox
A quick establishing shot in the 1998 episode “When You Dish Upon a Star” showed the entrance to 20th Century Fox. Beneath the studio’s name was a small sign identifying it as “A Division of Walt Disney Co.” At the time, it was simply a joke about Disney’s growing influence in Hollywood. Disney announced its deal to acquire most of 21st Century Fox in 2017, and the transaction was completed in 2019.
4. FIFA Officials Were Arrested for Corruption
In the 2014 episode “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Referee,” Homer is recruited to officiate at the World Cup after corruption damages public confidence in soccer. The executive who hires him is arrested during their conversation. The following year, Swiss authorities arrested several senior soccer officials as part of a United States investigation into bribery, fraud, racketeering, and money laundering connected to FIFA.
5. The United States Beat Sweden for Olympic Curling Gold
“Boy Meets Curl,” broadcast during the 2010 Winter Olympics, sent Homer and Marge to compete in mixed curling. Their American team eventually defeated Sweden in the gold medal match. Eight years later, the United States men’s curling team beat Sweden at the Pyeongchang Games, earning the first Olympic curling gold in American history.
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6. Bengt Holmström Won the Nobel Prize
In “Elementary School Musical,” several Springfield children fill out predictions for the 2010 Nobel Prizes. Milhouse selects Finnish economist Bengt Holmström, who did not win that year. Six years later, Holmström and Oliver Hart received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on contract theory. It was an unusually specific name to find on Milhouse’s card.
7. Lady Gaga Flew Over a Stadium Crowd
The 2012 episode “Lisa Goes Gaga” showed Lady Gaga suspended by cables and flying above an audience during a Springfield concert. At the Super Bowl LI halftime show in 2017, Gaga descended into Houston’s NRG Stadium while attached to wires. Aerial concert entrances already existed, but the costume, cables, and stadium setting gave the two performances a recognizable similarity.
8. A Voting Machine Selected the Wrong Candidate
During the 2008 episode “Treehouse of Horror XIX,” Homer attempts to vote for Barack Obama, but the electronic machine repeatedly records his choice for John McCain. In 2012, a voter in Pennsylvania filmed a machine selecting Mitt Romney when he touched Obama’s name. Election officials removed the machine from service and attributed the problem to a calibration error.
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9. Smartwatches Became Ordinary Devices
A character in the 1995 episode “Lisa’s Wedding” uses a watch as a telephone, speaking directly into the device on his wrist. Watches with communication features had appeared in older science fiction, but they were not common consumer products. Modern smartwatches can now handle calls, messages, payments, directions, and health monitoring without attracting much attention.
10. Video Calls Became a Normal Way to Communicate
The same futuristic episode showed Lisa speaking to Marge through a screen built into a telephone. Experimental videophones existed before 1995, but few people used them in everyday life. FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, and WhatsApp eventually made the basic setup familiar in homes and workplaces around the world.
11. Europe Found Horse Meat in Products Labeled as Beef
In the 1994 episode “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Song,” Lunchlady Doris reaches into a container marked as containing assorted horse parts while preparing a school meal. Nearly two decades later, testing found horse meat in numerous European products sold as beef. The 2013 scandal led to recalls across several countries and exposed gaps in the continent’s food supply chain.
12. London Built a Tower That Looked Like the Show’s Design
When “Lisa’s Wedding” presented a future version of London in 1995, the skyline included a pointed tower behind Tower Bridge. It looked remarkably similar to the Shard, the glass skyscraper later designed by Renzo Piano. Construction began in 2009, and the building opened in 2012. The animated structure was only a background detail, but its shape and approximate location made the resemblance hard to ignore.
13. Parents Objected to Michelangelo’s David
The 1990 episode “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” included a public argument over whether Michelangelo’s nude statue of David should be displayed in Springfield. In 2023, a controversy erupted at a Florida charter school after sixth-grade students were shown an image of the sculpture during a Renaissance art lesson. Complaints from a small number of parents, including one who reportedly described the image as pornographic, were followed by the principal’s resignation under pressure from the school board.
14. Children Became Hooked on Simulated Farm Work
At a carnival in the 1998 episode “Bart Carny,” Bart excitedly tries a “Yard Work Simulator” rather than doing actual chores at home. Games built around virtual manual labor later became enormously popular. FarmVille, released in 2009, attracted millions of players who spent their free time planting crops, harvesting fields, and maintaining digital farms.
15. A Former Beatle Answered Fan Mail Decades Late
In “Brush With Greatness,” Marge receives a response from Ringo Starr many years after sending him a portrait as a teenager. A similar situation surfaced in 2013, when two women from Essex finally received a reply from Paul McCartney to a recording and letter they had sent him roughly 50 years earlier. The original package had reached the BBC but failed to make it to McCartney at the time.
16. Greece Missed a Payment to the International Monetary Fund
A news ticker in the 2012 episode “Politically Inept, With Homer Simpson” joked that Europe had placed Greece for sale on eBay. Greece was already deep in a debt crisis, so the writers were exaggerating an existing problem rather than forecasting one. In 2015, however, the country missed a €1.5 billion payment to the International Monetary Fund, becoming the first developed economy to fall into arrears with the organization.
17. Richard Branson Reached Space
“The War of Art,” broadcast in 2014, briefly showed Richard Branson floating inside a spacecraft. Branson had founded Virgin Galactic a decade earlier and had openly discussed plans for commercial spaceflight, making this one of the show’s more informed guesses. He eventually flew aboard the VSS Unity in July 2021, reaching the edge of space seven years after the episode.
18. Robot Librarians Started Appearing
In the future imagined by “Lisa’s Wedding,” robots work inside a university library while the human librarians run the technology. Researchers and institutions later began experimenting with machines that could locate, transport, sort, and scan books. Some modern libraries also use robots to guide visitors or answer simple questions, although the profession has not been handed over to machines quite yet.
19. Software Began Interpreting Babies’ Cries
Herb Powell creates a baby translator in the 1992 episode “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?” The device converts Maggie’s cries into clear sentences, an ability real technology has not achieved. Researchers have, however, developed systems that analyze recordings of infant cries and attempt to identify patterns associated with hunger, discomfort, pain, or other needs. The results are far less precise than Herb’s invention, but the basic idea has moved beyond television.
In the mood for more?
Check out 15 Times a TV Show Accidentally Predicted a Real News Story Years Later, or take a look at 15 TV Series Based on Real Historical Events. If you want to see more strange coincidences, you can check out 15 Sci-Fi Technologies That Seemed Impossible in the 90s and Are Now Completely Real.
