STOP saying The Simpsons can predict the future!

hello friends it is me mr jj it's a very hot day in vancouver today so if there is one thing that i really like it is the simpsons i am a super hardcore simpsons fan having seen every episode multiple times that's right even though i am 36 years old i am not one of those hipster millennial types who stopped watching the show the second i graduated from high school and proceeded to spend the next two decades telling anyone within earshot that the show coincidentally got bad the exact moment i stopped caring about it but anyway i come to you today to debunk one of the most obnoxious simpsons memes of our time this idea that the show has some sort of awe-inspiring track record of predicting the future if you google a phrase like simpson's predictions you will find you get an endless flow of sensationalistic click bait stories like the simpsons has predicted the future many times here's the list all the simpsons predictions that came true 18 times the simpsons accurately predicted the future 21 moments from the simpsons that will 200 percent freak you out because they 100 predicted the future literally the entire internet is packed to the freaking gills with this stuff virtually every major news outlet has reported on this phenomenon at some point and let's not even get into the billions of youtube videos about it because here's the thing it is all complete garbage in fact i dare say this is the single stupidest internet viral craze since the mandela effect and today i shall explain why now this idea that television shows or books or movies or whatever can occasionally predict the future is a pretty stale cliche that has been ruined in some form or another as long as fiction has existed if you visit the website tv tropes you can find lots of fun examples under their pages on life imitates art or hilarious in hindsight or funny aneurysm the earliest example i could find of someone singling out the simpsons for this in particular comes from this august 2010 article from a guy named sam greenspan writing at a blog called 11 points sam was inspired to do this because 2010 was the year that the famous simpsons episode lisa's wedding took place that episode was made in 1995 but was supposed to take place 15 years in the future with all the future stuff based on comical extrapolations of 90s era trends so sam wanted to see how much they got right which as you might expect were a couple of things and tonight the following celebrities have been arrested remember if you see any celebrities consider them dangerous then came an article in 2013 from buzzfeed's jen lewis entitled 21 times the simpsons bizarrely predicted the future this was a much less inspired list of just 21 links to various news stories that kinda sorta resembled something that had happened on the simpsons at some point like how some guy in texas stole somebody's lemon tree once or how they opened a chocolate themed amusement park in china because remember homer once had that dream about the land of chocolate then in 2014 the simpsons themselves took credit for predicting that year's super bowl they sent out a tweet showing a scene from a 2005 episode where homer is watching a game between denver and seattle although the game he was watching in that episode wasn't supposed to be the super bowl and in homer's game unlike the real one oh the broncos one so really all that the simpsons predicted was that denver would play seattle someday in some context which they had already done many dozens of times by that point so there was clearly at least some history of people looking to the simpsons as an omen of the future but if you look at this little chart i made you can see that there was a dramatic uptick in simpsons predicts the future articles right around here in november of 2016. and why is this what happened in november of 2016. oh yeah this donald trump wins the presidency of the united states now like most people i remember quite vividly where i was the night that donald trump was elected i was sitting in front of the tv at my friend rachel's apartment with my newly purchased ipad in hand and i remember scrolling through twitter and seeing some reporter send out a glum tweet that went something like a 16 year old joke from the simpsons is now a reality and he posted a link to this clip as you know we've inherited quite a budget crunch from president trump i can't remember the exact reporter or how he phrased it but it doesn't matter because a million other people were all tweeting the same clip as well and the virality of that clip in the aftermath of donald trump's shockingly unexpected election is what kicked off this whole cliche of the simpsons amazing predictive powers now let us do a deep analysis of that clip for a bit so this is a scene from an episode called bart to the future the 17th episode of the simpsons 11th season it aired on the 19th of march in the year 2000 it was the second ever simpsons episode where a significant portion of the action took place in some imagined future in this case a future where lisa has been elected president of the united states in the episode lisa has just been elected president and at one point she sits down in the oval office for her first major briefing from her aides and she says the line about inheriting the budget crunch from president trump which then leads into this big thing about how america is in the midst of a very severe debt crisis in the future which is a big part of the plot of the rest of the episode the trump line is a single passing joke as part of this setup and is the only reference in the entire episode to trump having been president okay but why did the simpsons in the year 2000 go with trump of all people seems like a pretty random prediction right well i can tell you an interesting story about that so according to this 2009 article in the independent written by a former simpsons writer the whole process of making a simpsons episode takes 10 months which means that bart to the future probably started life sometime around may of 1999 and what was going on in america a ruined may of 1999 you ask well the start of the 2000 presidential election for one by spring of 1999 vice president al gore had already begun campaigning for the democratic party nomination which he was expected to easily clinch while the republican primary was more competitive with many declared candidates including future president george w bush but what is interesting about the 2000 election is that it occurred during this brief period of time in which the media was treating america as if it had a three-party system you see the two presidential elections of the 1990s had both featured a surprisingly strong third-party candidacy by an eccentric billionaire named ross perot who had created his own party known as reform perot won 19 of the vote in the 1992 election and 8 in the 1996 one which to this day is still the best ever third party presidential showing in the last 50 years so that being the recent history it made perfect sense to be treating reform as basically one of america's kind of borderline major parties circa 1999. even if the prospect of a reform party president seemed highly unlikely the party still had a strong potential to at least affect the outcome of the race you know with like vote splitting or whatever now what exactly the reform party believed other than americans needed a third choice wasn't always clear perrault had his own theories of what that third choice should look like but since he wasn't running again the debate was wide open and before long two leading reform party presidential candidates emerged one was a guy called patrick buchanan a former nixon staffer and political commentator who said that the problem with the american two-party system was that the two parties were too alike so he said that reform should become a sort of hard-edged nationalistic third option in favor of protectionism and isolationism and lower immigration and then this other guy came along and said that no the problem with the american two-party system is that the two parties are way too different what was actually needed was a candidate of the principled center someone who could pick and choose the best ideas from both sides rather than being a slave to the rigid ideology of left or right and that man's name was donald trump it's always been really interesting to me that donald trump's first campaign for president is so forgotten today i guess it's because that trump back then ran on such a completely different platform than the one he would proceed to get elected on 17 years later for example in the 2000 election trump spent a lot of time denouncing buchanan for being too racist as you can see in this 1999 c-span clip featuring trump's once and future advisor roger stone although he is very proud about the fact that he has joined the party and he would like to support the party's nominee if he is not the party's nominee i think he'd have serious problems supporting pat buchanan given the things that mr buchanan has written about jews and blacks and mexicans and his revisionist views of world war ii although on the other hand a lot of trump's campaign rhetoric from that time did sound very familiar the other big thing that trump's first candidacy had in common with his second is that he really had to fight against this perception that he was not serious many people said he was just running for president to self-promote and push this book he had recently written a manifesto of political centrism called the america we deserve now the thing you have to remember about trump in those days is that this was a time when his reputation was possibly at its lowest this was several years before the apprentice got started and shortly after his third bankruptcy and second divorce so at this point donald trump was seen mostly as this sort of pathetic washed-up tabloid figure from the 1980s a sort of d-rate pseudo-celebrity in deep denial about his loss of relevance which in turn made his run to be head of the reform party feed into what was then a growing narrative at the time namely that in the absence of perot's leadership reform was descending into farce here check out this editorial cartoon from the richmond times dispatch i had the good sense to save 17 years ago so it says really strange bedfellows and then we have a bed labeled reform party and in the bed we have donald trump and then jesse ventura who was a former pro wrestler who had recently been elected the reform party governor of minnesota and then here's mr perrault and beside him is patrick buchanan who is dressed as a caveman because a lot of people really saw him as this super right-wing regressive backwards oaf including as we said donald trump himself in fact at one point the reform party primary was seen as such a clown show that gary trudeau the cartoonist behind the comic strip doonsbury announced that one of his characters would be running in it as well uncle duke even got interviewed on larry king i want to shake things up in washington i want to be the ferret in the pants of government and in the end when trump finally abandoned what the new york times described as his brief and flamboyant run for president and one of the stranger episodes of the 2000 presidential race he would heap a lot of blame for his failed candidacy on the general dysfunction of the reform party okay so hopefully you now understand the full context of this three-second joke the writers of the simpsons were clearly trying to come up with some quick gag about some ludicrous political figure from 1999 somehow winding up as president in the near future it would sort of be like if someone today made a joke about marianne williamson being president in the year 2050 all right now that i have explained the crap out of that let us focus on the second half of this terrible viral phenomenon which is this picture here i suspect you have probably seen this picture a lot because it is the most commonly used picture in memes describing how the simpsons predicted trump and it is a pretty uncanny picture isn't it i mean same escalator same podium and sign wow and all the way back in 2000 you say well of course this is all complete lies as i said trump never actually appears in that 2000 episode where he is briefly mentioned as a former president in fact donald trump had never appeared on the simpsons at all up until that point so the picture is a hoax but it is not a complete fraud as the snopes people might say it is a real picture inaccurate description see the fox network has this youtube channel called animation domination where they air previews for their upcoming animated shows and sometimes they make original content for it as well on july 7th 2015 animation domination posted a short cartoon promoting the simpsons 27th season called trumptastic voyage it was an exclusive one and a half minute skit made especially for the channel and never part of any larger episode and most significantly it was posted several weeks after donald trump announced that he would be a candidate in the 2016 presidential election that announcement happened on june 16th 2015. so trump-tastic voyage is a very explicit after-the-fact satire of everything that happened on that famous day the escalator and the press conference and everything it even uses a clip of trump's actual voice i am officially running the plot of the clip such as it is is the homer sort of being hypnotized by trump's hair and having this whole fantasy about it and much like those clips of trump from 1999 trump-tastic voyage is a sort of weird thing to look at with today's eyes it contains all of these 2015 era criticisms of trump that are basically forgotten now like how he paid people to attend that first rally and how all of these companies had been canceling him recently for saying offensive stuff but then trump was elected and it didn't take long before people began dishonestly mashing up these two unrelated simpsons moments in order to create an urban legend that the simpsons had predicted trump's presidency with perfect accuracy 16 years ago and once that became this huge viral sensation it created increased market demand for more examples of how the simpsons had supposedly predicted the future in journalism they often say that you need at least three examples to prove a trend so the internet hive mind began madly scouring through old episodes of the simpsons in order to scrape up whatever tiny piece of evidence they could to prove this predetermined conclusion and by and large all of the examples that they were able to turn up that you see in the memes and on the news sites and all the rest of it are deeply deeply underwhelming for anybody that has any sort of reasonable standards of fortune telling like say this screen grab which supposedly shows the simpsons predicting september 11th this image comes from a much loved episode from 1997 where the family visits new york city lisa at one point talks about how cheap it is to visit new york by bus and holds up this ad and then bart is like nine bucks hey this one's on me i really don't see how this predicts 911 in any way other than the fact that there's a big number nine and there's the twin towers and they kind of look like the number 11. but by this logic you could say that the 911 emergency hotline predicted 911.2 i've seen this picture thrown around a lot as well this is from a 2002 episode and it's supposed to be a prediction of the global ebola outbreak of 2014. i guess some people are not aware that the ebola virus existed before 2014 and that it is a disease that is often associated with jungle animals like monkeys now this next one is legit kind of funny in an episode from 1998 we get a brief glimpse of a sign that says 20th century fox a division of walt disney co this is of course part of the simpsons long-running bite the hand that feeds them joke about how lame and pathetic the fox network is so the idea of portraying them as subordinate to their corporate rival makes a lot of sense by this logic but then in 2018 disney actually did buy fox for 71 billion dollars which does make this joke seem kind of predictive in hindsight although there is nothing pathetic about being bought for 71 billion beyond that a lot of the other standard simpsons predicted it examples that you tend to see are incredibly lame like oh the simpsons made a joke about corruption in professional soccer wow they sure went out on a limb with that one or a joke about siegfried and roy being mauled by their own tigers man that's something that no one except the simpsons had ever thought of before and oh look they predicted zoom because they depicted a future person talking on a video phone to someone else as if video phones were not the single most common technological prediction of the pre-internet age but the real dark side to all of this is when people are so desperate for shares that they create fake simpsons pictures in order to score a cheap viral hit like someone drew this incredibly vulgar drawing of chief wiggum with his knee on the throat of a black guy and then a bunch of people started passing it around and being like oh look the simpsons predicted george floyd lisa's even holding up a sign that says justice for george and certainly that's not suspiciously on the nose at all and then there's this fake image of trump in a casket which i guess means that he's gonna die in office because the simpsons can predict everything very thrilling to the morbid set so i often feel like one of the big imperatives of our time is for people especially young people to get much better at critical thinking i've been really bothered a lot lately by the growing online popularity of conspiracy theories and fake news and here i mean like genuine fake news in the sense of websites that just publish outright lies not like some editorial column that just has a mild partisan bias you disagree with the only real way you can immunize yourself against this kind of stuff is by working hard to develop strong instincts of skepticism and curiosity and deepening your knowledge about the world around you including by studying history and not just history in the sense of like the civil war or whatever i'm talking about like the history of just the last 10 or 20 years ideally this is a process that should begin early refusing to fall for stupid simpsons memes is a good start i will see you all next week oh yes and one last thing we are in the final 24 hours for my canada mon kickstarter this is a canada themed cartoon book i have been raising funds for for a while now if you're interested in reserving a copy of it for yourself get in there while you still can you

Channel: J.J. McCullough

Views: 162,370

Rating: 4.8742604 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: RIUg9Ojczww

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/shadowmastergt]

even disney with their streaming cashed in on this.

Whenever people say simpsons predicted the donald trump shit, It makes me so furious its crazy