The Simpsons has been on for so long, fans have been arguing when the show stopped being good (or started being good again) for more than two decades. But one thing that everyone can agree on is the fact that, across 35 seasons, the show has occasionally been cannily accurate at predicting the future—even if only because of a mathematical phenomenon known as the law of truly large numbers, which states that, “with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is apt to happen.” Still, the comparisons are fun to keep track of.
So with that caveat in mind, read on for 20 times The Simpsons got it right, from politics, to sports, to technological advancements.
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When a Reddit post in r/Europe showed off a three-eyed fish caught off the coast of Greenland last month, fans’ minds instantly turned to Blinky, the mutant specimen caught outside the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant in this vintage episode. “Yet another example of ‘The Simpsons did it earlier,'” joked one Reddit user.
Marge’s campaign against violence in cartoons sparks a movement that soon leads concerned citizens to protest an exhibition of Michelangelo’s statue of David due to its nudity in this 1990 episode. In 2016, this actually happened when a woman complained about a copy of the iconic statue in a St. Petersburg, Russia exhibit saying it “warps children’s souls.” Organizers of the exhibit took advantage of the publicity to launch a “Dress David” campaign that let residents vote on the icon’s outfit or to leave him au naturale.
In the now-legendary 1992 episode “Lisa the Greek,” Homer discovers Lisa’s uncanny knack for predicting football outcomes, earning him big bucks in betting (and hurting her feelings when she realizes their daddy-daughter time is being exploited). The episode aired just days before Super Bowl XXVI, where the Washington Redskins defeated the Buffalo Bills, matching Lisa’s prediction. When the episode re-aired the next year, Fox dubbed the episode to have Lisa bet on the Dallas Cowboys, who also won—a streak that continued through the next year when the Cowboys beat the Bills, per Lisa’s re-dubbed prediction.
In this 1993 episode, Mr. Burns opens the Monty Burns Casino, where the Siegfried and Roy-inspired characters Gunter and Ernst perform with their white tiger Anastasia. After flashing back to her capture from the wild, Anastasia attacks the duo. Ten years later, tragedy struck the real-life performers when a white Bengal tiger dragged Roy Horn off the stage at the Mirage casino resort, resulting in severe injuries.
“Homer’s driving one of them robot cars,” Lenny surmises when Homer pushes the head of Ned Flanders under the driver’s side window to avoid being seen with his nerdy neighbor. “One of them American robot cars,” Carl adds after a crash is heard off-screen.
Decades later, self-driving “robot cars” from American companies such as Tesla, Google, and Uber hit the road… and a few other things. (Let’s just hope there’s nothing to them reaching Level 5 autonomy in 2018’s “Baby You Can’t Drive My Car.”)
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In a psychic flash-forward to 2010, Lisa’s fiancé Hugh Parkfield uses a futuristic wristwatch that allows him to make video calls. While this wasn’t a completely radical concept in 1995—James Bond had a video-capable Seiko watch back in 1983—the prediction’s timing was almost spot-on with the first smartwatch capable of independent video chat launching around 2013.
When a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021 leading to at least four deaths and 140 police injuries, the internet was quick to cite a flashback scene in this Season 7 episode that shows characters storming the Capitol with guns and bombs after an amendment banning flag-burning was passed. While this similarity is legit, a widely circulated image that purports to show a tattooed Groundskeeper Willie dressed in a horned hat like that of now-convicted rioter and conspiracy theorist Jake Chansley was doctored.
In the 1996 episode from the height of Lollapalooza’s popularity, hip-hop group Cypress Hill performs with the London Symphony Orchestra in a parody of the alt-rock musical festival called Homerpalooza. The imagined collaboration became a reality in 2024 when the real Cypress Hill performed with the real London Symphony Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall.
In one of the more haunting Simpsons “predictions,” a brochure shown in this Manhattan-themed episode advertises a large “$9” aside an undeniably 11-like Twin Towers. Following the September 11th attacks on the buildings four years later, executive producer Bill Oakley told the New York Observer (via The New York Times ) that he was stunned by the coincidence, “given that it’s on the only episode of any series ever that had an entire act of World Trade Center jokes.”
In the 1997 episode “Lisa’s Sax,” Marge suggests Bart read the book Curious George and the Ebola Virus. While likely a reference to the 1989 outbreak among macaques at a Virginia lab (which thankfully involved a strain that was non-lethal to humans), Bart’s subsequent drawing—of a sad sun crying over a pile of dead bodies—seems to foreshadow the deadly 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
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Cooking grease hardly seemed like a hot commodity when this episode aired in 1998. On the show, Homer enlists Bart in a scheme to steal the grease from Krusty Burger and Springfield Elementary to sell for cash. A decade later, a spike in oil prices led to a rash of thefts of grease from restaurants, according to The New York Times—including one man who stole hundreds of gallons of the stuff from a Burger King.
A gag at the end of this 1998 episode shows a sign outside the Fox studio lot reading, “A Division of Walt Disney Co.” Nineteen years later, this became a reality when Disney announced plans to acquire 21st Century Fox in a landmark merger.
This 2000 episode has a future Lisa Simpson taking over as POTUS and inheriting “quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” Donald Trump wouldn’t actually become president for another 16 years—something that seemed incredibly unlikely at the time despite his run with the Reform party that year.
Within moments of Joe Biden announcing in July 2024 that he was stepping away from his reelection campaign, thereby leaving the path open for Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee, the internet began speculating whether this episode held a double whammy of political predictions. Namely, there are some similarities between the purple suit and pearl necklace Lisa wears as the United States’s “first straight female president” and the outfit Harris wore when being sworn in as the country’s first female vice president.
This 2006 episode has Homer board an underwater expedition to explore a sunken shipwreck with a professional treasure hunter who might be his father. During the dive, Homer experiences a life-threatening incident, losing consciousness underwater.
This episode foreshadowed a real-life 2023 tragedy in which the OceanGate Titan submersible imploded, killing five people, while exploring Titanic wreckage. Even more eerie is the fact that Mike Reiss, a long-time writer for The Simpsons, had boarded OceanGate three times in the previous year, noting that there were communication and navigation issues during every dive.
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A quick gag in this Halloween-themed episode, which aired prior to the 2008 presidential election, sees Homer attempt to vote for Barack Obama using an electronic voting machine, only for it to register six votes for his opponent, John McCain. Four years later, news outlets reported that voting machines did indeed switch some Obama votes to his next Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.
In this Olympics-themed episode, Homer and Marge form a mixed curling team and win the gold medal at the Olympics against all odds, with Sweden winning the silver. Eight years later at the 2018 Winter Olympics, the U.S. men’s curling team pulled off an improbable comeback and claimed the gold medal, with Sweden winning the silver. Curling had only been back in the Olympics since 1998 when the episode aired, making this prediction particularly striking.
As noted in a social media post from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, The Simpsons’ 22nd season premiere includes a quick onscreen gag to a card featuring Milhouse’s Nobel Prize betting sheet, which wound up predicting an actual Nobel winner.
The card shows that Bart and Milhouse’s classmate Martin has wagered that MIT professor Bengt Holmström would take the prize—which he would indeed go on to do. In 2016, Holmström was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences.
On a trip north of the border in 2010’s “License to Thrill,” Ned Flanders is flummoxed to be offered a puff of “reeferino” from a Canadian doppelganger who assures him “it’s legal here.” While recreational use wasn’t technically allowed in Canada at the time, the dream became a reality in 2018 when the country officially legalized cannabis nationwide.
In this soccer-themed 2014 episode, Homer is selected to become a World Cup referee after Lisa gives a speech calling him her hero. While Homer starts off refusing bribes and trying to referee honestly and maintain her respect, he gives into temptation after.learning he wasn’t Lisa’s first choice and almost throws the World Cup. Just one year later, the real-life FIFA corruption scandal broke, revealing 24 years of bribery and corruption among FIFA officials.