Here’s How You Can See Every Time ‘The Simpsons’ Predicted the Future
Disney+ may be taking some flak lately for removing some of their titles and not showing the correct aspect ratios of The Simpsons. Nevertheless, everyone knows those issues are temporary, including Disney announcing they’ll soon be fixing the Simpsons picture width problems from the pre-HD era. At least they’ve done a stellar job in the meantime of organizing things.
Those who’ve been on Disney+ since their debut on November 12 may have noticed one interesting thing the platform did with Simpsons episodes. They have one special category of all the times the show predicted the future, something the series has eerily done countless times.
Some might miss this playlist section, and here’s how to find it. However, it’s also worth taking a minute to reanalyze how much the show did predict and how they were able to do it.
Playlists under the episodes section
When clicking on individual seasons for The Simpsons, it’s easy to find various playlists under the main chronological episode listings. Disney+ decided that playlists would help fans be able to enjoy The Simpsons under specific categories since the show has encompassed nearly everything in pop culture.
No wonder so many memes about politics and everything else on Twitter often include an image from an old Simpsons episode. Not that Disney+ has limitless playlist categories for the series.
What they did do is place a smart compendium of episodes of the show predicting news events over the last 30 years. Plus, they have playlists for categories like sports, among others. Most fans undoubtedly went straight for the general predictions category first, and it’s very thorough…or so it appears.
There may be even more episodes not on this playlist where The Simpsons predicted numerous eerie events. Are they really supreme prognosticators, or was the writing team just overly astute to the world?
Sometimes it’s easy to predict the future with a team of sharp writers
Go back and look at that roster of writers The Simpsons has had over the years. It’s still incredible the level of highly educated and talent they brought aboard, with Conan O’Brien being one of them for a time. He was probably was one of the many writers who predicted things in a few episodes.
One of the most significant predictions on the show was their revelation of Donald Trump becoming President, something maybe not too hard to guess. On the other hand, it was so much a joke, the writing team figured the absurdity of it coming true would be a great sideline plot.
A real secret to the writers predicting so much is that seemingly absurd things really do happen in reality. Even the idea of Disney buying 20th Century Fox seemed like an insane prospect–hence The Simpsons predicting this as well.
Place a large group of highly educated writers in one room, and this is usually the result. Chances are, they didn’t intend for these predictions to become true and may be as amazed as everyone at what they brought into existence.
The world just continues to be surreal of late where the unlikely always happens.
Then again, some of the predictions seem like real visions
Let’s not explain away all those predictions as mere astute foresight on absurdity. Some of the things they predicted are still a bit eerie in their preciseness and not based on any connective strings.
For instance, the show accurately predicted sports outcomes, including correctly guessing at least three Super Bowl final scores. Don’t forget about their prediction of the U.S. winning at Curling, which some might see as another absurd angle.
Most startling of all, arguably, is a physics equation Homer writes on a chalkboard when deciding to become an inventor in a 1998 episode. The equation was somehow partially correct in explaining the mass of the Higgs-Boson particle (the God Particle) found years later.
With these in mind (and more), it might mean a few in the writing team became official designated soothsayers, something they perhaps regret.
