The Simpsons star's thoughts on how many future predictions come true

Movie News

16 Feb, 2023

The Simpsons star Hank Azaria shares his thoughts on how many of the show's future predictions have come true and what that might mean.

A "Simpsons" star has opened up about many of the show's virally accurate predictions for the future. The Simpsons, which originated as a short on The Tracey Ullman Show, has surpassed Tracey Ullman's talk show as the longest-running American animated series and American sitcom in history. Over the course of more than 30 years, The Simpsons had an enormous run time and was known for its social commentary and humorous situations.

However, as millions of people have watched The Simpsons over the years, some have begun to notice a strange tendency of the show: It occasionally predicts the future. Many of the show's episodic scenes involve events that actually happened over several years. However, in an interview with ComicBook.com, The Simpsons star Hank Azaria opened up about the show not actually making much of a prediction.

"Well the Trump [becoming president] one was pretty freaky. People have gotten excited about this, but we're a social satire that often comes from the point of view of, 'Well, if we keep going like this, here's what's going to happen.' And the show has made, like, 7,482 predictions and 12 have come true, so, actually, our rate of success is not that high, really."

Some Real-World Events The Simpsons Has Predicted

While Azaria is correct that over the course of hundreds of episodes, The Simpsons have not often predicted the future, a broken clock is still often correct. Given the time and space to tell so many stories, the Simpsons occasionally foretells events. After all, many believe The Simpsons foretold The future knew full well that 9/11 was coming, thanks to the unfortunate design of a scene in the show that made the towers form the "9/11" symbol.

A fish with three eyes appears in the season 2 episode "Two Cars per Garage, Three Eyes per Fish", thanks to pollution from the Springfield power plant. Twenty years later, a radioactive mutation did indeed create a three-eyed fish near a power plant in Argentina. The show also predicted the exact outcome of a mixed curling match between the United States and Sweden, prompting widespread speculation about the Simpsons' prophecy. ^The most famous example of The Simpsons predicting is the election of Donald Trump. After all, an episode of The Simpsons featured a future version of Lisa Simpson declaring that they inherited budget crunch from President Trump. Although it started as a joke, the Simpsons gag predicted Trump's eventual presidency. Even if it doesn't have any unnatural abilities, it's still interesting to see how many times the Simpsons imagined what might have happened before finding out it was true after all.