THE SIMPSONS © 2020 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.(NEW YORK) — If you’re on social media, you might have come across stories about how The Simpsons — in all of its 32-seasons since it began — has nailed some uncanny predictions.
Donald Trump descending the escalator at Trump Tower to announce he’s running for — and then winning — the White House? The Simpsons predicted that 19 years ago.
The super-secret, dragon flame-broiled series finale of Game of Thrones? Yep, they called that, too, in season 29, a year before the HBO show actually ended.
From semi-no brainers like Lady Gaga playing the Super Bowl halftime show — in an animated performance that was uncannily like her actual one, years later — to really obscure predictions, like MIT professor Bengt Holmström winning the Nobel Prize in economics in 2016, six years after The Simpsons showed him doing just that, the long-running animated series has an eerily impressive track record.
Yeardley [YARD-lee] Smith has voiced Lisa Simpson since The Simpsons was just a series of janky-looking animated shorts that ran on The Tracey Ullman show in 1987. She’s tickled by the predictions, and just as spooked out as the rest of us. “Maybe we’re sort of a modern day Nostradamuses, or Nostradami,” she laughs. “I’ve sort of joked that the writers have a crystal ball in the middle of their table in the writers’ room.”
She adds, “that’s sort of unexplainable…and…it feels like magic.”
However, Smith says with a laugh, “The other thing is that we’ve been on so long. Think of all the things that we’ve also predicted that haven’t come true.”
Oh, and for the record, a highly contagious flu-like virus imported from China? It was also shown on the show…back in 1993.
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