-
(#1) J.C. Penney Co. Files For Bankruptcy
The Joke: In the Season 18 episode "Please Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em", the Simpsons are casually strolling through the mall when they stumble upon a dilapidated JCPenney's (obviously a reference to J.C. Penney Co.), which had been shut down and converted into a mix of candle kiosks and CD stores.
What Actually Happened: J.C. Penney filed for bankruptcy on May 15, 2020, citing financial difficulties due to COVID-19.
-
(#2) There Is A Global Pandemic And Killer Bees
The Simpsons' Season 4 episode "Marge in Chains" from 1993 apparently foreshadows the events of 2020 with the spread of a new flu virus. When a worker in Osaka, Japan, sneezes into a package that ships to Springfield, the entire town is subsequently threatened by what they call the "Osaka Flu," mirroring the spread of the coronavirus around the world.
What's more, scientists in 2020 claim to have spotted Asian giant hornets in Washington state - a species that threatens life with its poisonous stingers. In the same Simpsons episode, residents knock over a truck they believe to be carrying a cure, but instead crack open a box labeled "Killer Bees."
Episode writer Bill Oakley told The Hollywood Reporter, "I don't like it being used for nefarious purposes. The idea that anyone misappropriates it to make coronavirus seem like an Asian plot is terrible. In terms of trying to place blame on Asia - I think that is gross."
-
(#3) Greta Thunberg Delivers An Emotional Speech About Climate Change
The Joke: In the 2007 Simpsons Movie, Lisa Simpson delivers an emotional speech about climate change to her classmates. She passionately warns= there is no room for optimism, Ralph, because in 50 years the oceans will rise and nothing will be left except hot desert lands that cannot produce quality foods.
What Actually Happened: In September 2019, 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg stood before the UN and called for those in power to take action against the changing climate. Her passion, knowledge, and composure were remarkably similar to Lisa Simpson's in 2007.
-
(#4) Daenerys Lays Waste To All Of King's Landing In The Penultimate Episode Of 'Game of Thrones'
The Joke: In an episode from 2017 called "The Serfsons," the Simpsons find themselves in Springfieldia, an alternate fantasy universe that is demolished when a fire-breathing dragon wreaks havoc.
What Actually Happened: In the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen surprises everyone by burning King's Landing in a move against Queen Cersei. Though Dany's attack on Cersei is somewhat expected, her actions take out countless innocent commoners, which goes against her history of benevolence toward innocent people.
-
(#5) Homer Predicts The Mass Of A Particle 14 Years Before It Is Discovered
The Joke: In the episode "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace," which aired in 1998, Homer takes his turn as an inventor and works out an equation to calculate the mass of a new particle.
What Actually Happened: Theoretical and particle physicist Simon Singh told The Independent that the equation Homer works out in "The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace" nearly equals the actual mass of an elementary particle called the Higgs boson, discovered over a decade later.
-
(#6) Canada Legalizes Marijuana
13 years before Canada actually legalized marijuana, Ned Flanders and Homer take a trip to Canada when prescription drugs get too expensive in Springfield in the "Midnight Rx" episode (2005). While on their trip, Ned is offered a puff of some "reeferino" by his Canadian doppelgänger—to which Ned responds, "They warned me Satan would be attractive. Let’s go!"
-
(#7) Prince William's Receding Hairline
The Joke: In a series of flashbacks in "And Maggie Makes Three," The Simpsons reveals the cause of Homer's gradual hair loss. It seems his go-to reaction after discovering Marge is pregnant is to panic and pull out his own hair. Maggie is the final straw, rendering the beloved TV dad completely bald as he tears out the last of his locks while letting out a blood-curdling scream.
What Actually Happened: Prince William and wife Kate Middleton welcomed three children from 2013 to 2018. With each subsequent birth, William's hairline receded. Internet sleuths pointed out the trajectory of Homer's hair closely matched that of Prince William's.
-
(#8) Lady Gaga Performs A High Wire Act
The Joke: In an effort to raise the self-esteem of Springfield - and boost the spirits of Lisa Simpson - Lady Gaga decides to hold a concert in Season 23's Episode 22, titled "Lisa Goes Gaga."
During her show, Lady Gaga zooms over the audience wearing a wire and a platinum silver outfit. As the crowd looks on she blasts pyrotechnics from her breasts,and sings about loving and accepting yourself.
What Actually Happened: During the Super Bowl LI halftime show, which aired almost five years after The Simpsons episode, Lady Gaga flew over the audience on a wire. People pointed out the similarities between the performance and the cartoon in not only her wire act, but also in her outfit. Unfortunately for Gaga fans, she didn't shoot sparks out of her boobs.
-
(#9) Bengt Holmström Wins The Nobel Prize
The Joke: In the Season 22 premiere, Milhouse and Lisa participate in a who-will-win-the-Nobel-Prize betting pool. For the economics prize, Milhouse, who loess to Martin, selects Bengt Holmström.
What Actually Happened: In 2016, Bengt Holmström of MIT and Oliver Hart of Harvard were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for work on contact theory and how to evaluate whether things should be government-run or privately owned."
-
(#10) Disney Buys Fox
The Joke: In the 1998 episode "When You Dish Upon a Star," Homer becomes the personal assistant to Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger when they move to Springfield. He winds up pitching a script to Ron Howard, and by the end of the episode Howard is pitching that same script to 20th Century Fox. A sign outside the studio reads, "A division of Walt Disney Co."
What Actually Happened: Disney bought 21st Century Fox in December 2017 for a cool $52.4 billion.
-
(#11) Team USA Wins Gold In Curling
The Joke: In the 2010 episode "Boy Meets Curl," Homer and Marge lead the United States curling team to a gold medal over Sweden and Russia.
What Actually Happened: Team USA edged out number-one-ranked Sweden to take home the gold in the 2018 PyeongChang games.
-
(#12) There's Very Little Meat In These Gym Mats
The Joke: As seen in the video above, Lunch Lady Doris is seen throwing gym mats into a meat grinder to prepare the school lunch for the day.
Anyone who's ever had a public school lunch knows how completely inedible they can be, and some of the wet, warm, questionable objects on your plastic-foam, sectioned-off tray do seem like they have hazardous chemicals as their base... but gym mats?
That would never happen, right?
What Actually Happened: It turns out that the bread used in the McDonald's McRib actually contains an ingredient (banned in some parts of Europe) that is used to keep gym mats sponge-y.In 2011, Time magazine's Healthland blog ran a story about the McRib, identifying azodicarbonamide as one ingredient in the sandwich's bun. Apparently, this flour-bleaching compound is most commonly used in the manufacturing of foam gym mats and the soles of shoes.
The blog also noted that the 70 ingredients of the McRib, including azodicarbonamide, exist in very small quantities and will almost certainly leave anyone eating a McRib unharmed. Still, azodicarbonamide is banned in Europe, and strictly regulated by the FDA.
Looks like the Doris joke really wasn't far off.
-
(#13) My Retirement Grease!!!!!
The Joke: In the episode "In Lard of the Dance," Homer discovers he can make money by stealing and reselling grease found in the back of Springfield Elementary's kitchen. He and Bart even build a contraption so they can steal the maximum amount of grease in their car.
They eventually give up after a few encounters with Groundskeeper Willie and the Springfield Grease Co. Bart and Homer barely escape an angry, greased-up Willie while trying to make it home-free with their glorious, profit-garnering grease in tow.
What Actually Happened: In November 2011, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported thieves had stolen at least $2,000 worth of grease from the privately owned restaurant St. Louis Wing Co. since April 2011.
"It's a big deal. There's a huge underground out there for this stuff," owner Bobby Tessler said. "Others have said that this is like the new copper... These thieves are getting more sophisticated."
After he called police, they spotted three teenagers taking grease from the back of Tessler's restaurant, as well as others on that same block. The man uses about 60 to 70 pounds of grease every week, so saving money by selling it has always been a way to help break even. A rendering company would have paid the owner of the company multiple thousands of dollars for used cooking grease.
-
(#14) A Poll Machine Is Hacked
The Joke: In the Season 20 episode "Treehouse of Horror XIX," which debuted in 2008, Homer attempts to vote for Obama, but the polling machine keeps recording it as the 2008 Republican candidate, John McCain.
What Actually Happened: In 2012, as Obama was running for reelection, a polling machine in Pennsylvania was rigged to change any vote for Obama to a vote for his Republican opposition, Mitt Romney.
-
(#15) Apple Develops Face Time
The Joke: In Season 6, episode 19, "Lisa's Wedding," which aired in 1995, Lisa uses her phone to contact Marge via video chat.
What Actually Happened: In 2003, Estonian developers introduced the popular video chatting site Skype to internet users everywhere. Several years later, in 2010, Apple created Face Time, making face-to-face conversations as accessible as The Simpsons predicted.
-
(#16) I Was Elected To Lead Not To Read
The Joke: This was a dig at Governor Schwarzenegger from The Simpson's Movie, saying he was too dumb to be a Government official.
The line "I was elected to lead, not read," was such a ridiculous statement because an elected official's entire job is reading long, difficult legislation, making sense of it, then deliberating.
What Actually Happened: In the 2012 GOP race there was a man by the name of Herman Cain, and he ran on the slogan "We need a leader, not a reader."
-
(#17) Donald Trump Becomes President
The Joke: In the 2000 episode, "Bart to the Future," Bart travels to the future where he learns that his sister Lisa has become President and her predecessor was Donald Trump.
What Actually Happened: In 2016, 16 years after the episode aired, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States.
-
(#18) Scotchtoberfest
The Joke: In the season 6 episode "Bart's Girlfriend," Principal Skinner attempts to trick Bart into causing trouble by hosting a "Scotchtoberfest" where he expects the teen to cave and prank the groundskeeper.
What Actually Happened: Several years after the 1994 episode aired for the first time, Des Minos, Iowa, hosted an actual Scotchtober fest, a holiday that is not common in America.
-
(#19) Flaming Moe
The Joke: Homer tells the local tavern owner Moe about a secret cocktail that includes cough medicine and fire that he calls a "Flaming Homer."
Moe steals the recipe and renames the drink the "Flaming Moe," and begins selling it at his tavern, betraying Homer in the process. The drink is a success and Moe becomes famous, even Aerosmith drops by to perform at his place!
What Actually Happened: Andy Heidel, the owner of a bar in Prospect Heights, NY, called The Way Station, just happened to have a bottle of Robitussin behind the bar when someone brought up the Flaming Moe. He grabbed the 'tussin and mixed it with Pernod, Jagermeister and a Bacardi 151 floater and set it on fire. He and his friends got shmammered and the real-life Flaming Moe was born.
-
(#20) Stolen Sugar Truck
The Joke: Lisa begins to feel threatened by Allison, a new student, because she is smarter, younger, and a better saxophone player than she is.
Their rivalry reaches a climax at the school's diorama contest where Lisa plans to sabotage Allison's entry. The episode's subplot sees Homer steal a large pile of sugar from a crashed truck, and begin selling it door-to-door. He keeps it in the back yard and it eventually melts from the rain.
What Actually Happened: Someone actually stole a sugar truck. In 2009, two kids were arrested by police in India for stealing a sugar truck from a person actually in charge of delivering the sugar. The kids were actually in charge of cleaning the truck and took it while it was parked at the cleaner/boss's house.
No word on whether or not they planned to sell it door to door.
-
(#21) The Good Morning Burger
The Joke: In the Simpsons, the Good Morning Burger was 18 ounces of sizzling ground beef soaked in rich creamery butter, topped off with bacon, ham, and a fried egg.
This was before all fast food restaurants started carrying a regular menu of breakfast burgers every morning before 10:30 am, so it really worked as a satire of how horrible fast food is for you.
Before the "Baconator," a Sourdough Jack, or even a triple cheeseburger were as bad as things got. The Good Morning Burger seemed so ridiculous and far off that it could never really happen.
Until...
What Actually Happened: The Good Morning Burger came to fruition. It is made of hash browns, topped with a hamburger, topped with a fried egg. There are hash browns under a burger that's under a fried egg. Another good example of how far things have gotten in fast food are, of course, the KFC Double Down and their "failure bowls" (as comedian Patton Oswalt calls them in this bit).
-
(#22) It Tastes Like Grandma!!
The Joke: Inspired by a Zorro movie, Homer begins slapping people with a glove and challenging them to duels.
When a real Southern gentleman accepts Homer's request for a duel, the Simpsons run off to the old farm Homer lived on with his parents and breed a dangerously addictive but successful tobacco/tomato hybrid called "tomacco."
What Actually Happened: Homer’s "tomacco" plant became a reality when Rob Baur, a senior operations analyst at an Oregon sewage treatment plant, created it in his house.
He grafted together a tobacco root with a tomato plant to create a real-life tomacco, without even enlisting the aid of radioactive material. To date, no nearby farm animals have gone berserk and articulated their tomacco desire through speech yet. YET.
-
(#23) Itchy and Scratchy's Bloody Billboard
The Joke: When The "Itchy and Scratchy Movie" premiered in The Simpsons, they advertised with a billboard that sprayed blood when Itchy hit Scratchy over the head with a sledgehammer, meant to poke fun at the overtness of not only violence in emerging popular media, but in even its advertising.
What Actually Happened: New Zealand was super excited about the TV premier of Kill Bill, so they borrowed the idea from "The Simpsons" in a way that actually may have escaped the creators of the controversial Kill Bill billboard.
In an homage to Kill Bill's gore, the billboard sprayed "blood" across the wall, street and cars.
Just like the advertising for "The Itchy and Scratchy Movie."
-
(#24) The Land Of Chocolate
The Joke: The Land of Chocolate is a land imagined by Homer when German businessman bought the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and, during an interview, told Homer they came from "the Land of Chocolate," meaning Germany.
In Homer's head, this land was made entirely of chocolate, including houses, streetlights, paths, and rivers. Even chocolate rabbits and dogs. And in a part called "Fudgetown," they even had chocolate fudge rains.
What Actually Happened: Well, China has done it again. For the second year in a row, a theme park made entirely from chocolate will open its doors in Shanghai, according to CNNGo.
The park used 80 tons of Belgian chocolate to create sculptures such as the Terracotta warriors and The Great Wall.
The exhibit drew roughly a half a million visitors, according to CNNGo.
This year, the park is moving to Shanghai's Himalayas Art Museum, and will feature 200 pieces of chocolate art. Chocolatiers will also be on hand to make everything from truffle chocolate to wine chocolate; visitors will also be able to create their own chocolate.
-
(#25) The Leftorium
The Joke: In the episode "Ned Flander Fails," Homer makes a wish for Flanders's new left-handed store to go out of business.
The ridiculousness in this bit lied in the idea of an entire store existing just for the left-handed. Surely, nobody needed to be coddled this much, let alone a whole section of the population.
The wish comes true and gets Flanders into financial hardship.
Ned is forced to sell his possessions, and Homer happily buys most of it. When he finds out that Ned's house is going to be repossessed, Homer feels guilty and decides to get the store back in business by telling all the left-handed citizens about it.
What Actually Happened: In 2009 Lefty's opened its doors in San Francisco. Now they have stores at Pier 39 in San Francisco and The Marketplace at Downtown Disney at Walt Disney World Resorts in Florida, as well as hundreds of left-handed items on their website.
The store features left-handed scissors, left-handed pens, and left-handed notebooks, left-handed office and school supplies, left-handed children's writing guides and shoe tying instruction cards, even left-handed kitchen tools and equipment. And then there are left-handed sayings and toys, which they print on T-shirts, left-handed mugs, left-handed portfolios, and lots of other items.
For all other needs, Anything Left Handed is the store for you. They even took the homage to "The Simpsons" one step further by having their website as Leftorium.com. What a bunch of great leftorinos. -
(#26) Ice To See You
The Joke: In the episode, "Last Exit To Springfield," Bart and Homer watch a McBain movie in which McBain busts out of an ice sculpture and utters this cringe worthy line before wasting the bad guys: "Ice To See You."
What Actually Happened: In 1997, the worst Batman movie was released and in it was a villain called Mr. Freeze, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In the late 80s early 90s, the character McBain was of course, based on the action hero success and ubiquitous popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The fact that the real Arnold went on to not only make a movie more ridiculous than the cartoon McBain action saga, but a movie that actually contained worse and somehow cheesier lines than some written to be intentionally funny by comedy writers is insane.
-
(#27) Viva Ned Flanders = The Hangover
The Joke: Ned Flanders decides he hasn't really lived so he turns to Homer, who takes him to Vegas. As you can see in the image above, it pretty much plays out exactly like The Hangover.
What Actually Happened: The movie The Hangover comes out, the film is about a couple of guys that go to Vegas for a bachelor party and it is quite similar to the Simpson's episode.
-
(#28) 'Star Wars' & 'Alvin And The Chipmunks' Share An Opening Weekend
The Joke: Ginormous Pictures is debuting Star Wars: The Apology and Alivn and the Chipmunks Get Rabies at the same time.
What Actually Happened: Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip both premiered in December 2015.
-
(#29) Catch Every Prediction On Disney+
Disney+ has an entire collection dedicated to all the times The Simpsons accurately called the future. From Donald Trump’s presidency to Homer actually discovering the mass of a particle roughly 14 years before it happened IRL, you can stream all your favorite episodes and spot even more seemingly absurd jokes that came true when you sign up for Disney+. If you haven't already, start your free 7-day trial today.
New Random Displays Display All By Ranking
About This Tool
The Simpsons is an animated sitcom produced by Fox, which is still very popular today. This cartoon series made a humorous mockery of American culture, society, and many fields. The surprising thing is that some absurd plots in the Simpsons became reality many years later, which are considered prophecies. Since its debut on the screen in 1989, it has been aired for 30 seasons.
The cartoon has already made many successful predictions, including the 9·11, the Ebola outbreak, smartphones, and even Donald Trump becomes president. The random tool explained 29 amazing Simpsons jokes that came true in real life.
Our data comes from Ranker, If you want to participate in the ranking of items displayed on this page, please click here.