Ah, good, the nerds are at it again. It seems rarely a day goes by without a viral tweet or 20 clogging up your timeline, as some smarmy pillock proclaims that he’s sussed it – the meaning of life can be found in a bit-part gag in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons. Sigh.
It’s an embarrassing trend, exacerbated by the ‘share first, ask questions later’ attitude of social media clickbait. One of the most prominent of such rumours comes from a doctored image claiming that the show predicted Donald Trump’s presidential run in way back in 2000. As fact-checking site Snopes points out, the clip in question was in fact released in 2015, not 2000, and was based on the very scenes it supposedly ‘predicted’. While a similar joke was made back in 2000, Trump had already been talking about his ambitions to run for president for a year by that point. Elsewhere, The Simpsons has been pegged as predicting everything from Pokémon Go, to Lady Gaga’s Superbowl appearance, to a shooting at a Black Panther screening – all of it easily debunked. Honesty, guys, try Google some time.
It’s an embarrassing trend, exacerbated by the ‘share first, ask questions later’ attitude of social media clickbait.
This latest entrant into the whole stupid saga might just be the worst of the bunch, though. Some (presumably very bored/boring/both) Simpsons ‘fans’ have decided that maybe, just maybe the show has predicted the World Cup final. Because once upon a time there was an international football match in The Simpsons. That’s pretty much it. That’s all they’re going off.
The ‘rumour’ stems from season nine episode The Cartridge Family, during which Mexico and Portugal contest a football match to decide “which nation is the greatest on Earth”. It’s this which people have decided is the latest in a long lineage of The Simpsons’ psychic moments. Because of course they have.
Let’s debunk this latest bout of nonsense, then. For starters, the game in the show is an exhibition game – nowt to do with The World Cup. Secondly, there’s about a billion (exact figure, no you can’t see our working) different ways the World Cup final could go – to claim that it might be Mexico and Portugal just because of a throwaway joke in a cartoon sitcom is an insult to the proud, honest and noble sport of football. That joke about “which nation is the greatest on Earth” is sarcastic genius too – and has apparently soared straight over the heads of those who are seemingly taking it on face value.
This whole ‘Simpsons predictions’ thing is infuriating – the kind of amateur memery that only neckbearded Banksy superfans really get off on. And it needs to stop, because it’s ruining The Simpsons. When every joke from the show’s golden age is dissected, stripped of context and warped into some YOU’LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT THEY’VE GONE AND DONE NOW clickbait, it kills the magic of The Greatest Sitcom Ever Made. So please, for the love of god, stop trawling through old episodes of The Simpsons and desperately clawing for scraps of semi-relevant information. Besides, if the show could really see the future, it probably wouldn’t have become so fucking terrible? Ho hum.
Hypocrisy editor’s note: yeah, we did run the story