No, The Simpsons didn’t predict the death of the Queen. For the love of god, please stop acting like The Simpsons predicts everything that happens now.
On Twitter, a tweet has circulated positing that the Queen’s death year had been predicted in a 2014 episode of The Simpsons (the meme on Twitter being reposted from Facebook). The post has picked up more than 337,000 likes at the time of writing, with many commenters sharing either disbelief or continuing the myth that The Simpsons is an unstoppable prediction machine.
But, no, like some attempts at claiming The Simpsons can foresee the future, this was a fake (although sometimes it’s real). It’s actually been fact-checked thoroughly since the post went up at 5:37am AEST.
Every time these get more obviously fake but people keep falling for it somehow https://t.co/hmlIDh6aqA
— Quinton Reviews🎬 (@Q_Review) September 19, 2022
Politifact has been on the pulse of fake predictions in The Simpsons for a while. Here’s a par from their piece completely debunking the above meme:
“Here’s a list of things ‘The Simpsons’ didn’t predict, despite social media posts claiming the long-running Matt Groening cartoon series’ prescience: COVID-19, Tom Hanks catching COVID-19, Canada’s trucker convoy protest, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.”
The second and third images in the meme appear to be inauthentic, according to Politifact, however, the first image is from a real episode: The Regina Monologues in 2003, in which the family goes to England and Queen Elizabeth II is depicted.
Also, let’s be honest, it’s a shit quality fake. Here’s what I noticed that immediately made me cautious:
- The Queen is drawn in a very different art style in the second image (and her hair is literally clipping through her hat)
- The text in the second/third image is weirdly framed
- By 2014, The Simpsons had switched to an HD artstyle, which that first image clearly is not
- Fakes tend to be bad quality with poor cropping to account for their illegitimacy, like this one
What has The Simpsons actually predicted? You know, quite a lot, but the deaths of world leaders and political violence like the Capital riot aren’t exactly part of the magic. So far.
The show doesn’t need your fakes. Please stop faking predictions from The Simpsons.
Keep your lie detectors on when you use social media, people.
Anyway, as you were.