“Wow, you can predict … the present.”

Lisa (Yeardley Smith) expresses her skepticism of a psychic in “The Simpsons” Season 6, Episode 19 (“Lisa’s Wedding”), but everyone in the real world seems to be a true believer that “The Simpsons” writing staff has some time travelers in its ranks. The show, which has cranked out hundreds of episodes since 1989, has managed to predict many real-world events over the years — but which were genuine predictions and which were simply luck?

There’s no shortage of articles and YouTube essays about the dozens of times “The Simpsons” predicted the future. But with all due respect, many don’t feel like true predictions. For instance, there’s an episode where a Siegfried and Roy parody called Gunter and Ernst gets mauled by their white tiger. This would eventually come to fruition when the real Roy Horn was attacked by a tiger. However, this feels less like a prediction and more like an inevitability when you’re dealing with live animals. So after watching every episode of “The Simpsons,” these are the “predictions” that feel the most genuine and should make people raise an eyebrow. 

This is the granddaddy of all “Simpsons” predictions. Season 11’s “Bart to the Future” envisions a timeline where Lisa becomes the first straight female president, and she’s one of the best fictional female presidents of all time in TVLine’s book. But the historic moment is overshadowed when she tells her cabinet, “As you know, we’ve inherited quite the budget crunch from President Trump.” The episode came out in 2000, and Donald Trump would indeed be elected to the presidency twice (on non-consecutive occasions).

Trump’s presidency didn’t come out of nowhere. He actually put together an exploratory committee during the 2000 presidential election, considering running as a member of the Reform Party. Little did “The Simpsons” writers know that Trump’s interest in politics wouldn’t wane, and he’d actually win in 2016. Dan Greaney, who wrote “Bart to the Future,” spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in 2016 about why they thought Lisa inheriting a Trump economy was so funny. “That just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was pitched because it was consistent with the vision of America going insane,” he said.

“The Simpsons” has made fun of Disney countless times over the years. Heck, there’s a joke in “The Simpsons Movie” where Bart (Nancy Cartwright) dresses like Mickey Mouse and says, “I’m the mascot of an evil corporation.” It must have led to some awkward conversations when Disney acquired the show’s parent company, 20th Century Fox, in 2019 — but then again, maybe “The Simpsons” saw this coming.

The 1999 episode “When You Dish Upon a Star” has a brief shot of a sign of 20th Century Fox with the bottom saying the following: “A Division of Walt Disney Co.” This was 20 years before the Disney-Fox merger, but Disney had a history of acquiring various companies in the years prior to the joke. “The Simpsons” still seems to be allowed to bite the hand that feeds it to an extent. However, one also has to consider the copious “Simpsons” Disney+ original shorts that basically feel like an excuse to express corporate synergy by having the Simpson family hang out with various Disney princesses and Marvel characters. 

No one really expects the United States to win much at the Winter Olympics, which is why it was a huge deal when the men’s curling team took home the gold medal at the 2018 games. “The Simpsons” always believed it was possible, as Homer (Dan Castellaneta) and Marge (Julie Kavner) join a curling team in the Season 21 episode “Boy Meets Curl” because Marge has gotten so good at sweeping after being a homemaker all these years. Despite Marge suffering an injury, they win the top prize.

Amazingly, the real-life U.S. curling team had to defeat Sweden in the final match-up, which is also the country the Simpsons had to beat in their 2010 episode. But there are some differences, like the men’s team winning in real life, whereas Homer and Marge are obviously on a mixed-gender team. But for anyone keeping track at home, Homer is now a Grammy-winning astronaut with an Olympic gold medal — in case you need any encouragement to start pursuing any dreams you have. 

2010 was a good year for “Simpsons” predictions. The Season 22 premiere, “Elementary School Musical,” sees Lisa and some of the resident elementary school eggheads watch the Nobel Prize winner announcements. In true nerd fashion, Martin Prince (Russi Taylor) produces a betting card to show who everyone believed would win, and everyone is understandably shocked when Krusty the Clown (Dan Castellaneta) takes home the Nobel Peace Prize. 

It would have been easy enough to just make up a bunch of names, but “The Simpsons” writers’ room clearly wanted to show off their nerd cred and actually list people who had a decent shot of getting a prize — and it only took six years for one to come to fruition. In 2016, Bengt R. Holmstrom won the Nobel Prize in economics. That’s precisely who Milhouse van Houten (Pamela Hayden) had winning; he was only six years too early. Everything was coming up Milhouse that day. 

“Marge in Chains” from Season 4 is basically the year 2020 in a nutshell. The episode kicks off with most of Springfield getting sick from the Osaka Flu. Some outlets were quick to call this a prediction of COVID-19, which resulted in lockdowns across the United States in 2020. However, COVID-19 was discovered in China while the Osaka Flu originated in Japan. Besides, it’s not like an epidemic or pandemic had never occurred before prior to 2020. 

However, later that episode, a bunch of Springfieldians wanting placebos knock over a truck, unleashing killer bees. This has some parallels to the bizarre murder hornets that made headlines just a couple of months after lockdowns began. Killer insects materializing when cities are ravaged by diseases is enough for us to declare this a rather unexpected “Simpsons” prediction. In fact, you could say “Marge in Chains” pulls off a true hat trick with another joke of Mayor Quimby going on vacation when the town’s in crisis, which mirrors Ted Cruz going on vacation when Texas was in the midst of a massive storm in 2021.

Homer is easily the best character on “The Simpsons.” Despite being dumb most of the time, he has his occasional moments of brilliance, as demonstrated in “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” from Season 10. Homer tries to become the next Thomas Edison, and at one point, he writes a complicated equation on a chalkboard, complete with a diagram of a doughnut steadily getting eaten. You might assume it’s all just random numbers and letters, but incredulously, the equation Homer writes roughly gets you the mass of the Higgs Boson, otherwise known as the God particle, which is fundamental in understanding the many mysteries of the universe.

The episode debuted in 1998, but the mass of the Higgs Boson wasn’t uncovered until 2012. Forget a shotgun that applies makeup for you — Homer should’ve taken his work to the Nobel Prize committee for mathematics. Granted, it’s the most Homer Simpson thing ever to discover something truly monumental and then do nothing with it. 

“The Mysterious Voyage of Homer” from Season 8 has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag where the camera pans down from Marge in the bedroom to Homer in the living room. If you pause at just the right moment, you’ll see various wires labelled “FBI,” “CIA,” and “NSA.” Who did the Simpsons tick off to get them this kind of spyware? But the show would double down on the idea that the National Security Agency is watching your every move much more explicitly in “The Simpsons Movie,” which came out in 2007. A man working for the governmental organization cheers when he locates the Simpson family, who are fugitives on the run. 

The idea that the government would spy on its own citizens isn’t exactly a novel idea; however, any conspiracies about that were confirmed in 2013 when Edward Snowden leaked classified information about the NSA conducting surveillance programs. No word on whether Snowden is a big “Simpsons” fan, unfortunately. 

Plenty of TV shows and movies predicted the idea that one day we could see the person we were calling on the phone. “The Jetsons” had video phones going all the way back to the 1960s, but it’s neat to see that throughline go to “The Simpsons.” The Season 6 episode “Lisa’s Wedding” sees her future, young-adult self call Marge to announce her engagement to Hugh (Mandy Patinkin). Marge appears on a video screen, which comes back to bite her when Lisa sees that Marge has her fingers crossed while promising that Homer won’t mess up her wedding.

This can be seen as an early predictor of FaceTime. With many people owning smartphones these days, we can all call up our moms to tell them we met the perfect British guy to marry. Honestly, it’d be great if one of these tech companies released the actual rotary phone/video phone combination seen in “Lisa’s Wedding.” It could encourage millennials and Gen Z-ers to get landlines.

Seeing as “Lisa’s Wedding” is a flash-forward episode, it may not come as too surprising to see it has multiple predictions come true. And this one’s far more impressive than a video phone. 

When Lisa visits London, we get an establishing shot of the city’s skyline, complete with a modified version of Big Ben with a digital clock face. That’s clearly meant to be the focal point, but if you look into the background, you’ll find a building’s silhouette. No one paid it any mind for decades because it was probably intended to be a generic skyscraper, but in 2012, the city finished construction on the Shard, which has a suspiciously similar outline to the random building in “Lisa’s Wedding.” What’s even more astonishing is that “Lisa’s Wedding” is set in 2010, and construction on the Shard occurred from 2009 to 2012. They even got the dates fairly accurate as far as when this new building would exist.

Many networks try to benefit from the Super Bowl by airing special episodes of beloved shows immediately after. But “The Simpsons” got in on the action a few days before the big game in 1992. “Lisa the Greek” sees Lisa and Homer bonding over football games, although Homer is only interested because Lisa can accurately predict who’s going to win every time. And in its initial airing, Lisa predicts the Washington Redskins will defeat the Buffalo Bills, which is exactly what happened later that week at Super Bowl XXVII. 

The following year, “The Simpsons” team pushed their luck again by re-dubbing the episode on reruns so that Lisa and Homer discussed the Dallas Cowboys and the Buffalo Bills. Lisa predicted the Cowboys would emerge victorious, which they, in fact, did. It should’ve become an annual tradition to re-dub “Lisa the Greek” every year right before the Super Bowl to see how long Lisa could’ve gone correctly guessing the winner.

The Season 29 premiere of “The Simpsons” is an Elseworlds-esque story. “The Serfsons” occurs in a fantasy world that parodies fantasy shows in general but largely takes aim at “Game of Thrones,” especially seeing as it was the biggest show on television in 2017. This was before the series burned all of its goodwill on what many consider to be a lackluster final season (and one of the worst TV finales of all time). Maybe that’s because the folks behind the scenes may have taken some inspiration for a major plot point directly from this episode.

In Season 8, Episode 5 of “Game of Thrones,” titled “The Bells,” Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her dragon, Drogon, set King’s Landing ablaze. It was a surprising moment since Daenerys always seemed more like a liberator than a despot, but it may not have been surprising for anyone who watches “The Simpsons.” The episode also ends with a dragon destroying a village, but the Serfsons take it in far more stride than the other characters on “Game of Thrones.”

Season 6’s “The PTA Disbands” is all about how Springfield Elementary is tight on funds. Apparently, the food they serve in the cafeteria contains both newspapers and gym mats, with viewers seeing Lunchlady Doris (Doris Grau) ram a gym mat through a meat grinder. It seems like one of many nonsense jokes “The Simpsons” has become famous for, but it became all too real circa 2014. 

A news story went viral around this time about how the bread used at Subway contained an ingredient called Azodicarbonamide, which is also found in gym mats and other rubber-based items. Subway was quick to remove the ingredient from its bread after public outcry, but it wasn’t the only brand that had some explaining to do. Numerous other fast food places, from McDonald’s to White Castle, had Azodicarbonamide in their bread, and many of these companies did away with it. No word, though, on whether any fast food companies have tried to put newspaper inks into their meals. 

Not every new film release can afford an all-encompassing marketing campaign on the level of “Barbie.” However, one well-placed stunt is really all you need to get people talking and watch your movie. In 2008, the ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi needed to get the word out about “Kill Bill Vol. 1” making it to television screens. It wasn’t even a new release, but they still went all out with a design of the Bride’s (Uma Thurman) katana extending past the billboard while blood lined the street and nearby cars (that were props meticulously placed in the right spot).

It bore a striking resemblance to a gag in “The Simpsons” Season 4, Episode 6, “Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie.” To promote the fictional film, blood squirts out of Scratchy’s neck and onto some newlyweds. The “Kill Bill” billboard (Kill billboard, if you will) didn’t ruin anyone’s dress, but liability laws are probably less stringent in “The Simpsons” universe. 

“The Simpsons” has always been acutely aware of the rise of anti-intellectualism in modern society, like in Season 5’s “Deep Space Homer,” where NASA wants to send a nobody into orbit to increase excitement surrounding space launches. Homer naturally wins and almost ruins the entire mission when he sends chips and ants flying everywhere. 

The question is whether anyone within the U.K.’s space program saw the episode because the organization hosted a similar contest in 2013. About 87,000 individuals entered for the chance to go to space, and Oliver Knight was the lucky winner. Beating out tens of thousands of other entrants is certainly impressive, at least more impressive than Homer just needing to be slightly more competent than Barney Gumble (Dan Castellaneta). To make the connection even deeper, Buzz Aldrin announced the 23 finalists within the competition, and Aldrin (voicing himself) also accompanied Homer into space. It really does make one think how much “Simpsons” rocket scientists are watching. 

If “The Simpsons” had an unofficial mascot (outside of the titular family), it would have to be Blinky the fish. The three-eyed creature is frequently spotted throughout Springfield, a byproduct of the nuclear waste emitted by the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Such waste has caused many creatures to develop extra features throughout the show’s run, but still, when a three-eyed fish materialized in Greenland in 2024, people couldn’t help but make comparisons. 

We can’t know for certain how exactly the third eye on the real fish came to be. More than likely, it was born that way and simply has a superfluous eye, but if there were any power plants in the vicinity, that’d be another question entirely. 

Does “The Simpsons” actually predict the future? Do people merely seek out confirmation bias now that “Simpsons” predictions have become a meme in their own right? Either way, it’ll keep people watching the show for years to come to see what Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie have predicted next.