President Trump and smart watches - The Simpsons has a knack for predicting the future
Weâll never watch Homer, Marge and Bart the same way again. When the world woke to the shock of a Donald Trump presidency on Wednesday, fans of The Simpsons will have recalled with a shiver an episode from 16 years ago in which the Grand Oompah Loompa was predicted to have taken the White House. Truth had become stranger and far scarier than fiction.
âIt was a warning to America,â said Dan Greaney, writer of the fateful instalment. âThat just seemed like the logical last stop before hitting bottom. It was consistent with the vision of America going insane.â
In âBart to the Futureâ The Simpsons leaps forward in time and imagines an America listing towards dystopia after four years of Commander-in-Chief Trump. Lisa â essentially a cartoon imagining of a young Hillary Clinton â has ousted The Donald and must perform emergency surgery on a bankrupted nation (âAs you know, weâve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,â she tells her advisors).
âWhat we needed was for Lisa to have problems beyond her fixing, that everything went as bad as it possibly could, and thatâs why we had Trump be president before her,â said Greaney.
Whatâs interesting is that Trump was presented as a crass clown rather than a malevolent racist. At the time he was famous as a larger- than-life businessman. The incendiary loudmouth of the presidential campaign just past had yet to emerge. A Trump presidency was pitched as farce rather than nightmare.
âThe Donald Trump that we were writing about was kind of a lovable, over-the-top character and didnât have this darkness,â said an astonished Greaney in an interview this week.
The Simpsons wasnât alone in recognising in Trump something other than a real-estate tycoon with a flair for self publicity. In Back to the Future II, bully Biff is depicted as a Trump-esque megalomaniac, with orange hair and radioactive narcism. The resemblance to Trump was entirely intended said the movieâs writer Bob Gale.
âYou watch part II again and thereâs a scene where Marty confronts Biff in his office and thereâs a huge portrait of Biff on the wall behind Biff, and thereâs one moment where Biff kind of stands up and he takes exactly the same pose as the portrait? Yeah.â
Returning to The Simpsons, Trump wasnât the first time it had proved unnervingly prescient. This parodic cartoon has second-guessed real-life events in an extraordinary and occasionally chilling fashion. The endless afterlife of the Rolling Stones was for instance predicted by the series in the 1995 episode âLisaâs Weddingâ. Here we jumped to 2010, where the characterâs fiancĂ©e has a poster in his college dorm advertising the bandâs âSteel Wheelchair Tourâ.
Later in the same dispatch characters are shown communicating via âsmart watchesâ that look suspiciously like prototypes of the wrist-top devices Apple has put so much effort into marketing lately. Our televisions had been transformed into unwitting crystal balls.
As with Trump, some of the forecasts are supremely dark. In 1993, The Simpsons lampooned big cat magicians Siegfried and Roy with the pair mauled by one of their tigers. Ten years later, just such a tragedy occurred when Roy was attacked by his beloved white tiger Montecore, essentially bringing their career to an end.
Also prophesied was the 2013 horsemeat scandal. In 1994 viewers saw children at Springfield Elementary school feed dinners made of reconstituted equine. Twenty years on, we were chomping down on horse burgers in cheery ignorance. If only weâd paid closer attention to The Simpsons. In much the same vein, the animation was farsighted as to the impact of pollution run amok (Springfield being, of course, a dumping ground for Mr Burnsâs nuclear power plant).
In 1999âs âE-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt), Homer poisons a field with tobacco-yielding giant mutated tomatoes. Chillingly, just such a crop was later discovered in the vicinity of Fukushima power plant in Japan.
Similarly, the three-eyed fish who featured regularly in The Simpsonsâ early years, having spawned in the shadow of the Burnsâs nuclear reactor, was revealed to have a real world equivalent in 2011, when just such a creature was discovered in an Argentinian reservoir downstream from a power plant.
Most chilling of all was an unwitting prediction of September 11. In New York City Against Homer Lisa holds up a magazine advertising $9 bus tickets to Manhattan â with the twin towers in the background, it reads as â9 11â.
Of course, The Simpsons doesnât always get it exactly right. It gave us Donald Trump as a figure of fun â a buffoon ripe for parodying. That he would become a poster boy for the Ku Klux Klan was beyond the writersâ most darkest imaginings.
âThe Donald Trump that we were writing about was kind of a lovable, over-the-top character and didnât have this darkness,âsaid Simpsons creator Matt Groening. âThereâs nothing in the episode about walls or rounding up Mexicans or Islamophobia. You would expect that heâd build giant monuments to himself but you wouldnât expect that the first thing would be a wall.â
âI am tickled we are getting all this attention, but I donât think itâs going to trigger this well-awaited re-evaluation of my episode that I was hoping for,â said Greaney.
âThe Simpsons has always kind of embraced the over-the-top side of American culture and [Trump] is just the fulfilment of that.â
LOOKING AHEAD
Self-driving cars seemed a pipe dream when Arnold Schwarzenegger got into the back of a âJohnny Cabâ in 1990. Nowadays, âsmartâ automobiles are regarded as the inevitable next stage of personal transport.
In addition to giving us Biff-as-Trump the Tyrant , Back to the Future II delivering an unnervingly accurate portrait of life in 2015. We see the McFly family watch multiple TV channels once and communicating via a Skype-style video link-up.
Director Steven Spielberg consulted technology experts for the making of this 2002 cyberpunk thriller and duly gave us touch-screen technology that bears an uncanny resemblance to that in widespread use today.
Hal, the computer villain of Kubrickâs masterpiece, was essentially an out-of-control version of Appleâs Siri personal assistant. Just donât ask Siri to open the âpod bay doorsâ.
Gene Roddenberryâs sci-fi romp predicted the future in a myriad of ways. In the 60s, Kirk and Spock can be seen talking into glorified iPhones while, during the â90s, Star Trek: The Next Generation showed us a distant tomorrow in which 3D printing and virtual reality were part of everyday life.
