The Internet Thinks the Simpsons Predicted the Future Once Again as Toys ‘R’ Us Closes

March 23, 2018

It’s become almost expected that everything that happens in the world has already happened on an episode of The Simpsons. Do you remember the episode of South Park where Butters nearly has a mental breakdown because he can’t think of an evil plan that wasn’t already an episode of The Simpsons? That was first aired 15 years ago.

Well, people have noticed this phenomenon and have been stretching it to ever more tenuous lengths. Did The Simpsons predict a Trump presidency? No, but they did make a joke about Lisa having to clean up President Trump’s mess when she became president because the idea of Donald Trump becoming president was just the right mix of ridiculous but plausible to be funny, as was the joke that preceded it about refilling the oceans, which we haven’t had to do yet.

This latest “The Simpsons did it!” is one of the most far-fetched, though. In an episode called ‘Marge vs. Singles, Seniors, Childless Couples and Teens, and Gays’, a riot by babies at a Roofi concert leads Springfield to against children in a montage sequence that parodies the “liberation” of Iraq the previous year. One of the quick scenes shows Moe turning the backwards “R” in “Toys ‘R’ Us” around as the kids, including Milhouse, start crying. With Toys ‘R’ Us filing for bankruptcy, people have begun to call the scene prophetic.

It didn’t take a degree from Harvard (which 24 writers for The Simpsons have had) to know that Toys ‘R’ Us was doomed the minute Bain Capital saddled it five $5 billion in debt as part of a leveraged buyout, but that didn’t happen until 2005. But the Harvard degrees and overall intelligence of the writers explains why there are so many moments in the show that seem to predict the future; the writers are just more plugged into what’s going on in the world than the average person. For example, they didn’t predict Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, they just took her normal antics and turned them up to 11 for comedic effect. She did the same thing when she performed at the Super Bowl.

This is how people started thinking Nostradamus could predict the future. Star Trek didn’t predict the future when they showed communicators that flipped open and allowed the crew to talk over huge distances, the flip phone was designed that way because of Star Trek. I think we should talk about some of the times The Simpsons didn’t predict the future.