The Simpsons has had a good run of correctly predicting the future, but it met its downfall last night when the Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl.
When it comes to politics, disasters, TV plots and even Greta Thunberg, the long-running show is eerily accurate in guessing what the future holds. It could be a case of life repeatedly imitating art, or simply that The Simpsons’ writers have magical powers, but either way it never fails to be impressive.
That is, until the show gets something wrong, like the outcome of the Super Bowl yesterday, February 2.
Way back in 1999, The Simpsons aired an episode titled Sunday, Cruddy Sunday, in which Bart and Homer travel to Miami to watch the Super Bowl.
Unfortunately their tickets end up being fake, and a series of mishaps results in them being swept into the locker room with the winners of the game; a team wearing a white and red kit not unlike that of the San Francisco 49ers.
Fast forward 21 years, and we have the similarly dressed 49ers in Miami for the Super Bowl, where they took on the Kansas City Chiefs. For a while it looked as if The Simpsons’ prediction could come true, as the Chiefs entered the fourth quarter down 20-10, but the team managed to make a stunning comeback and ended up winning the game 31-20.
Now, to be fair to the writers, the prediction was made more than two decades ago, way in advance of even the 1999 Super Bowl. The episode had to be animated so early that the writers had to take a guess at who would win in 1999, which is why they decided to dress their characters in a relatively generic kit.
As a result, the writers could claim the episode’s apparent prediction was actually just coincidence, but I don’t think fans will let them get away with that excuse.
Someone who did manage to accurately guess the outcome of yesterday’s game was Ant-Man star Paul Rudd. His prediction was made more recently than The Simpsons’, following the Kansas City Chiefs’ loss in the AFC Championship game last year.
Check out his prediction here:
Rudd appeared in a video shared on the official NFL Twitter account last February, in which he assured Chiefs fans they’d ‘get ’em next year’.
The actor made specific reference to the team’s quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who wound up being named Super Bowl MVP after yesterday’s game.
Rudd’s prediction could be read simply as the unwavering support of a dedicated fan, but it’s more fun to think he used some Marvel-esque powers to see into the future.
Congratulations, Chiefs!
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Emily Brown first began delivering important news stories aged just 13, when she launched her career with a paper round. She graduated with a BA Hons in English Language in the Media from Lancaster University, and went on to become a freelance writer and blogger. Emily contributed to The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Student Problems before becoming a journalist at UNILAD, where she works on breaking news as well as longer form features.