SOCIAL media users believed The Simpsons had predicted the death of George Floyd after an image depicting one of the show’s characters surfaced on the internet.
The image showed Springfield Police Chief Clancy Wiggum kneeling on a black man’s neck as Lisa Simpson stood behind holding a sign that reads “Justice for George.”
Here’s more on the eerie picture and whether the cartoon actually predicted George Floyd’s fate.
There is no episode in which The Simpsons predicted the 46-year-old black man’s death.
On May 30, five days after Floyd died, Instagram user Yuri Pomo shared a image he created of Chief Wiggum kneeling on a black man as Lisa Simpson watched and held the sign.
“Imagine you’re sat with you daughter/son watching the Simpsons, and all of a sudden this scene happens in the show, as cruel as it has been, no jokes, no irony, nothing that the Simpsons normally has, and what it’s loved for,” the Instagram user wrote in the caption.
“Imagine that, how would you feel? … Think about that deeply, and give yourself an answer, no need to add anything else!”
The image was not from any Simpsons episode, and appeared to have been created by Pomo, whose profile states he is an “artist who rose to fame by turning celebrities into characters inspired by the animated sitcom The Simpsons.”
The post is now blurred with the message “False Information” and “Reviewed by independent fact-checkers.”
Besides the Chief Wiggum and Lisa Simpson image, a collage emerged of the Springfield police station ablaze in the show, with a photograph below it of a building on fire.
The bottom photo was not a police precinct in Minneapolis—which was burned amid protests over Floyd’s death—but rather an unfinished affordable housing complex in Minneapolis.
While the Springfield police station fire image did come from the show, it was unrelated to the protests around Floyd’s death and police brutality.
While The Simpsons have accurately predicted the future more than a dozen times, the show did not predict the death of President Donald Trump on August 27, as rumored.
A faked image of an animated Trump in a coffin spread on Twitter, but it did not come from the show.
The date surfaced from some Tik Tok users and was linked to the faked image of Trump in the coffin.
The Simpsons, which debuted in 1989, has gained a reputation for predicting the future, and appears to have done so correctly in at least 18 instances.
That includes predicting 19 years ago that Trump would one day be elected the president of the United States.
In the 1990s, the show seemingly foreshadowed the 2014 Ebola outbreak in an episode in which Marge Simpson told an ill Bart Simpson to read a book titled, “Curious George and the Ebola Virus.”
In 2012, The Simpsons showed Lady Gaga performing while hanging in the air, which she did at the Super Bowl halftime show five years later.
Fans recently claimed the show predicted actor Tom Hanks being diagnosed with the coronavirus and isolated, because he made a 2007 cameo appearance saying the American government lost credibility.
