Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
The iconic American animated sitcom, ‘The Simpsons’, has acquired a reputation of predicting major events, including Donald Trump becoming US president, the Walt Disney acquisition of 21st Century Fox, among others. Following Queen Elizabeth II’s death, several social media users claimed that ‘The Simpsons’ has done it again, predicting her year of death in one of the episodes that aired in early 2000s.
There is also a video doing the rounds, where a sticker showing the date of Queen’s death can be seen in the background of a scene.
Fact check
Newschecker first ran a keyword search for the terms “Simpsons Queen Elizabeth”, which led us to a couple of dedicated fan pages to The Simpsons that details appearances by a character. According to Simpsons Wiki, Queen Elizabeth II has appeared in ten episodes, including mentions in four. None of these websites stated that the Queen’s death was shown in an episode of ‘The Simpsons’.
We then went through the synopses of each of the 10 episodes on Disney+ Hotstar, where we did not find any plotline that indicated the Queen’s death. The synopsis of episode four of season 15, titled “The Regina Monologues”, stated — “The Simpsons travel to England, where Homer is imprisoned in the Tower of London after he smashes a car into the Queen’s royal coach”. The episode was first aired on November 23, 2003, the same year mentioned in the viral tweet.
According to the storyline of the episode in IMDb, Homer accidentally rams Queen Elizabeth II’s coach and gets put in the Tower of London. Escaping through a secret tunnel he ends up in the Queen’s bedroom, but she agrees to let him go back to America as long as he takes Madonna with him.
We skimmed through the episode and found that the Queen’s clothes were similar to the one seen in the viral posts. However, we did not find any scene that showed the Queen dead or her funeral.
Newschecker then did a reverse image search of the viral picture, which led us to several news reports on the Simpsons’ alleged prediction of Donald Trump’s death on August 27, 2020.
According to the reports, including News18, DNA, UK’s Metro, posts of an image of the Simpsons version of Trump lying in a coffin were circulated on social media in 2020, which was later proved to be doctored. The reports stated that no episode of the popular series actually predicted Trump’s death.
We found that the edited Trump image was similar to the current viral picture of Queen Elizabeth. The similarity in background, tombstone and coffin proves the same image was again altered.
Also, a comparison of screenshots of the viral video and the original episode showed that it was doctored to add the sticker showing the Queen’s date of death.
Conclusion
Viral posts claiming that ‘The Simpsons’ predicted Queen Elizabeth II’s year of death were found to be false as the cartoon did not have any episode depicting the monarch’s death and that the viral image and video are altered.
Result: Altered media
Sources
Disney+ Hotstar Simpsons catalogue
News18 report, August 28, 2020
Metro report, August 27, 2020
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
