A Sniper Attempting to Assassinate Someone in the Middle of a Politcal Speech? 'The Simpsons' Did It.
By this point, I think we've all gotten accustomed to the idea that anything that happens in real life has already happened on The Simpsons. Life imitating art. Though it happens so often, the challenge is keeping straight which is reality and which is the show about a dysfunctional family with yellow skin and eight fingers.
So often in fact that, a "Simpsons Did It" incident hasn't happened since [checks notes] ... last Thursday when Cypress Hill played Royal Albert Hall:
Since the show has been on for 35 years (and, I'm not telling tales out of school when I say is hasn't been consistently good in at least 20 years), it might be less a matter of the writers being insanely prescient, or their predictions are just a "If you put enough monkeys at enough typewriters" scenario. Which The Simpsons also did:
When a show has predicted everything from Covid to murder hornets, Apple Watches to the FIFA scandal, Sigfried and Roy getting mauled by their tigers to stealing used fryolater oil for money, they're likely to be spot-on when it comes to anything that is truly historic. Like Donald Trump running for President in 2024:
… or his attempted assassination by a sniper while he's in the middle of a speech. Which is even more surreal when you recognize the voice of Donald Sutherland, who died just days ago:
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Source - Titled 'Lisa the Iconoclast', the season 7 episode that didn't make the air on Sunday sees Lisa discovering that the founder of Springfield was a murderous pirate who tried to assassinate George Washington. …
One person, who had highlighted that the episode features a scene with a gunman on a roof, noted: "Just to add to this that Jebediah Springfield trying to kill George Washington is also a major plot point in the episode, so it might have been pulled because of that without anyone remembering this specific sniper scene."
For what it's worth, "Lisa the Iconoclast" is still on Disney+:
… as it should be. I like to think that as a culture, we've matured past the point where we don't concern ourselves about a cartoon episode from 1996 mirroring real events in 2024 so much that we can't let anyone watch it. Besides, Season 7 was still very much in the peak run of the show. When you still had the original show runners and writers like Conan O'Brien. The season where Homer got fat on purpose so he could go out on disability and work from home (another prediction). Of Cape Fear-inspired episodes with Sideshow Bob. Of Radioactive Man. Of Troy McClure starring in the stage production of Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off! And the utterly unique "22 Short Films About Springfield," which gave us "Steamed Hams":
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We can all be united and declare in one, loud, harmonic voice we don't want any more assassinations. But we also need to say just as definitively, we can't be banning 1990s Simpsons under any circumstances.