Is it true that The Simpsons predicted the Beirut bombing?

Shortly after an explosion in the Lebanese capital damaged much of the city in August 2020, social media users began circulating a video proving it was what the popular cartoon series had predicted. We checked to see if The Simpsons actually warned about the explosion several years in advance.

On the evening of August 4, 2020, a powerful explosion occurred in the port of Beirut. According to Lebanese authorities, died more than 200 and more than 6,000 people were injured, and the damage from the incident evaluate $15 billion (about 30% of the country’s annual GDP). Although at first there were versions that a fireworks warehouse exploded, authorities and journalists quickly established that the cause of the disaster steel 3 tons of ammonium nitrate. In 2014, they were moved from the abandoned cargo ship Rhosus to a local warehouse. Nevertheless, the version about pyrotechnics quickly became popular on the Internet - it was this that formed the basis tweets that the disaster was predicted in The Simpsons.

In support of their claim, the authors of publications on social networks offered a fragment of one of the episodes of The Simpsons. In this video, Homer visits a store that sells illegal fireworks. An Arab salesman takes Homer to a warehouse filled with various pyrotechnics, and the main character buys one of the fireworks, after which he decides to set it on fire with a gas stove. Following the signature cry of “D'oh!” A powerful explosion occurs in the middle of Springfield, and a mushroom cloud rises above the ruins of the city.

This video is actually stitched together from two different episodes of The Simpsons. Most of it taken from the 25th episode of the seventh season, which aired in 1996. In that episode, Homer actually visited a store that sold illegal pyrotechnics, and then set fireworks on fire from the stove. Only after that everything was not as shown in the video from social networks: realizing that the firecracker was about to explode, Homer locked it in the dishwasher. Everything ended relatively well - only equipment and pipes in the Simpsons' house were damaged.

The explosion that destroyed the city, which was considered a prediction of events in Beirut, shown in the first episode of the 16th season, which aired eight years after the episode about the illegal purchase of pyrotechnics. The destruction of the city has nothing to do with fireworks - Homer's neighbor Ned Flanders imagined him blowing up the nuclear power plant where he works. Let us remember that it was not a nuclear power plant that exploded in Beirut, but a warehouse in the port.

At the same time, The Simpsons does not say that the explosion will occur in Beirut (or another Middle Eastern city), that it will happen in 2020, that the cause of the explosion will be saltpeter - in other words, the animated series does not mention any exact details. Explosions, including quite destructive ones, are shown in hundreds of films, and the clip from The Simpsons (even if it were not stitched together from two different episodes) “predicts” the events in Beirut no more than any of these films. Probably, the fact that the creators of the animated series have a reputation as seers on the Internet played a role - they are credited with predicting dozens of events in recent years. However, almost all such statements do not correspond reality.

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/simpsons-predict-beirut-explosion/
2. https://www.snopes.com/collections/the-simpsons-didnt-predict-that/
3. https://meduza.io/feature/2020/08/22/kto-vinovat-vo-vzryve-v-beyrute