Arnold Schwarzenegger

NOSTRAD'OHMUS

An image of Farrah Fawcett on The Simpsons.

Over the past four decades, the The Simpsons television program has made thousands of incorrect predictions about the future, ranging from Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming president, Disney’s acquisition of romance, and the seizure of the East Coast by a supervillain.

So it frankly wasn’t all that surprising when a human-eyed viewer on Digg shared yet another bungled prediction to add to the pile: the late Farrah Fawcett still being alive in the year 2034.

In the 1994 episode “Bart Gets Famous,” Bart Simpson becomes a famous celebrity. Worried that his fame is fleeting, he imagines a future in which he appears on the game show Match Game 2034 alongside other has-been celebrities, including Billy Crystal, Loni Anderson, Spike Lee, the head of Kitty Carlisle, and Farrah Fawcett.

Sadly, Fawcett would not live to see the year 2034, as the Charlie’s Angels star would tragically pass away from a rare type of cancer on June 25, 2009. Compounding the tragedy, she is introduced in Bart’s fantasy as “Farrah Fawcett-Majors-O’Neal-Varney,” implying that she would eventually marry actor Jim Varney, best known for playing the character Ernest P. Worrell. Varney passed away himself in the year 2000.

Nobody expects a cartoon to get everything right, particularly one as frequently wrong as The Simpsons. However, one can’t help but wonder if this tragedy could’ve been avoided if Fawcett had been the one whose head was preserved in a jar. Perhaps Fawcett would’ve seen the episode, become more aware of her mortality, and the cancer could’ve been detected earlier. The Simpsons would still be wrong, but at least we’d still have one more Angel here on Earth.

THOSE CLOWNS IN CONGRESS

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain likes to quote movies. And not just any movies, but movies based on cartoon franchises. As reported by our sister blog, AnimeJihad, Cain quoted a song from Pokémon: The Movie 2000 during a debate last August. As any political analyst could tell you, it was a brazen dog whistle for the highly-coveted otaku crowd (a move popularized by Lee Atwater’s so-called “Shounen Strategy”). Which apparently worked, because he soon shot up to frontrunner status.

Well now the Cainster is at it again. During a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Cain wheeled out his new talking point, telling his supporters “We need a leader, not a reader.”

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OAKLEY CORRAL

Julian Assange
Bill Oakley.

Former Simpsons writer/showrunner and notorious “hacktivist” Bill Oakley, who has been in communication with fans via the internet since before most people even had the internet, has been tearin’ up the Twitter lately, uploading a treasure trove of rare Simpsons material that has never before been made public. Among the documents uploaded so far: the first draft of “$pringfield, (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling),” the first draft of the “Skinner and the Superintendent” segment from “22 Short Films About Springfield,” the original story outline for “Two Bad Neighbors,” and a list of random ideas.

Among the more intriguing ideas lost to the sands of time:

  • An aborted “$pringfield” subplot involving Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone maintaining a Planet Hollywood in Springfield that got dropped since the three actors never actually agreed to be on the show.
  • More scenes of Springfield being hit by an economic recession, which somehow feels more timely and relevant than last year’s “No Loan Again, Naturally” despite being written a decade earlier.
  • George and Barbara Bush eating pizza.
  • An episode plot where Bart obtains 144 Jeeps for some reason.
  • This visual gag:
     

    The town secretary records the vote in a ledger, where we see
    previous idiotic town votes, e.g. “Above-Ground H-Bomb Test,”
    “Lower Drinking Age to 14,” and “Build Monorail.”

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