Anna Daniels
The scene from The Simpsons Movie, a clip of which Twitter user @ftbldillon shared, is a brief but critical plot point of the 2007 film. During the flick, President Arnold Schwarzenegger decides to enclose Springfield in a giant glass dome after Homer’s actions dangerously pollute a nearby lake, causing animal mutations. When the Environmental Protection Agency arrives to contain the scene and a mob of locals come after the family, the Simpsons flee to Alaska through a sinkhole in Maggie’s sandbox. While the Simpsons are away, the government makes plans to destroy the town and replace it with a new Grand Canyon, which they advertise with the help of Hanks. That’s where the line is from, and what propels the Simpsons to go back and save their town.
But Hanks isn’t ill in The Simpsons Movie — he’s simply using his credibility to help out the government and advertise the new Grand Canyon that will replace Springfield. Unlike the series’ somewhat unsettling 9/11 connection or even The Simpsons predicting the Disney-Fox merger — a joke that took two decades to pay off — Hanks’ quarantine “prediction” really wasn’t a really prediction at all.
It’s easy to see how the parallels between the movie’s quarantine situation and Hanks’ predicament might have some crossover, but it’s a weak link at best. Not only does the dialogue in question sound like something just about every famous person says about going out in public, but the circumstances of the quarantine are also drastically different. The cameo and Hanks’ current status actually mirrors some of The Simpsons‘ other softer predictions — like the three-eyed fish Bart found near a Springfield power plant during a 1990 episode mirroring three-eyed fish that was discovered in a reservoir in Argentina near a nuclear power plant nearly a decade later. There are similarities between what happens in The Simpsons Movie and what’s going on in real life, but anyone claiming that the film predicted Hanks getting the coronavirus is committing a huge leap in logic.
Written by: Looper
