The Beirut Blast on The Simpsons: How the Shocking Event Was Predicted and Interpreted

As with every major international event, fans of The Simpsons rush to share videos of scenes and episodes that they think echos the most recent global news. The Beirut port blast was no exception.

On Twitter, fans of the show quickly remembered a scene where a brown-skinned man wearing a traditional eastern outfit and speaking in a dialect accent showed Homer Simpson around a room filled with explosives before trying setting it on fire which caused a massive explosion that had the mushroom-like cloud very similar to the one the appeared in videos depicting the Beirut blast.

However, other social media users pointed out that the video was fake, especially the explosion's scene, as they posted a video of the full scene.

Other social media users shared another video of a wide-scale explosion showed in another episode of the popular show, where a scientist in a nuclear facility looks for Homer Simpson trying to stop a disastrous blast before it goes off.

Sharing videos of Simpsons' scenes and suggesting that it has predicted global incidents have been a recurrent trend. Earlier this year, online websites cited the shows' "prediction" of Kobe Bryant's death in an airplane crash and the emergence of the novel coronavirus that was announced as a pandemic by the end of January. 

By the end of May and following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white policeman in Minneapolis, Minnesota triggering national and international protests chanting "Black Lives Matter," the internet also shared The Simpsons-themed photos so similar to the well-known incident that was caught on tape wondering if it's an actual prediction, before realizing that the images were done by Italian vip-cartoonizer Yuri Pomo days after Floyd's death.

The show's predictions gained more significance after they depicted that current US President Donald Trump will run for president before he actually did in 2015.