‘Simpsons’ Writer Slams Racist Conspiracies Over The Show’s Coronavirus “Predictions”
"In terms of trying to place blame on Asia — I think that is gross."
People just love to make very loose connections between episodes of The Simpsons and real life events.
From Disney buying 21st Century Fox to the prediction of Donald Trump’s presidency back in 2000, The Simpsons always seems to know things before we do.
But because people are racist and don’t understand geography, some believe that The Simpsons also predicted COVID-19 coronavirus. Edited screenshots from an episode from 1993 shows newsreader Kent Brockman reporting about the coronavirus 27 years before it occurred.
The Season 4 episode, “Marge in Chains” follows Marge getting arrested for shoplifting supplies for her sick family. The Simpson family have contracted the “Osaka Flu” from a contaminated juicer box shipped over from Japan.
The popular juicer is manufactured in Osaka, Japan where one of the packing crew came into work sick. Coughing into Homer’s juicer box, the sick man tells his co-worker: “Please don’t tell the supervisor that I have the flu.”
With that, Homer’s contaminated box along with countless others, are taped up and shipped over to Springfield. Two months later, when everyone gets their packages, the town falls ill with the “Osaka Flu”.
Now first of all, Japan is not China, the country where COVID-19 originated from. Beyond that, viruses are often spread through cough droplets and not through packaged goods.
Even if the virus could spread through packages, studies show that coronavirus particles can only survive for three days, at maximum. Plus, this is only if the virus was in contact with plastic or stainless steel in a controlled environment, which is nowhere near the six to eight weeks that The Simpsons showed with the “Osaka Flu”.
As people try to draw any parallels they can, Bill Oakley — co-writer of the “Marge in Chains” episode — has shared that he isn’t a fan of people doing so.
“I don’t like it being used for nefarious purposes,” Oakley told The Hollywood Reporter. “The idea that anyone misappropriates it to make coronavirus seem like an Asian plot is terrible. In terms of trying to place blame on Asia — I think that is gross.”
It was actually called the "Osaka Flu" in this episode and it obviously came from Japan. You all just see Asians and presume they're Chinese. The Simpsons predicted nothing and there's no correlation at all. #coronavirus https://t.co/gYJVbtBXMZ
— Dudge ? (@DudgeYT) February 3, 2020
Drawing inspiration from the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, Oakley said that the gag was meant to be cartoonish. “It was meant to be absurd that someone could cough into a box and the virus would survive for six to eight weeks in the box,” Oakley continued.
“We intentionally made it cartoonish because we wanted it to be silly and not scary, and not carry any of these bad associations along with it, which is why the virus itself was acting like a cartoon character and behaving in extremely unrealistic ways.”
So there you have it, stop being racist. The Simpsons may have predicted a bunch of things, but COVID-19 coronavirus isn’t one of them.
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