Did ‘The Simpsons’ predict Queen Elizabeth II’s death? The truth behind the 2014 claim

New images which are supposedly from an old episode of The Simpsons are circulating on social media depicting Queen Elizabeth II’s casket and the date of her death as 2022. This would not be the first time that The Simpsons has accurately depicted a major world event, like when they predicted that Donald Trump would become president. But what exactly are the origins of the prediction, and does it hold any water? Let’s take a look at the episode that the image was taken from and if it really depicted Queen Elizabeth II’s death. 

Did The Simpsons predict Queen Elizabeth II’s death?

The viral tweet, which you can see above, consists of a screenshot of three different images which are apparently from The Simpsons. The first image is accompanied by the date 2014 in red, yet that particular image came from the episode, ‘The Regina Monologues’ which was the fourth episode of the 15th season of the show, and it was originally released on 9 Jan. 2004. The episode did not show Queen Elizabeth II’s death, instead, Homer was imprisoned for hitting her royal carriage with his car, causing her to wear a neck brace which you can see in the image.

As for the other two images, well Queen Elizabeth II did have a few appearances throughout the 33 seasons of the animated series, but she did not die in any of them and she never appeared in a casket labeled with the year 2022. The fact-checking website PolitiFact has corroborated this information and has concluded that the image of Queen Elizabeth II was not in any episodes of The Simpsons instead it is an altered version of a Donald Trump image, which they also reported to be fake. 

So ultimately the images and the tweet which went viral are indeed fake. But just because The Simpsons did not predict Queen Elizabeth II’s death, does not mean that other people did not. One Twitter user back in August managed to predict her death up to the day, in a joke tweet. After she did die that day the tweet went viral and the user had to state that they were only making a joke and had no affiliation with any organizations or cults. 

After 33 seasons of The Simpsons and a number of episodes in which they make jokes about the future, some of these were bound to come true. But in this case, it was nothing more than a fake viral tweet. The Simpsons will probably do an episode on Queen Elizabeth II’s death, but if not, there’s still South Park.