The Simpsons’ writer said the claims of the show predicting the coronavirus is ‘gross.
’ The classic animated show has managed to predict the future as in one of the past episodes it showed Donald Trump was elected as president.
Over social media, photos and videos from Oakley and his co-writer Josh Weinstein’s season 4 episode ‘Marge in Chains’ has since gone viral.
The episode, which aired in 1993, shows a Japanese worker cough into a box which is then transported to Springfield, where residents including Homer Simpson are hit with a disease called the ‘Osaka Flu.’
Clips from the episode uploaded by netizens have since garnered millions of views on YouTube. Facebook’s fact-checking system has since flagged the post as “False information.”
The former showrunner Mike Reiss of The Simpsons joked: ‘The whole “Simpsons predicted it” thing is silly, but The Simpsons predicted it’, Bill Oakley, who co-wrote Marge In Chains, is not happy with how the episode is being used on social media.
He told the Hollywood Reporter: ’I don’t like it being used for nefarious purposes. 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.’
“There are very few cases where The Simpsons predicted something,” Oakley said. “It’s mainly just coincidence because the episodes are so old that history repeats itself. Most of these episodes are based on things that happened in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s that we knew about.”
”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. It is cartoonish” he said, “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.”
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