Entertainment
Fans floored as The Simpsons ‘predicts’ Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight: ‘They did it again!’
Is this too good to be true?
People may throw about the ‘The Simpsons predicted X’ argument all too often, but by Jobe, they’ve appeared to have done it again following Richard Branson’s successful flight to space on Virgin Galactic.
The billionaire won the rich man space race – with Jeff Bezos heading up to yonder next week and Elon Musk still welding his rocketship – and jetted up through the Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday.
A week before his 71st birthday, Branson successfully flew aboard the VSS unity, which touched down at Virgin Galactic’s New Mexico hub Spaceport America over the weekend.
Branson and crew climbed to an altitude of 90km (295,000ft), offering a view of the curvature of the Earth and four minutes of weightlessness for those onboard.
However, many fans have suggested The Simpsons put the guy in space years earlier, even if we’re wishfully thinking the show ‘predicted’ every major event to come.
It only took Branson’s first zero-gravity float around the Virgin cabin for fans of the Fox series to realise a lookalike did the same in season 25, with the Virgin Atlantic Twitter also musing about the moment.
Twitter user Aditya Kondawar shared a tweet that’s now been sent fire and wide and shows a split image of Branson in space and an astronaut – who bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin founder – similarly floating about a spacecraft.
They wrote of the moment, which went down in 2014 episode The War Of Art: ‘How can The Simpsons show predict every Damn thing?’
The moment stems from art forger Klaus Ziegler (voiced by Max von Sydow) explaining to Lisa Simpson that ‘forgeries give pleasure to people all over the world’, with a blink and you’ll miss it moment of a man resembling Branson floating in space as he remarks over his own floating artwork.
And, frankly, from the Branson likeness to the carbon copy of a spaceship, the scene floored a lot of fans.
While Virgin wrote: ‘The Simpsons predicted it…’, another Twitter user laughed: ‘I’ll be damned … The Simpsons did it again.’
One very realistically wrote: ‘Thats insane, there must be some logical explaination to this. [sic]’
And, sorry to say, there appears to be.
Sadly this one seems too good to be true – as most brilliant ‘predictions’ are – with the billionaire’s plans for his Virgin spaceship announced when he founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, a good decade before Simpsons writers put pen to paper.
While there is something brilliant about the show pre-empting this shaggy-haired billionaire effortlessly floating around in space with the world watching in a near-mirror image of events to unfold seven years later, many weren’t buying it.
More: US TV news
As one fan wrote: ‘So the @TheSimpsons predicted yet another thing that came true.@richardbranson making his flight into space for the #Unity22 launch,’ they were sadly shot down by someone who’d done their research.
‘Well its been known Virgin Galactic has been trying to get Richard Branson into space for 17 of the 34 years The Simpsons have been on the air,’ they offered, ‘so the show wasn’t exactly being Nostradamus here.’
Hey, we can dream it was though.
MORE : The Simpsons producer on whether series will ever end: ‘If the show sucks, it goes off the air’
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