The Simpsons Did It

About

The Simpsons Did It is a term used to call out ideas considered “new” that may have already been perfomed on famous tv show The Simpsons, due to its influence as a long-running series. The phrase evolved to point out the predictive nature of several situations and jokes made in the show that eventually turned out to happen in real life.

Origin

On June 26th, 2002, Comedy Central first aired The 7th episode from the 6th season of popular tv show South Park. Titled “Simpsons Already Did It”, the episode, which continues on from the events of the previous episode “Professor Chaos”, Butters thinks up a series of schemes to take over the world, but realizes that each one has already been performed on The Simpsons^[1]. In one of the scenes, uploaded to YouTube on October 28th 2010 (shown below), Butter’s assistant keeps repeating the phrase “Simpsons did it”, as an answer to indicate that an idea Butter had, under his Professor Chaos persona, and thought was new, was actually already done in the show, which drives him mad.

In a commentary video made by the South Park creators, they state how the episode came to be after they realized The Simpsons already beat them to a lot of ideas and jokes they had for their own show^[5].

Spread

As highlighted by a thread on the Democratic Underground forums on July 11th 2003^[3], the catchphrase was quoted in various discussions about lack of originality in more recent tv shows, including The Simpsons itself.
On May 11th 2004, Urban Dictionary user Mister Ignorant submitted an entry for “Simpsons Did It”^[2], giving the following definition:

A term you refer to when a situation requested by someone has been already done on The Simpsons.

Derives from South Park.

On April 14th 2009, humor website CollegeHumor released a music clip parodying “we didn’t start the fire” by Billy Joel, using various comments from the site and YouTube as lyrics^[6] (Youtube upload from 2013 shown below).

The phrase can be read, along with “South Park did it too”.
On TVTropes, the page for the It’s Been Done trope that was created on October 23th 2011, lists the phrase “The Simpsons Did It” as an alternative title^[4]
A Meme Generator macro was also launched in 2013^[16], leading to about 60 parodies as of September 2015.

The SImpsons’ Predictions

Among Conspiracy Theories enthiusiasts, a peculiar screenshot from a scene in episode 179, titled “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson” and first aired on September 21st 1997, featuring Lisa Simpson showing a booklet about a 9$ bus ride to the city, became quoted as an example of the show predicting the events of the September 11th attacks because of the strange outline of the number “9” with the Twin Towers forming “11”^[7] (shown below).

On August 11th, 2009, College Humor issued a list of jokes and situations made in the show that were eventually found to happen in real life years after the episodes aired^[18]. Similar lists were made on BuzzFeed^[9] and other media blogs and sites such as What Culture^[10] and Mashable^[11]. News outlets and blogs also took parts in this phenomenon, highlighting several instances of the show predicting future events such as Donald Trump presidency in the Daily Mail^[12] or the 2015 Greek crisis on Metro News^[13].
In 2012, the Tumblr“SImpsons Did It” was launched^[14], posting real life examples reminiscent from the show. An entire sub-reddit was also created in 2013^[15].

External References