There is widespread belief among fans of The Simpsons that the program has once again seen the future.
On Thursday, experienced writer and producer Mike Reiss dispelled rumors that the TV show had foreseen the lost Titan submarine in its 1998 “Simpson Tide” episode.
Oddly, Reiss had made the 13,000-foot descent down to the Titanic’s ruins last July.
Reiss, 63, wrote the Simpsons episode where Homer descends to the ocean’s depths and encounters an accident. Reiss said he forgot about that episode.
It aired in March 1998 and featured Homer in the US Navy Reserve after he was sacked from his job as a nuclear safety inspector for putting a donut in a reactor.
Homer joins the Navy and is promptly discharged dishonorably when he recklessly sails a nuclear-powered submarine into the Russian seas.
In the episode “Homer’s Paternity Coot” (2006), “The Simpsons” continued the deep-sea exploration humor by having Homer encounter his long-lost biological father, a treasure hunter called Mason Fairbanks, and the two of them hopping into two deep-sea submersibles.
Reiss said the OceanGate submersible wasn’t on the show’s radar in 1998. Instead, the story was inspired by the Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman film Crimson Tide in 1995.
Homer and Fairbanks discover the wreckage of a titanic sunken ship filled with wealth in the tenth episode of the show’s seventeenth season. However, Homer’s possible catastrophic misadventure on the coral reef changes what might have been a precious find. He humorously tries to break free as a light that reads “oxygen slightly higher” lights on him, but he passes out while pleading for his father and doesn’t regain consciousness until many days later.
Reiss carried additional paper with him in case things went wrong, the couple told The Post earlier this week, and he signed a release warning many times of probable death.
They flew from New York to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and then boarded the MV Polar Prince to travel the 400 kilometers to the crash site.
Reiss remarked on the event. Before boarding, passengers must sign a lengthy disclaimer in which “death” is mentioned three times on the first page.
