The long-running animated sitcom South Park best excels when satirizing contemporary culture, but the series also has a serious knack for predicting the future. First airing on August 13th, 1997, South Park has continued to run for a highly impressive 317 episodes to date. Created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, South Park has become infamous over the last two and a half decades for its profanity and dark, surreal humor that pokes fun at a wide range of topics – with the series also occasionally helping shape the modern zeitgeist it aims to mock.
Now in its 25th season, South Park continues to revolve around Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick (all voiced by Parker and Stone) and has already seen the boys tackle navigating St. Patricks Day, the perils of Airsoft, and a fluctuating real estate market in their titular Colorado town. South Park‘s consistently current feel is primarily owed to its unique production schedule, where Parker, Stone, and their creative teams write each episode just a week before it airs. This cutting-edge, last-minute approach to episode creation has also helped Parker and Stone hold sway in the national conversation, with South Park able to satirize breaking news and events in a way few other TV series can.
As a result, South Park‘s immersion in contemporary culture has led to some scarily accurate predictions of the future from the show. From predicting celebrity meltdowns and behaviors years before they happen to accurately guessing technological advances, South Park‘s prescience is famed and far-reaching. Here’s every time South Park predicted the future chronologically, as well as when each prediction happened in reference to the real-life event.
Winning Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Original Score at the 78th Academy Awards and topping numerous critics’ “best of” lists in 2005, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain was an undeniable hit. Lee’s movie is a tender and touching portrait of two cowboys’ forbidden love in the American west, with Brokeback Mountain permanently changing the landscape of queer cinema at the time. In 2018, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant to the history of cinema – highlighting its cultural impact.
Yet as has since become their trademark, South Park aired the premise of Brokeback Mountain long before Ang Lee signed on to direct the little-known works of writer Annie Proulx. As far back as 1998, South Park season 2 episode 9, “Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls,” brought the Sundance Film Festival to South Park, with all four boys attending the festival. In the midst of a movie, Cartman remarks that all independent movies are “about gay cowboys eating pudding” – bizarrely tracking with Brokeback Mountain‘s plot. Trey Parker and Matt Stone expanded on this idea in 2010, telling Today that after attending the Sundance festival in the mid-’90s, they “could just tell [indie cinema] was going toward gay cowboydom.” This accurate prediction would mark the start of a long future-predicting run for South Park‘s Trey Parker and Matt Stone that is still running today.
Summer 2016 saw the memorable yet relatively short-lived widespread obsession with Niantic’s Pokémon Go, which encouraged users to go and catch Pokémon “in the wild” using one of the first mainstream applications of augmented reality via people’s smartphones GPS. This led to swathes of players roaming their respective cities and towns hunting Pokémon via Pokémon Go in an attempt to catch em’ all, with Niantic’s developers using each player’s data to improve the game itself. Whether loathed or loved at the time, Pokémon Go was a defining feature of Summer 2016 that now evokes significant nostalgia for many people worldwide.
Unbelievably, however, South Park created Pokémon Go‘s concept as early as 1999 in their season 3 episode “Chinpokomon.” This episode sees Kyle, Stan, Kenny, and Cartman become obsessed with a Japanese fad named Chinpokomon, with the boys and their South Park elementary peers gobbling up all the Chinpokomon related merchandise they can get their hands on. Chinpokomon, however, turns out to be rather nefarious, with each of these purchased Chinpokomon devices designed to track a player’s location and send the information back to the Japanese developers, which they plan to use to convert America’s youth into child soldiers. While it must be stated Niantic’s data collection from Pokémon Go players was only ever used to improve the end-user in-game experience, the rest of South Park‘s “Chinpokomon” parody shows undeniable prescience some 19 years before Pokémon Go‘s initial release.
South Park has always dared to tread on the most controversial of eggshells, and their handling of the first episode to air since the September 11th attacks was no different in this regard. Season 5, episode 9, “Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants,” managed to deliver an accurate and thoughtful appraisal of the mood in America at the time while retaining the gross-out and zany humor South Park is known for. While “Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants” has an event-packed plot, the end of the episode sees the then al-Qaeda leader blown up with dynamite and shot multiple times in a Looney Tunes-Esque sequence. Despite its cartoonish presentation, this 2001 South Park episode would mark one of the first examples of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s prescience, with Bin Laden killed in Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, almost a decade after South Park initially predicted his demise.
First airing on March 31st, 2004, South Park season 8, episode 3, “The Passion of the Jew,” sees Kyle rent the blockbuster movie The Passion of the Christ – becoming enraged at its content and demanding his money back from its director Mel Gibson. South Park‘s version of Gibson is a twisted, anti-Semitic caricature, hurling abuse at Jewish people and prancing around nude waving a gun, with critics at the time also citing the series’ biting critique of The Passion of the Christ movie itself.
While initially considered defamatory upon release in 2004, South Park‘s portrayal of Mel Gibson would sadly prove to be an accurate one. Just two years later, in 2006, Gibson was famously arrested for driving under the influence before shouting anti-Semitic abuse at his arresting officer, permanently altering his public perception. Controversy has continued to plague Gibson’s personal life since, highlighting Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s knack for uncannily predicting celebrity behavior.
South Park‘s 2008 episode “Britney’s New Look” centers on a brutal, cultish news cycle in which the mainstream media of South Park and the wider world offer up a celebrity’s career for destruction. At the end of the episode, a newscaster reveals the “ritual” used to derail Britney Spears’ in-universe career before stating Miley Cyrus’ reputation is next on the chopping block – with big media looking to make the then-teen star into their next scandalous figure.
Amazingly, Miley Cyrus’ real-life career temporarily imploded less than a year after “Britney’s New Look” first aired, with the singer’s rapidly changing aesthetic and musical style alienating a large section of her fanbase. In particular, Cyrus’ sudden and overt sexualization bore striking ties to South Park‘s depiction of the singers chosen for the fictitious ritual, with Cyrus’ negative publicity over the subsequent years something very few apart from Parker and Stone could have predicted.
Season 13, episode 8 of South Park, “Dead Celebrities,” sees the ghost of Billy Mays return to attempt to sell Ike a product named ChipotlAway. This “genius” new invention removes bloodstains in people’s underwear caused by eating the food from Chipotle Mexican Grill, which Cartman is a staunch advocate of. Just days after “Dead Celebrities” first aired, fast-food chain Chipotle naturally issued a statement disputing South Park‘s claim that consuming Chipotle results in customers defecating blood.
Yet six years after South Park unveiled ChipotlAway to the world; there was another bizarre case of Parker and Stone’s show predicting the future. In 2015, E-Coli found in Chipotle products caused more than 50 people to get sick after eating at various Chipotle outlets. The 2015 outbreak meant the chain was forced to close 43 restaurants in Oregon and Washington alone, putting a serious dent in the company’s then healthy-style fast food reputation.
South Park‘s season 14 episode “Medicinal Fried Chicken” sees Cartman and company establish an underground KFC market after the town’s local Kentucky Fried Chicken chain is replaced by a medicinal marijuana restaurant, leading to outcry from South Park’s residents. Cartman subsequently takes to wheeling and dealing chicken in the shadows, with South Park’s townsfolk paying outrageous sums after hankering for the Colonel’s secret chicken recipe.
While “Medicinal Fried Chicken” first premiered in 2010, this South Park episode’s premise would shockingly come to pass just eight years later. In 2018, reported operational issues forced KFC to close down approximately 75% of their UK-based restaurants for a period ranging from five days to a month, depending on location. This led to a mass outcry from many UK residents and saw several opportunists take to selling KFC chicken buckets on eBay for a reported $100 each, perfectly imitating “Medicinal Fried Chicken”‘s ridiculous premise.
One of South Park‘s most prescient future predictions arrived courtesy of an offhand quip by the town’s newscaster who says, “Passengers said the Carnival cruise line smelled like poop, but that that was an improvement” as Randy and Sharon watch TV in Season 14, episode 14 “Crème Fraîche.” While likely a throwaway line and light-hearted dig towards Carnival at the time, this one-liner would prove scarily accurate. Just three years later, in 2013, a stranded Carnival cruise ship saw its plumbing explode following an electrical fire, causing sewage to flow freely aboard the vessel in a harrowing experience for those unlucky passengers aboard the cruiseliner.
South Park season 18, episode 2, “Gluten Free Ebola,” centers on Cartman and the boys lampooning the trend of the gluten-free diet lifestyle and the constant changes recommended to the Western pattern diet. More specifically, two of South Park’s residents experience violent, gluten-related deaths after switching their diets per government recommendations, leading the rest of the town to fear an outbreak of gluten-induced Ebola. Incredibly, the same week that “Gluten Free Ebola” aired in 2014, scientists discovered a new strain of the Ebola virus after an unnamed laboratory became contaminated with a version of the Zaire Ebolavirus.
The idea of drone warfare in contemporary culture is becoming more and more prevalent as the use of flying devices increases exponentially. Recent examples of Drones moving beyond fun gadget status include several drones shutting down travel at London’s Heathrow airport in late December 2018, as well as Pyeongchang officials being trained to take down suspicious drones by using their own drones at the 2018 Winter Olympics. This is not to mention the myriad military applications of drones, with drone strikes during war a genuine option for developed armed forces.
However, long before Drones began to seep into the public consciousness as dangerous objects, South Park predicted their more nefarious applications. South Park season 18, episode 5, “The Magic Bush,” sees South Park residents use private drones to spy on their neighbors, allowing all manner of salacious secrets to spill forth. This, in turn, leads to the South Park police purchasing their own drones to shoot down the civilian-owned ones – perfectly mirroring the security measures put in place at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
South Park season 20, episode 8, “Members Only,” sees Cartman and his girlfriend Heidi Turner seek refuge at the SpaceX building to avoid an increasingly cloying social media age. Cartman and Heidi pressure the SpaceX team to let them go to Mars because it has “shi*** WiFi,” before Tesla CEO Elon Musk appears and tells the pair he is yet to solve all the scientific problems involved with colonizing Mars – but he has made it his mission to reach the red planet in the future. Once again, South Park apparently knew Musk’s own desires before they became public knowledge, with “Members Only” first airing in November 2016. Just one year later, in 2017, Elon Musk would begin to publicly outline his plans to go to Mars, with his first order of business being the goal to send a rocket to Mars in 2019.