10 Creepy Theories That Ruin Your Favourite Kids TV Shows
8. The Simpsons Are Trapped Inside A Quantum Event
At twenty-eight seasons - 603 episodes - and counting, The Simpsons is America’s longest running animated series and longest running sitcom. That’s a long time to sustain a frankly wonky internal logic… so they stopped even trying a good two decades ago.
Springfield can’t be pinned down to any one state, or even a set geographical position in the US. Its landmarks include a glacier, a volcano, the Murderhorn mountain, a gorge, a national park and a desert, all of which seem to appear and disappear randomly while other locations like Moe’s Bar, the power plant, etc move from place to place without rhyme or reason.
Then there’s the matter of the passage of time. For three decades, Lisa Simpson has been eight years old: a gifted child with an IQ of 159, she remains an elementary school student. Homer and Marge remember their childhood as taking place in either the seventies or the eighties, depending seemingly on whim.
These are only a few examples of the way in which Springfield’s relationship with time and space is screwier than the magic island on Lost. Who cares if The Simpsons - a cartoon - makes sense? Fandom, obviously - hence the creation of what’s become known as The Simpsons Tesseract Hypothesis by anonymous members of the 4chan imageboard.
It’s a kind of unified field theory that attempts to provide an in-universe explanation as to the show’s many, many cheerfully oblivious inconsistencies and plot holes. The idea is that Springfield is trapped inside a four-dimensional hypercube, known as a tesseract. Spacetime folds around the town, rendering normal physical laws plastic and mutable.
This so-called ‘Springfield Effect’ even extends to its citizens when they step outside of the boundaries of the tesseract - when the Simpsons holiday in Italy, they encounter Bart’s nemesis Sideshow Bob, who emigrated there and now has a toddler son older than Maggie. No one, including Bob, mentions that Bart remains ten years old: and once little Gino sets foot in Springfield, he too stops aging… trapped in a quantum prison for an infinity of eternities.