Here’s the Oldest Age Mr. Burns Could Be, Based on His Place of Birth
Smithers, who is that prehistoric power plant proprietor?
The characters of The Simpsons have been frozen in time for so long that even the Maggies among them can be considered ageless. The floating timeline of the 35-seasons-and-counting sitcom makes it so that the birthdates of every character are necessarily nebulous, as demonstrated by the ever-changing origin story of the central couple, Marge and Homer. In most cases, the characteristically undefined age of a character is the simple result of the series running decades longer than anyone ever thought an animated series could continue pre-1989. But when it comes to the arch, ambitious antagonist Charles Montgomery Plantagenet Schicklgruber Burns, his ancient age is also one of the show’s oldest-running gags.
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A recent post in the Simpsons subreddit sought to determine the earliest possible birthdate for Springfield’s most senior citizen, and the result turned out to be not only pre-emancipation and pre-industrial, but also pre-continental.
At the beginning of the Season 17 episode “The Seemingly Never-Ending Story,” the title of which could serve as a tagline for The Simpsons itself, an enraged ram chases Lisa into Mr. Burns’ abode where the pair attempt to flee to the panic room. Unable to remember his password (perhaps it was Homer Simpson?), Mr. Burns enters his place of birth as the security question to have his password emailed to him. Mr. Burns enters “Pangea,” which is, of course, the supercontinent from which every modern landmass split apart some 200 million years ago.
By that measure, Mr. Burns predates the Homo sapiens species by at least 199,700,000 years and was alive for the entire Jurassic period, sharing the planet with dinosaurs like the Brachiosaurus and the Apatosaurus, and, of course, the Cretacious period, when the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the world. Mr. Burns also would have witnessed the famous Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction event, and could possibly settle, once and for all, whether an asteroid or a volcano eruption killed off the non-avian dinosaurs.
Considering how unimaginably ancient Mr. Burns is, his many quaint, old-timey sayings like “Ahoy-hoy!” and "Fill it up with petroleum distillate and re-vulcanize my tires!” are positively hip proportional to his age — an aeromail the Prussian consulate in Siam might as well be a TikTok post to this present-day Pangean.
