The Epic Stephen King Novel Strikingly Similar To The Simpsons Movie

Stephen King’s Under the Dome has a terrifying premise that may sound familiar if you’re a fan of The Simpsons. In his novel, which was later adapted into a CBS series of the same name in 2013, an invisible dome suddenly separates the small town of Chester’s Mill, Maine from the rest of civilization, leaving its citizens to their own devices as the government tries to figure out what’s going on. In both the novel and the series, a corrupt selectman named James “Big Jim” Rennie uses the small-town crisis to seize power over his citizens, leading to disastrous results as he hoards precious resources to become a malicious dictator.

Throughout the Stephen King novel and series, a group of teenagers experience seizures while repeating the phrase “the pink stars are falling in line,” hinting that something terrible or out of this world is about to happen.

The Simpsons Movie boasts a similar setup, but takes a completely different approach to the narrative structure found in Stephen King’s Under the Dome. In the movie, a giant glass dome appears over the town of Springfield thanks to President Arnold Schwarzenegger being urged by the EPA to control the town’s rampant pollution problem that resulted in the death of the band Green Day. Not unlike the Stephen King novel, The Simpsons Movie‘s plot leads to mass hysteria as the citizens of Springfield run out of resources and try to escape from beneath the unbreakable enclosure.

While the dome in Stephen King’s work has a mysterious origin, leading to all sorts of different forms of internal conflict, The Simpsons Movie is more straight-forward in its storytelling because the dome is simply a vehicle for Matt Groening and company to riff on jokes.

But still, at the beginning of The Simpsons Movie, Grandpa Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) convulses on the church floor while saying the cryptic line, “People of Springfield, heed this warning … twisted tail, a thousand eyes, trapped forever, whoop, whoop, whoop!” While this exchange isn’t exactly the same as “pink stars are falling in line” found in Stephen King’s novel, you can’t deny the similarity found between both stories that are being told at their respective outsets.

If you dig a little deeper, it’s highly unlikely that Stephen King ripped off The Simpsons Movie because he has been toying with the dome premise since 1972. The earliest iteration was, in fact, entitled Under the Dome, but a second attempt was made in 1982 when King started drafting the unpublished work known as The Cannibals. This rough draft, which was eventually rewritten with the Under the Dome title, would have been a dark comedy in which a group of people were trapped inside of an apartment building and started eating each other after being cut off from society.

In my opinion, it would be career suicide for Stephen King to rip off The Simpsons Movie because the author and the series have both been household names for decades. However, it’s worth noting that Matt Groening and Stephen King are friends, and have occasionally played together in a charitable cover band called The Rock Bottom Remainders. The Rock Bottom Remainders’ lineup boasts a revolving door of well-known authors like Dave Barry, Amy Tan, James McBride, Mitch Albom, and many others.

The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that during a rehearsal or hang-out, King and Groening may have been talking shop, and briefly discussed the “dome” idea. King would then decide to finish what he started with The Cannibals decades prior around the same time The Simpsons Movie was in active development.

While there are striking similarities between both intellectual properties, it doesn’t really matter because they both explore the same kind of premise but with wildly different buildups and resolutions. Sure, Stephen King’s Under the Dome and The Simpsons Movie both involve an invisible dome forming over a small town, but after their initial setups they go in completely different directions. If anything, it’s fascinating to see how one idea can lead to two different stories that are equally epic, memorable, and worth your time.