Hilarious in Hindsight/Film

File:Panam-cropped.jpg

...and by the time 2001 rolled around, they had been out of business for 10 years.

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• Tin Cup. Rory McIlroy, a Real Life golfer who comes out of nowhere to win Opens makes it even funnier to follow the adventures of the fictional Roy McAvoy.
• When Stanley Kubrick made the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he changed a setting: instead of having Discovery head to Saturn and its moon Iapetus, he moved it to Jupiter and its moon Io. He did it because he couldn't create the special effects to make Saturn. Lo and behold, in 1979, the Voyager probes discovered that the next moon out around Jupiter, Europa, is very icy, and later observations have found it likely has a tidally-heated subsurface ocean of liquid water. Not only did it inspire 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but today Europa is considered more likely to harbor extraterrestrial life than Mars!
  • Also: The page image. Pan Am, in 1968, was all but ubiquitous--it was the international airline for the US, and a cultural icon. Pan Am folded in 1991; its nearest rival for "official airline of the United States", TWA, was bought in all but name by American Airlines in 2001. Obviously, Kubrick had no way of knowing any of this in 1968, and so naturally extended current tendencies in the airline world to space...but that doesn't keep the presence of Pan Am spacecraft from being hilarious Zeerust to modern audiences.
• 2010: The Year We Make Contact was made in 1984 and one of the characters is wearing an off the shoulder Flashdance style sweater. Shirts like this actually came back into fashion in 2010.
• The Dead Zone features Martin Sheen as a local politician. At one point, he passionately shouts that he will be the President of the United States one day. He later starred in The West Wing as the President of the United States.
  • On another level, the psychic protagonist predicts he will become a President Evil if allowed to take office, while the President on The West Wing was very much a President Personable.
• In Dead Poets Society, the character Neal Perry is being forced to become a doctor by his father. Neal is played by Robert Sean Leonard aka Dr. James Wilson.
  • Also 4 years after his character is bullied by his father for wanting to be in a Shakespeare play, Robert Sean Leonard would play the lead (well sorta) in Much Ado About Nothing.
  • Extra points for having Neal's father played by Kurtwood Smith, who would later guest star on an episode of House... as a doctor who has a son. (Played by Dave Matthews, in case you wonder)
    • Kurtwood Smith being hard on his son? Nah. Dumbass.
• Death Becomes Her features Meryl Streep as an aging actress desperate to regain her youth. This movie was released in 1992; these days Meryl's career is hotter than ever, despite being in her sixties.
• In Batman Forever, Jim Carrey 's Riddler says "if knowledge is power, then A God Am I!" Several years later, he ends up playing a man endowed with all of God's powers, in Bruce Almighty.
• In Baby's Day Out Joe Pantoliano says 'Hey, Eddie, maybe he went down a rabbit hole.'
• Wag the Dog, about creating a (fictional) war with Albania to cover up a presidential sex scandal, was released less than a month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and subsequent attacks against Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia, which is directly to the north of Albania.
  • And indeed Albania itself imploded not long after the UK release of the film — from one of the most massive Ponzi scams of all time, between Ivar Kreuger and Bernie Madoff.
  • Wag the Dog was shown on Serbian state television on the night Operation Noble Anvil--the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia--began
    • And before the Lewinsky scandal, it was considered to be very timely, because Clinton was being accused of demonizing Osama Bin Laden to distract attention from the Paula Jones scandal.
• Three words: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
  • From Demolition Man:

(Context: Huxley has just told Spartan that she did some research at the "Schwarzenegger Presidential Library") John Spartan: Stop, he was president? Lenina Huxley: Yes! Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment, which states -- John Spartan: I don't want to know.

• • • The list of convicts in Demolition Man also included one Scott Peterson, about a decade before the real-life murder case.
  • From Last Action Hero:

Nick: There's lots worse things than movies. There's politicians and wars and forest fires and... and famine and plague and... sickness, pain, warts, politicians-- Jack Slater: You already mentioned them. Nick: I know I did, they're twice as bad as anything else.

• • Also from Last Action Hero:

Mayor: This is the Lieutenant Governor! Jack Slater: [punches the Lieutenant Governor] When the Governor gets here, call me.

• • The fight scene between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura in the movie version of The Running Man. Tell anyone back then that both men would be elected as US Governors and they would have called you nuts.....heh. Arnold's character even says "I'm not into politics, I'm into survival!". And it gives new meaning to the "running" in the title.
    • Or Predator, or Batman and Robin...
    • Even the T-shirts Minnesotans started wearing after Ventura's election, that claimed "My governor can beat up your governor", became ironically amusing in hindsight when Schwarzenegger won California.
  • This goes all the way back to his second (uncredited) American film appearance. In the 1973 movie adaptation of The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe yells at a cop that he'll go to Ronald Reagan, then-governor. In the very next scene, he walks into a room flanked by two mute strong guys, one of whom would later be the governor. Marlowe, it seems, was really serious about making sure that cop got reported.
• In True Lies, Ahnuld's character, in the name of Obfuscating Stupidity, calls a nuclear warhead a "sno-cone maker". Hang on a minute, this reminds us of a later Ahnold role, in which his character's gimmick is snow, ice and bad puns.
  • In Last Action Hero, after Slater has come to the real world, he commandeers a car by punching through the window first, then lampshades the Soft Glass trope by pointing out that it really hurt. Arnold's next movie was True Lies, and while filming one scene in which he punches out a car window angrily while talking to Tom Arnold's character, he accidentally punched the wrong window... one that was real glass.
• The Femme Fatale of True Lies is Juno Skinner as played by Tia Carrere, an antiquities dealer who has attracted the scorn and ire of archaeologists for profiteering off priceless artifacts of great historical value. Carrere would go on to portray the Adventurer Archaeologist Sydney Fox in the TV show Relic Hunter.
• Tomorrow Never Dies features Elliot Carver discuss starting a Presidential sex scandal — shortly before Bill Clinton's own "Fornigate". Even before any scandals broke Clinton had a reputation as a womanizer, and a sex scandal was assumed to be political death for any sitting president.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original one) shows doctors wondering how Klaatu can heal so marvelously fast, soon coming to the conclusion that his medical science must be far more advanced than theirs. And then they all light up their cigarettes.
• In the 1993 film on AIDS, And the Band Played On, a conference leads to Ken Jenkins asking this question, sure to inspire much inappropriate laughter in those who recognize him as Dr. Kelso on Scrubs:

Dennis Donahue: When the doctors start acting like businessmen, who do the people turn to for doctors?

• Memetic Mutation courtesy of Three Hundred makes any usage of "this is madness!" open to this, because of the impending "This! Is! SPARTA!" comeback.
  • In particular, there's the line "Clearly, Madame, genius has turned to madness" in The Phantom of the Opera (which featured Gerard Butler in the title role). The line is already unintentional hilarity incarnate, but the 300 connection adds a whole new level of hilarity.
• Most incidents of Bald Black Leader Guy, especially ones used in comic settings (for example, Chris Rock's Head of State) have become this after the election of almost-bald black President Barack Obama.
  • Even funnier is that Head of State features a smear campaign against Chris Rock's character, part of which is a newspaper article alleging that "He's Half White!"
  • Or the fact that the movie featured a younger, relatively inexperienced African American vs the older war veteran for the presidency.
• The quick joke in Spaceballs about 'Rocky Five... Thousand' became even funnier when the most recent Rocky came out.
  • As did a sight gag from Airplane! II: The Sequel: a movie poster showing a 90-or-so year old man in boxing trunks and gloves, with the caption "Rocky XXXVIII".
    • Not Rocky-related, but Stallone-related: The Angry Video Game Nerd, in an episode about confusing sequel names, complained about the sixth installment being called Rocky Balboa and went something along the lines of "What are they gonna do next, a Rambo sequel and name it John Rambo"? Needless to say, guess how the next movie in the Rambo franchise was named (in some countries, anyway)...
• Ernest Rides Again, made in 1993, has Ernest making several comedic references to Indiana Jones, including a scene where he unearths "Cleopatra's crystal skull". Then in 2008, we get... Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not Cleopatra's, though.
• The Alpha Bitch in Mean Girls informs her new best friend (Lindsay Lohan) that she dumped her original best friend because she couldn't afford the stigma of being seen to be friends with a lesbian (the friend was not in fact gay). Four years later and with Samantha Ronson in the picture, the line takes on new meaning.
• In Austin Powers, the title character laments his opponent's poor choice of weapon with the words "Who throws a shoe?! Honestly!" Now, remember what happened to president Bush when he was giving an interview to the press...though he did dodge that shoe.
  • This is even funnier, as an Israeli man got thrown into prison for three years after he threw a shoe at Judgess Dorit Beinish. Even funnier when you think about all the hype both cases got...
• Sleeper, a Woody Allen film, is about a man who is unknowingly cryogenically frozen in the 1970s and wakes up 200 years later. He is quizzed by scientists about the mysterious 20th Century. When they show him a picture of Richard Nixon, they say they've theorized that he was president, but that he did something horrible, as he doesn't show up in the history books, on stamps, money, etc. Woody Allen's character quips that the Secret Service had to count the silverware every time Nixon left the White House. While the film was released at the end of 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal (as it related to Nixon), it was written and produced before the scandal broke.
  • Though Nixon was already "Tricky Dick," at least in reputation, by the time he was first elected president.
  • While Allen's character is coming to grips with being asleep 200 years, he realizes "Hey, you know, I bought Polaroid at 7; it must be up millions by now!" ...or not.
• "Son, your ego's writing checks that your body can't cash." That's said to Tom "Maverick" Cruise, in the movie Top Gun, many years before Cruise's ego in Real Life started writing such checks.
• Watching Wonder Boys, which stars Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire, may provoke the slightly juvenile thought of Spider-Man/Iron Man slash.
  • Which is EVEN FUNNIER to anyone who has seen the fake movie previews at the beginning of Tropic Thunder, which advertised an Oscar Bait film starring Downey's character and, you guessed it, Tobey Maguire, as two monks who fall in love.
    • Wolf teamed up Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer (aka The Joker and Catwoman).
    • Christopher Walken and Pfeiffer re-teamed for Hairspray! The Musical as a married man and the woman trying to seduce him away from his wife (John Travolta!)
    • Man on the Moon: Danny DeVito (The Penguin) plays Jim Carrey's (The Riddler) agent.
    • DeVito not only had a co-starring role in Hoffa, which starred Nicholson, but he directed it too.
    • Twins and Junior both teamed up DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Mr. Freeze).
    • And by extension, Heath Ledger starring alongside both Gyllenhaal siblings (Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Brokeback Mountain and The Dark Knight. Jack Twist and Rachel Dawes are killed by the end of their movies... while Ennis and the Joker both survive.
      • Isn't that one Harsher in Hindsight?
    • In Terminator Salvation, we have Christian Bale (Batman) fight a stand-in for Arnold Schwarzenegger (Mr. Freeze).
    • In Real Life, Uma Thurman (Poison Ivy) was married to Gary Oldman (Gordon in The Dark Knight Saga); in Batman and Robin, just as Ivy is about to deliver Gordon a literal kiss of death, she stops and tells him "You're too old for me."
    • In the 2000 remake of Shaft, Pat Hingle, who played Commissioner Gordon in the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher directed Batman films appears in the same movie as Christian Bale, who would go on to play Batman in Christopher Nolan's 2005 reboot.
    • In the short-lived Amalgam universe of Marvel Comics and DC Comics, The Joker and Sabertooth were combined into Hyena. In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Sabertooth was played by Liev Schreiber. What do the two have in common? Naomi Watts.
  • And thinking of Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm now, one can't help but be amused by how the ending plays out. The Vain Sorceress is opposed by the titular brothers, played by Heath Ledger and Matt Damon. You'd think Jason Bourne could stop her, but no; she winds up mind-controlling him in the climax. So the other accidentally figures out how to undo her.
  • And now you've turned Hard Candy into Kitty Pryde vs. Nite-Owl. Sunnuvabitch!
  • The film version of S.W.A.T. had Bullseye and Hawkeye as former partners; and Nick Fury leading the S.W.A.T. team.
    • Don't you mean Hawkeye and Dark Hawkeye?
  • Two years before Daredevil paired real life lovers Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner together as Doomed Lovers Daredevil and Elektra, Pearl Harbor had them share the screen briefly as future husband and friend respectively of Rachel McAdams' character. Speaking of Daredevil, Jon Favreau plays both Daredevil's law partner Foggy Nelson and Tony Stark's driver Happy Hogan.
  • Even more hilarious is when Jon Favreau played the title character Rocky Marciano in the 1999 TV movie. In one scene, Marciano's father tells him "You should feel like Iron Man [1]."
  • A peek at the cast of Small Soldiers? Tommy Lee Jones/Two-Face battles Frank Langella/Skeletor on Mary Jane Watson's/KirstenDunst's doorstep.
  • In the second film version of The Punisher, Frank Castle lives next door to both X-Men's Mystique and Angel.
  • U.S. Marshals, or Iron Man vs. Blade vs. Two-Face.
    • With Daily Bugle Reporter, and holder of Daredevil's secret identity, Ben Urich (Joe Pantoliano) helping Two-Face all the way.
    • Some prefer Sherlock Holmes vs. Simon Phoenix vs. Agent Kay.
  • What of I'm Not There, where Heath Ledger is an actor (and possibly Bob Dylan) who plays Christian Bale (who is Bob Dylan/not Bob Dylan) in a biopic?
  • In Monster's Ball, Billy Bob Thornton has the Joker (Ledger) for a son, and embarks on an affair with an In Name Only Catwoman (Halle Berry)!
  • Gary Oldman played the (apparent) Big Bad of The Fifth Element, and Commissioner Gordon in The Dark Knight Saga. Tom "Tiny" Lister Jr. played the President of Earth, while in Dark Knight he plays a convict. And no, they never share a scene in either one.
    • Oldman playing Jim Gordon is even funnier if you consider his role in Léon: The Professional, but better than that is his role in Harry Potter: "Why so Sirius, commissioner?"
  • Another Batman one! In The Peacemaker, George Clooney (Batman) and Nicole Kidman (Chase Meridian) team up to catch a terrorist.
  • In Paycheck, Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) faces off against Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart).
  • In The Bucket List, The Joker (Jack Nicholson) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) go on a road trip before they died from terminal illnesses.
• The Scottish film Shallow Grave basically culminated in Obi-Wan Kenobi vs The Doctor.
  • Velvet Goldmine: Obi-Wan Kenobi has sex with Batman Begins and Henry VIII. Not at the same time.
  • One Fine Day has George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer fall in love. This time it turns out better.
• In Anthony Minghella's Breaking And Entering, Jude Law and Martin Freeman play best friends. They would both go on to play Watson in different media.
• In Me Myself and Irene, one of Charlie's genius sons says "Man how the hell can they call Pluto a planet? No motherfucking planet has an elliptical orbit. This shit don't make no sense." (All planets have elliptical orbits, just not as markedly elliptical as Pluto's.) Fast forward six years to 2006; after ongoing debates stretching as far back to 1992, Pluto finally got demoted to a dwarf planet.
  • Lexx, among other shows, also played with Pluto's planetary status before the demotion.
• One of Sil's victims in the 1995 movie Species was named John F. Carey. The 2004 Democratic presidential candidate was named John F. Kerry.
• In Spies Like Us, Dan Aykroyd's character responds to a question of his abilities by rattling off a list of things he's skilled in, concluding with "I'm Mr. Hands!"
• In 12 Monkeys Bruce Willis says "All I see are dead people." Four years later we have The Sixth Sense and its famous line. and he's the dead guy being seen!!!
  • Speaking of The Sixth Sense, the film won a Best Screenplay Oscar for its originality and its twist ending. As it turns out, M. Night lifted the entire story, including his twist ending, from "The Tale of The Dream Girl," an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? that aired years before.
• In Clueless, Cher is unimpressed at the celebrity guest at a tree planting event: "Oh how fabulous. Getting Marky Mark to take time from his busy pants-dropping schedule to plant trees." Since the film came out in 1995 Mark Wahlberg has become an Oscar-nominated movie star (involving actual pants-dropping in Boogie Nights) and Alicia Silverstone has gone from nothing, to being the next big thing, to being semi-forgotten. Essentially, she has gone through a whole career arc while the supposedly washed-up Wahlberg is bigger than ever (no pun intended).
  • Well, she was right about Mark's music career, which wound up ending shortly after the film's release (and he later disowned his whole music career) his successful acting career was something that absolutely NOBODY saw coming-if you told anyone back then that "Marky Mark" would be an Oscar nominated actor, they'd probably laugh themselves into a coma.
  • Speaking of Marky Mark and plants, there's also The Happening, where Wahlberg plays a professor in a world where all plant life is trying to murder people with neurotoxins.
• U.S. Marshals, where Wesley Snipes is wrongfully accused, becomes slightly silly now that Snipes has been convicted of numerous crimes.
  • Really most of his movies outside maybe the Blade series falls under this, since he's usually typecast as a cop or other authority figure.
• Three years after A New Hope debuts in theaters, flybys reveal this closeup of Mimas, one of the Moons of Saturn.
  • That's No Moon, that's a... oh, wait, no. You were right, it's a moon. Sorry.
  • "These blast points, too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise." Fair or not, Popcultural Osmosis has given the stormtroopers the opposite reputation, making it difficult to take Obi-Wan's declaration seriously.
    • It should be noted that precision and accuracy are entirely different things. Someone who shoots arrows consistently to the same spot to the left of the target is precise, but not accurate.
• Rick Moranis' voice as Dark Helmet in Spaceballs got even funnier with the release of the Star Wars original trilogy on DVD and the set's documentary Empire of Dreams, where it's revealed that the voice of David Prowse, the man in the Darth Vader suit, was remarkably similar.
• Hamlet II was actually predated by this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.
  • Which in turn is predated by Last Action Hero doing a gag trailer.
• In RoboCop, Murphy drives a modified 1986 Ford Taurus, while the villains steal the notoriously fuel-inefficient "6000 SUX", an obvious Brand X Expy of the Pontiac 6000, made by GM. In 2009, guess which brand went bankrupt, and which one didn't?
• Jurassic Park: "That's not very scary. More like a six foot turkey!" Years later, fossil evidence confirmed that Velociraptor had feathers, and people complained that it was no longer scary because it looked like, well, a turkey. Its image is not helped by the fact that it was actually somewhat smaller than portrayed in the films; in fact, it was about the size of a turkey.
  • And several more years later, this happened. Now if only the kid had said "chicken" instead of "turkey"...
• In Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta's character, Tony, stops having sex with Annette because she doesn't have a diaphragm and he doesn't want to get her pregnant. (She might have wanted him to get her pregnant.) At the beginning of Look Who's Talking Too, Travolta's character, James, has sex with Mollie while she's wearing her diaphragm. She gets pregnant anyway.
  • Actually, many dancing scenes of the movie may count, as they would seem ridiculous to many people now.
• Surf Ninjas was about two princes growing up as surfers. Prince William, second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, is a surfer. That and the binoculars and eyepatch gag are probably the two truly funny things from that movie.
• In Barbra Streisand's classic starring roles in Hello, Dolly! and Funny Girl, the overbearing narcissism of her characters is played for laughs. While it's true that Streisand was developing her reputation even then, it's only gotten progressively funnier...
  • From Hello, Dolly!:

Dolly: I have always been a woman who arranges things Like furniture and daffodils and lives.

• The 1990 film Crazy People had the premise of someone in advertising being sent to a mental institution because they accidentally let print a set of really "honest" ads, such as saying Volvo's are "boxy, but they're good". Amusingly, most of the ads shown in the film are similar to the tongue-in-cheek advertising around today.
• In his 1976 review of the movie Cannonball, Roger Ebert glibly remarked that "there seems to be some sort of insatiable desire among moviegoers this summer to see high-speed car chases and flaming wreckage. The only things more popular on the nation's screens are the Good Ol' Movies (extensively discussed here in recent weeks) and films of demonic possession. If we can get Burt Reynolds into a Trans-Am with the devil in the back seat, we've got a winner on our hands." One year later, the Burt-Reynolds-in-a-Trans-Am movie Smokey and the Bandit became the second-highest-grossing film of 1977, after Star Wars. If director Hal Needham had thought to incorporate Satan into the movie, maybe it would've been #1. Indeed, the same studio (Universal) also made The Car — about a demonic coupe — in '77, but that flopped!
  • In his review of Jurassic Park, he ponders how special effects advances have altered storytelling in films: "I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made Close Encounters [of the Third Kind] today, we would have seen the aliens in the first 10 minutes, and by the halfway mark they'd be attacking Manhattan with death rays." Three years later, Independence Day might not have shown us the aliens themselves that early on, but it wasn't far off the mark as far as substituting effects for substance goes.
  • Then, some 10 years later, we have Spielberg's The War of the Worlds remake (though aliens still show up quite late).
• Star Trek the Motion Picture features a space probe that was turned into an intelligent life form. That probe was originally Voyager 6. Nevermind that NASA only ever planned for and launched two Voyager probes...
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a very funny movie, but it's about twice as funny now that we know George Takei is gay. Boy, Sulu sure does love San Francisco, doesn't he?
  • Except for the fact Takei was born there, and that was used as part of Sulu's Backstory in the first place.
  • Made even better when interviewed in 2006 as to when he first met his partner Brad Altman, the time he said was "about 20 years ago", around the time that Star Trek IV was being made.
  • There are a lot of moments like this in Star Trek the Original Series now. For instance, the crew goes down to a planet that brings dreams to life. For Kirk, beautiful women appear. For Sulu, a handsome samurai.
    • There was one scene in "The Naked Time" ep where Sulu, under the effects of polywater, asks the male navigator to go to the gym with him in order to teach him "fencing"...
    • Star Trek Generations contains a scene where the other crew members are surprised to learn that Sulu has a daughter.
      • Well, Kirk is surprised, Scotty doesn't seem to be and Chekov clearly knows. It might have been more of a jab at William Shatner, who has admitted the rest of the OS cast may have had a point about him being completely self-absorbed--Kirk is so oblivious to his crew having moved on he doesn't know Sulu has a daughter old enough to be an officer on Enterprise-B.
    • There is also that scene in Star Trek III the Search For Spock, when they're busting McCoy out of the jail. Sulu is holding a (male) guard up against a wall, and seems just a LITTLE too close and low. Oh, and he seemed to be thrusting a bit, and if one pauses and REALLY looks for it, Sulu's eyes seem to be staring at the guard's crotch.
      • "Don't call me 'Tiny'"......
      • In that same scene from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, a phaser packing Uhura demands the transporter beam operator to "get in the closet"!
  • On a slightly different note, Sulu's canon interest in "botany" is kind of hilarious now that he's being portrayed by Harold and Kumar. I think we all know what he's really growing back there...
• This wiki's page for Translation Train Wreck links to a set of poorly translated subtitles for "The Two Towers." Many are very funny on their own, but this one is especially hilarious now.
• One of the characters in Return Of The Killer Tomatoes is trying to con women into dating him via a phoney competition offering a date with a movie star. The character is played by future movie star George Clooney.
  • Similarly, one of the other actors in that film, Rick Rockwell, would later become the titular rich man in the reality show Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire? — which, as it turned out, was as much of a scam as what Clooney's character tries in the film.
• Deliberately played in Good Night and Good Luck, which used stock footage of a '50s interview with Liberace where he's asked why he remains a bachelor despite being handsome, famous and wealthy. We now know he wasn't just waiting for the right woman.
• Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville revolved around the campaign of an unseen third-party presidential candidate who had unexpectedly become a serious contender. Throughout the movie he can be heard giving speeches in a thick Southern accent, criticizing the Washington elite. In 1992 a third-party candidate from the South unexpectedly became a serious contender in the presidential race.
• At the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Bud and Lou, having survived Dracula (played by the original screen Dracula, Bela Lugosi), The Wolf Man (played by Lon Chaney, jr, the one and only Wolf Man), and the Frankenstein Monster (played by Glenn Strange, who'd played the Monster in two previous films, after Boris Karloff passed on the project), run into the Invisible Man in the film's closing gag, who is unmistakably voiced by horror film star Vincent Price. But at the time this film was made Price was not known as a horror film star (although he did play the title role in The Invisible Man Returns in 1940). It would not be for another five years before Price did his first real horror movie (House of Wax in 1953), and not for another ten years that he began doing them regularly (with Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations beginning in 1958). Today, that closing gag with Abbott & Costello is both a hilarious and touching passing of the torch from one generation of horror film stars to the next.
• In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), Will Ferrell plays Marshal Willenholly, whose name is a reference to the three main characters in the TV series Land of the Lost. Flash forward to 2009, where it's announced that a movie remake of Land of the Lost is in production — starring Will Ferrell as Rick Marshall.
  • Although the name of the character in JASBSB was because Smith and Ferrell were both Lot L fans, not surprising that Ferrell would end up in the re-make.
• In the rockumentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot a metalhead chick talks about how she would "jump his bones", referring to Judas Priest singer Rob Halford. This was before Halford came out of the closet.
  • Around the time Priest started to break in the U.S., Cheryl Rixon (who had a memorable part in Used Cars) was Penthouse "Pet of the Month", and mentioned them as a favorite band. Not long after, she and Halford were a couple, and promotional material was issued of the two together. Whether they were truly linked or it was just an act, the band's management certainly wasted little time taking advantage.
• Arsenic and Old Lace opens with a scene of a major league baseball game being played on Halloween, something that would have been ludicrous in 1944 but which has already happened since (and could eventually become a regular occurrence, as the sport's playoffs and World Series get pushed back ever further into the fall).
  • Hmm...it seems to have been a regular occurrence and occasionally stretching into November for the last 10 years or so.
  • By the 1970's, it had become customary to play the World Series in October, which is how Reggie Jackson got his sobriquet "Mr. October".
• Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) has, as a subplot, evil foreigners from the future changing history and creating King Ghidorah to prevent Japan from economically taking over the world. At around the time the movie came out, the Japanese economy collapsed; almost twenty years later, it has yet to completely recover.
  • Another fun one : when the Futurians go back on a tropical island in 1945, the day before a dinosaur which would later become Godzilla destroyed an american platoon, their arrival is witnessed by two soldiers. The officer, mistaking them for aliens, say to the private next to him, called Spielberg, that it would make something to tell to his son. This is an obvious Shout-Out to Steven Spielberg, who directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET the Extraterrestrial. Then you realize that, two years later, Steven Spielberg would direct a movie about dinosaurs wrecking havoc on a tropical island. He really must have liked his father's wacky wartime stories !
• The Naked Gun series featured O.J. Simpson as an accident-prone detective named Nordberg. While this may count as a Funny Aneurysm Moment for some, seeing O.J. being fed through the wringers in the movies can be strangely cathartic.
  • An even better O.J. example: Simpson was once considered for the role of the Terminator, but the director changed his mind, on the basis that he wouldn't be convincing enough as a determined killer. Though this might be more Funny Aneurysm Moment, depending on one's interpretation...
    • Probably still holds true, the key word being "determined": Ax Crazy yes, but "determined" requires a certain amount of mental focus that Simpson has yet to exhibit.
• Overlaps with Totally Radical in The Wizard; "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad." Those of a certain age who remember that in circa-1990 youth slang, bad meant good will understand the intended meaning...
  • It's even more hilarious now that the Wii has come out and been everything the Power Glove is not.
• In Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler is making fun of golfers wearing plaid shorts, remarking "if I were wearing stuff like that, I'd have to kick my OWN ass." Fast forward to 2009, where a close approximation of that look can be seen adorning 20-something hipsters and included in LL Cool J's clothing line.
• In Altered States, in a scene at an airport, the "background noise" voice at the scene's start (56:45) announces "Paging Daniel Craig..."
• According to The X-Files The Movie, one of the Government Conspiracy's most powerful weapons is FEMA. After the New Orleans debacle...um...no.
  • Now that the latest laughable Conspiracy Theory involves FEMA-run prison camps, it's even funnier.
  • The video game Deus Ex also made use of FEMA in this manner, claiming it had the power to 'suspend the Constitution in case of an emergency' thus allowing the conspiracy to take over.
• The two major Complete Monster villains of the neorealism classic Open City are named Major Bergman and Ingrid. The film's director Roberto Rosselini later married actress Ingrid Bergman. Did she know about this?
• In Walk Hard, there's a scene where Dewey Cox's song of the same name (which is a spoof of Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line", to go with the early portions of the film spoofing the Cash biopic Walk The Line) gets sampled in a hit rap song in a very clumsy, incongruous way. A couple of years later, Snoop Dogg would do a remix of "I Walk The Line" itself, which amounted to a Snoop Dogg song with very awkwardly incorporated Johnny Cash samples.
• Watching Ferris Buellers Day Off knowing that Jeffrey Jones, the actor who plays Ed Rooney, is a sex offender who took pictures of a 14-year-old boy makes that movie simultaneously more disturbing and more hilarious.
• In the 1982 action movie The Soldier, a war game is mentioned involving a simulated attack on Iraqi oil fields by US troops, which predicts that the Iraqis would kick the ass of the attacking US forces. The movie was made after the failed attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages, when faith in US military strength was at an all time low.
  • It was also made before much of the modern US arsenal that went to war in 1991 came into service or was present in significant numbers. Betting that a large, prepared force could take conventional US forces in a ground war at the time was a decent bet.
    • It was also before the Iran-Iraq war had ground the Iraqi military into a bloody pulp. Certainly the US military of 1991 would have been likely to prevail against the Iraqi military at its peak, but the cost in American lives would have been exponentially higher.
• More of an in-film thing, but one of Zoe Saldana's early roles was as a TSA agent in The Terminal. Who happened to be a die-hard Trekkie. Five years later, she lands the role of Lt. Uhura.
• In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks' characters are the spares paired. They would later play the leads of Zack and Miri Make a Porno.
• In the new Get Smart movie, Alan Arkin's character scolds an agent by saying "We don't go stapling things to people's heads! That's CIA stuff!" Considering the allegations and memos that came to light a little less than a year after the movie came out, that's a whole lot funnier now.
• The two Major League movies certainly qualify. In them, the crappy Cleveland Indians went from worst to first. Not long after the second one came out, the Indians had gone from perennial doormats to perennial contenders.
  • More to the point, in the first Major League movie, the bitchy owner of the Indians plots to put together a team that's so bad, that she could justify moving them to Miami (which didn't have a Major League Baseball team in real life in 1989). Eight years after Major League was released, the real life Cleveland Indians lost the World Series in seven games to the Florida Marlins.
  • In Major League 2, cash strapped owner Roger Dorn covers the outfield wall in advertisements to try to squeeze every last penny he could out of his team. It was only a couple years later when all Major League Stadiums had advertisements all over the walls. Some even more obtrusive than even Roger Dorn could ever have imagined. Coincidence? Or did the movie give the real life owners the idea? Up until that point, only the NHL had ads around their playing area, having started the practice in the late 80s.
• The 2009 Star Trek film has a particularly awesome one with Kirk's dad getting his doom on after investigating a lightning storm in space. Flash forward a few weeks and guess who's been cast as Thor? We found this hee-larious on the second viewing.
  • In the Doom movie Karl Urban playing a marine said the line "They're Marines, Sam, not poets." which almost sounds like a I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder. Later in 2009's Star Trek movie he played Dr. McCoy.
  • In the British TV show Spaced, Simon Pegg's character remarks that every odd numbered Star Trek movie is "shit." In 2009, Simon Pegg appears in an odd-numbered Star Trek movie. He lampshaded this in an interview after taking the role.

Simon Pegg: Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass.

• Pick any scene with Kristen Stewart in Zathura. It's about a zillion times funnier after Twilight. Especially when she sniffs her hair, and when she says that the astronaut obviously feels very protective of her.
• And now that we are talking about Twilight: In the Japanese dub of the movie, Takahiro Sakurai voiced the vampire hero Edward Cullen. This is even funnier if you already know that Sakurai voiced in the Japanese version of Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin for Nintendo DS the main hero Jonathan Morris, a vampire hunter.
  • How about Cedric Diggory's ghost sparkling in the movie of Harry Potter?
• From The Singing Cowboy (1936):

Gene Autry: It's the same old story. The broadcasting companies say there's not enough color in the cowboy orchestra to appeal to the audience any more. Smiley Burnette (sidekick): Well, if it's color they want, we can all put on red shirts.

• In Harsh Times, Christian Bale snaps when learning his LAPD job offer was refused, snapping at a driver next to him. Since the incident when Bale snapped at a Director of Photography, that incident has become funnier than first intended.
  • Likewise, any scene on the movie where the rant was recorded (Salvation) where Bale yells at someone turns somewhat funny.
  • Really, this works for any time he ever yells in a movie. The Machinist is full of examples.
• In Gold Diggers of 1933 (guess what year it came out), a Broadway producer is trying to talk a talented amateur composer into starring in a show with his (the composer's) girlfriend, a chorus girl. The producer tells the composer, "You could be a famous song-and-dance team, like the Astaires," referring to the popular brother-and-sister act of Fred and Adele Astaire. In that same scene is another chorus girl the producer keeps noticeably snubbing. This chorus girl is played by Ginger Rogers who, by the end of 1933, will become part of an even more famous song-and-dance team...with Fred Astaire.
• Hey, isn't that Leslie Nielsen captaining the S.S. Poseidon?
  • In fact, most of Leslie Nielsen's pre-Airplane! film roles would qualify under this trope. Behold Project Kill, where he plays a rogue, drug-addicted CIA assassin. At the climax, he has a martial arts battle with 2001: A Space Odyssey's Gary Lockwood.
  • The whole point of casting people like Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, etc. in Airplane was to give them a chance to send up their earlier performances in "straight" disaster films.
  • A better example would probably be his role as Ted Danson's killer (because Ted Danson was a lot like Sam Malone and slept with Nielsen's wife) in Creepshow because Creepshow came out well after Airplane! and just a few months after Police Squad! It was Nielsen's last serious role in a well known movie. The only one after his comedy career began.
  • Try going through the original Prom Night without riffing "don't call me Shirley" during Nielsen's scenes. Just try it.
• The '90s X-Men animated series had a significant amount of Ho Yay elements between Magneto and Professor X, particularly in the series finale — well before they cast Sir Ian McKellen (who is openly gay) as Magneto. Also, Patrick Stewart, who played Xavier, once played a gay man in the film Jeffrey.
  • And now James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender have notably embraced the Ho Yay in X-Men First Class.
• The werewolf almost killing one of the kids in the direct-to-tv adaptation of Stephen King's IT is not as scary when you realize said kid is played by Seth Green...famous for playing a werewolf years later. And Seth joins up with other kids to stop the horrible monster.
  • Yeah, and you know who one of the other kids was? Brigitte from Ginger Snaps!
• In Girl, Interrupted, Winona Ryder's opening monologue is ...

Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the '60s. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.

• • ... which becomes rather funny after Ryder shoplifted US$5,500 of stuff on December 12, 2001.
• In Stand by Me, Wil Wheaton stars as Gordie LaChance. A year later, Star Trek the Next Generation premieres with Wheaton as Wesley Crusher, and features a character named Geordi LaForge.
• Watch Equilibrium, then watch Warriors of Virtue and you'll wonder whether Angus MacFadyen finally decided to take some Prozium, but accidentally took Ecstasy instead.
• The plot of the 2nd Spider-Man movie can be summed up by the preexisting Memetic Mutation "How Do I Shot Web?".
  • On the subject of Spider-Man, in the first movie, when the Green Goblin is trying to trick Spidey into letting his guard down at the climax of the film, he said, and I quote, "Believe in me, as I have believed in you." Not exactly the same as in the linked series, but it was hilarious.
• The Biblical account of the story details that Moses had a stutter and God told him to take his brother Aaron to speak to Pharaoh. Well, in the The Prince of Egypt, Aaron is placed in a minor role and is voiced by Jeff Goldblum, famed for his stutter.
• Batman: The Movie: The Joker putting explosives in someone's stomach, I'm sure we'll never see that happen again.
  • Batman's line about how "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb" brings to mind all the fuss surrounding another campy Batman film.
• In Undercover Brother (2002), Lance (Neil Patrick Harris) has his Berserk Button pressed when a guard calls him a sissy, leading him to say "I am not a SISSY!" In November 2006, Neil Patrick Harris publicly came out as gay. For those not in the know, "sissy" was originally a slur against gay people.
• Zavulon in Night Watch was seen playing a video game with his cellphone. Whatever he did with his phone, his in-game character did with his sword. Looked cool back in 2004. Then came the Wii...
• The poster for Final Destination: "NO ACCIDENTS. NO COINCIDENCES. NO ESCAPES. FINAL DESTINATION."
• The 1946 drama Dragonwyck has Vincent Price as the sinister Nicholas Van Ryn. At one point he sardonically asks the heroine if she expected to find in his room velvet drapes, pagan idols, and altars to human sacrifice. The movies he appeared in afterwards tended to have elements like those in them regularly. It was like Price had looked into his future...
• In The Movie of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Doctor Gonzo (Benicio del Toro) says, "Even a fucking werewolf deserves legal counsel."
• 50 First Dates: "Red Sox Win World Series. Just Kidding." Guess what happened the next season...
  • Also, Drew Barrymore was later in Fever Pitch, which ends in a scene of her celebrating the Red Sox winning the World Series.
• Mako, who was in the movie Sidekicks, said "And then, the Turtles will dance." Mako would later go on to voice Splinter in the 2007 TMNT movie. This can also be turned into Funny Aneurysm Moment, as Splinter was Mako's last role before he died.
• In Galaxy Quest, Fred's first comment about the alien ship is, "It's so clean!" This becomes hilarious once you realize that Fred is played by Tony Shaloub, who went on to play the title character (who has OCD) on Monk.
  • His comment: "The door, did you see that? It was kind of sticky. I'll get some of my guys down here with some WD-40 later."
  • There's also how its shown how the Show Within a Show Star Trek parody achieves its Screen Shake with a hydraulically shifted set--a method which would later be used for the production of an actual Star Trek film.
  • That's not too surprising: On the commentary the director states that "we all agree that our favorite Star Trek film was Galaxy Quest." (ouch!)
• The Engulf and Devour logo from Mel Brooks' Silent Movie has a disturbing resemblance to the infamous Goatse image. The movie was made a good twenty years or more before the site was started.
• Romulus, My Father stars Eric Bana (as Romulus). Few years later, Mr Bana is cast in the 2009 Star Trek film as Nero, A ROMULAN, LIKE FROM ROMULUS.
  • In the 2009 Star Trek picture, Eric Bana plays a time-traveling man who misses his now-dead wife. Not long after, Bana starred in The Time-Traveler's Wife.
    • Technically he did the latter film before Star Trek. The reason Star Trek was released first was because they needed to re-shoot a scene, and Bana had to shave his head to play Nero, so they needed to wait for his hair to grow back.
• The Flash Gordon film, from 1980, has a scene where Brian Blessed shouts out the phrase "Who wants to live forever?!" in the middle of a rousing soundtrack by Queen.
• This real-life scandal involves a Mrs. Robinson having an affair with a 19-year-old boy. And yes, they're aware of the irony.
• In the Riff Trax commentary for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Bill Corbett made a joke about Indy being suspect for communist ties. Guess what happened one year later when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released.
  • Similarly, in the Rifftrax for Avatar, Bill jokingly compares Pandora and Home Tree to Disney's Animal Kingdom. Disney and Cameron later announced the addition of a Pandora-themed land to that very park.
• In Shakespeare in Love, producer Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush) becomes increasingly confused as Shakespeare's comedy Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter becomes the tragedy Romeo and Juliet over the course of the movie (without anyone telling Henslowe). His shouts of "Where are the pirates?!" are even funnier now. Bloody pirates.
• The entire scene in Scanners where one of the titular psychics is hooked up to a computer. "Nobody's ever shut down a scanner before."
• Everyone knows that James Cameron had been writing Avatar since he finished Titanic. The hero's name is Jake Sully. Did you think he counted on another hero named "Sully" rising to prominence shortly before his film finally premiered?
  • Or, indeed, another blue CGI hero called Sully...
  • Jack says "I see you" to Rose early on in their relationship.
• Lucy Liu played O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, an assassin who is incredibly talented in kung fu and is codenamed "Cottonmouth" after the snake. "Cottonmouth" is translated into Chinese as Hundred-Step-Snake or Bai-Bu-She, which is the term used for "viper". Four years later, that becomes the name of the character she voices in Kung Fu Panda.
• One of the most remembered aspects of Spy Kids 3D was Elijah Wood's appearance as "The Guy", the Ultimate Gamer 386 of the video game who ends up getting killed less than a minute after he appears. Everyone say it with me: GAME OVER — PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN.
• In Frank Miller's version of The Spirit, Officer Morgenstern is frequently told that she will "make detective in no time." Morgenstern was played by Stana Katic, who would later go on to play Detective Kate Beckett in Castle.
• In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr.'s character cautions against "going full-retard": playing a mentally challenged character who doesn't have special abilities because of it, and so turns off the Oscar voters you're trying to win over (he was nominated for an Oscar for his role). Robert Downey Jr.'s next film was The Soloist, which featured his character befriending a man with mental problems played by Jamie Foxx (he wasn't nominated for an Oscar despite portraying a Real Life mentally challenged yet ridiculously gifted person).
  • While we are on the subject of Tropic Thunder, there are some people in France who should have paid more attention to it. Less than two years after it was released they hired the very white Gerad Depardieu to play the lead role in a biopic on Alexandre Dumas (whose grandfather was African, and who, when he was alive, was known as Le Negre) in makeup and a curly wig. Outrage ensued.
  • Also in Tropic Thunder Downey Jr. plays a character who seems to be a parody of Heath Ledger. The following year he was nominated for an Oscar and lost. Guess who won.
• The 1992 A Stranger Among Us has a scene where Melanie Griffith's character sees the male lead, a Hasidic Jew and Kabbala student, listening to headphones and asks "Madonna?".
• Almost anyone who's seen the original version of The Blob after about 1990 will find some humor in the film's final line, "We're safe as long as the Arctic stays cold."
• In Ocean's Thirteen, the fictional owner of the Bellagio declares that he hates another casino owner, whose own hotel is called The Bank. In real life, the Bellagio has a nightclub called The Bank.
• It's hard not to laugh at a line in Red Eye when Lisa asks Jackson Rippner if he's a psychiatrist if that's exactly what Cillian Murphy played in the first movie you ever saw him in. Granted, he was already fairly recognizable as Jim from 28 Days Later for some people before he was Scarecrow, but considering most of the teenagers/early twenty-somethings that make up Cillian Murphy's fangirls were too young to see that one in theaters when it came out and Scarecrow was their first exposure to Murphy, it's still funny to them.
• The Naked Gun 2 1/2 was released in 1991, just after it was discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror was flawed and it was taking fuzzy pictures. In the movie, a picture of the Hubble appears on a "Wall of Failures" next to the Titanic. Yeah, no so much anymore...
  • That depends on how you look at it. Considering it took a new mission at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to fix it, one could still call it a disaster.
• It is rather hard to think of Remember Me without laughing if one recalls the meme Metroid: Other M spawned with those two words.
• In Fritz the Cat a character trying (in vain) to seem racially aware hilariously remarked "Why does a great actor like James Earl Jones always have to play black characters?" Five years later Star Wars: A New Hope hit theaters, with James Earl Jones portraying the the presumed, and eventually confirmed White guy Darth Vader.
• Wes Craven's Cursed 2005 features a werewolf named Jake.
• The President's Analyst, from 1967, has the title character (James Coburn) excitedly talking about his first session with his girlfriend: "You'd think he'd spend all his time worrying about China, or Russia? ...hasn't slept in eight nights worrying about Libya!"
• You are now playing THE GAME.
• In Casino Royale 1967, it was mentioned that the Secret Service keeps installing new instances of James Bond 007 ever so often since the original James Bond 007 (David Niven) quit by renaming and renumbering other agents. Two years later, Sean Connery was replaced as James Bond 007 by George Lazenby (before he returned for another movie). Even later came Roger Moore, yet another return of Connery, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and you might also want to include Daniel Craig on the list.
• In The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock plays a woman who adopts a very underprivileged black boy in The Deep South. In Real Life, Sandra adopted a black (infant) boy from New Orleans. Made less hilarious now that she's divorcing her husband.
• In Love Actually, Hugh Grant, the actor known for his boyish face, plays the British Prime Minister. Several years later, David Cameron is PM, with the help of Nick Clegg.
• In Role Models, upon seeing Augy (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in his LAIRE cape for the first time, Ronnie remarks, "What are you supposed to be, a superhero or something?" Mintz-Plasse would go on to play a super in Kick Ass.
• In Lethal Weapon 4, a rabbi presided over Mel Gibson and Rene Russo's characters' "spur of the moment" wedding just as Russo is about to give birth. The idea of a rabbi aiding Mel Gibson of any kind is hilarious now knowing about Gibson's Real Life anti-Semitic feelings.
• In another Mel Gibson example, he voices the dashing John Smith in Pocahontas who reconciles two warring races and falls in love with a woman of a different ethnicity — and doesn't blast racial slurs at her. Also, Christian Bale is mild, meek young soldier who doesn't seem like he would hurl verbal abuse at the Virginia Company's photographer. The Nostalgia Chick gleefully points this out.
• In yet another Mel Gibson example his gangster film "Payback" was marketed with the tagline "No More Mr Nice Guy"
• In 1992, Nicolas Cage stars in Honeymoon in Vegas, a sily Romantic Comedy with one iconic scene: Cage skydiving with the Flying Elvises to save his marriage, and then re-marrying with them in the audience. Ten years later, he actually married Elvis' daughter.
  • Face Off, the movie in which he and John Travolta exchange identities thanks to plastic surgery, becomes freaking hilarious once you read about more than a century old photos of two dudes who look JUST like them.
• While we're talking about Elvis, there's the 2004 movie Elvis Has Left The Building, with the opening stating "at this rate, in 2012 one person out of four will be an Elvis impersonator". And now here we are. Um, yeah, Elvis impersonator are all over the place.
• One scene in Independence Day involves a kid with a King Ghidorah toy. The makers of the movie would later attempt Godzilla.
• The main character in the original Troll film is named Harry Potter Jr.
• Tim Matheson appeared in Judas as Pontius Pilate. And he's wearing a toga...
• In the original 1941 film The Wolf Man, Sir Talbot (Claude Rains) makes an offhand remark about destiny and the werewolf legend. Lon Chaney's character, recalling something the old gypsy woman told him earlier, replies in all sincerity, "That's What She Said."
• The 1999 Christian film The Omega Code contains a couple of instances within the first 10 minutes:
  • First, Dr. Gillen Lane (the main protagonist) arrives on a talk show to hawk a book on the supposed Bible code. He makes his entrance doing a "raise the roof" gesture and jumps over the couch. Just fast-forward to 2005 and Tom Cruise infamously jumping on a couch during an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
  • Later he breaks from the interview to get the crowd to briefly chant "change". Sound familiar?
• A 1991 draft of the script for the Super Mario Bros. movie had Mario accidentally hatching a baby dinosaur, named Mario Jr., who mistakes Mario for his mother. A couple of months later, the Super Mario World episode "Mama Luigi", in which Luigi finds a baby Yoshi who mistakes him for his mother, aired. This is perhaps made even funnier by the fact that "Mama Luigi" is now an Internet meme.
• A classic example in the Cary Grant movie Only Angels Have Wings. One of the characters says "I hate to pull a boner on you" (it's supposed to mean "I hate to burst your bubble").
• In the musical-cum-film 1776, "New York abstains — courteously." The state budget, in the year 2010, was several months overdue, just like every other year.

John Hancock: Mr. Morris... WHAT THE HELL GOES ON IN NEW YORK? Lewis Morris: I'm sorry Mr. President, but the simple fact is that our legislature has never sent us explicit instructions on anything! John Hancock: Never? That's impossible! Lewis Morris: Mr. President, have you ever been present at a meeting of the New York legislature?

• • This may not actually qualify, as the New York Legislature has been incredibly dysfunctional since Day One, and The Seventies (when the script was written), by all accounts, were no exception.
• In Mallrats, Stan Lee has a scene where he's advising Brody to get back together with his girlfriend, doing so by saying there was this one girl who got away from him when he was younger and his success as a comic writer has done little to ease the pain of losing her. There's something funny about the guy who created Spider-Man saying, "I'd give it all up, just for One More Day with her."
• Nicolas Cage co-starred with the original Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel, in the National Treasure films. Cage would go on to play the Lieutenant himself in The Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans.
• Mel Gibson's character in Signs has issues swearing to scare off invaders. Pretty funny the first time around, becomes absolutely hysterical after his widely publicized, coarsely worded behavior.
• The film The Kid Stays In the Picture features the anti-drug "Get High on Yourself" show, which Evans hilariously labels "the Woodstock of the 80's", resembling a cheap "We Are the World" vanilla hamfest. Even funnier (or sadder), one of the actresses singing this anti-drug message is Dana Plato.
• In In Like Flint (1967), an evil organization replaces the president with a look-alike, leading Derek Flint (James Coburn) to say in disbelief, "An actor ... as president?!"(Possibly deliberate, and not especially prescient--Governor Reagan was a serious contender in1968.)
• In Die Hard With a Vengeance, Samuel L. Jackson plays someone who is suspicious of White people on the whole, and it's played for laughs. Over a decade later, in Lakeview Terrace, Jackson plays a cop who is just plain racist and is really upset that his new neighbours are a mixed Caucasian and African-American couple.
• Also related to the third Die Hard film is when Jeremy Irons' character, the villainous Simon Gruber, exclaims "I love this country!" in reference to America. Several years earlier, Jeremy sung the part of Henry Higgins in a concert of My Fair Lady, where he claims "in America they haven't used it (the proper English language) for years".
• In Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, they riff on the movie This Island Earth. During a scene where Brack communicates via interocitor, Tom sings a fictional theme song that goes, "It's the Brack show, starring me — and Brack! It's the Brack show, and I've got lots of good guests..." Four years later, The Brak Show would come into existence (which was preceded by two specials, both entitled Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak, the second of which was a variety show that — indeed — had guests).
• The Disney movie Smart House had a computer system in the house that wanted to become a mother to the children of the widowed owner. She had programmed herself to be the perfect mother, loving, caring, wanting to do what she thought was best for her 'children'. When she finally showed up in holographic form, she was played by Katey Sagal, who played Peggy Bundy, one of the laziest, uncaring, selfish mothers ever to show up on TV.
  • This is funnier when you realize there actually was a Married With Children episode in which Peg becomes a competent housewife (albeit it was because she suffered from amnesia and Al brainwashes her).
  • Space Cases had a similar gag, with Katey Sagal providing the voice of "Ma", a space entity who reduces everyone who comes into contact with her to a childlike mental state and then spoils them rotten.
• In Disney's Cinderella, one of the heroine's evil stepsisters is named "Anastasia". Fast-forward about fifty years, and Anastasia becomes something of an evil stepsister to the Disney canon princesses, considering she was Don Bluth's answer to them, and Don Bluth used to work for Disney before leaving and establishing himself as a competitor.
  • Even better, both Anastasias are/eventually become Red Headed Heroines with love interests with humble backgrounds. And both men are named Dimitri.
• Anna Paquin rose to fame as Rogue in the X-Men film series. Rogue is unable to have prolonged physical contact with anyone as she sucks out their life-force like a vampire. In True Blood, she deals with actual vampires, and it seems that all her character ever does is have prolonged physical contact.
• Towards the end of Help by The Beatles, while at an airport, the Beatles dress up in disguise to avoid the myriad of people chasing them. In what was meant to look comically ridiculous, John Lennon puts on a long beard and granny glasses, the same image that would later define him. In a less iconic image, Ringo's ridiculous disguise is the same exact style of beard he's been sporting since The Beatles Anthology.
• In Nine it's revealed that the "stitchpunk dolls" are actually homunculi based on different aspects of their creator's personality. Now where have I heard that before?
• The Farelly Brothers comedy Stuck On You, starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as a pair on conjoined twins, becomes even funnier after Green Zone, where Damon plays a soldier who is pitted against Kinnear's unethical bureaucrat.
• Johnny Depp's first movie role was in A Nightmare on Elm Street, but he didn't first intend to audition for the movie. He went to the auditions to support a friend who was auditioning, and Wes Craven liked Depp so much, he asked him to read. So Depp got cast and the friend wasn't. Guess who's playing Freddy Kreuger 26 years later in the remake? Depp's friend, Jackie Earle Haley.
  • Except Jackie Earle Haley himself has said the "auditioning with Johnny Depp" thing isn't true and has no idea how that rumor got started.
• In Runaway Bride, Ike says " You want a man who will lead you down the beach with his hand over your eyes just so you can discover the feel of the sand under your feet." to Maggie, Julia Roberts' character. Fast forward 11 years to Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love and what happens? Her character is led down to a beach with him covering her eyes.
• When Nick and his boss talk to a shady CIA guy in Law Abiding Citizen to find out more about Clyde's CIA past, they're told a story of someone the Company wanted to kill, but couldn't seem to take out with airstrikes or anything else. So they talked to Clyde, and he rigged up a self-winding garrote hidden in the target's necktie (he had a thing for nice ties). In 2010, narcoterrorist Mono Jojoy was killed when Columbian intelligence implanted a tracker in his custom boots after intercepting his order online, and bombed his camp to bits.
• In The Muppet Movie, Kermit and Fozzie pick up Gonzo and Camilla. Gonzo states that he's always wanted to move to Bombay, India, to become a movie star. Fozzie retorts "You don't go to Bombay to become a movie star. You go where we're going: Hollywood!". Thirty years later, when the Bollywood film industry is outputting more movies than Hollywood is, Gonzo doesn't look so crazy.
  • Bollywood was well-known as a global movie capital even then, so Gonzo really wasn't all that prophetic.
  • Speaking of The Muppets, in The Muppets Take Manhattan, Rizzo the Rat and friends are working at a Greasy Spoon, decades before Ratatouille. For more fun, that was a Disney movie, and Disney now owns the Muppets.
• In Die Another Day, Toby Stephens plays the big bad Bond villain Gustav Graves. Several years later, he ends up providing the voice of James Bond himself in a BBC radio adaptation of Ian Fleming's Bond novel Goldfinger.
• Rambo III features "noble" Afghan freedom fighters helping Rambo fight off Russian enemies, which is obviously an allegory for America funding the early Taliban lead by Osama Bin Laden to better fight off Russia's communist ventures in the Middle East. Stallone even dedicated the movie to Bin Laden's cause at the end of the movie, naturally since 9/11 it is no wonder why the third Rambo movie is never aired in America.
  • Similarly, James Bond fights alongside heroic Afghan mujaheddin in The Living Daylights.
• "Comedy = tragedy plus time": When Ashley Judd's character rents an apartment in Someone Like You, she's told it has a great view of the Twin Towers.
• Chloe Moretz biting someone in the neck in Kick-Ass becomes hilarious now that she play the vampire gal in Let Me In.
• In Zombieland, Jesse Eisenberg's character mentions that the best thing about the zombie apocalypse is that there are "no Facebook status updates." The year after the film was released, Eisenberg played the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network.
  • Between The Social Network and Continuity Reboot Spider-Man, Eduardo Saverin/Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) created an internet sensation with Colombus and hooked up with Wichita.
• In 1982's The Thing, Keith David's Dr. Childs claimed he "didn't believe [in] voodoo bullshit". Come 2009, he's turned to conjuring voodoo bullshit.
• At the end of The Hunt for Red October, Sam Neill's character lies dying and says he would have liked to have seen Montana. Come Jurassic Park, he is granted his wish — the first scene with Neill's character is of him at a dinosaur excavation site in Montana.
• In The Living Daylights, Art Malik plays a Mujahideen warrior who helps out James Bond. Several years later in True Lies, he plays a Middle-Eastern extremist about to detonate a nuke on United States soil. The sad/funny part (depending on your point of view) is that his character in True Lies could have in effect been the same one as in The Living Daylights, as the Mujahideen was the genesis of al-Qaeda.
• Arnold Vosloo played Darkman in the two sequels that followed the original starring Liam Neeson. Darkman was a master of disguise, and later Vosloo would play another famous master of disguise, Zartan in G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra.
  • Vosloo played the title villain in The Mummy Trilogy. Both Darkman and mummies are traditionally wrapped in bandages.
• In Lean on Me, Morgan Freeman's character Joe Clark holds a baseball bat in his hand and proclaims "They used to call me Crazy Joe. Well now they can call me Batman!" Freeman would go on to play Batman's gadget guy and technical advisor, Lucius Fox, in The Dark Knight Saga.
• In Steven Spielberg's Hook, Robin Williams plays a lawyer who is very irate about not being able to proceed with a land development deal because endangered owls are nesting there. He asks "does anyone miss the Tyrannosaurus Rex?" Spielberg's next film Jurassic Park was indeed about people who missed the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the consequences of bringing it and other dinosaurs back from extinction. Jurassic Park even included a line where they talked about using the technology to create whole flocks of endangered condors.
  • Not only that, but the T-Rex's only human victim in that film was... a lawyer.
• In Coming to America, Eddie Murphy's character asks his boss if he saw the New York Giants defeat the Green Bay Packers with a last second field goal on tv the previous night. This ended up being the exact finish to the 2007-08 NFC Championship game played 20 years after the film's release. It's also a Funny Aneurysm Moment if you're a Green Bay fan.
  • When King Jaffe Joffer, played by James Earl Jones, arrives in New York City, he's seen wearing a lion skin over his suit. Jones would go on to star as Mufasa in The Lion King, and Madge Sinclair, who plays Queen Aoleon, would again play Jones' queen, Sarabi.
• In Spawn, Martin Sheen plays the evil and corrupt CIA Director Jason Wynn. It has just been announced that Sheen has been cast in another comic book film: the new Spider-Man reboot as...Uncle Ben, quite possibly the nicest and kindest comic book character ever.
• Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman starred as rival ballerinas in the psychological thriller Black Swan. Come 2011, No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, both about a couple trying to keep their relationship strictly physical without love getting in the way (and destined to be Dueling Movies), will hit screens. The former stars Portman and the latter Kunis.
  • Even better, No Strings Attached pairs Natalie Portman with Ashton Kutcher, who was Mila Kunis' onscreen boyfriend in That 70s Show.
  • Another Black Swan example, but this one doesn't deal with the Mila-Natalie "rivalry." In the movie, the director asks Nina's (Portman) partner (IRL ballet dancer and the film's choreographer Benjamin Millepied, Portman's boyfriend of about a year when the movie came out) if he would fuck her. The partner laughs and says no. On December 27, 2010, three and a half weeks after Black Swan was released, Portman's representatives revealed she was pregnant by and engaged to Millepied.
• The scene from Back to The Future II where Marty shows two future kids how to play Wild Gunman, and they deride it because "you have to use your hands". This is funnier given some fanboys' reaction to motion-control systems like the Wii, the Kinect, and the Play Station Move.
  • Oh, there's more. By 2015, Statler Toyota has become Statler Pontiac. Guess which brand GM announced it was cutting in 2009?
  • In 2015, Marty notices the Cubs winning the series against Miami [depicted an alligator mascot].
  • Lea Thompson has this line in Back To The Future Part III: "Sure'n I hope you're considerin' the future, Mr. Eastwood". 22 years later, she has a cameo in J. Edgar.
• The PSA, The Finishing Line, is in the same vein as Apaches with informing kids that playing in dangerous locations, like in this case, train tracks, is not a good idea. The way they present it though, is that it's an Imagine Spot from a kid, showing children, or better yet, students, killing each other for entertainment value. Sound Familiar?
  • In fact, a review for this even lampshades it by having the title card for the review have the same logo as Battle Royale except for FL replacing BR.
• Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill did an interview promoting The Empire Strikes Back on the morning show Today back in 1980. At the end of the interview, the host asks if they know which one of them will end up with Princess Leia. Hamill says that they want to keep as many surprises as possible, otherwise it would be like "your sister telling you what you're getting for Christmas". It's not clear if Hamill knew that Luke and Leia were twin siblings at that point, but it's very funny to watch that today nonetheless.
• In No Holds Barred, the climax features Hulk Hogan's character fighting in a six-sided ring similar to what would be used by TNA over a decade later... that is until Hogan became part owner of TNA and promptly eschewed the six-sided ring in favor of the standard four-sided variety.
• In The a Team, Murdock does a parody of Braveheart. As it happens, Mel Gibson's planned cameo in The Hangover 2 has been cancelled, and he has been replaced by none other than Hannibal himself, Liam Neeson. Bonus points as Bradley Cooper stars in both films.
• In the first Shrek movie, after Fiona realizes Shrek is an ogre, he remarks "You were expecting maybe Prince Charming?" We learn in the second movie that she really was expecting Prince Charming, and her not being rescued by said Prince Charming drives part of the plot.
  • And a part in the second movie when a poster of "Sir Justin" is seen in Fiona's room who looks like Justin Timberlake. Timberlake played the role of Arthur in the third movie.
• In the musical Miss Saigon, Jonathan Pryce played the Engineer, a sleazy bar-owner who sings a number called "The American Dream" about all the things he would do once he makes in big in America. In G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra, Pryce played the American President, which is probably the ultimate American dream, fulfilled.
• The movie, Scrooged, had the main character talking to his boss who wanted to have a show that appeals to the pet demographic. Cross repeated dumbfounded about "A show surrounding animals." Now we have a network surrounding animals.
• It's a well-known fact that Snake Plissken from Escape from New York and Escape From L.A. was the main inspiration for Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid (and Metal Gear before that). One of Solid Snake's more notorious traits is his tendency to lapse into Parrot Exposition during conversations. Which makes the following exchange from Escape from New York a whole lot funnier:

Hauk: You go in, find the President and bring him out in 24 hours, and you're a free man. Snake: 24 hours, huh?

• The end of Mars Attacks had the president's daughter being played by Natalie Portman inheriting the role since the US's government was destroyed. A few years later, she ended up playing a queen who was voted into office.
• For Doctor Who and/or Axis Powers Hetalia fans, try watching John Barrowman's performance on The Producers (the 2005 version) and not think of either Captain Jack Harkness or Prussia. As seen here.
  • Actually, at first glance it looks like Prussia, the uniform is dead on, but Germany is more realistic. Look at that hair.
• In the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down, a US military officer says that "This isn't Iraq. It's a bit more complicated."
• Twice in Forrest Gump, Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinese) says something to Forrest (Tom Hanks) regarding the space program. The first is when he insults Forrest's plans by saying "The day you become a shrimp boat captain is the day I become an astronaut!" At the end of the movie, he tells Forrest that his prosthetic legs are made of the same stuff used in the space shuttle. A year later, Hanks and Sinese co-starred as astronauts in Apollo 13, with Sinese playing a character who would fly on the Space Shuttle.
  • Also a Shout-Out to the fact that in the novel Forrest did become an astronaut.
  • One could also argue that Forrest's remark how "He [Lt. Dan] got me invested in some kinda fruit company" is even more hilarious today.
• In Hocus Pocus, Sarah Jessica Parker plays a witch who was hung in Salem, Massachusetts. In 2010, Sarah Jessica Parker found out that an ancestor of hers was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. (Said ancestor was freed after the trials were ordered to end.)
  • Also, when Max rescues Dani from certain death by the Sanderson Sisters, he says, "I know one kind of power that you don't have!" (or something like that), and Winnie asks, "And what is that, dude?" before he replies with, "It's Daylight Savings Time," followed by the turned-on car lights pretending to be the sun that harms them. Considering that it was a joke back in 1993 (when DST ended on the last Sunday of October in the U.S.), the new U.S. Daylight Saving Time rules weren't around until 14 years later, when DST now ends on the first Sunday of November from 2007 onward. The joke now still works only if Halloween happens to fall on the day before the first Sunday of November (i.e., Saturday, October 31).
• In The Blues Brothers, the brothers' agent tells them they really ought to quit playing blues music, because it's a Dead Horse Genre. They should really get into disco. That's where it's at!
• In The Matrix, Morpheus takes Neo out of the Matrix by covering him in a mercury-like substance (due to the reality-warping abilities of the hackers). Laurence Fishburne, in a different role, would later do the same thing in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
• In The Dark Knight Rises, Josh Pence will play young Ra's Al Ghul. Pence was the stand-in and one half of the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network — and the other half, Armie Hammer, was previously cast as Batman in the now-cancelled Justice League feature film.
  • Also in the film, Anne Hathaway plays Catwoman. According to the Chinese Zodiac, Hathaway was born in the year of the dog.
• From the 1990 Clint Eastwood directed/Produced White Hunter, Black Heart: (The clip was actually used in full for the montage that was made for his "Lifetime Achiements Awards")

John Wilson (As John Huston expy): Oh Bill! I'll die broke in a downtown Los Angeles flop house; And I won't be bitter! I'll have contributed maybe five-ten damn good pictures. They'll name a Special Academy Award after me. And you know something? All the wrong Guys will get it. And I will be in Hell laughing my ass off!

• In Water for Elephants, Robert Pattinson plays a character named "Jacob". This also happens to be the name of the romantic rival to Pattinson's character in a popular film series, also based on books.
• In Big, Josh pitches the idea of an "interactive comic book", which was what amounts to an e-reader that used cartridges. The e-reader itself would cost $5 and each cartridge would cost $15. The idea is shot down for obvious reasons. Due to the rise of digital comics and real, self contained e-readers, this is probably even funnier now than it was back in 1988.
  • Tom Hanks' character works at a toy company, and years later, would star in another movie involving toys.
  • While looking through the classifieds, Josh's friend Billy is annoyed at Josh's insistence at looking at the MacMillan toy company's ad, because it asks for computer skills, saying "would you quit with your stupid computers?!". Thanks to Technology Marches On, computer skills are very helpful to have in the job market.
• The actor who'll be playing General Zod in the next Superman movie plays a Straight Gay character named "Petie" in Cecil B. Demented, and in the climax, we actually see a guy, well...
• Dracula: Prince of Darkness: The visiting English couple are named Charles and Diana.
• The 1975 film Hearts of the West has Jeff Bridges' character (an aspiring writer of Westerns) suggest that a character with a whip would make an interesting hero, however no one shows any interest in the idea. Six years later, Raiders of the Lost Ark came out.
• In the 90's, Rainbow Studios were working on a project, with this trailer, blaring White Zombie's "More Human Than Human" and parodying Pixar film, as the only existing evidence of the soon-to-be-cancelled project. More than a decade later, the reveal trailer for Pixar's film Planes comes out, playing the exact same song.
• In the 1992 Eddie Murphy film The Distinguished Gentleman, Murphy plays a con man who gets elected to Congress. In his victory speech, he says "We campaigned on the issue. The issue is change. Change for the future!".
  • This is not exactly a shocking prediction. Obama certainly was not the first politician to run on the platform of "change." He was not even the 276th one to do so. Plus, Woody Boyd on Cheers also runs on the platform of Change, though he mis-words it by saying if elected he will make change, leading Frasier to point out that that would mean giving 4 quarters for a dollar bill to a customer who wanted to play pool.
    • It's HIH because it's an African-American politician doing so.
• Ellen DeGeneres starred in a movie called Mr Wrong in 1996. The following year, she indirectly declared the title redundant from her perspective.
• The 1954 Bing Crosby film White Christmas has a line about it being "impossible to find a Democrat in Vermont. Back in the 40's-late 50's, Vermont was very Republican, to the point where it was one of the only states FDR never took in his 4 presidential elections. 60 years later, it's the only state George W. Bush never visited as president, probably out of fear for his life.
• Big Fan is about a die-hard football fan who gets beat up by his favorite player, Quantrell "QB" Bishop, after hassling him at a strip club. Around eight months after it was released, Tennessee Titans QB Vince Young got into a fight under nearly identical circumstances.
• An Empire Magazine article from 2006 on the film that would become Avatar (then named Project 880) included descriptions of seven major characters (from a casting notice that had been leaked online). The magazine included casting suggestions for each of them, and were dead on in predicting Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy.
• In X-Men First Class, when Hank is outed as a mutant in the 60s, he bluntly states, "You didn't ask, so I didn't tell." The funny bit is that when the screenplay was written, the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy was still in effect. As of June 2011, however...
  • Also from X-Men First Class: Michael Fassbender who played Azazeal on Hex fought and then joined a mutant team that included the demonic Azazel.
• In the 1967 movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Dr. Prentice, a black man engaged to be married to a white woman after meeting her in Hawaii, is asked by the father of his fiancee if he has "given any thought to the problems [his] children are going to have". In the ensuing conversation, he mentions that his wife thinks all their children will grow up to be President, but that he thought it was "optimistic" and would settle for Secretary of State. Six years before the movie came out, in Hawaii, a future president was born of a black father and a white mother.
• In Bruges has Ralph Fiennes shooting at Brendan Gleeson. Voldemort kills Mad-Eye Moody off-screen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part1.
• Bill Paxton has a habit of dying at the hands of aliens in sequels. If only he could keep his mouth shut.
• In the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace the bad guys deal in suitcases full of Euros rather than Dollars, stating that the "Dollar isn't what it was" (a reference to the US's financial woes) and suggesting that the Euro is now the stable, reliable universal currency. And yet, only a few years after the film came out...
  • YMMV since in terms of the actual value and exchange rate, the Euro did in fact remain stable, especially in comparison to the dollar, which saw large drops in value due to quantitative easing.
• Charlie Sheen's old movie The Chase has a throwaway line where Sheen's character remarks, "Yeah, the public will adore me. Maybe I'll get my own sitcom."
  • From another angle, the overhyped media coverage of the high-speed chase is how most high-profile real-life chases are covered by the media today. As an added bonus, the film came out just three months before O.J. Simpson's famous white Bronco chase.
• Taken. Liam Neeson is a retired black ops superninja-type chap whose daughter is taken from him. He proceeds to hand the city of Paris (and a few gangsters) their collective asshole in the course of getting her back. Now, then. In Batman Begins, Liam Neeson plays Ra's al-Ghul, a ninja master who is apparently killed at the end of the film, who canonically has a daughter named Talia, and one of whose lines in the Batman film includes:

Ra's al-Ghul: I once had a wife...my great love. She was...taken from me. I learned there are men who must be fought without pity, without any hesitation whatsoever.

• The movie Alaska features a poacher is played by Charlton Heston. He would go on to become president of the NRA from 1998 to 2003.
• In Time Bandits, David Warner's character rants about how he would've made the universe if God hadn't beaten him to the proverbial punch. Said rant includes a couple sentences which are quite hilarious in light of both Tron and the advancements in computers over the 30 years since the film's release in 1981:

Evil: It's a good question. Why have I let the Supreme Being keep me here in the Foretress of Ultimate Darkness? ... Look, SHUT UP, I'm speaking rhetorically. I let him keep me here in order to lull him into a false sense of security. When I have the Map, I will be free, and the world will be different, because I have understanding...of digital watches. And soon I shall have understanding of videocassette recorders and car telephones. And when I have understanding of them, I shall have understanding of computers. And when I have understanding of computers, I shall be the Supreme Being! God isn't interested in technology. He knows nothing of the potential of the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time! Forty-three species of parrot! Nipples for men! Slugs!! He created slugs. They can't hear! They can't speak! They can't operate machinery! I mean, are we not in the hands of a lunatic? If I were creating a world, I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, day one!

• Pineapple Express features a scene when Amber Heard's character gets upset about being called a lesbian. Years later, she's with a girl but still doesn't like being called a lesbian.
• In one scene in Disney's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Jessica Rabbit tells Eddie Valiant, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." Imagine that after 23 years, one defense lawyer said the same thing about Amanda Knox when comparing her with Jessica during the appeals trial in that she was no Femme Fatale. Amazingly, it was the same "Jessica Rabbit" defense that got Knox and her co-defendant cleared of murder.
• In the Eddie Murphy remake of The Nutty Professor, Professor Sherman Klump adopts a reassuring motto from weight-loss guru Lance Perkins: "Yes, I can!".
• The third act of John Waters' Serial Mom deals with the media hoopla surrounding the title character's trial. The film came out a full year before the O.J. Simpson trial.
• Canadian Bacon gives us:

Secretary of State: We were thinking, what could be a bigger threat than aliens invading from space? General Panzer: Ooh boy! Scare the shit out of everyone. Even me, sir! U.S. President: Jesus, is this the best you could come up with? What about, ya know, international terrorism? General Panzer: Well, sir, we're not going to re-open missile factories just to fight some creeps running around in exploding rental cars, are we, sir?

• In one scene of the classic Japanese 1957 film The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty, one perpetrator takes off a woman's clothing, all the while he says, "I feel... good..." and "I'm h-a-p-p-y!" and the woman shouts out, "It hurts, it hurts!!", right before he kills her! Seriously, how could you watch this scene and not be reminded of Giygas?
  • It did inspire Giygas.
• The scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Henry Sr., played by Sean Connery, subdues a Nazi soldier by spraying his face with ink from his pen, leading Marcus to say "The Pen Is Mightier than the sword!", is funnier in light of the Saturday Night Live "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketch where Sean Connery misreads "The Pen Is Mightier" as "The Penis Mightier".
• At the end of Goldeneye an American military man says to Bond and the lead female, "Maybe you two would like to finish debriefing each other at Guantanamo?" She playfully resists, to which Bond replies, "Darling, what could possibly go wrong?" (the original joke is in reference to how every vehicle Bond sets foot in explodes)
• Many movies from the 70s or before that have a scene from the future of the 21st Century depict people still using typewriters.
• In the 1991 film Homicide, Joe Mantegna's character moans about how the FBI are bunch of incompetent morons.
• While obviously meant to be a satire of news media, Billy Wilder's 1974 remake of The Front Page becomes a lot funnier when you remember that just seven years after the film's release, Carol Burnett sued the National Enquirer for libel, making quotes like this one all the more ironic:

Earl Williams: You don't have to answer this, Mollie, but is it true what they said in the papers? Mollie Malloy: Is what true? Earl Williams: That you were going to marry me on the gallows. Mollie Malloy: Well, if it's in the papers, it must be true. They wouldn't print a lie.

• In Labyrinth, Sarah mistakenly calls Hoggle "Hogwart".
• Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window was released in 1954, and featured the character of Stella questioning how the suspected murderer, Thorwald, would've killed his wife. "Of course, the bathtub! It's the only place he could've washed the blood!" Six years later, Hitchcock released his most famous film: Psycho, which is famous for the shower scene.
• The opening scene of New York I Love You features Phil and Doug getting into the same taxi.
• This one could be either hilarious or Harsher in Hindsight, in 'The Kid' Spencer Breslin utters the line "Let me get this straight, I grow up to be a loser!". Now that Spencer is grown up, no one's heard from him in a while and his career has been eclipsed by his little sister's.
• The Hunger Games has often been compared to Battle Royale. The Battle Royale movie was filmed in an island that was formerly a coal mine. District 12, where Katniss and Peeta come from in The Hunger Games, is a coal-mining district.
• In Singles, Matt Dillon's rock singer character gets a review that says he sucks, but his backing band is pretty good. His backing band? The members of soon-to-be-famous Pearl Jam, playing themselves.
• Near the end of Revenge of the Sith, C-3PO remarks as he pilots Padme's ship "that [he] may be getting the hang of this flying." It's a reference to A New Hope, when Threepio said "Oh my, I've forgotten how much I hate space travel!". But then, Disney's Star Tours ride was revamped, and look who now pilots your Starspeeder 1000?
• In the forgotten skiing film Aspen Extreme, one of the main characters mentions that the Detroit Red Wings never win and aren't worth watching. Four years later, the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup and began their (still going) era of being one of the NHL's more dominating teams.
• In Dark Shadows, Eva Green plays The Vamp to Johnny Depp's Barnabas Collins, an actual vampire. Eva Green's real-life father is a dentist. In another film, Johnny Depp's character had a dentist for a father. In fact, he actually cameos in Dark Shadows too.
• In Spaceballs, Bill Pullman plays a parody of Harrison Ford's character in Star Wars, Han Solo. Eventually, both end up playing President Actions, in Independence Day and Air Force One, at about the same time too.
• Amy Adams played a cannibal in an episode of Smallville. In the film reboot The Man of Steel, she's playing Lois Lane. Wow.
• In The Flintstones, Halle Berry plays a character named Sharon Stone. In Catwoman, she stars as the titular character opposite...Sharon Stone as the villainess.
• In Meet the Robinsons, at the science fair, Wilbur knocks over a box of frogs and their owner makes him pick it up. He isn't pleased and calls their owner "an annoying little girl" and she warns him that she knows karate. It becomes hilarious when you realize that the little girl was a young Fanny in the past. Wilbur was calling his own Mom an annoying little girl and yes, she does know karate.
• Nestor Carbonell played "Batmanuel" in the live-action The Tick TV series. Later, he would play the mayor of Gotham City in The Dark Knight Saga.
• Documentary production company Prometheus Entertainment (established in 1999) is behind the series Ancient Aliens and also a behind-the-scenes documentary about the Alien films. Now, the Alien prequel is named...Prometheus.
• Keanu Reeves spends most of Johnny Mnemonic running around in a suit, playing a character named "John Smith". In The Matrix, his character's nemesis is a computer program in the guise of a guy in a suit, named "Agent Smith".