A Stern Warning of Things to Come
— "The Deep South" opening tagline
- "Space Pilot 3000":
- The line about Stop & Drop Suicide booths being "Americans' favorite suicide booth since 2008" becomes a bit wince-worthy in light of 2008's economic meltdown and the invention of an actual suicide machine in the same year.
- Fry's delighted reaction to realizing that everybody and everything he knew in the 20th century has gone (since he thought they didn't seem to like, care, or even respect him) seems much harsher subsequent episodes such as "The Luck of the Fryrish", "Cold Warriors", and "Game of Tones" have shown that his family actually did love him and were worried about him when he went missing.
- One of the stations in the New New York tubeway system is given as "J.F.K., Jr. Airport". After the real-life John F. Kennedy, Jr. died when his private plane crashed, the line was replaced with "Radio City Mutant Hall" (though the original line can still be heard on the full-episode animatic that appears on Futurama volume one DVD).
- In "The Lesser of Two Evils", the main characters visit a theme park modeled on 2000s New York. There's a brief scene where the stock market drops from about 11,000 to 7,200, similar numbers to the real-life 2008 crash. (Fortunately, it jumps right back up to 11,000, and all the stock brokers who jumped to their apparent deaths float back up into the building via jetpack). Considering that the scene was supposed to be a "distorted history" take on the crash that started the Great Depression, that makes this a sort of bizarre case of life imitating art imitating life.
- In "A Bicyclops Built For Two" the gang explore the internet and Amy is angered to find nude pictures of herself, which Bender admits he created by sticking pictures of her head onto someone else's body (i.e., Leela's). In the late 2010s, the abuse of deepfake technology began to become an increasing issue, including its use to make illicit pornography
of people without their consent. - "The Problem With Popplers" features an Animal Wrongs Group protesting meat consumption, with Leela pointing out that animals eat other animals and then shown a lion who was taught to eat tofu... with the lion in a very, very malnourished state. The 2010s brings us the disturbing trend of vegan pet owners forcing their pets onto vegan diets.
- In "The Honking", Bender transforming into a werecar and almost running over Leela became less hilarious after Katey Sagal, Leela's voice actor, got hit by a car for real. Fortunately, Katey survived the whole ordeal.
- Bender expressing a wish for the death penalty in "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" might just seem like his warped sense of laziness at first, but following "Lethal Inspection", we learn that he thought he was immortal at this point in the show's history; Bender may have legitimately assumed that getting the death penalty would have just been another easy way to avoid work, and only learned the truth when it was too late...
- In "That's Lobstertainment", Joan Rivers' head joked she had her face lifted so many times they finally cut it off her body. It becomes a lot less funny after the real Joan Rivers died during plastic surgery.
- In "Time Keeps on Slippin," There's a scene of a news report that talks about a celebrity named Wendy, who we learn through the timeskip jumps that occur that she won three grammies and then died in her bathtub. this could be an eerie foreshadowing of what happened to Whitney Houston in 2012, as she was found dead in the bathtub at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly hills the day before the Grammy awards that year.
- In "I Dated A Robot" we see a video about how humans dating robots will destroy the world. Then we get "Proposition Infinity" and discover robosexuals are both common and repressed. Bonus awkward for the original tape being a high school health class video approved by The Space Pope.
- In "Bend Her," Bender masquerades as female as a means of dominating the fembots at the Olympics and scoring easy medals. In real life, scenarios like the one presented in the episode are often used to justify barring transgender women from participating in sports and disqualifying their achievements, under the pretense that they are men taking advantage of Political Overcorrectness to score easy wins; this escalated in 2021 when numerous U.S. state legislatures began making these restrictions into formal law. The gender testing that Bender is then forced to go through is also harsher in light of real testosterone testing for athletes, which targets not only trans women but also cisgender women with hyperandrogenism; this trend made it all the way to the real Tokyo 2020 Olympics, when outside commentators attempted to discredit cisgender Namibian runner Christine Mboma's silver medal-winning performance by claiming she was actually a man. note
- In "Into the Wild Green Yonder", white rhinoceroses are shown amongst the animals preserved by the Last Encyclopod alongside extinct species. In 2018, the northern white rhinoceros was declared functionally extinct after the death of the last male.
- "Attack of the Killer App":
- The electronics disposal scene can be somewhat disquieting for actual New Yorkers. In 2015, It became illegal to submit most electronics for curbside garbage disposal in New York State.
- Sal's friend Hoschel remarks that the video of Fry diving into alien goat vomit and diarrhea is "disgusting and inspiring, like Jared from Subway". As of 2015, Jared Fogle has been fired by Subway after he confessed to owning child pornography and having sex with minors.
- Nibbler was assumed to be a non-intelligent animal before his sapience was revealed in "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid". "Parasites Regained" would have Nibbler be in danger of becoming a non-intelligent animal for real due to being infected with worms.
- "Stench and Stenchability" ends with Marianne joking to Zoidberg that she has to dump him, meaning she's taking him with her to the dump rather than breaking up with him. Come "I Know What You Did Next Xmas" and Zoidberg is alone, presumably because Marianne dumped him for real this time.
