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 | Please don't list this on a work's page as a trope.
Examples can go on the work's YMMV tab. | |
aka: Un Funny Aneurysm Moment
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That's the Tokyo Tower... yeah. is a serious event or plotline where a later event (in the story or real life) comes up and only serves to amplify the effects of the already bitter-tasting effect. It can lead to episodes or issues being pulled or held from re-running if it's perceived as Too Soon.
This leads to a rather heart-wrenching moment and makes some people feel uneasy about it when they view the event in the original work.
Compare "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, Too Soon, Cerebus Retcon (elements that were originally comedic are later deconstructed and played as tragic).
Note that if the event in question is something inevitable, such as people dying, that's not necessarily this trope. Everyone dies eventually, as far as we know. It would be this trope if the death had some link to how they appeared on screen.
Contrast Hilarious in Hindsight, Heartwarming In Hindsight.
CONTAINS SPOILERS.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- The 70s Super Robot Genre anime Zambot 3 had the Big Bad making people into "human bombs", and detonating them - one even exploded on an airliner and caused it to crash. Accidental Nightmare Fuel even back then, even moreso now with suicide bombings in the news.
- Lupin III had a similar plotline, about Arab terrorists developing a pill that turned people into unwilling living bombs.
- When Naruto first defeated Neji in the chuunin exam, he convinced him that he isn't bound by fate, just as Naruto is able to defeat him even though he is a failure, while Neji is born with a pedigree that makes him strong. Later we learn that Naruto's father was the Fourth Hokage (arguably the most powerful Hokage to live), and his mother came from a clan that was related to the first two Hokages, making his pedigree even better than Neji's, and meaning that if fate existed, it was fated for Neji to be defeated by Naruto. What makes this worse is that Naruto is The Chosen One of a prophecy, destined to either save the world or destroy it. No matter which way you spin it, Neji turned out to be right in the end.
- In Neon Genesis Evangelion, when the Japanese government and private corporations create the Jet Alone project, a nuclear powered mecha, as an alternative to the EVA series, NERV hacks the robot's computer system causing a near meltdown and putting an end to the project. This is already harsh enough, when the news breaks that a virus by the name of "Stuxnets" has, apparently successfully, stalled the enrichment of uranium in Iran by sabotaging many pieces of hardware and software critical to the process. In other words, the first known cyberattack to the critical infrastructure of a country, thus raising the chilling prospect that it is now technologically feasible to hack a nuclear power plant and perhaps trigger its reactors to meltdown.
- Hikari's crush on Toji becomes much harsher after Unit-01 destroys Bardiel. Cue Hikari making lunch for herself, her two sisters, and Toji. Also, Ritsuko's mother, constantly. Gets worse in The End Of Evangelion.
- The scene in the Fullmetal Alchemist anime where King Bradley (a.k.a. Pride) kills his son gets a sense of irony in the manga when the kid's revealed to be a homuculus himself, namely Pride (Bradley's Wrath in the manga).
- There was another line where Mustang tells Hughes that the soldiers who won't shut up about their girls back home always die. Surprise, he was right, just years later, in a death that involved both the girl he was talking about, and was shot to death, where directly after making this comment, Mustang makes a gun motion at him.
- Shou Tucker's transmutation on Nina to make a talking chimera. One has the nasty feeling that someone out their did a better job. guess what?
- Cowboy Bebop episode "Wild Horses" has an old old Space Shuttle being brought out for one last mission. The shuttle? Columbia. Cartoon Network actually pulled this one off the air for a while after the disaster.
- Similarly, the episode "Cowboy Funk" was pulled off the air after the events of September 11th, due to the episode involving the bombing of tall buildings.
- Other anime episodes not aired by networks for being too close in subject matter would include an episode of Pokémon in which a skyscraper is destroyed by a giant Tentacruel. I'm not sure that 'close enough to not be aired' counts as 'in any way actually similar'.
- Similarly, the episode "Tower of Terror" was banned in North America for almost two years after September 11th, and the episode "A Scare in the Air" was renamed "Spirits in the Sky".
- Ironically, that didn't stop the scene of Tentacruel smashing a tower from being in the show's opening for the rest of the Indigo League season.
- The Team Rocket vs. Team Plasma two-parters were delayed because of the earthquake in Japan. The special contained such scenes as a Paul-lookalike Plasma Grunt and a Liepard blowing up a building, and James blowing up the city.
- Two almost immediate examples from Transformers Armada:
- The episode "Palace" begins with Demolishor buried in a desert, taking sniper shots at the Autobots as they struggle to find him. The episode aired during the time of the Beltway sniper attacks.
- The later episode "Tactician" begins with a news report of a space shuttle nearly colliding with something in space, which somehow appeared to be an exact duplicate (it turns out to be Jetfire). Two days after the episode aired, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated.
- In-universe example: In Hellsing, there's a scene during which Enrico Maxwell, the head of Iscariot, is being chewed out by Integra Hellsing for allowing her men to be killed by Alexander Anderson. He responds by saying, "Two men? If we killed two million of your worthless Protestant scum I would not have shed a single tear." It becomes a whole lot scarier in hindsight when that's exactly what he does. The killing people, not shedding tears.
- Also Jan Valentine said that he planned to kill Integra and violate her corpse afterwards. Later, we find out that thugs did the same thing to Seras's mom.
- Natsuki Takaya is the queen of this trope with Fruits Basket and Hoshi wa Utau. Yuki takes the cake with: "There was something I wanted, something I envisioned, loving parents, a happy home with everyone smiling at me. A home that no one would ever want to leave, a warm place, a warm person. It exists, I know it does." When we first meet him it's beginning to become true, but later in the manga, it becomes clear how he became SO desperate for it.
- And another one for the WTC September 11th attacks: with another 70s Combining Mecha show, Voltes V. Part of the first episode shows a series of stills showing the invading aliens' armada laying waste on the world's military forces and key cities, and among them was a certain pair of twin towers. What's more disturbing is that this image was flashed right after the montage of the Liberty getting blown up.
- In Paprika, Detective Konakawa is tormented in his dreams by the cry of "what about the rest of it?" in regards to a film he started with a friend in school that was left incomplete after he walked away from the project and the friend dies. Satoshi Kon, director of Paprika, died in August 2010 with his next movie incomplete.
- In the first episode of Future GPX Cyber Formula ZERO, Hayato and Randoll nearly got killed in the British Grand Prix when their cars collided, Hayato's car went off the track banking and crashed to the ground. Then came the Formula One San Marino Grand Prix a month later, in which 2 separate accidents resulted in the deaths of Roland Ratzenberger and 3-time champion Ayrton Senna.
- In Macross Frontier: The False Songstress, Alto and Sheryl fall of a cliff with their Segways, but they managed to survive. Less than a year later, Jimi Heselden, the company owner of Segway died in an accident falling off a cliff...while riding his Segway.
- In Durarara!!, Celty describes Shizuo's level of strength to a reporter by saying, "You know how, no matter how good a martial artist is, you can just shoot him and it's all over? Shizuo's the gun." The pithy line seems to take on a much darker meaning in a later arc when Horada nearly kills Shizuo doing exactly that.
- Way back around Volume 7 of Mahou Sensei Negima!, Negi reveals his past: how, when he was four, he tried several times to get himself into danger so his Disappeared Dad would show up and rescue him. One night, a horde of demons attacked his village, turning many people to stone and slaughtering the rest. With only Negi and his cousin Nekane alive, his dad Nagi did show up and fight off the demons. Ever since, Negi felt that the entire thing was his fault, and that it was some divine punishment for his earlier actions. Asuna calls him an idiot and says that it couldn't possibly been his fault; one four-year-old cannot inadvertantly catch the attention of a demon horde. And then, late in the Magic World Arc, we find out that the demon attack was specifically an assassination attempt on Negi's life, made by the Megalomesembrian Senate because Negi was the son of two of the Senate's most powerful enemies. So, in short, the massacre was Negi's fault; they came there and butchered everyone specifically to try to kill him.
- In The Prince of Tennis, Ryoma oversleeps and arrives late to a match, and when asked he says "I was helping a pregnant woman to the hospital." Later in the story Oishi makes the same excuse, but he was actually telling the truth...and since he caught the soon-to-be-mom when she fell down a flight of stairs, he got a serious injury in his arm.
- Remember Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, the anime which describes a fictional scenario where Tokyo is almost completely destroyed by an earthquake, magnitude 8.0? Well, on March 11, 2011, nature decided to lob Japan with a quake that was 9.0 on the Richter scale.
- This is probably the most egregious example, but there are a lot of anime & manga which in some way involve a major earthquake/tsunami devastating Japan. The 9.0 earthquake is to manga what 9/11 is to western comics.
- Ditto for Coppelion, which the background story involves Tokyo being destroyed by a nuclear reactor explosion, caused by earthquake destroying its cooling system. It's almost as bad as it can get.
- The plot of Kanojo o Mamoru 51 no Houhou deals with the survivors of a sudden massive earthquake.
- Most recent example: in episode 10 of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which aired Friday, March 11 2011, at around 1 or 2AM, the emergence of Walpurgis Night brings forth a ruined, flooded city. Guess what happened around 1PM or 2PM of the same day? It got to the level that the last two episodes were declared Too Soon to be aired, and were broadcast about one month later.
- Hayao Miyazaki: It felt really inappropriate to watch Ponyo (it was on cable) wherein one character is chided for freaking out about tsunamis and the title preschool sea spirit causes a fun one; additionally Princess Mononoke ends with a wave of sludge wiping out a human settlement. Not to mention that Ponyo is about a tsunami. Guess what happened on March 11 2011? The second biggest tsunami ever recorded that's what (worst was the tsunami that hit 14 countries in 2004).
- Satoshi Kon: Millennium Actress uses earthquakes to highlight significant points in the title actress' life, starting with her birth in 1923. Additionally, both Paprika and Paranoia Agent end with Tokyo in ruins, although those were caused by "mindquakes".
- The final stretch of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The MOVIE 1st, which happened in the course of a single day, involved a duel over a devastated city submerged in sea water, a flashback that involved a disastrous power plant meltdown, and a climax where the protagonists had to stop a massive quake caused by the Big Bad. The movie was released in 2010. One year later, Japan was devastated by a 9.0 earthquake that was immediately followed by a tsunami, causing a radiation leak from a nuclear power plant that eventually grew into a level 7 nuclear accident.
- Saikano anime ended with the entire planet being destroyed by a massive earthquake. It didn't help that the town was swept away by the tsunami.
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex features an episode where Togusa visits ruined and flooded Tokyo where rebuilding has barely started despite of years of effort, and where he must keep wary of radiation leaking from a ruined nuclear powerplant. Does this sound at all familiar?
- Whitebeard from One Piece has the power to cause earthquakes and tsunamis. He nearly destroys Marine Headquarters. And it gets even worse when Blackbeard takes his power and indirectly sends a Tsunami right into Saobody.
- Fans chose the Ruby/Sapphire arc of Pokémon Special via poll to be re-released in wide-ban format. This is the arc where Groudon and Kyogre, two weather-based legendaries, duke it out between each other, causing massive earthquakes and floods *
and droughts that wreak havoc and destruction all across the Hoenn region. People were even shown crowded and huddling in a shelter. Due to the really bad timing, only the first out of the planned three volumes has been released.
- In the series Air, Misuzu Kamio's body eventually debilates in a way very similar to a cancer patient, and dies in the arms of her adoptive mother/aunt, Haruko. This already gut wrenching scene becomes even sadder after her seiyuu, Tomoko Kawakami, died of ovarian cancer a few years later on June 9, 2011.
- Tadashi Kawashima, the writer of Alive The Final Evolution died of liver cancer, and wrote the last few chapters from his hospital bed. Ordinarily, Author Existence Failure is tragic enough. However, death is a very strong recurring theme in the manga, with the driving force of the plot being a Happening-esque "suicide virus".
- Broly, in the climax of Movie 8, says to Goku after being powered up by his friends "No matter how much power you absorb from those idiots, it won't be enough to kill me!" Movie 10 pretty much reveals that Broly was actually quite correct about that statement (at least in regards to being killed by Goku's power increase, although just barely).
- The OVA Series Bubblegum Crash has got a bizarre coincidence. In the last episode, the heroes desperately fight to prevent an attack on a Japanese power plant which could not be deactivated in the right time to prevent damage. This attack could cause a meltdown which could irradiate many parts of Japan and threatens Tokyo directly. In a really bizarre, macabre coincidence, one of the 3 writers of the series has the last name "Fukushima".
- A rather brutal example in Elfen Lied where Kouta's sister, Kanae, tries to tell him that Lucy kills people. This ends up in a rather depressing scene where Kouta yells-at and slaps his sister. His final words to her were "Apologize to her! If you don't I'll hate you!" Immediately after, Lucy brutally kills her right in front of him. The fact that those were his last words to his little sister, who was telling the truth the whole time, is pretty damn harsh in hindsight.
- In the early chapter of Gunslinger Girl, we get Henrietta making it clear that she would kill herself if Jose stopped caring about her. It's heart-warming at the time, but becomes much worse when Jose, knowing that Henrietta will never be able to feel anything towards him after she was restored to the factory settings, kills her (and himself).
- In 2010, Bang Zoom CEO Eric P. Sherman stated that the studio will stop dubbing anime due to internet piracy. Two years later, Bandai Entertainment, Bang Zoom!'s last largest client for their dubs, will shut down DVD/BD distribution. Good job "fans," now there will be no more anime dubs coming from Bang Zoom!
- Watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica. You'll probably cry. Try watching it again. You'll cry even more.
Comic Books
- In an issue of Uncanny X-Men from 1986, we get a flashback (-forward?) to Rachel Summers' Crapsack World of her Days of Future Past, where it's revealed that among the other actions to happen in the war against the mutants, someone destroyed the World Trade Center with a bomb (one panel shows the Twin Towers in ruins). Unthinkable in 1986, but cringe-inducing after 1993 and absolutely eerie after 2001. Bear in mind that, if not for Comic Book Time, 2001 would likely be the actual year that the World Trade Center was destroyed in Rachel's timeline.
- Similarly, one issue of Wolverine's own comic book featured an enemy flying a plane into him. While he was standing on top of the World Trade Center.
- On the subject of 9/11, the Transformers Marvel Comics featured Galvatron visiting an alternate universe, where New York had been devastated and Rodimus Prime's corpse was strung up between the smoking stumps of the Twin Towers.
- More fun with 9/11 in the 1995 Marvel Comics tie-in novel Spider-Man: The Octopus Agenda by Diane Duane: the book's climax features Spidey's attempts to foil the plans of Doctor Octopus, who's planted a bomb in the World Trade Center.
- There was also the Spider-Man/X-Force crossover where the Juggernaut destroyed one of the twin towers in the course of his brawl with the heroes.
- 9/11 times four, and this time not from Marvel: An issue of Superman sent DC into a panic, when the LexCorp Towers (Metropolis' version of the Twin Towers) were shown to be in a state of near total collapse after being hit by an alien spaceship. The day that comic was due to hit newstands? September 12, 2001. DC assured retailers that they would be allowed a no-fault return for the issue, given the situation, and encouraged them to make use of it. Few, apparently, did..
- It's worse than that: The issue, taking place after a global invasion, had several pictures of buildings in ruins...Near the picture of the LexCorp building was one of the ACTUAL twin towers, with blast holes at roughly the SAME place as where the planes had hit in real life!
- But topping them all would have to be The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. Published in 1986, the story involves Two-Face plotting to blow up "The Twin Towers" in Gotham. Luckily, he's stopped by Batman. Shortly thereafter, an electromagnetic pulse caused by the detonation of a powerful nuclear warhead in the western hemisphere knocks out all power to seemingly the entirety of America. A 747 then falls out of the sky and crashes into the Twin Towers, blowing them up and setting all of Gotham on fire.
- A 1995 Judge Dredd arc had Dredd travel back in time to prevent an alien disease from spreading. To do this, he had to blow up a plane...over New York...in 2001. The twin towers are visible in the background as the plane crashes into the river. The scene was even on the front cover with the caption "Airport 2001".
- In a one-off story from 1978, a criminal demonstrates his power by causing the World Trade Center to collapse. Ouch.
- V for Vendetta features a futuristic dystopian Britain. Full of surveillance cameras...
- It also features a pedophile priest who's disappointed at the idea of bedding a girl who's as old as 15. Already creepy at the time, it takes on a whole new layer of uncomfortableness with the Catholic child molestation scandals that have broken out since — there have been accusations for centuries, which probably inspired the character, but they really hit broad public awareness in The Nineties.
- Although in this instance it was an Anglican priest.
- ...who's interested in female children.
- The surveillance cameras can't really count as Harsher in Hindsight. The CCTV program was around more than a decade before V for Vendetta was written.
- The ending of the graphic novel (where thanks to V's actions, it is heavily implied that Great Britain descended into complete and total Anarchy after too much government control) becomes even more harsh when taking into account what is currently happening in Great Britain.
- Assuming thats a reference to the 2011 London riots, it would have had similar harsh connotations in the Brixton Riots of 1995, and the Brixton Riots of 1985 took place while the original run was still being published, making the ending both this and a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, and possibly even Too Soon. Britain seems to like the anarchy, it seems.
- The scenes in Uncanny X-Men #101 where the space shuttle breaks up on re-entry and crashes in New York and the similar sequence from the 1990s Spider-man animated series were intended to be merely dramatic when they were created, but some find it difficult to watch them without thinking of the Columbia tragedy.
- The Spider-Man episode is the most similar to the real disaster, which makes it REALLY creepy, especially if you're a John Jameson fan. (Yes, John Jameson has fans. Shut up.)
- An in-universe example (or in-multiverse, anyway) from an issue of the early 80's Marvel Star Trek comic, where the Enterprise is on a mission to help evacuate a world that's about to die:
Kirk: But, these people will have lost their world! Imagine how they feel!
Spock: Captain...at times like this I am most thankful that a Vulcan cannot!
- One Wonder Woman comic had a fake newspaper on its cover with headlines proclaiming Wonder Woman's death and referred to her as Princess Diana. Guess who died a week later.
- Back to Marvel: there's a late 70's issue of Marvel Two-In-One where the World Trade Center (maybe just one tower) catches fire. Just looking at the cover can induce that deep, nausea/wince.
- The illustration on this page, by way of reference, was based on a previous incident in which, believe it or not, a B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. In the early 70s, this was long enough ago to be safe.
- A while ago, DC published an Elseworlds joke comic starring Mr. Mxyzlplk and the Bat-Mite. One of the first scenes in the book is Superman holding Batman's smoldering skeleton. This is played for laughs.
- The Batman storyline A Lonely Place of Dying has a scene where Two-Face almost decides to blow up the twin towers just to piss the dark knight off. This is made worse by Bruce Wayne simultaneously considering holding a massive charity event there to provoke him into attacking.
- He was also thinking about stealing one of Princess Diana's necklaces on the same page.
- Another 9/11 one: The Big Book Of The Seventies (published in 2000) had a section on the rise of terrorism, which ended with the first WTC bombing. All they have to do to make it a little more relevant is flip the last picture upside down.
- One Nintendo Comics System issue from 1990 had an establishing shot of the Twin Towers with a dark cloud looming above.
- On the penultimate pages of Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem puts a cigarette in his mouth for One Last Smoke, draws a handgun, puts it under his chin, and it turns out to be a lighter. Sad part? Three years later, Spider's inspiration, Hunter S. Thompson, did the exact same thing...except the gun was real.
- One of the very first mirage Ninja Turtles comics had the bad guy threatening to collapse the Twin Towers if he wasn't paid a ransom of thousand of dollars. This troper bought a new re-print, which had a note at the very edge of the paper "(Remember this comic was released a long time before 9/11)"
- An in-universe example for the Marvel Universe. One issue of the late 90s Captain America comic had Cap foiling a plot by a Skrull to impersonate him and cause widespread chaos in the United States. What does he say upon defeating the Skrull?:
Cap: Next time, take over a planet without me on it.
- Cue 2008's Secret Invasion, in which the Skrulls do take over the planet Without Cap on it, as he had been supposedly dead at the time.
- More 9/11 references, this time the Spanish series Mortadelo y Filemón showed a plane crashing into a Twin Tower as a joke in the cover for the book named ''El 35 aniversario".
- In Ultimate X-Men, mutants are more discriminated than ever before and can be held without a trial even if they didn't do anything wrong, and you can even legally kill them. At the time when it was written, it was meant to show how Ultimate Marvel is different from Earth-616. And then the National Defense Authorization Act came.
Fan Fic
- The already-disturbing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Cupcakes, became even more disturbing when the episode "Party Of One" aired, which at one point has Pinkie Pie having a creepy-as-heck psychotic breakdown, whilst alone in a room with Rainbow Dash.
- The episode Cutie Pox has given us a possible, in-canon reason on why the townsponies in Story of the Blanks would be so terrified of Cutie Marks.
- The soul-crushing Hunting The Unicorn became this when "I Am Unicorn" aired. The episode's Kurt/unicorn comparison is largely Played for Laughs, while the fanfic is a huge Deconstruction of Klaine's relationship. And then a revelation in the fanfic turned out even more painful in light of "The First Time".
- While not noticeable to the reader at first, in 'Nexus' the scene where Dante hugs his nephew could count, especially if you read the pre-cursor’s bittersweet ending. It was HeartwarmingMoments, since the character showing the emotion was [[Badass Dante, until Jack ruined the moment by (unknowingly) reminding Dante that he didn’t remember him at all. Then Dante just looked depressed.
Film
- Pick a disaster film. ''Any'' disaster film.
- Hot Tub Time Machine: This Adam's quote: "One little change has a ripple effect and it effects everything else. Like a butterfly floats its wings and Tokyo explodes or there's a tsunami, in like, you know, somewhere".
- This exchange from The Long Kiss Goodnight vies with The Lone Gunmen pilot for king of this trope:
Leland: 1993. World Trade Center bombing, remember? During the trial, one of the bombers claimed the CIA had advanced knowledge. The diplomat who issued the terrorists' visas was CIA. It's not unthinkable that they paved the way for the bombing, purely to justify a budget increase.
Mitch: You're telling me that you're going to fake some terrorist thing, just to scare some money out of Congress?
Leland: Well, unfortunately, Mr. Hennessey, I have no idea how to fake killing four thousand people, so we're just going to have to do it for real. Blame it on the Muslims, naturally. Then I get my funding.
- The China Syndrome, which deals with a near-meltdown at a U.S. nuclear power plant, was released to theaters on March 16, 1979 and was a success. Then, twelve days later, a partial meltdown took place at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. Of course, no one perished in that situation, but it got massive amounts of news coverage, remained in the forefront of America's mind, and contributed mightily to The China Syndrome being an even bigger hit — though producer/star Michael Douglas noted that they actually scaled back its release somewhat because of this trope.
- Woody Allen's film Radio Days includes a scene involving a little girl falling down a well, and the nationwide media sensation it causes. The film was released in January 1987; in October of that year, 18-month-old Jessica McClure fell down a well in Texas, causing - yes - a nationwide media sensation. Only the fact that McClure was successfully rescued keeps this from being even Harsher than it is. (In Allen's film, the little girl dies before rescuers can reach her...which was also the case with three-year-old Kathy Fiscus, whose own 1949 well accident was the basis for the movie incident.)
- Kathy Fiscus was kind of a Real Life example of this trope: Her father, a California water company employee, was in Sacramento on the day of his daughter's fatal fall, speaking to the state legislature about tighter regulations on the permanent sealing of abandoned wells.
- Woody Allen starred in (though, unusually, didn't write or direct) the 1976 film The Front. He plays a "front" in the TV industry under Joe McCarthy—someone who pretends to be a scriptwriter when the real scriptwriter is blacklisted. When the Woody Allen character refuses to defy the House Un-American Activities Committee, his girlfriend is deeply offended (I forget if she breaks up with him), but she says that she still respects him as an artist. In the movie, the irony is that he isn't the real artist. But when he began an affair with Soon-Yi, then married her, many people were saying that they still respected him as an artist.
- Bollywood film Main Hoon Na is a double offender: first, it shows a group of terrorists shooting up an Indian television studio. Later in the film, the terrorists take the students and faculty of a school hostage in a gymnasium rigged with bombs. The Beslan School Siege in Chechnya would happen a few months after the film was released, and the terrorist attacks on Mumbai would happen a few years later.
- Love Actually: Liam Neeson's character's storyline is just gut-wrenching as of his wife's death.
- In the movie Jack, the title character, a ten year old boy who ages 4 times too fast (played by Robin Williams) suffers an angina attack. Robin Williams recently had heart surgery to replace an aortic valve, which isn't the same thing, but the sight of him clutching his chest in pain is pretty cringe-worthy.
- They Shoot Horses, Don't They? culminates with Jane Fonda's character begging to be shot dead and put her out of her misery. In 1978 Gig Young, who won an Oscar for his role in the same film but never got the career boost he had been hoping for from it, shot and killed his wife before turning the gun on himself.
- Batman & Robin just got a lot harder to watch now that Michael Gough has died of old age and illness, it used to be the one decent part, but now watching all those bed-ridden, dying Alfred scenes is really too much.
- Not to mention the guy who Bane who looked insanely juiced died shortly after the movie of a heart attack
- The Siege is an action thriller from 1998 about terrorist strikes in New York that end up with martial law. Back in 1998, there was a backlash from the Arab community because they thought it made them look like terrorists. Fast forward to September 11, 2001.
- In fact, FOX itself marketed the movie as being "Eerily prescient of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath" in the backcopy of the blu-ray DVD edition.
- Wrong is Right seemed like an over-the-top political satire about the links between war, government, and the media in 1982. Now the number of coincidences with events in Iraq is staggering. At least for some viewers; Your Mileage May Vary.
- The Formula One documentary film Senna plays out as a huge collection of mentions of crashes, Senna being in a crash, Senna talking about crashes and safety issues within Formula One (Senna's death being the major turning point for safety within Formula One). There are very few scenes without a nod to the fact he dies on the racetrack. One of the very first scenes is an interview with his family when he began racing saying how they prayed to God their son would never get injured on the racetrack...
- While definitely a case of Your Milage May Vary, in Demolition Man, while looking up the parole hearings, the name listed before Simon Phoenix is Peterson, Scott. The writers maintain that it was complete coincidence.
- Of course it was. Demolition Man was released in 1993. Scott Peterson was convicted in 2005.
- A later scene has Phoenix looking up the names of the cryoprison inmates. He comes across Jeffrey Dahmer's name and shouts "Jeffrey Dahmer? I LOVE that guy!". Dahmer was murdered in prison the year after the movie was released, prompting some broadcasts of the movie to omit the latter line.
- The same film has a mention of President Schwarzenegger. Although this one probably qualifies as Hilarious in Hindsight, you have to wonder about time traveller involvement during the film.
- In Paranoiac, Oliver Reed's character has a drinking problem. In Curse of the Werewolf, he works at a winery, and there are several scenes of him getting drunk with his coworker. In Captain Clegg, he smugglers liqueur. Reed had an alcohol problem all his life, and drank himself to death on the set of Gladiator.
- The anti-nuclear drama Fail-Safe was intentionally very serious and gloomy, but the events of 9/11 make the ending worse, in which a pilot is ordered to drop a nuclear bomb destroying New York City. In retrospect it makes 9/11 conspiracy theories look trivial.
- The 1979 Disaster Film flop Meteor had a spaceship called the Challenger exploding.
- And the Twin Towers destroyed near the end.
- In The Towering Inferno, it's hard not to listen to Steve McQueen's last lines as the fire chief and not find them eerily prophetic in a post-9/11 world.
- The final scene of if...., a surrealist counterculture comedy from 1968, centers on the protagonist and his fellow misfits getting revenge on their hated school by going on a shooting spree. At the time of its release, this scene was intended to be the surreal culmination of the protagonist's revolutionary ideals. In the post-Columbine era...not so much.
- Nor does it help that the protagonist is played by A Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell. In A Clockwork Orange, McDowell's character Alex leads a gang of teen hoodlums in acts of violence (i.e. assault, rape, murder). After the film's release, it was reported that teen gangs had been copycatting the film's on-screen crimes.
- In Heathers, the idea of "normal" high school students killing each other was also considered to be comedy in and of itself.
- One of the many memorable put-downs from the film was "Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?" by Heather #1. Kim Walker, the actress who played Heather #1, died of a brain tumor in 2001.
- Another voiceover line was "Dear God, please don't let this happen to me, 'cause I don't think I could handle suicide." The actor, Jeremy Applegate, committed suicide in 2000.
- Wag The Dog concerns a sleazy President of the US who starts an entirely fake war in the Balkans to divert attention from a sex scandal. Shortly after it was released, President Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his sexual escapades, and then went to war in the Balkans.
- The coincidence was much talked about at the time, and is often claimed in the press and in books as an example of this trope, but for several reasons, it is not. Clinton had been dealing with sex scandals since before he was elected President (Gennifer Flowers, anyone?), and America had been expected to intervene in the war in the Balkans for years. Also, the film is an adaptation of a book, American Hero by Larry Beinhart, which was written several years earlier and the President in the book is mentioned to be George HW Bush.
- Watching it after 9/11 makes it even harsher, with the idea of terrorists from some backwater country that "hate freedom" and want to "destroy our way of life". Even more so is the idea claiming that the (non-existent) Albanian terrorists want to infiltrate the US via Canada to any Canadian familiar with changes to the border traffic after 9/11 and numerous false accusations from the US of terrorists coming into their country from Canada.
- The 1991 film Grand Canyon includes a scene where a white driver, whose car has broken down in the streets of Los Angeles, is "rescued" from a gang of young black teenagers by a black tow-truck driver. Many a journalist drew parallels when the Los Angeles Riots began than a year later with the Reginald Denny Incident. White truck driver (Reginald Denny) was driven to safety by an unarmed black civilian (Bobby Green Jr - himself a truck driver), after being brutally beaten by a group of young black men at the corner of Florence and Normandy.
- Escape from New York begins with terrorists hijacking an airplane and flying it into a building in Manhattan near the World Trade Center; later, Snake Plissken lands a glider on the WTC's roof.
- Later, in Escape from L.A., Snake meets a woman who reveals that she was persecuted and ultimately rejected from society for being a Muslim. Sadly, Truth in Television for many Muslims today.
- Pimpernel Smith, a 1941 updating of The Scarlet Pimpernel, ends soberly, with its Adventurer Archaeologist hero facing execution by the Nazis for helping refugees to escape. From a shadow, Leslie Howard delivers the final speech as Smith, before vanishing into the darkness, baffling his captors forever:
General von Graum: Why do I talk to you? You are a dead man.
Smith: May a dead man say a few words to you for your enlightenment? You will never rule the world, because you are doomed. All of you who have demoralized and corrupted a nation are doomed. Tonight you will take the first step along a dark road from which there is no turning back. You will have to go on and on, from one madness to another, leaving behind you a wilderness of misery and hatred. And still you will have to go on, because you will find no horizon, and see no dawn, until at last you are lost and destroyed. You are doomed, captain of murderers. And one day, sooner or later, you will remember my words...
- Two years later, Leslie Howard was shot down over neutral waters by the Nazis.
- Raoul Wallenberg, who saved tens of thousands of Jewish refugees from concentration camps, cited the film as one of his inspirations - making the speech a rare simultaneous crossing of this trope and Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- According to the recently (2011) declassified Russian documents, Raoul Wallenberg had been detained by NKVD and then killed on Stalin's (or possibly Beria's) orders because he knew about atrocities committed by USSR during the war.
- In the film In Cold Blood, Robert Blake played real-life convicted murderer Perry Smith. In 2001, he became a real-life murder suspect...
- His role in Lost Highway is now even creepier than originally intended for the same reason.
- This Die Hard poster. The Angry Video Game Nerd even comments on it.
- An Example of Your Mileage May Vary. Some people have said that they can't see the 9/11 similarities in it.
- Alternatively, looking at the first three movies is kind of eerie when put together: A tall tower blowing up, airplanes, and New York being the target of terrorist bombings.
- One of the DVD promotional posters for the 2009 horror movie Deadline depicts lead actress Brittany Murphy laying dead in a bathtub◊ with her hand over the edge. In light of Murphy's recent death (in which she was found laying dead in her shower), the posters were hastily recalled.
- Try listening to Tai describe her "near-death experience" in Clueless. Yikes.
- The movie Marooned, was about an Apollo mission going awry after its engines failed. The film was released four months after the Apollo 11 moon landing. Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell reported that he had taken his wife, Marilyn, to see Marooned. This added to her worries in the weeks leading up to the launch of the Apollo 13, and we all know how that turned out.
- The scenes of Grace Kelly's character driving recklessly in order to freak out Cary Grant in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief take on a different feel once one realizes that they were filmed in the same vicinity as the site of Grace's fatal 1982 car accident.
- The movie Equilibrium revolves around a resistance in the fictional country of 'Libria'. Does the name remind you of anything?
- A lot of In the Loop, focusing as it does on the political dishonesty that was the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Especially when combined with the film's penchant for Cringe Comedy. There's nothing wrong with dark satire, but a particularly striking example from the deleted scenes is Toby asking for directions in Washington, DC from a confused young boy, who proves to be of no help. Toby tells him, "Don't come crying to me when you get called up because I didn't stop this shit!" Toby is a Dirty Coward and there's nothing heroic about the character or the line. It just makes you wince.
- To be fair that was the intention- In The Loop is a comedy but it's also a very angry film, based on a Real Life bunch of Dirty Cowards and written by a team of British writers who were ashamed of their own government's involvement in the war. I guess Your Mileage May Vary.
- A recent example of this trope was experienced by the guy who played Michael Oher in the film The Blind Side. He was at risk of being evicted from his home at the time, and in the film, his character's grandmother has been evicted from her home.
- Any time that Ducky or Anne Marie is in danger. Both were voiced by Judith Barsi. Judith Barsi was murdered by her father.
- But probably the worst of all is Jaws: The Revenge, where her character's father is almost responsible for her death, due to neglecting to warn his family that a shark is in the area.
- Also Judith's last film was about heaven (All Dogs Go to Heaven). She goes there a year before the film is released.
- There's two of these moments in one scene in the 2001 dark comedy The Royal Tenenbaums where Ritchie Tenenbaum attempts suicide by slitting his wrists with razorblades. The character of Ritchie is played by Luke Wilson, whose brother Owen (who not only plays Eli Cash in the movie, but also co-wrote the film) attempted to kill himself in late 2007 in a similar manner. Furthermore, this scene is soundtracked by "Needle in the Hay", a 1995 song by alternative folk musician Elliott Smith. Two years after the film was released, Smith succeeded in killing himself (although with a knife, not with a razor blade).
- This trope makes Wedding Crashers somewhat difficult to watch now, as part of the Black Comedy of the second half is that Owen Wilson's character is contemplating suicide. Owen Wilson was hospitalized in 2007 for attempted suicide.
- As a movie of historic interest, Pearl Harbor went into the cinemas in May 2001 in the US and elsewhere not later than in summer of said year, conveniently even sixty years after the actual event. Of course, nobody could even remotely suspect that a comparable event would happen in the course of same year.
- The last thing the 2000 film Battlefield Earth needs is another aspect for people to treat it with derision. But after the real-life tragedy that took place the following year, when one watches the movie (for some unfathomable reason), one may find the hero's journey depicted there as a path to terrorism. (The hero's land is taken by a technologically superior civilization because of its resources; the hero educates himself on the aliens and their technology and formulates plans to take the alien civilization down; the hero attacks, crashing aircraft and sending in suicide bombers.)
- In Traffic, Michael Douglas' character has a daughter who has problems with drugs. Then you learn that his eldest son, Cameron, has just been sentenced to five years in prison for selling drugs. Meep.
- And even more freaky once you watch Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps and stumbles upon the fllowing quote, that is less a Harsher in Hindsight moment and more a freakish case of an enforced actor moment.
Winnie, he was my only son. I tried everything. I put him in the 12-step-deal...I never told you, I borrowed money from harcore guys. Tens of thousands of dollars which I didn't have. I gave it to the best therapist I could find. I even tried to pay off one scumbag dealer not to sell to my boy! [..] Rudy was a victim, you know! Like, he had cancer. You cannot blame me, and you gotta stop blaming yourself!
- In the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass, Deanie (Natalie Wood) tries to drown herself, but she's rescued. Natalie Wood died in 1981, when she fell off her yacht (named Splendor) and drowned.
- In the 1995 film Canadian Bacon there is a deeply ironic scene where the National Security Advisor Smiley, (Kevin Pollack), General Panzer (Rip Torn) and the President (Alan Alda) are discussing the gutted military budget of the US since the end of the Cold War:
Smiley 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?
- Roman Polanski's film Repulsion, about a woman who has passionate fantasies of being raped every night seems a lot darker after what would happen a few years later.
- Another Polanski example is Chinatown. Noah Cross raped his daughter and gives this line
:Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of ANYTHING. when confronted.
- This troper has a similar problem with Rosemary's Baby. What felt like a film that dealt implicitly and (to my mind) thoughtfully with the issues of spousal rape and forced impregnation is a little harder to peg down once you're familiar with Polanski's history.
- The 1996 film Executive Decision deals with a Middle Eastern terrorist group who, after pulling off a bombing in London, hijack a plane with which they plan to attack Washington DC. "Ouch" doesn't start to describe how much harsher the movie is today.
- In the Swedish movie Indrivaren of the Wallander franchise, the character Patrik gets killed towards the end. The fact that the actor playing Patrik, Emil Forselius, committed suicide before the movie even premiered makes the scene in the morgue with Patrik's dead body particularly difficult to watch.
- In the Yellow Bird Swedish TV adaptation, during the final episode of the 2005-2006 season, The Secret, Stefan kills himself as a result of disturbing events that happened in his childhood. As if that wasn't heart-wrenching enough, the actress who played Linda (Johanna Sällström) committed suicide the next year.
- It's sobering seeing Heath Ledger's character hanging from a bridge in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. In his last film.
- Yet another "New York City blowing up" one is The Peacemaker, in which Nicole Kidman and George Clooney have to find a terrorist who is carrying a nuke in his backpack and plans to blow up the United Nations building. In fact, the terrorist is there as a delegate, replacing a dead representative from his country.
- In Back to the Future 2, a copy of USA Today has this in the top right hand corner: "Washington prepares for Queen Diana's visit". Granted, she would not have been Queen, but ow.
- Not queen regnant, but still a queen. Of course, this assumes Elizabeth II isn't around in 2015. At this rate, she just might be.
- It also assumes that in the event of Elizabeth II not still being Queen in 2015, Prince Charles won't step aside in favour of Prince William becoming King, which might also happen.
- An innocuous editing dissolve in the 1992 film Unlawful Entry suddenly became very sinister.
- King Vidor's silent classic The Crowd involves a man whose life descends into joblessness and alcoholism, climaxing in his near-suicide. The lead actor in the film, James Murray, fell into joblessness and alcoholism himself during the Depression, and in 1936 died after falling from a pier into New York's Hudson River and drowning.
- The Virginity Hit is a comedy about a guy whose friends secretly tape him and his girlfriend making out and the ensuing hilarity that follows after said video is released on YouTube. In Real Life, a guy gets caught on webcam making out with another guy and after it's shown on the web he jumps off a bridge -- the fourth gay teen to kill himself in a month. While the movie itself hasn't come out yet, its commercial that played every other break has disappeared.
- In the Bruceploitation film The Clones of Bruce Lee, one of the Bruce clones is investigating a director who uses his work to cover his gold smuggling. The director gets suspicious and eventually decides to eliminate Bruce by staging a weapons malfunction during filming...which is exactly the way Bruce's son Brandon died while filming The Crow.
- The 1997 HBO made-for-TV movie "Path To Paradise" featured a fictionalized account of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Most notably, the film discusses accusations that U.S. intelligence forces knew about terrorist cells operating in the country and never did anything about it until after the attempted bombing. At the end of the film, the "organizer" of the bombings is escorted back to New York City to stand trial for his crimes, and as he is flown past the Twin Towers, he says, "Next time, we'll bring them ''both'' down." For obvious reasons, it hasn't been broadcast in the U.S. HBO channel since 2001 (although it has aired on HBO Canada, and has been released on DVD).
- Keep in mind when watching Street Fighter that in the final scene, Jean-Claude Van Damme is beating the crap out of somebody who is dying of cancer.
- In the first Urban Legend movie, the killer turns out to be Brenda, played by Rebecca Gayheart. Three years later in 2001, Gayheart accidentally killed 9-year-old Jorge Cruz, Jr. when she struck him with her car. To make things harsher, the film actually does have a scene where commits vehicular homicide.
- Now that it has been announced that Natalie Portman is pregnant with her first child, the trailer for the film The Other Woman which she made just before becoming pregnant becomes startlingly unsettling. In the story, Portman plays a newlywed whose baby dies days after delivery. Everyone wants Portman to have a smooth pregnancy and it's still early days, but one must imagine that Portman must have fresh memories of playing a new mother whose baby has died, and it must've crossed her mind when she discovered she was pregnant.
- In Inception, Pete Postlethwaite has two scenes as Maurice Fischer, a tycoon character who spends his entire screen time in a hospital bed, and eventually dies. Postlethwaite died six months after the movie's theater release, and almost a month after it was released on DVD and Blu-ray.
- Even worse, in TheTown he plays the villain, and has a Karmic Death in which Ben Affleck shoots him in the nuts. Postlethwaite died from testicular cancer.
- In Toys (1992), the Big Bad is an American general who wants to create violent videogames in order to trick children into becoming drone pilots (he's rejected, but only after strangling another general who thinks the plan might need some refining). If only he knew trickery would be unnecessary nine years later and all he had to do was finance the video game industry.
- In Real Life drone pilots do train on video game-esque simulators and prior experience playing games is said to help with the training. Still, this movie was made years before the Murder Simulator term became widepsread.
- Simon Scuddamore, the actor who portrayed the mentally unstable and heavily bullied Marty in Slaughter High, committed suicide shortly after the film was released.
- Apparently Hereafter just started playing in Japanese cinemas. The movie features the Boxing Day tsunami wiping out everything, and on the 11th of March 2011 a 8.9 earthquake triggered a tsunami that wiped out the town of Sendai in Japan. The movie's producers eventually decided to donate the film's box office money to tsunami relief.
- Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural starred Cheryl Smith as an adolescent with an absent father coming to terms with her budding sexuality, making the transformation from being the target of predatory attention to herself becoming an aggressor. In real life, Smith's father had abandoned the family long before, and she was reputed to have spent part of her teenage years working in Sunset Strip massage parlors.
- Victor Salva, director of the Monster Clown film Clownhouse, was later convicted of having molested the film's underage male star. After serving prison time, Salva went on to direct Jeepers Creepers, which featured a monster who appears to target teenage boys. The monster is at one point seen identifying a potential victim by rifling through his laundry and sniffing his underwear.
- The Chuck Norris film Invasion U.S.A. revolves around terrorists invading the US. Needless to say it's a tad uncomfortable to watch after 9/11.
- The Tailor of Panama is a 2001 film about the eponymous tailor telling tall tales about the Panama canal to an corrupt intelligence agent which ultimately leads to a mistaken U.S. invasion of Panama seeking to reclaim the canal before it is sold to the Chinese. Meanwhile, in real life, "Curveball" was an Iraqi engineer telling tall tales to German intelligence about mobile weapons labs, whose testimony was heavily used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
- In a scene in the film Maid In Manhattan, the title character and her coworker enter a suite to clean. The guest walks into the room completely naked and feigns surprise that they're there (the maids had previously been warned that this man likes to expose himself). The ladies laugh it off and leave, clearly unimpressed by what they've seen. The IMF chief's alleged attack on a hotel maid apparently started out almost exactly as this scene in the film. Furthermore, a follow-up article in the New York Times indicated that hotel maids frequent have to deal with this sort of behavior.
- Any scene in the Jackass movies with Ryan Dunn in a vehicle, mostly because he usually ends up falling out of it. It's not so funny anymore following his death.
- In January 2011 a documentation "25 Years of Tscernobyl" appeared. Fast forward two months and we have Fukushima.
- The 2011 remake of Arthur had Russell Brand playing a funny alcoholic (just like Dudley Moore in the original). Three and a half months later, his friend Amy Winehouse died trying to kick an alcohol addiction. Brand is now trying to get Hollywood to help celebrities fight their addictions.
- The russian film Stalker became rather famous because in the movie, an incident creates an enclosed Zone which is forbidden for most humans to enter. (And entering the zone has a reputation of being lethally dangerous) Years later, the Chernobyl Accident created a similar Zone and some terms of the movie were even directly used for some aspects of this zone. For example, the illegal entering of this zone is sometimes called "Chernobyl Stalking" as a reference to this movie. The the video game of the same name is also partly inspired by the similarities between this movie and the real world incident.
- There are even rumors that parts of the movie were filmed in places which became the real zone of alienation and that one scene of the movie even shows the real Chernobyl Nuclear plant. (Although this is proven wrong.)
- The beginning of Captain America: The First Avenger had Red Skull's forces attacking Tonsberg, Norway, and was implied to have had the town decimated after acquiring the Tesseract. This movie aired the same day as the Oslo bombings in Norway.
- V for Vendetta: The scene where the first open act of rebellion by the citizens of Britain against the Norsefire Regime (and in the case of the graphic novel, the first step towards total anarchy in Britain) was when the people killed a Norsefire officer in retribution for killing a little girl for spraypainting V onto a Norsefire propaganda poster. This becomes significantly harsher when it comes to light the current riots within London over a police officer somehow shooting someone in a demonstration.
- In Max Keeble's Big Move, Max ends up going to Jenna's milkshake party instead of going to the going away party his friends Megan and Robe prepared for him, which resulted in his friends becoming angered at him. Something similar happens in the subplot in the CSI episode Unleashed, where the Prom King Nominee dates Maria Dioro, a girl suffering from grieving for her dad dying as well as her mom being distant with her, instead of the Prom Queen nominee, causing the latter to spitefully torture her by making a viral video of her allegedly calling herself a whore in cheerleading tryouts, making a website where her face is put on a donkey where it says "I'm A Stupid Bitch", as well as making various hateful posts towards her, which among other factors broke her spirit and mind, thus resorting to her committing suicide while pregnant. In case you're wondering how these are in any way related, both Jenna and Maria Diorio are played by the same actress (Brooke Anne Smith, more specifically).
- The film Bamboozled depicts a world where blackface is brought into the modern age and is generally accepted by white audiences. Eight years later, Saturday Night Live, despite controversy and criticism, cast Fred Armisen (who is German, Japanese, and Venezuelan) as Barack Obama (who is half-black and half-white). What's worse is that Jordan Peele (from MADtv and the upcoming sketch show Key and Peele) and Donald Glover (from Community) originally auditioned to be Barack Obama. And to add insult to injury, the newest black cast member the show has — Jay Pharoah — has Barack Obama as one of his many popular impressions as seen on his YouTube videos, and Lorne Michaels chose not to switch Armisen out in favor of Pharoah.
- Look Both Ways, directed by Sarah Watt, stars her husband William McInnes as a man who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Six years later, Sarah Watt died of cancer.
- Xtro II: The Second Encounter is a So Bad, It's Good Canadian ripoff of Alien. At one point, a soldier (played by Nicholas Lea) mentions that he "has enough C4 to blow the World Trade Center." Needless to say, it's a line that can make you cringe now.
- The 1936 film "Things to Come" features a scene in which London is destroyed by bombs. This happens later. In Real Life.
- When it first came out in 1995, Heat was criticized as being wildly unrealistic for the climactic sequence in which a squad of cops and a team of bank robbers shoot it out with automatic weapons across several blocks of downtown Los Angeles. Then came the North Hollywood shootout two years later...
- In The Santa Clause 2, when Santa/Scott Calvin learns that Charlie Calvin was now on the naughty list, he initially thinks that the naughty/nice elf was referring to Charlie Sheen, and remarks that he thought he straightened out. Flash forward to 2011, and all of the stuff Charlie Sheen did relating to his drug related problems and...well, his transforming into a real-life version of Charlie Harper, and it becomes a lot harsher about how much Sheen had really "straightened out", not to mention that Charlie Calvin's naughty behavior in that movie, in comparison, was actually far closer to the nice list.
- In the 1972 film Pete 'n' Tillie, Carol Burnett's son passes away from an unidentified terminal illness. This is very sad in itself, but it becomes absolutely heart-wrenching when you remember that some 30 years later in 2002, Burnett's daughter Carrie died of cancer.
- The 1992 comedy horror Evil Toons starts with David Carradine's character hanging himself.
- The 1990s movie The Siege is still only reluctantly put on TV these days. It doesn't have so much to do with the acting so much as the themes of a terrorist assault on America by Islamic terrorists, necessitating the incarceration of Arabic nationalities and gross invasions of public liberties.
Literature
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Viewers might view the Oompa-Loompas in a different light once they lean about the real life child slavery issue the cocoa industry has.
- In Animorphs, Jake is shown a Bad Future in which the Yeerks have taken over Earth. The only part of the New York skyline left standing? The World Trade Center.
- The 2002 novel House of the Scorpion takes place in a fictional nation created and controlled by drug lords that is between Mexico and the United States. Seeing that Mexico's local governments (and national) are becoming more and more influenced by the drug cartels, this is becoming more of a reality.
- Another 9/11 moment: Tom Clancy's novel Debt of Honor features at its climax a suicidally depressed Japanese Airlines pilot deliberately crashing his jetliner into the U.S. Capitol building during a special joint session of Congress confirming a newly appointed Vice-President, decapitating all three branches of government. One could say this predicted 9/11 to a certain extent, as Clancy went out of his way to illustrate how easy such an attack might be to carry out.
- Clancy gives us another one in Teeth of the Tiger. Robby Jackson, Jack Ryan's Vice President at the end of The Bear and the Dragon, would be a natural candidate for the first black President, but instead gets unceremoniously killed off in between books so that the Straw Liberal Kealty can come back and mess up the U.S.' foreign relations. Or maybe because the idea of a black President was too controversial. Fast-forward to 2008...and Barack Obama.
- Robby DID become the first African American pres. partway through his last term Ryan resigned for personal reasons, making Jackson POTUS, a few months later during a trip to his home state of Alabama, he's shot by "a guy that just couldn't stand the thought of a black president."
- In Debt of Honor, deaths caused by faulty gas tanks in a popular model of Japanese car prompts the US government to enact punitive trade legislation against Japan. In 2010, major recalls of Toyota cars due to safety defects prompted a Congressional investigation.
- While technically belonging in the video game section, the first Ghost Recon yet even more proves Clancy is either psychic, or a Time Lord. The main plot of the game is set in the then future year of 2008, and deals with a Russian invasion of Georgia...
- The ending of Stephen King's The Running Man is another 9/11 example.
- And then there's Insomnia, where a pro-life extremist (driven mad by the Crimson King) attempts to pilot a Cessna loaded with C4 into the Derry Civic Center while a women's rights advocate is giving a speech.
- King himself had Rage taken out of print following a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky.
- As the storm clouds gathered over Europe and the Far East, Pulp Magazine hero Secret Service Operator #5 (1934 - 1939) fought attempts by various foreign armies from South America, Europe and the Orient to conquer the United States. The events are completely over-the-top as benefits the pulp genre, except for the time the Japs destroy an entire city (Philadelphia) with their atomic bomb! Only those evil Orientals would do such a dastardly deed...
- In Spider Robinson's Lady Slings The Booze a throwaway comment is made in connection with a terrorist plot to the effect that they "aren't going to blow up the WTC because that only impresses the people that live within sight of the WTC".
- You'd think Robinson of all people would have realized that with modern communications technology, the entire world lives "within sight of the WTC".
- Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake has a passage describing several kinds of futuristic snuff sites. One of them is an assisted-suicide site, founded for entertainment. It's sickening as it is, but then the main character Jimmy goes and compares the site to Alex the parrot saying "I'm going away now." A few years after the book was published, Alex died.
- Tad Williams' Doorstopper novel The War Of The Flowers has a scene in which a skyscraper was set on fire and is in danger of collapse after an attack by a flying, fire-breathing dragon, and the main character, who are trapped on a high floor of said skyscraper, has to climb down flight after flight of stairs in the midst of smoke and flames. The book contains an introduction saying that he wrote the scene before 9/11, and the similarity between the events in the book and the experiences of the 9/11 survivors is simply an unfortunate coincidence.
- Good luck getting into Logan's Run (a novel about a dystopian society that kills off everyone that reaches 30) after the recent surge (both were 50) of deaths.
- In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian blackmails a character Alan Campbell into helping him dispose of a body. While not stated outright, the strong implication is that Campbell was Dorian's ex-lover and Dorian was threatening to expose him as homosexual, thereby ruining his professional life and potentially exposing him to the threat of imprisonment. Later, of course, Wilde himself was ruined by exposure of his homosexuality.
- The Spider novel City Destroyers featured a structure called the Sky Building collapsing. In the 1970's, a redacted version of this novel changed it to the World Trade Center.
- The Nick Fury novel Empyre featured a Saddam Hussein counterpart masterminding a plot to attack cities by crashing airplanes. Interesting, since at one point, 46% of Americans thought that Hussein had masterminded the 9/11 attacks, when he had nothing to do with it.
- Van Wyck Mason wrote a novel positing an attack on Pearl Harbor, written in the early 1930's. Actually, numerous works depicted this, such as the first Shield/Wizard meeting.
- There's a long, long history of this. A novella called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan was written wherein a drunken old captain has to fight for his life after the ship he pilots — described as "the largest ship in the world" — is sunk by an iceberg. The novel was written fourteen years before the Titanic went down. It was initially rejected for publication due to being "unbelievable."
- In the Clive Cussler book Valhalla Rising, the Corrupt Corporate Executive bad guy plans to have his goons blow up an oil tanker in San Francisco Harbor, thereby destroying the SF "World Trade Towers", making America revolt against imported energy, and increasing the value of his own domestic oil holdings. Wincing yet?
- It gets better; one of his lieutenants leaks the plan, and the ship is boarded by special forces troops, who find it a perfectly normal oil tanker. The hero of the book realizes that the baddie had planned to say "World Trade Center" as a decoy, and had not gotten SF's WTC and the one in New York confused. Yes, that's right, the bad guy planned to blow up the base of the Twin Towers and a good portion of Manhattan. Thanks to the Freudian slip, the real ship being delayed, and the hero's submersible, disaster is averted. But barely.
- David Weber pulled one on himself, as he says in the Author's Note in Flag in Exile. He first wrote the manuscript in 1994, and mentions the Oklahoma City bombings that took place between his writing and the publishing in 1995 had this effect on him. (Link contains some spoilers)
- Although the work wasn't published until the 2000s so no-one could have read it, but J. R. R. Tolkien's story The Notion Club Papers, written in 1944, is set in 1987. The characters mention that six months ago in 1986 there was 1) a disaster involving a spacecraft, 2) a nuclear disaster, and 3) during the course of the book the greatest storm in history hits England. All three proceeded to happen in Real Life.
- The Zack Files book Never Trust A Cat Who Wears Earrings features a curse that is turning Zack into a cat that he can only break by performing a ceremony in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Reading it now, the Fridge Logic seems to be that he would keep turning into a cat...which is Accidental Nightmare Fuel.
- The 1996 book Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre has a doctor character who is described as the worst serial killer in British history, with a kill count of about 30. And then, just two years later...
- The fact it's just so damn easy to put 1984 into this territory these days might be the reason why Orwell's Magnum Opus wasn't mentioned in this article until now.
- This claim tends to be made of almost all works of dystopic fiction, but it's invoked so often (and so subjectively) that it's lost a lot of its meaning, and has even begun to rob the original works of their relevance. Basically, it would be safe to assume that for every work of fiction set Twenty Minutes into the Future, there's someone who feels this trope applies.
- Still, the work itself applies. Try to reread it after you finished it once. It's never the same again. ESPECIALLY if you managed to avoid knowing storyline beforehand.
- Specifically the article linked above, which shows the prevalence of CCTV monitoring in the UK - including a half dozen cameras with direct views either to Orwell's apartment. That definitely counts.
- Double whammy for Sylvia Plath. "How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?" In the month following the publication of The Bell Jar, she killed herself. For the same reason, Lady Lazarus, a poem about her previous suicide attempt and foreshadowing her next attempt, is just heartbreaking when she writes: This is Number Three./What a trash/To annihilate each decade.
- In Dame Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, the German Lady's-Maid comments on the kidnapping and murder of a child, then adds: "We are not so wicked as that in Germany." The novel was written in 1933.
- There is a detective novel written and set around 1936, where a cab driver goes on and on about the success of German industry, and the failure of British industry, and ends his rant with "What this country needs is a Hitler!"
- Don't forget that a lot of people - including King Edward VIII - thought like that before the full extent of Nazism was known. OK, so most people even in 1936 thought that Hitler was a rather unpleasant thug but London cabbies at least are generally stereotyped as being very right wing, and would have been exactly the people you'd expect to hear saying that.
- The novel you're thinking of is probably Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers. The (very minor) character who say it isn't a cab driver, but that line is exactly what he says. There are a couple of other examples from Sayers' work in which a positive view of fascism is expressed by working-class Britons.
- Truth in Television: Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists was composed mainly of working-class men and women from the East End.
- The Robin Cook thriller Vector features an antagonist (formerly an employee of a Russian government-run bioweapons project) who manufactures anthrax in preparation for a biological attack and kills someone with an anthrax-laced letter as a test to see how potent his toxin is. The book was published in 1999. Then two years later, it happened for real...
- The Robert R. McCammon novel Swan Song has a chapter where a militant cult is laid siege to. The siege ends when their building burns down with them in it. A few years later, this happens to the Branch Davidians.
- State of Fear is a 2004 technothriller by Michael Crichton, about a global conspiracy of Animal Wrongs Groups who falsify data to support Global Warming. Fast-forward to November 17 2009 - Playful Hackers release (supposed) evidence of a conspiracy by the Climatic Research Unit to falsify data to support Global Warming. Welcome to ClimateGate!
- Aaron Allston's Sidhe-Devil came out in June 2001. The back-cover blurb (accurately) describes part of the situation the heroes have to deal with as "a mad genius is sending fiery destruction against the city's skyscrapers."
- Reading older Discworld books is very much this trope regarding the Bursar and PTerry's recent diagnosis.
- YMMV on this one. Alzheimer's is a terrible condition with an inevitable end, whereas it is very strongly suggested that the Bursar's particular brand of reality is self-imposed, so he doesn't have to deal with Ridcully.
- Far more depressing is in one of the later books, Wintersmith when Roland reflects on his time in the world of the fairies and all it's horrors. He makes the following statement, which just kicks you right in the teeth now: Roland hates things that make you forget who you are. Once you forget who you are, you lose everything.
- Erik's deceptive communication with Christine in The Phantom of the Opera must have been creepy enough in 1910, but its resemblance to the m.o. of modern Internet predators makes it even creepier a century later.
- The Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" features a villain who's locked his daughter up as a tormented prisoner, and whose young son tortures helpless animals. At the time, the son's behavior was seen as a hereditary clue to the father's cruel nature, and the villain's motives were financial only; nowadays, readers are more likely to deduce the man was molesting both his kids.
- And the first line he says to Watson ("I see You are from Afganistan") is somehow made more cringeworthy by the fact that now, over 100 years later, this still makes sense.
- In the movie version of Waiting To Exhale by Terry McMillan, Gloria finds out her ex-husband is gay after trying to seduce him. Years later, Terry McMillan and her husband split up after he reveals that he was gay and marrying her to get a green card.
- In the final chapter of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about a soldier's experience during World War I, the protagonist, Paul Bäumer, reflects on how miserable the rest of his life is going to be if he does manage to survive the war. One of the reasons he gives is that the next generation, having not known war, will not be able to understand what he endured.
- The German story Mario and the Magician written in 1929 and set in 1926, describes the changes happening to fascist Italia, as seen by eyes of a liberal family from then democratic Germany, and repeatedly shows how the change makes Italian people intolerant, arrogant and aggressive. When Nazis came to power, they made the same to Germany, only much, much more worse.
- Also in the end, the Cippola is shot dead by Mario, whom he previously braiswashed into doing icky things. Mussolini (for whom Cippola was an obvious stand-in) was in the end shot by people of his own nation.
- In the fantastic history book A Little History of the World it talks about how humanity has come a long way from mindless persecution and hatred of other cultures and at the end of the original print, which was about WWI, it had a message of hope for the future. This was in 1935; the German-born Jewish author added another chapter after WWII really lamenting some of the things he said in the book.
- In Isaac Asimov's short story "Evidence", Stephen Byerley is a candidate for mayor of NYC who is accused of being a robot, which would disqualify him from the election. The premise seems kind of silly and it's hard to believe that so many people would believe that Byerley is a robot based on such flimsy evidence. Fast forward to 2008, when people are arguing that President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, and it seems much more plausible.
- It´s a little more harsher than that: Quinn, the political boss who propagates the rumor, is a conservative Sleazy Politician who admittedly couldn’t care less for the civil rights of his people, and so his subordinates. Byerley is a liberal public prosecutor who really is doing things to stop crime and redeem criminals. Quinn only opposes Byerley liberal position because, well, he is a conservative. To be a robot is a rumor so incredible that when it proves false, only shows the extremely superficiality and stupidity of those who oppose Byerley.
- Humorously, there, in fact, Ain't No Rule that says that a robot can't be mayor of New York.*
" He or she needs to be 18 years old and a resident of NYC on Election Day." The only legal leg to stand on would be arguing for or against citizenship of a robot. This is also the case for the US President, who has but three requirements, none of which refer to species.* be a natural born citizen of the United States; be at least thirty-five years old; have been a permanent resident in the United States for at least fourteen years.
- The Great Gatsby has the Jewish mobster Meyer Wolfsheim who works in an office labeled "The Swastika Holding Company." The book was written in the 20s. Oh Crap.
- This troper and his English teacher had an interesting discussion about that exact passage, needless to say he mentioned at the time the different meaning behind the swastika.
- In the first book from the series A Song of Ice and Fire, Tyrion and Jaime Lannister discuss the fate of Bran Stark, who'd fallen from a tower and would be crippled for life even if he survived. Jaime, who'd been the one to throw him from the tower, commented that if it had been his decision, he'd euthanize the boy rather than having him grow up a cripple. Tyrion disagreed, since he himself was a dwarf, and stated that death was too final and that life held endless possibilities even for "cripples and grotesques." Three books later, Jaime himself became a cripple when his sword hand is cut off and he contemplates letting himself die, before being convinced to live in order to see his family again and avenge himself.
- In Bridge to Terabithia, there is a scene where Leslie (child from non-religious family) discusses faith with Jess and Maybelle (children from religious family), and the latter says to Leslie: "If you don't believe in Jesus, you go to Hell when you die". Then later Leslie dies in a freak accident and Jess fears she is in Hell - and all because he wasn't there to save her. This is just one big Tear Jerker
- And, while chronologically this is NOT "in hindsight", Leslie's death became even more tragic for this troper when he read the afterword and learned that the book is based on the experience of the author's son (and surely many readers felt similar when reading the afterword).
- Averted in Dr. Strangelove: They quickly dubbed over all mentions of "Texas" because of the Kennedy assassination.
- Not just Texas. Dallas.
- And of course, most people nowadays who've seen the movie know the line was dubbed, so YMMV on whether this is averted.
- The Cthulhu Mythos gives us Yog-Sothoth, a tentacled monstrosity who impregnates a human woman. Squicky, yes. But it gets even worse when you consider hentai.
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea: Since the beginning of his career as a writer, Verne has being accused by critics of being ‘’”only”’’ a HardScifi writer that paid little heed to the social ramifications of technology. But with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Verne wrote in 1869 about Captain Nemo, a man from an oppressed country who had training in the west, and has money enough to pay a country’s national debt, who decides to create an organization strong enough to fight an entire Western country through terrible acts of violence, and therefore is chased as a menace by all established countries in the West. After Osama bin Laden, 9/11 and The War on Terror, we must admit that Verne really knew much more than anyone ever suspected about how the world will turn in the next 130 years!
- In the technothriller series Talon Force book Dire Straits published a few months before 9-11 the plot revolves around Islamist terrorists trying to take over Turkey. Osama Bin Laden is mentioned to be a major backer of the terrorists and one character laments that he's been tried in absentia.
- When The Tomorrow Series was first published, an attack on any Western state that could actually threaten it seemed inconceivable. Then came 9/11.
- Another point is that it depicts Australian people fighting the occupiers - but shortly thereafter, Australia itself participated in the Iraq occupation.
- Anthony Horowitz wrote a short story called The Man With the Yellow Face, where a boy is frightened of a mysterious man he believes is coming to kill him, and worries that the man might be "one of those suicide bombers you read about in the Middle East." The story was published in 1998 ...
- Some of the early Star Trek: The Next Generation novels become Harsher in Hindsight with regards to Tasha Yar. The novel "Survivors" contains an epilogue that takes place during "Skin Of Evil", but this dialogue from "The Children of Hamlin"*
Published 1988, probably written 1987 , which is chronologically right before that episode according to Memory Beta contains rather creepy irony:
Dr. Crusher: Tasha, stay out of trouble. I don't want to see you in sickbay again for a long time.
Yar: Don't worry, I'm not coming back.
- It's true, too. She didn't. Not alive, anyway.
- In-Universe in the Dale Brown novel Shadows of Steel: Hal Briggs is chastened for taking a risk that gets him hurt by a ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun. Guess how he dies, several books later?
Live Action TV
- A first-season episode of the reimagined Hawaii Five-O was centered around a tsunami. Guess what happened on March 11, 2011?
- History Channel's Underwater Universe has been preceded by a sympathy message and filmed-prior-to-3/11/11 disclaimer ever since the quake. This is particularly relevant for the episode featuring a previous tsunami in Samoa.
- The SeaQuest DSV episode "The Regulator" contains the following dialogue:
Crocker: Not dead either.
Bridger: Might as well be. A genius who's every effort failed. And then he fakes a suicide to escape the ridicule of his peers.
Lucas: I can sympathize with that.
- Pretty depressing considering Jonathan Brandis (who played Lucas) committed suicide a few years ago...
- The iCarly special, iPsycho, shows a depressed Gibby saying that he has nothing better to do than to watch reruns. This episode aired the same week Gary Coleman passed away. Considering the "Awww" that came from the canned laughter, it may be possible that they added it at the last minute to pay tribute to him.
- Perhaps the most eerie example was the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, in which The Government nearly succeeds in crashing an airliner into the World Trade Center and thereby creating a new era of conflict. It aired in March 2001. Yikes.
- The BBC children's drama Grange Hill had a nasty and quite personal example of this back in 2000. The character of Judi Jeffreys was (long story short) locked in a storage room that was on fire. She tried to escape by climbing out of the window onto a nearby fire escape, and ended up falling head first to her death. The actress who played her, Laura Sadler, met her own sad and untimely demise in the exact same way about 3 years later. (That is, she fell head first out of a building to her death; but while drunk and drugged up with vodka and cocaine, not while trying to escape a fire).
- On Angel, Doyle's Heroic Sacrifice - just nine episodes into the series - became even more heartbreaking after Glenn Quinn, who played him, died three years later in 2002.
- In the very last episode "Not Fade Away," Lorne (the Host, a usually fun-loving karaoke-singing demon) has a melancholic plotline in which he eventually shoots Lindsey dead before resigning from Angel's crew. Afterwards, as if talking to the audience, he says, "Good night, folks." Though not meant to be funny or light-hearted, it's become even sadder; a month after the May 2004 finale, Andy Hallett, Lorne's actor, got a dental infection that spread to his bloodstream. Five years after that, he died of the heart disease that resulted. In Hallett's memory, the writers of the comic-book sequel Angel: After the Fall retired the character of Lorne in 2010.
- Related to this, there is a HORRIBLE moment on the commentary for "Not Fade Away" where the director mentions jokingly that Andy Hallet was suffering a tooth abcess while shooting and is practically propped up in the shot. This is the tooth abbcess that would lead to Andy Hallet's heart disease and death.
- Thankfully, not related to a real-life tragedy, in the fourth season of Angel, Fred and Gunn are discussing whether or not it's good to feel. Fred says she'd rather feel the pain, she'd "take that over being a shell any day." In the fifth season, she dies and her body is used by the demon Illyria, who repeatedly refers to Fred as a shell.
- There's also Angel lightheartedly reassuring Lorne that all families have problems, some more than others. Angel has no idea how many problems his family is going to have in the next two seasons.
- In the season 1 episode "Expecting", upon seeing the magically pregnant Cordelia, Wes utters the phrase: "Mother of God". Well, yeah.
- In Scrubs, Dr Cox reacted badly to the birth of Jack, feeling ignored and like he couldn't love him. He's critical of Jordan for paying too much attention to the baby. Harmless, until we find out three years later that Jordan had post-partum depression.
- The ending of the Mork and Mindy episode "Mork Meets Robin Williams", where Mork gives his report to Orson about the downside of fame, which ends with a listing of celebrities who became victims of their own fame (mostly from drug overdoses). About a year later, Robin's friend, John Belushi, would die of a drug overdose.
- It gets worse when you watch the Saturday Night Live short film "Don't Look Back in Anger". It stars John Belushi—aged with makeup—revealed as the last living member of the original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players." The harsh part? One of the first lines he speaks is "everybody thought I'd be the first to go", which was an ironic joke on his well-known hard partying lifestyle. He was, in fact, the first one to die.
- It's also tough looking at that knowing that Robin himself had a pretty nasty cocaine habit at the time. He's said that John's death was one of the reasons he quit.
- On the subject of Power Rangers and Super Sentai...
- That bit near the end of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy where Trakeena, having recently gone off the deep end due to an accidental Biological Mashup with Deviot, turns her Mooks into suicide bombers and sends them out to do as much senseless damage as possible. It was a morally tasteless moment then, with one of her closest generals expressing horror at her tactics. But now...
- The 1984 Super Sentai show Choudenshi Bioman was the first installment in the franchise to feature a female Yellow Ranger (the original Yellow Four). However, the actress playing her (Yuki Yajima) had to leave the series, so her character was killed off early in the series in what was also one of the few instances in the franchise where a core member of the team was killed off. While only one hero in Power Rangers was killed off within the actual show, Thuy Trang (the actress who played the first Power Rangers Yellow Ranger in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers) ended up dying in a car accident in real life. And that's before we make it a yellow trio by mentioning the real life typecasting-induced suicide of Baku Hatakeyama, the actor who played the first Sentai Yellow Ranger in Himitsu Sentai Goranger.
- And when Hatakeyama took a break from the show, his character was replaced with a Suspiciously Similar Substitute, who was also killed off so Hatakeyama's character could return.
- Power Rangers has now suffered another real life Ranger death. Peta Rutter, who played Udonna, the White Ranger in Power Rangers Mystic Force. While Udonna was still alive at the end of the season, ironically, her Mahou Sentai Magiranger counterpart was killed off at the start of the series. Also, while Mystic Force was in production, Machiko Soga (Rita Repulsa from MMPR) died, so footage of her from Magiranger as another character, which would normally have been skipped over, was used in tribute in the finale, and said to be a reformed Rita.
- The page picture as of November 9th, 2011 comes from Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger. It is a vision of a Bad Future, of what would happen if the Zyurangers failed to fully unite as a team. It was distressing enough back then, but after the earthquake in March 2011 that devastated Tokyo it's even worse.
- The Granada Sherlock Holmes episode "The Dying Detective" takes on a whole new significance when you know that Jeremy Brett, who played Holmes, died the year after it was filmed.
- For Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the speech to Cordelia about wanting to live in the world for a moment, in spite of her duty, at the time? Sad. Given everything Cordelia goes through over the course of Angel for her duty? Oh dear God. * sobs*
- An in-universe example, the ending of the episode "Lie To Me". Depressing and sad when aired, but the characters hadn't suffered great tragedy or major deaths yet. By the time the show is over that ending is second only to "The Body" in tear factor.
- The season 3 episode "Earshot" — whose plot involved a school sniper — was originally withheld from airing in the U.S. because of the Columbine shootings in April 1999. The season finale, "Graduation Day, Part Two" was also postponed the following month for similar reasons. Both episodes eventually aired later that summer, "Graduation Day, Part Two" in July and "Earshot" in September.
- Early in 24's third season, Jack is occasionally seen wrapping a belt around his arm in preparation for shooting up heroin. This becomes even more horrifying in the season finale, when he's wrapping it around Chase's arm in order to cut his hand off.
- In the same season, after Tony learns that Michelle is trapped inside a hotel whose inhabitants are infected with the Cordilla Virus, Ryan Chappelle tells him that the best way to focus is to assume the worst and think about getting revenge. In season 7, Tony's desire for revenge for Michelle's death at the start of the fifth season leads him to attempt to curry favor with the main antagonists so that he can meet up with and kill the man responsible, even if thousands of innocent civilians die in the process.
- The diffusion of the first episode of Fringe, which contains a plane accident, in France coincided with the Rio-Paris plane crash...The episode was broadcast one week later instead.
- The Doctor Who serial "The Tenth Planet", first shown in 1966, has a spacecraft lost with all hands in 1986.
- The Doctor's "One day, I shall come back" speech from The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Unless you count the Doctor Who Expanded Universe, he doesn't come back.
- In-universe example: the final scene of "Blink", which implied that every statue could be a Weeping Angel, was already horrific enough." "The Time of Angels" turned that concept into reality. Have sweet dreams.
- Another one: the Happiness in Slavery thing the Ood from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" have going is cringe-inducing enough. Then a couple seasons later we find out it's because they've been lobotomized.
- The Doctor's worst fear (introduced in Inferno and reiterated in The Mind of Evil) is that of a burning planet. Guess what he had no choice but to do to Gallifrey in the Time War.
- The episode "Forest of the Dead" ends with River Song making a Heroic Sacrifice. At the time, it's pretty sad, but we don't really feel much connection to her since she'd only just been introduced. But as the show continues, we find out more about her and her relationship with the Doctor, and that first episode becomes simply heartbreaking to watch...especially once you realise the Doctor himself should have mourned her death far more than he did, it was just unlucky chance that he didn't know her when she died.
- And remember, the Doctor KNOWS River's fate. He knows the date and destiny of the daughter of Amy and Rory Pond. As uplifting a note as the episode "A Good Man Goes To War" ends on, remembering that the Doctor already knows when it is that she dies, and that she dies for him, can be quite the Fridge Horror moment - the daughter of the companions that he has come to look at as his family died for him before he knew who she was or even met her parents.
- The Seventh Doctor, distraught over the apparent death of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, tells him "You should have died in bed!" Fast forward to "The Wedding of River Song"...
- Pretty much every interaction the Doctor had with the Face of Boe once it's revealed that he's actually Jack Harkness. The Face of Boe watched the Earth get destroyed, while a snooty woman with too much plastic surgery proudly proclaimed herself the last of the humans, and then his goodbye to the Doctor where he states that he's also the Last of His Kind.
- Ten's heartwarming "Goodbye - my Sarah Jane!!" from "School Reunion" becomes absolutely heartbreaking after Elisabeth Sladen's untimely death. Just...ouch. Ouch.
- The Sarah Jane Adventures story Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith is about Sarah Jane struggling with senility brought on by a terminal illness. In fact, the illness was fabricated by Sarah Jane's replacement, and once she's defeated, Sarah Jane instantly recovers.) And to think Elisabeth Sladen must have known she was ill when she filmed them.
- At the end of season two of Dexter, Dexter has trapped James Doakes in a cage inside a remote cabin in the Everglades after he found out Dexter was a serial killer. Trying to convince his captor to turn himself in, Doakes describes Dexter's urge to kill as being "like a cancer - and in case you haven't noticed, it's spreading". Michael C. Hall contracted Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2010, before recovering later that year.
- In Sanford and Son, Fred Sanford had a Running Gag where he would fake a heart attack whenever something shocked or upset him. In real life, Redd Foxx died of a heart attack...
- ...during a rehearsal on the set of his later show, The Royal Family. At first some cast and crew members thought he was just reprising his "I'm coming, Elizabeth" gag.
- Parodied in The Whitest Kids U Know when a hunter is making a tasteless joke about hunting accidents at the expense of a friend — the friend died in a hunting accident just the other day. He insists that this makes it exceptionally funny, while the other members of the hunting party are more reluctant to laugh.
- The Touched by an Angel story "Netherlands", which aired in May of 2001. The plot has heroine Monica witnessing a building being destroyed by a bomb. Many are killed, and though she's an angel she has a crisis of faith that culminates in her being tempted to forsake God by Satan himself. (CBS pulled a scheduled repeat in the wake of 9/11.)
- In a season 16 episode of Law & Order, after a hit list is discovered with Jack's name on it, Alexandra Borgia advises him to hand the case off to someone else because it might save his life. Five months later she's tortured and killed because of a case she's working on. What's more, Arthur Branch tells Jack she would have fought him tooth and nail if he'd tried to take her off the case.
- Another example would be an early episode called "Second Opinion", where the victim was killed by a quack remedy for her cancer, and Lt. Van Buren and Detective Briscoe are discussing the woman's condition. Briscoe's actor, Jerry Orbach, died of cancer, and a final season story arc involved Van Buren receiving a scare about possible cancer.
- In an April 2009 episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent entitled "Rock Star", a musician falls to his death in an elevator shaft in a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In November of that same year, Jerry Fuchs, the drummer for various indie rock bands such as !!! and The Juan Maclean, died pretty much the same way in a similar building in the same neighborhood. However, unlike in the episode, where the musician was pushed down the shaft, Fuchs actually fell while trying to jump from a stalled elevator to the next floor. Still pretty damn eerie.
- There were a lot of moments on the TV show Titus in which Titus's dad doubted that his son and Erin would be together forever, which Titus tried to prove wrong time and again. In reality, Christoper Titus and his wife Erin Carden (the inspiration for the character's girlfriend) divorced three years after the show was canceled (and, in Love Is Evol, Titus has nothing good to say about his ex-wife Erin, I mean, "Kate" and really lets it be known that she was a two-timing bitch who tried to murder him and crushed his self-esteem to the point where Titus wanted to kill himself and made him doubt his faith in God — until God "told" Titus that he made the divorce happen so he could date a 20-something year old who had two college degrees, paid for her own breast implants {as opposed to Erin using Titus's money to surgically make herself over [or as Titus put it, "re-build this bitch from the ground-up"] just so she can have affairs behind his back}, and worked as a model).
- The mockumentary Oil Storm is about an oil shortage caused by a major hurricane making landfall near New Orleans in September 2005. It aired in June 2005.
- "The Uncanny Valley" episode of Criminal Minds featured a disturbed unsub who was molested by their father, the head of the local sanitarium. Today I opened the paper and read this real-life occurrence, and now I'm not sure which came first since they only started investigating that guy in September. I suppose the one thing the real-life bastard has going for him is that it's not mentioned whether he used shock therapy to give his victims Laser-Guided Amnesia.
- Shock Therapy is widely misrepresented in fiction and isn't nearly as horrible as portrayed.
- In an in-universe example, a conversation between Hotch and Prentiss about the importance of family and how Hotch is trying his best for Hayley and Jack becomes heartbreaking after having watched season 5, in which Hayley is murdered.
- A 1979 episode of Blake's 7 called "Shadow" has the gang of rebels trying to bribe a drug dealing mob to help them in their fight against the Federation, only to find out that despite their public anti-drug stance the Federation is the secret head of the mob. It seems that they want to control both sides of the law. Of course, a modern, enlightened democracy would never stoop to selling illegal drugs to their own people to further their political ends. Oh wait.
- In the episode of Friends where Monica and Chandler went on their honeymoon, their entire storyline had to be re-written and re-shot at the last minute. The original storyline involved the two of them getting arrested by airport security because Chandler made a joke about a bomb. The re-shoot version of their storyline involved a sort of one-sided competition for free upgrades with another honeymooning couple, with several of the original gags recycled. The episode aired October 11, 2001.
- Although the deleted scenes were eventually made available on Youtube.
- In a season two episode of How I Met Your Mother, first aired in 2007, Marshall mentions that he's had a song from Dirty Dancing, starring Patrick Swayze, stuck in his head for the last couple of days. He looks upwards and says "Damn you, Swayze!", which is less funny since Swayze's death from pancreatic cancer.
- An earthquake hits Washington, DC in the pre-credits sequence of the Bones episode "The Bones on a Blue Line". It aired a month after a earthquake hit Chile, and Chilean fans weren't amused.
- Taub and Kutner discuss suicide in the House episode "Painless". This is one of the things later latched on to fans as Foreshadowing towards the latter's suicide, which was specifically written to come completely out of nowhere.
- Earlier, in "Mirror Mirror", Kutner and Amber are debating which of them the patient, who had Mirror Syndrome, it mimicking. When he starts developing a new symptom, Kutner says "he's mimicking whichever one of us is dying". Both doctors would be dead by the end of the next season.
- Whose Line Is It Anyway? the UK version. Regular on the show for seven years, Tony Slattery was told by Clive Anderson after one disappointing game: "No points to Tony, I don't think we'll have him on the show ever again." This was episode six of season seven. With the exception of the compilation episodes taken from previously recorded footage, this actually was Tony Slattery's last ever appearance on the show. Soon after leaving, he suffered a nervous breakdown, not leaving his house for six months.
- During Conan O'Brien's last week as host of Late Night, he had a final interview with Matt Lauer. Lauer asked Conan if he wouldn't mind coming back to New York to visit in a year. Conan's response (in jest) was that he wouldn't be on television by next year. In mere months, he wasn't, though he would have a new show within a year.
- Conan O'Brien, in the first few weeks of his run on The Tonight Show used his trademark self effacing humor to often mention that his show was going to be canceled. These early jokes weren't funny by January 2010.
- In his second Emmy hosting gig, Conan opened the show with a song and dance lamenting the trouble NBC was experiencing. What was funny in 2006 became Harsher in Hindsight in 2010.
- On an early Frasier episode, the Girl of the Week arrives on American Airlines Flight 11. It Gets Worse: David Angell, one of the show's executive producers, was on that exact flight on 9/11. Niles and Daphne's son is named for him.
- In the Season 2 Pride episode of Queer As Folk, Vic tells Emmett that a mutual friend of theirs had just died from AIDS. When Emmett is shocked at the suddenness of it, Vic tells him, "Sometimes it happens very quickly. That can be a blessing." A few years later, Vic dies extremely suddenly due to side effects of his HIV medication.
- In an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Hodges and Simms are at a sci-fi convention when a body is found. Essentially, a crime happened at a convention. The day after someone was stabbed near the eye with a pen at the San Diego Comic Convention 2010 (The event was on a Saturday), this episode reran on Spike TV. This trope couldn't help be feel like this was odd to have this running so soon after the guy was hurt.
- The Tarantino-directed season 5 finale had the team desperately try to find their colleague Nick, who'd been buried alive and who began to suffer delusions from oxygen deprivation and being eaten by ants. The episode was put back from its original showing in the UK because of the London 7/7 bombings.
- In the fourth episode of Gossip Girl, Blair's mother tells her not to have croissants like her friend Serena, and instead to have fat-free yoghurt. Then Blair says she lost two pounds and her mother says "And you look amazing" in a patronizing sort of way. Then, it's just showing she's a bad mother, who likes Serena better. Then six episodes later we find out Blair's bulimic, and that scene becomes much more sad.
- Season 19, Episode 4 of Never Mind The Buzzcocks at one point has Simon Amstell saying to Amy Winehouse, "Am I going to just sit here while you drink yourself to death?" This was over two years before she tragically died from alcohol poisoning.
- Watching a repeat of Sandra Bullock's Feb. 2010 post Oscar-nom appearance for The Blind Side on The Tonight Show is doubly harsh: her intro-music was "Jessie's Girl" (she's no longer Jessie's girl after she found out about his affair), and she teased David Letterman about whether he'd ever kissed a woman (he admitted to doing a bit more than that after being threatened with blackmail, although that could've happened before and my memory is faulty).
- The Seven Days episode "Pinball Wizard" featured an aircraft being crashed into the The Pentagon during an attack, complete with faux footage of the building with one side blown in, and faux news coverage of the wreckage and mass casualties. It was filmed in 1999.
- In a 2007 episode of Kitchen Nightmares, celebrity chef and famously insufferable loudmouth Gordon Ramsay told New Jersey restaurateur Joseph Cerniglia that his business was "about to swim down the Hudson." In 2010 Cerniglia's body was found — in the Hudson — in an apparent suicide.
- In the Star Trek TOS episode "Assignment: Earth", Spock mentions that one of the events that occurred during the Enterprise's visit to Earth in 1968 was an assassination. The episode was first aired on March 29, 1968. Six days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Robert F. Kennedy was killed that year as well.
- The Route 66 episode "I'm Here to Kill a King" has Tod and Linc encountering a would-be political assassin who looks just like Tod. The episode was originally scheduled to air on the night of November 29, 1963; after the real-life assassination of President John F. Kennedy exactly one week earlier, CBS pulled the episode from its schedule, and it was not seen until the series went into syndication several years later.
- Stephen Colbert's astronaut training clips are a bit less funny since the wife of the shuttle pilot who helped him was targeted for assassination — she was shot in the head but survived; unfortunately the mentally unstable shooter killed six other people, including a federal judge and a little girl who was born on 9/11 who had just been elected class president.
- The Hill Street Blues season one episode "Life, Death, Eternity, Etc." features the sudden death of a secondary character due to ill health, causing Sgt. Phil Esterhaus (perhaps the most beloved character in the series, played by Michael Conrad) to ponder the transient nature of life. Michael Conrad would die three years later at the age of 57 due to cancer, with Sgt. Esterhaus dying in a special episode timed to correspond with the actor's death.
- The M*A*S*H episode "Blood Brothers" features Patrick Swayze as Pvt. Sturgis, a wounded soldier diagnosed with leukemia (which in the 1950s had a much higher mortality rate than it does now). Almost thirty years after the episode aired, Swayze himself died of cancer.
- The same episode had this trope intentionally written-in. When Swayze's character learns he has leukemia, and Hawkeye urges him to go to Tokyo to begin experimental treatments, Swayze's character cynically predicts "they'll have a cure in twenty years!" The episode aired in the early 80s, more then twenty years after the Korean War ended. And still no cure.
- Following a nasty contract dispute, Susan St. James was McLeaned from Mc Millan And Wife by having her character and infant son killed in an airplane crash. Nearly 30 years later, St. James' son was killed, and her husband and another son critically injured, in a plane crash.
- Hearing Captain Phil say during the 6th season of Deadliest Catch that he hopes "my dumb ass will be around for a while" when talking about his kids is a bit of a stab in the heart considering what happened to him.
- Pretty much anything that focused on Phil in Season 6, to deliberate effect. 'Catch' fans knew that Phil's death was going to be documented and thought the four months between his death and the showing would help steel themselves, but it still made it all the more unnerving when it happened on TV. One particular moment: In the episode "Valhalla", which documented the fleet's reactions to the death of Phil, Sig Hansen goes to meet Cornelia Marie relief captain Derek Ray in Saint Paul. While talking with Sig, Derek commented he could only take up so much of Phil's space in the wheelhouse so the only thing he removed was the ashtray. Sig joked that Phil would find that funny. Problem was, none of the fleet knew that Phil had passed yet, so Derek broke the news. It was awkward from that point on.
- This year's After The Catch is/was in New Orleans, where that area's fishermen are experiencing some very bad times due to the Gulf Coast oil spill. This is addressed a few episodes later when the captains see the effects of the spill up close; having lived through the Exxon Valdez oil spill themselves the Gulf spill is especially disturbing. It's also noted that all the fishing-related activities they did have since been shut down indefinitely.
- In the home video of a crew not associated with the show, one man jokingly said that his friends ought to be on Deadliest Catch. The video aired as part of a special episode after the ship sank with either one or no survivors.
- Burn Notice: S1, Episode 9, "Wanted Man". The Libyan spy that Michael is cultivating comments, "The security forces of my country are not known for being gentle." This has been dramatically proven; as of the day of this edit, the 2011 Libyan Uprising riots are being suppressed—with gunship strafing.
- The X-Files episode "Beyond The Sea" opens with Captain William Scully, Scully's father, dying of a massive coronary off screen. Fourteen years later Don S Davis who played Captain Scully would die of the exact same thing.
- In the Stargate SG-1 episode "2010", it was mentioned that General Hammond (Don S. Davis' character) had died of a massive heart attack in 2004. It turned out that only four years after this date, Davis did indeed die of a heart attack.
- Also, In the Season 5 two-parter finale (the end of the first part, more specifically), when introduced to Hammond's temporary replacement, Weaver, Bra'tac asks if Hammond of Texas (his term of respect for the General) had fallen in battle. It becomes a lot more harsh when watching it after Davis' death.
- The Golden Girls featured an episode in which the girls, in the end, made a pact to always take care of each other, even if it meant going to the same nursing homes. At which point, Rose, played by Betty White, asks the question "What happens when there's only one of us left?" Cue 2010, where White is the only member of the cast left alive.
- To rub salt in on the wound, Estelle Getty, who played Sophia, the oldest character on the show, nonchalantly replies that she'll be able to take care of herself at that point. Getty would die first of the four, despite being younger than Co-Stars Betty White and Bea Arthur.
- This troper caught a promo for Two and a Half Men that played the following scene—-Berta: "You ever gonna stop drinking?" Charlie: "No, I'll just stop waking up." Meant as a joke, but with Sheen's lifestyle hopefully it won't be a line that haunts that show.
- It is: According to recent press releases, because of both Two and a Half Men still airing and Charlie Sheen being fired due to the aforementioned lifestyle choices of his, Charlie Harper ends up killed off, with the season starter having a funeral for him with his family and his various girlfriends attending.
- Tori Spelling's short-lived sitcom So NoTorious was a self-parodying look at her life as a struggling actress and daughter of Hollywood royalty. It featured caricatured versions of her parents: her mother as a glamorous yet passive-aggressive nutjob, and her father as...basically the speakerbox from Charlie's Angels. A year later, Aaron Spelling dies, and Candy Spelling basically disinherits Tori. Maybe she hit a nerve there...
- The Daily Show: In one episode, Jon Stewart was commenting on the rising unemployment rates, the increasing deficit, and lack of solid political leadership with a very simple "We're doomed!". The day that episode aired? September 10th, 2001.
- The Japanese game show DERO! had a round where a team of contestants is put inside a room a bit more than 2 meters tall, and have to solve a series of puzzles via Linked List Clue Methodology involving various objects in the room, while water is pumped into the room, gradually making it harder to find and reach those objects. They win money if they successfully complete the challenge in time, but if the water level reaches a height of 2 meters first (leaving them with a couple inches of breathing room), the water stops, the game ends in failure, and the team gets nothing (besides wet) from the round. This game suddenly became considerably less fun and exciting a year later when the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster left a ton of houses in Sendai underwater and drowned many of their residents. It got so bad that the show was immediately pulled off the air with its remaining taped episodes never aired, including a two-hour special. The production team ended up Retooling the show into TORE!, a Spiritual Successor which premiered 4 months later.
- The already unsettling Millennium episode "TEOTWAWKI" became even more disturbing to watch after a certain high school massacre.
- On The Glee Project two contestants had to sing the song Valerie as covered by Amy Winehouse to avoid elimination. The judges made a couple goodhearted jokes at Ms. Winehouse's expense. Amy Winehouse died less than a week later and the episode did not air online until three days after her death.
- The image of Kate in a body bag with a bullet hole in her forehead in Gibbs' dream in the first season finale of NCIS (written before anyone knew Sasha Alexander was leaving the show) was jarring when it first aired, but it was even more jarring when she died the exact same way in the finale of the following season.
- In a later season episode of Boy Meets World, newly-married Cory and Topanga try to buy a starter home so they can leave their ramshackle apartment despite barely having any money. The realter draws up a special mortgage plan for them so they can buy the house but the plan requires signatures from the parents, and Mr. and Mrs. Matthews refuse to sign it because thy don't think Cory and Topanga will be able to make the payments. The moral of the episode is that you need to work to earn what you buy and not rely on others for help. This episode aired in 1999, many years before the late 2000s economic recession which was caused in part by this kind of financial behavior: young couples buying homes they couldn't afford through subprime mortgage payments.
- The Glee episode "Duets" makes one feel for poor Quinn because of her parents, a father who wants only a perfect daughter and a mother who ignores any problems. After Home and Born This Way, you realize just how bad those traits were, as her mother had turned a eye as Quinn went on crazy diets (including starving herself to the point of passing out) and her father allowed his thirteen year old daughter to get a nose job
- A short-lived USA Network reality show called Combat Missions pitted former soldiers, sailors, Marines, and cops against each other in various mock combat scenarios. One of the contestants was Scott Helvenston, a US Navy SEAL. Through the contacts he made on the show, he later joined Blackwater USA and was sent to Iraq. His convoy was ambushed in Fallujah, and his body along with his colleagues' were publicly desecrated, leading to the First Battle of Fallujah later that week.
- The original TV version of Edge Of Darkness features Bob Peck as the lead character, who through the course of events contracts and subsequently dies of radiation poisoning. Peck himself died of Cancer some years later, making the slow decline of his character due to radiation rather tragic. In addition to this, it's established his character's wife died of Cancer some years previous, making a number of scenes where he reflects on this downright uncomfortable now.
- In Kamen Rider Den-O, Yuuto Sakurai/Kamen Rider Zeronos' Super Mode is powered by special cards that erase the memories of his younger self. While it was a fairly ominous idea then, it becomes more depressing knowing that Yuuto's actor, Yuichi Nakamura, has all but disappeared since late 2010 due to a Game Breaking Injury.
- There's a season 3 Highlander episode where Richie asks Duncan if they'll ever have to fight each other. Guess what happens in season 5, that leads to Richie's death?
- In-universe example in The Drew Carey Show, a season 5 episode has a joke where Mimi's prepared a suitcase for Steve in case he ever cheats on her. Guess what he did a couple seasons later?
Music
- MartinaMcBride's Concrete Angel is bad enough, noting an abusive relationship that ends in death, and the memorial as a concrete angel. But after hearing about the "Concrete-encased high school girl murder case" and the resulting guro manga made of the incident (no links, please), it becomes particularly chilling when you realize none of the lyrics suggest that it was her parents that did this, and the entire song could just as easily describe this incident. It wasn't intentional, not that it matters.
- "Rehab" by Amy Winehouse sounds a lot more disturbing since she passed away after a lifetime of drugs and alcohol abuse.
- "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd is a perfect example of this trope. "If I leave here tomorrow..."
- Taiji Sawada. Here's just a few of them...
- In the video for "Week End" for X Japan, he was killed. A Conspiracy Theory with arguable validity (more validity than the official statement that he committed suicide) state that his death was an intentional homicide.
- One of the songs he co-wrote was "Voiceless Screaming," a pained reflection on depression and its related suffering, somewhat modeled on Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. He would later release this song in his solo work as "Voiceless," as a tribute to his late best friend, hide.
- With Loudness he wrote, among others, the songs "Black Widow" and "Racing The Wind," which were Exactly What It Says on the Tin for the first, and an angry Religion Rant Song for the second. Arguably, two of the people who contributed to his death were a Black Widow and a shadowy religious guru who he had began to follow.
- Many of the songs in his career with D.T.R. referred to his experiences with drugs and mental illness...both of which would become constant companions in his life.
- Smiley Culture was a UK reggae artist who had a few hits in the 80s. His most famous song was called "Police Officer", and is about how he was about to be busted for drugs possession when the police realised who he was (their family members were big fans of his previous song "Cockney Translator"). The arrest was more or less called off on the provision that he sign some items for them. In 2011, police performed a drug raid on his house. As he could no longer use his fame or money to get himself out of being sent to prison, he committed suicide. The very subject of his biggest hit came back to haunt him and resulted in his death.
- Warren Zevon has a couple of these; most noticeably "My Shit's Fucked Up", and "Life'll Kill ya." The former is about a patient finding out he's terminally ill (in a decidedly un-clinical way), and the latter includes the lyrics "Some get the awful, awful diseases." Warren died in 2003 of Mesothelioma, a form of lung cancer.
- The last song on the final Elliott Smith album released in his lifetime is titled "Bye." His first posthumously released album features "King's Crossing", which is basically a musical suicide note. Depressing when he used to perform it live, now it's just chilling.
- The Notorious B.I.G. named his first two albums Ready to Die and Life After Death. He was gunned down in Los Angeles just weeks before the release of the latter, which ends with a song titled "You're Nobody ('Til Somebody Kills You)".
- German bubblegum dance group Passion Fruit released their first (and only) album, Spanglish Love Affairs, in April 2000. One of the tracks on the album is "Do You Remember", a haunting song about missing someone during Christmastime, complete with a sample of their normally upbeat first single, "Rigga Ding Dong Song", that sounds like a broken down carnival ride. Tragedy hit when the band was involved in a plane crash, killing two of the three members, Maria Serrano and Nathaly van het Ende, and severely injuring the survivor, Debby St. Marteen. The date of the crash? November 24, 2001 - a little over a month before Christmas. "Do You Remember" is rather chilling in the fact that it sounds just like a song dedicated to Maria and Nathaly's deaths, and even as a farewell to the group as a whole due to the sample - but it was released almost two years before the accident. People have expressed surprise that the song was indeed on their album and not actually written about the crash.
- J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers charted in 1964 with "Last Kiss," a sad song memorializing an (actual) gruesomely fatal car crash. Around the time that the single made the top ten, J. Frank was involved in an auto accident that left him injured and the band's manager dead.
- The video for the Johnny Cash cover of "Hurt" has a quick cut to his wife June Carter Cash as he sings "Everyone I know/Goes away in the end". Her death a few months later made the video even more depressing.
- In 1997, Michael Jackson released the song "Morphine" on the album Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix. The song was a chilling description of drug abuse, with lines like "A heart attack, baby" and "Trust in me / Just in me / Put all your trust in me", the latter line referring to dependence on the titular drug. The bridge is even worse: the angry singing turns into a soft, melancholy melody describing a person's slide into addiction, specifically to the painkiller Demerol, while the sounds of a respirator, an ECG machine, and presumably a doctor talking are heard in the background. Between 2003 and 2005, Jackson allegedly became dependent on Demerol. Then, on June 25, 2009, Jackson died of cardiac arrest, eventually deemed to have been a homicide caused by a lethal combination of drugs, primarily the anesthetic propofol, administered by his personal doctor. As of August 30, the doctor is currently under investigation for manslaughter, although he claims that Jackson specifically asked for propofol, and he also claims that he had administered it every night for six weeks.
- On top of the obvious points listed above, there is also a chilling pattern present on the album as a whole. The album, primarily a remix album, included five original songs, "Morphine" being the second. The first song, "Blood on the Dance Floor", sang about an attempted murder (albeit with a knife), while the final two original songs ("Ghosts" and "Is It Scary") both dealt with ghostly imagery straight out of a horror movie. Combining "Morphine" with a song about homicide and two songs about ghosts is even more chillingly prophetic than the song alone.
- "Breaking News", one of the unfinished-in-his-lifetime songs on the posthumously-assembled Michael, starts with a very harsh line. This troper cringes every time she hears it. The fact that the dialogue seems to be taken directly from reports talking about him - the point of the song - makes it even scarier.
"The clock begins to destroy Michael Jackson."
- Actually, the line is "The PLOT begins to destroy Michael Jackson," in keeping with the overall 'scumbag media' theme of the song. (Ironically, this line takes on a more sinister interpretation when one realizes that "Breaking News" was an extremely controversial song, widely believed - with strong evidence behind it - to be another singer imitating Jackson's voice on a song he recorded no vocals for in his lifetime.)
- Most of Joy Division's lyrics. Especially In A Lonely Place: "Hangman looks round as he waits, cord stretches tight as it breaks, one day we will die in your dreams, how I wish you were here with me now".
- For Squirrels' single "The Mighty KC" was inspired by Kurt Cobain's suicide, and while the chorus was actually optimistic, the verses were needless to say pretty bleak. A month before the album it was on came out, half of the band (including vocalist Jack Vigliatura III) and their manager died when their touring van overturned. Particularly eerie because all had died younger than Cobain did (Vigliatura was only 21), and because the song included the line "Ship me off to the morgue, I'm ready to be buried".
- Kurt Cobain's suicide makes some Nirvana material uncomfortable.
- "Come as You Are" has the chorus, "And I swear that I don't have a gun/No I don't have a gun/No I don't have a gun."
- One of their last singles is called "I Hate Myself And I Want To Die," though the lyrics have nothing to do with it.
- This song was reportedly named after the phrase Cobain liked to use whenever people asked him "How are you?", because he hated that question.
- When Kurt Cobain was 15, he made a short film entitled, "Kurt Commits Bloody Suicide".
- One photo of the band has Kurt holding a shotgun in his mouth.
- Rakim in 1991, right after the Gulf War: "Even though we won, it doesn't mean its peace. So I wait for terrorists to attack, every time a truck fires, I fire back. I look for shelter when a plane is over me, remember Pearl Harbor? New York could be over, G. Kamikazes, strapped with bombs, no peace in the east, they want revenge for Saddam." Not exactly right in all details, but pretty scary nonetheless.
- One of the verses in Phil Ochs "There but for Fortune" is about a man whose life was ruined by alcohol. Only one example of Phil's more depressing lyrics describing his own future and eventually suicide.
- Just listen to Chords of Fame:
I found him by the stage last night
He was breathing his last breath
A bottle of gin and a cigarette
Was all that he had left
"I can see you're making music
'Cause you carry a guitar
But God help the troubadour
Who tries to be a star'"
- And then there's No More Songs:
Hello, hello, hello Is there anybody home? I've only called to say I'm sorry. The drums are in the dawn, and all the voices gone. And it seems that there are no more songs.
Once I knew a saint
who sang upon the stage
He told about the world,
His lover.
A ghost without a name,
Stands ragged in the rain.
And it seems that there are no more songs.
- Jordin Kare's Fire in the Sky, has the fourth verse, about the space shuttle Columbia, end with "See her big jets burning. See her fire in the sky." Then we did. (apparently he has since added a verse to recognize this.)
- The wording of the fifth verse "And with Challenger and seven, once again the price is paid", which sounds like it refers to two incidents with seven people being lost, but actually is just an accident of wording.
- Similarly, Billy Joe Royal had a country hit called "Burned Like a Rocket." It reached #10 on the Billboard charts and was still heading up when the Challenger Disaster occurred, and radio stations stopped playing the song.
- Squad Five-O's album art for Bombs Over Broadway, released in 2000, Has a downright chilling feel to it now. Likewise, the lyrics for the song the album was named for are unnerving at best: New York, New York. Our pride has done you in. Lights out, New York City. You were the first, but you won't be the last.
- A song from Elton John's Blue Moves album from 1976, "Idol", is a rumination on the rise and fall of a (possibly fictional) washed-up teen idol from The Fifties, one whose "face has changed, he's not the same anymore". This song was inspired by Elton's meeting Elvis Presley for the first time, and being horrified at the distressed state Elvis was in. A year later, Elvis would be dead. This would serve as a wake-up call for Elton to slow down his own career, lest he wind up like Elvis. Unfortunately, Elton's drug and alcohol habits, promiscuity and bulimia were still taking over his life. After seeing himself in a video singing at Ryan White's funeral as sad, bloated, morbidly obese and "look(ing) like a 75-year old man", he finally took himself to rehab in 1990 and saved his life.
- A verse in Queen's 1989 album, The Miracle, called "Khashoggi's Ship", contains the lines "I'm in pretty good shape" and "No one stops my party". Freddie Mercury secretly (but knowingly) was dying of AIDS at the time.
- The Miracle was so called as it was "a miracle" it was finished as Freddie was so ill.
- Also "I'm Going Slightly Mad" is not so funny when you know it was all his fears about dementia brought on by AIDS.
- YMMV...Word Of God said himself that it was just a silly joke song he wrote in about 5 minutes.
- Freddie, Queen, and the few other people who knew about Freddie's illness did and said all that they could to hide the fact that Freddie had the disease, at least until it was too obvious to keep it a secret. It wasn't mentioned in interviews, talked about in private, etc. until the night before his death, when Freddie sent the press release. Freddie wanted to carry on as normally as possible until the end, and did not want the tabloid press to complicate his life or the lives of those he cared for, or for anyone to worry about him or buy his records out of sympathy. So any Word Of God you get from Freddie, Queen, etc. up until November 23, 1991 was made while trying to keep the issue a secret and downplay any "clues" about his condition.
- Unrelated to Freddie, but the song Under Pressure features many scenes of skyscrapers being destroyed. It was supposed to be moving and deep, and still is...but for completely different reasons.
- The video for Eminem's song Like Toy Soldiers featured D12 member Proof being gunned down and then dying from his wounds in the hospital. Proof was shot and killed for real only a year later.
- "New Life" by Blind Melon was written about vocalist Shannon Hoon hoping the birth of his daughter would give him enough strength to turn his life around - unfortunately he died of a drug overdose the year she was born.
- When Charlie Fink, the frontman of British indie folk group Noah and the Whale, split up with his beloved girlfriend, he and his band crafted a rather melancholy and gloomy (and no doubt somewhat autobiographical) concept album The First Days of Spring about the messy break of a relationship as a result. The whole thing makes the small hit "5 Years Time" from the band's previous album Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down rather melancholy to listen, with its happily optimistic daydreaming about having good times with your beloved and hopes that in five years they'll still be together.
- Its especially harsh because his girlfriend was singer/songwriter Laura Marling who was also a member of the band up until she and Fink broke up and she sung back up on "5 Years Time" (and the rest of the album) and he produced her debut solo album Alas, I Cannot Swim which was more acclaimed and popular than the band's album. Her second album I Speak Because I Can was also a much gloomier affair than her first because of the breakup. Again, Marling's album was much more acclaimed and popular. Happily, he's seemed to have gotten over this, as the band's next album Last Night on Earth, despite its Creator Breakdown-alluding title, was a much happier affair.
- On The Who's "Tommy," the song "Sally Simpson" tells the story of a girl who sneaks out of her house to see Tommy speak, only to be injured when the audience's passionate reaction to Tommy causes them to riot. It is very chilling to hear after the infamous Who concert riot of 1979.
- Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice" is a song about the unpredictability of life and death, and the last song John Lennon worked on. He was shot to death the day he finished recording it, and died clutching the completed mix of the song in his hands.
- After Hurricane Katrina "New Orleans is sinking" by The Tragically Hip was not played on radio stations, at least in Canada for months.
- Trust me, it wasn't played in the US either.
- The title song from Alice Cooper's 1977 album "Lace and Whiskey" mentions that he'll "end up a broken old hobo with red and yellow eyes, swearin' and drunk and dyin" but "that's a long, long way from today". Later in the same year he was hospitalized to cure his alcoholism.
- In August 2009, critically acclaimed indie punk rocker Jay Reatard released his second solo album, Watch Me Fall. A little over five months later in January 2010, he died in his bed of cocaine toxicity, after a tumultuous year that culminated in the firing of his entire live band.
- The first single from ''Watch Me Fall" was entitled "It Ain't Gonna Save Me", which for almost the last half focused around a hook based on the line "all is lost, there is no hope for me".
- In The Beatles, "Come Together," John Lennon says the phrase "shoot me" numerous times. Unfortunately...
- One of Britney Spears' early singles, "Lucky" talks about an actress who has fame, beauty, awards...and soul-crushing loneliness. Given the singer's later breakdowns, the song takes on a creepy air of foretelling.
- James "The Rev" Sullivan's backing vocal tracks of Avenged Sevenfold's Afterlife "I'm much too young to fall" and later on "I am unbroken, I'm choking, on this ecstasy/ Unbreak me, unchain me, I need another chance to live". The Rev died of drug overdose at age 28.
- Billy Joel's "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" straddles the line between this trope and a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment, as Joel originally intended the described destruction of New York City to be tongue-in-cheek or, in his words, "science fiction". After 9/11 some of the imagery (particularly the falling skyline) became all too real. Billy averted Too Soon by playing the song very soon after 9/11 at a benefit concert, lampshading these tropes, saying "I never thought it would really happen. But unlike the end of that song, we ain't going anywhere."
- Harry Chapin's "Dreams Go By" has this verse:
You say you should have been a ballerina, babe
There are songs I should have sung
But I guess our dreams have come and gone
You gotta dream when you are young
- While "Forecast Fascist Future" by of Montreal is filled with one Lyrical Shoehorn after another (or, given Kevin Barnes's Elephant 6-flavored personality, a bizarre universe), the title and chorus was always marked as a harsh criticism towards his audience. Considering how things got worse, it almost seems prophetic now, especially the chorus:
Boredom murders the heart of our age
While sanguinary creeps take the stage (they're on the stage!)
Boredom strangles the life from the printed page!
- In 2004, Phil Anselmo, a former bandmate of Dimebag Darrell's, had said, "I could kill [Darrell] like a fuckin' piece of vapor. The world should know that. He deserves to be beaten severely". Weeks later, Darrell was shot to death onstage.
- Scissor Sisters song 'Mary'. "Mary" is about Jake Shears' platonic love for his friend Mary. The song itself sounds a bit mournful, though it was released in 2004. It was two years before she died of an aneurysm.
- Whitney Houston's sophomore album, Whitney, contained a song called "Love is a Contact Sport". While the lyrics were basic fluff, the title in particular is quite harsher considering the level of physical violence in her marriage to fellow singer Bobby Brown.
- Aaliyah, early in her career, did the soundtrack for the animated film Anastasia. Think about it: a girl who tragically died too young did music for a movie whose titular character tragically died too young IRL.
- King Crimson's song "Larks' Tongues in Aspic IV" (specifically, the "Coda: I Have a Dream" section), released in 2000, has lyrics consisting of a list of major events during the 20th century; one line of lyrics is "Tim McVeigh, Saddam Hussein, the bombing of the World Trade". Many live performances of this song used an instrumental version of the coda (although they started doing this at least as early as August 2001).
- Brian Wilson's old Beach Boys song "In My Room" where he 'locks out all his worries and fears' and where he 'won't be afraid' takes on some real gravity when you know what his family life was like.
- The end of Dan Fogelberg's "Tucson, Arizona (Gazette)" after the 2011 Tucson shooting. Just look at the similarities between Tony in the song and the suspect in this one article alone:
- "Now a second high school sweetheart is speaking out. [She] says the same thing — that Loughner cared about grades, friends, school — but turned to marijuana, alcohol and hallucinogens like mushrooms after the break up."
The papers simply stated, it must have been the drugs that drove him mad
- "he was actually a really nice kid when it came to it..."
The neighbors speculated, what could make a good boy go so bad?
- "She says he came from a dysfunctional family, and never got along with his parents."
It might have been the home he never had.
- Accidental elegys:
- Darren Criss performed his song "Not Alone" at the Trevor Live concert for The Trevor Project. The song itself is a heartwarming, if bittersweet ballad, but lines like "I've seen how heartless the world can be" become utterly heartbreaking in light of The Trevor Project's very existence. Especially the chorus.
Baby, you're not alone
'Cause you're here with me
- The first Jack's Mannequin album, Everything In Transit's references to being sick was due to Andrew McMahon's recovery from tour burnout. Those lyrics would then turn eerily ironic when he visits his doctor for a case of laryngitis only to discover he had leukemia. Even eerier? He was diagnosed with leukemia the day he was finished with mixing the album and the day he was admitted to the hospital for leukemia was the day the album was released.
- The Dio track "End of the World" off of the "Master of the Moon" album contains the line "They say you never hear the bullet that kills, and I don't hear a sound...". After Ronnie James Dio died of cancer, it was revealed that the cancer wasn't caught until a very late stage, due to his stubborn reluctance to ever see a doctor (not even once he was having obvious symptoms, so certainly not for routine screenings). In contrast to the image the line originally evoked, it now calls to mind the idea that if he had been listening for the bullet, he might have heard it in time to dodge.
- Italian rapper Caparezza set up a Viral Marketing fake blog to promote his latest album. The blog is written from the perspective of a Conspiracy Theorist, in reference to one of the songs that mock conspiracy nuts, and its second entry is about natural catastrophes. The album came out March 1, 2011, and on March 11 a massive earthquake hit Japan, triggering a colossal tsunami and a nuclear meltdown.
- The music video for McFly's 19th single 'That's the Truth' featured bassist Dougie reacting badly to a breakup. Shortly after the video's release, Dougie was admitted to rehab, the reason rumoured to be depression over breaking up with his girlfriend.
- John Lennon's "Beautiful Boy", written for his son Sean, features the line "I can hardly wait until you come of age but I guess we'll both just have to be patient". He was murdered a few years later, when his son was five (even his older son, Julian, was only a teenager).
- Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks" is eerie enough in a post-Columbine world:
All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks better run, better run, outrun my gun
All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks better run, better run, faster than my bullet
—and is downright scary after the Oslo/Utoya attacks where 69 teenagers were murdered by a lone gunman.
- In Coheed and Cambria's "Blood Red Summer" video, Claudio Sanchez (lead vocals, rhythm guitar) looks up to see Joshua Eppard (drums) and Mic Todd (bass) sitting in rocking chairs, waving to him, and vanishing. Josh later left the band to further a solo project, while Mic left after being charged for robbery while on drugs. Even worse, in their "A Favor House Atlantic: The Movie" self-parody video, Mic's personality was essentially boiled down to "the stoner".
- In 2011, Anal Cunt released "Wearing Out Our Welcome", which has become this trope due to the death of lead singer Seth Putnam the same year.
- The songs "Nothing's Offensive Anymore" and "Wasting Time Writing Anal Cunt Songs", both discussing how the band was declining and running out of steam.
- The cover art featured a man with a needle in his arm. Putnam's death by heart attack was likely due to his excessive drug usage.
- From "Heart of Gold" by Neil Young: "Keep me searching for a heart of gold...and I'm getting old." First sung when he was 25. He is now 65.
- In 1973, keyboardist Richard Wright of Pink Floyd wrote an instrumental piece as part of The Dark Side of the Moon caled "The Great Gig In The Sky", which evokes grief, sorrow and fear of death. Wright was the first member of the band lineup that recorded the album to die, age 65, in 2008 of cancer.
- In 1994, Weezer released the song "Mykel and Carli," a cute, bittersweet tribute to two girls who ran the Weezer fan club - actually it's something of a tuckerization as the Mykel and Carli in the song are a pair of friends in high school, who the narrator still misses. The song, which was released as a B-side to "Undone (The Sweater Song)," takes a more poignant tone when you learn that, a few years after the song was released, both Mykel and Carli died in a tragic car accident on their way to a Weezer show. The song can be found on the Deluxe Edition of the Blue Album.
- Even more poignant, the A-side "Undone" features spoken word segments. One of them was provided by Mykel.
- The Russian band Kino became extremely famous in their home country in the late 80s, and their lead singer Viktor Tsoi was seen as an icon of Russian youth during perestroika. The last song on their final album (which became known as "The Black Album") was called "Следи за собой," which translates as "Watch Out For Yourself." The lyrics discuss the imminence of death, by discussing several very grim ways in which one can die, including the line, "Someone, coming out of their house, will get hit by a car." Viktor Tsoi died on August 15, 1990 when his car collided with a bus. What's more, even though he had been performing the song for several years beforehand, the recording of the final version that would go on the posthumously released Black Album, along with the other tracks on the album, was the only thing that survived the crash.
- The current single by pop singer Katy Perry (as of January 2012) is "The One That Got Away", taken from her 2010 album, Teenage Dream. Not long after she released the single in late 2011 came the announcement that she and Russell Brand were divorcing.
- Perhaps it was deliberate, but the second and final album by Too Good to Last 1990s power-pop band Jellyfish was titled Spilt Milk, a reference to the phrase, "don't cry over spilt milk". The band would break up over Creative Differences a year later, while the album would experience low sales in the wake of Grunge. With the band less and less likely to reunite, and their albums being reappraised as catchy, sunny, well-crafted, Beatlesque masterpieces misunderstood at the time of release, many fans may indeed be "crying over ''Spilt Milk''".
Newspaper Comics
- One Bloom County strip sets up the punchline by saying that the local newspaper reported on a "heterosexual AIDS epidemic" that turned out to be a false alarm. ...Yeah.
Professional Wrestling
- One of the paid advertisements that the New World Order ran on Nitro saw Sting's entrance parodied by having someone cut the wire and having an action figure fall into a toy ring. As the video ended, the Sting doll was placed into a casket. The video aired in late 1997 to build towards the Starrcade main event with Sting and Hulk Hogan. However, this uncomfortably mirrored the Owen Hart tragedy that took place about a year and a half later.
- One such example deals with Muhammad Hassan being carried off by several masked men as though he were a suicide bomber after a beatdown on The Undertaker. The footage was taped a few days before 7/7, but it wound up airing on 7/7.
- At the first One Night Stand, Mike Awesome does a Suicide Dive onto Tanaka, and Joey Styles said "It's a damn shame he didn't really take his own life!" A few years later, Awesome killed himself.
- When Chris Benoit and his family were found dead the morning of a scheduled 3-hour episode of Raw, the show was scrapped and replaced with a special episode dedicated to his past wrestling career. It was found out very soon after the episode aired that he was likely to have murdered his own family, then committed suicide.
- What makes this so bad is that the WWE tried to avert this but the very attempt itself caused it to be played straight. Talk about a no-win situation...
- A promo for Wrestlemania 19 had a voice-over talking about what wrestlers go through to make their mark on history and become immortals, and when it says "Someday, we will die", it focuses on Eddie Guerrero. It's rather uncomfortable to watch these days, because of his death two years later.
- Just like John Madden Football has it's Madden Curse, WWE has it's Undertaker curse, where, in the Smackdown VS RAW series, the wrestler feuding with the Undertaker ends up dying in real life. It first happened with Eddie Guerrero in Smackdown VS RAW 2006, in which it ends in a Casket Match. Guerrero died 2 days later. It got worse in the following year in a feud with Chris Benoit. The creepiest part? Undertaker says to him, "While your family mourns over your dead carcass, your family will have no one to blame but you." Brrrr.
Radio
- From the opening of the 1938 version of The War of the Worlds: "In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment, near the end of October....the war scare was over."
- The Audio Drama of A New Hope has this scene, in which Darth Vader is interrogating Leia with a combination of drugs and the Dark Side of the Force, making her suggestible. Vader tells her that her father wants to know what she's done with the Death Star plans, and goes from gently coaxing to telling her her father orders she tell them. When she gasps that Father wouldn't, Vader switches to telling her that she's in incredible pain. Burning alive, and her flesh has been torn apart, she's dying!
Tabletop Games
- Unknown Armies has a published adventure titled "Fly to Heaven," in which an airplane is hijacked by a madman who plans to broadcast himself crashing the plane into the Sears Tower in order to ascend to the Invisible Clergy as the archetype of The Terrorist. Did we mention this was published in 1998?
- One of the Shadowrun supplements from the 90s describes a volcanic eruption in Japan that triggers nuclear accidents at a cluster of fusion power plants, irradiating large areas of the island nation's densely-populated coastline. At the time, it read like WizKids backpeddling on the game-line's previous Japan Takes Over the World slant, but it's a lot darker of a Take That now...
Theater
- The title song in Cabaret has always been an emotionally loaded number, but after the death of Natasha Richardson, who played Sally in the 1998 revival, it's almost physically painful to listen to, especially in the verses about Elsie.
- The harshness of that song goes back even earlier: Liza Minelli, who won an Oscar as Sally, struggled with drug addiction in real life. The song Cabaret glorifies dying of an overdose as going out with a bang, so to speak. When Minelli performs the song in concert today, she actually changes the line, "When I go, I'm going like Elsie," to "When I go, I'm *not* going like Elsie," to make it less depressing.
- In Christopher Durang's "Beyond Therapy," Prudence asks Bob, who is a pharmacist, "What exactly is in Tylenol, anyway?" Shortly after the play opened, several bottles of Tylenol were contaminated with cynide in the Chicago area, leading to the tragic deaths of consumers.
- W. S. Gilbert's last play ends with the criminal protagonist dead from heart failure, just as his death sentence was commuted, because he thought the people coming in to tell him he wasn't going to be killed were about to take him to be hanged, and he had a weak heart. Gilbert died of heart failure shortly after, while rescuing a young woman from a pond. He had diabetes, which weakens the heart. Context? Very different. Cause of death? The same.
- Dunno if this is really where this belongs, but there's a song strictly in the musical version of The Lion King, called Endless Night. The song tends to be quite creepy, and ridiculously heart-breaking when you realize the man singing this version, Jason Raize, proceeded to hang himself at the age of 28.
- Watching Alan Cumming and Hilary Lyon act out the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene from Hamlet is just...odd now, as they were married at the time but now aren't.
- Edward Rochester's (of Jane Eyre fame) attitude towards women is (arguably) problematic at the best of the times, but The Musical makes matters worse: the actor who originated the role (and thus the one on the cast recording) would later be arrested for statutory rape. This gives certain lines in songs like "As Good As You" a creepy (creepier?) subtext. Plus, when you consider that in the book Jane is a teenager and Rochester is middle-aged, well...
- An example that doesn't have an event in real life mirroring it, (and played for comedy), the main antagonist of Sister Act, Shanke is singing about getting back his girlfriend after she saw him commit a murder. He uses the line, "When I find my baby, I ain't letting her go." The song is Lyrical Dissonance and sung to sound like a love song, but the verses following are actually about him drilling, shooting, stabbing, drowning, disemboweling, and giving "her skull a big dent with a blunt instrument". He repeats the line after each verse, (including the first, where he already establishes that he wants to kill her) but by then we pretty much get the point.
- He also says it towards the end, but this time he says it threateningly.
Video Games
- Another case involved the death of Liam Neeson's wife: the character he voiced for the game Fallout 3 loses his wife in the intro sequence.
- The 1990 Neo Geo game The Super Spy ends with a warning on the increase in power of terrorism, complete with an image of the Twin Towers in the background. Then come 9/11...
- The Neo Geo arcade game Sonic Wings 2 (aka Aero Fighters 2) features New York as the backdrop for level 2. While the Statues of Liberty can be shot for a powerup, there is no physical damage, though this is not the case with BOTH twin towers. Not only that, but there's money inside each! Paid to destroy the twin towers. Golly.
- An in-game example comes from Tales of Symphonia. Close to the beginning, there is a cutscene about Lloyd's Exphere in with Genis says something about his mother protecting him through it. It feels way heavier the second time you play it since you then know that the Desians imprisoned his mother's probably still conscious soul in the stone, which gives it its power.
- Again with 9/11, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 features the World Trade Center burning on the cover (though that cover was later recalled), and a mission in the Soviet campaign allows you to destroy them yourself (they are better utilized as garrisons for your conscripts). As if that wasn't enough, there's a mission involving an attack on the Pentagon as well.
- Later patches would change the names of these buildings (and other famous monuments) to generic ones. And then fan mods reverted the names because as we all know, people don't like censorship.
- Stalin's death by poison in the original Red Alert's Soviet campaign end. The fact that he was actually poisoned in Real Life which caused his stroke was not known when the game was made.
- Warren Spector once joked that the lack of the two towers in the NYC skybox for Deus Ex (released in 2000) was due to a terrorist attack. Guess what happened about a year later?
- A rare example of it happening before the game is released, so the moment really only happened to the developers: Metal Gear Solid 2 had a scene showing Arsenal Gear crashing into New York, including a detailed scene where the towers were destroyed. It was supposedly going to be one of the best scenes in the game - but just before the game was set for release, 9/11 happened, causing them to hastily edit the scene and leave it rather disjointed.
- More specifically, the landfall of Arsenal Gear purportedly destroyed all of New York City's financial district. The prow made it so far inland as to toss the protagonist and his nemesis onto the roof of Federal Hall, which, as anyone who has been to Wall Street knows, is quite removed from the coastline. Early concept art shows the devastation, with pretty much the entire south end of Manhattan reduced to smoldering rubble. The final version cuts away to black as Arsenal Gear approaches the Brooklyn Bridge, then shows the mobile base already at rest at Federal Hall.
- In a more traditional example, the 2010 oil spill off the US coastline makes one wonder when British Petrol is gonna put up a Big Shell over the Gulf of Mexico...
- The game also introduces the main villains of the series with the Nebulous Evil Organization of the Patriots, which has been in full control of American politics apparently for well over a hundred years with the ultimate goal of stripping the population of its civil liberties and turn them into mindless slaves that are completely oblivious of their control. Given that the game was released in November 2001, any similarities to the PATRIOT Act and its aftermath are probably completely coincidence.
- On a related note, the founders of the Patriots were implied in that game to be 12 people who control american politics, and Solidus, the supposed main villain, is trying to save America from the Patriots plans, which are implied to be destroying everything America stood for including liberty. Now, take into account Obama and the pro-government control movement's plan to have a supercommittee made up of a select few people out of 12 chosen states, as well as leaving a majority of the states being taxed without any representation, and even the states supposedly being represented being for the most part unrepresented, something that America, while it was still a colony, didn't like and in fact revolted against Great Britain for this reason among others, and the similarities are almost haunting.
- Speaking of 9/11, the Electronic Arts game Urban Strike (released in 1994) was set in the year 2001, according to the intro. A cutscene in which Malone's laser fires and blows up part of the World Trade Center is shown right before the seventh campaign, which takes place in New York City. When you reach your destination in the mission to rescue the survivors, there is a huge smouldering hole in the side of one of the towers. If you fail the mission by incorrectly defusing the bombs that have been set in the towers, the whole thing comes crashing down. The fact that some people do believe that placed explosives brought down the Twin Towers makes this even more ironic.
- Not to mention that it originally came out a bit Too Soon after the 1993 car bomb attack.
- One of the missions in Shadow the Hedgehog requires the player to complement a(n alien) terrorist attack by detonating five large bombs planted around a city centre. The game was actually released after the attacks on London, but the mission would have been completed well before.
- In 1998, the makers of Doonesbury released Doonesbury Flashbacks: 25 Years of Serious Fun, which contained an archive of every strip published up until that point, as well as numerous extras. Each menu on the disc featured "fun" little animations. The menu for the archive itself was an exterior shot of the White House. One of the many "wacky" things that goes on if the viewer leaves the menu on long enough: an airplane crashing on the White House lawn.
- Rainbow Six Black Thorn originally had the eighth mission set in a airport terminal. After 9/11 it was changed to a bus depot, but the developers actually sent the level designs to modders who wanted to restore the original level.
- Modern Warfare 2 was highly controversial at its release for including a level in which the player is part of a terrorist attack on the Moscow airport as an undercover agent. In January 2011, actual terrorists also decided that the airport would make an excellent target. However, they used explosives instead of machine guns (which had been used in a terrorist attack on an airport in India earlier).
- An earlier example would be the first Modern Warfare, which was made in 2007, but took place in 2011. Now that the actual year 2011 has rolled around, the events of the Arab Spring, especially the stuff going on in Libya, make the depictions of civil unrest, a violent coup, and subsequent Western intervention across the course of Al-Asad's rise to power seem chillingly prophetic.
- In-universe example of this trope is basically the basic premise of Alan Wake, as the eponymous writer gets caught up in scenarios eerily reminiscent of the books he wrote.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Oil ocean zone. (Counts extra within that particular video, since the uploader's username has "bp" in it.)
- Double for the comic which is Sonic and Bunnie in said zone. Ian Flynn has stated that he planned the storyline before the Oil Spill.
- Once again, Die Hard. See the film section for the movie poster.
- What was already a pretty heavy bit of foreshadowing in the Human Noble backstory of Dragon Age: Origins becomes painful to see on a second playthrough. While talking to your brother and his family, you can engage your young nephew in a conversation about swords, at which point his father says "Don't worry, son. You'll get to see a sword up close real soon, I promise."
- In the Expansion Pack Awakening, the banter between Anders and Justice about demonic possession is horrifying and ironic when you consider what happens in Dragon Age II.
- And now Anders blowing up the Chantry in Dragon Age II is rather uncomfortable in the wake of the 2011 Norway attacks, especially since one perpetrator happens to share the same name with him.
- And then there's this◊ from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. A closer depiction to the Die Hard example above.
- The Asian-themed level "Tsunami" in Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex in which you evade a small tsunami and then explored around the flooded remains. Granted the game's levels were themed around natural disasters, though at this point in time, it's hard not to view it in a rather grim fashion.
- In Pokemon Ruby And Sapphire, the player is charged with fighting water- or fire-themed villains. The villains want to use the games' legendary Pokémon to their various ends, but the legendary Pokémon turn out to be too powerful, and end up causing torrential downpours threatening to flood the entire world (in the case of the water Pokémon) or causing massive worldwide droughts, threatening people with starvation (in the case of the fire Pokémon). It all looks like a standard case of Gone Horribly Right, but takes on a new meaning if you consider that some of these things are happening (or threatening to happen) nowadays as a result of global climate change.
- In SimCity 2000, if you build your airport too close to your big cities, your planes can and will crash into your skyscrapers, sparking fires and the collapse of said skyscrapers. Yeah.
- Tron 2.0 and its sequel comic Ghost in the Machine came out in 2003, well before TRON: Legacy was even written. 2.0 is even considered Canon Discontinuity or Alternate Continuity. Still, about half the game's plot straddle the line between this and Hilarious in Hindsight when it comes to light that in both timelines, Tron and Flynn vanished under mysterious circumstances. There was also a plot element with a Tron upgrade code (which is called the Tron Legacy code...) with an unfortunate bug in it that turns the Program it's installed into to go Ax Crazy.
- And for more unfortunate moments in TRON games, check out the Intellivision games. Due to Mattel getting an early draft of the script, they screwed up and made Tron an orange-colored (bad guy colored) sprite, cutting through hordes of blue (good guy colored) enemies. A simple mix-up in 1982 gets much nastier when you factor in "Rinzler." The other one is from Maze-A-Tron. You're playing Flynn, trapped on a circuit board and trying to navigate the maze - alone, with no way to win...
- The Ace Attorney series has quite a few.
- One of the most gut-wrenching is this quote from Diego Armando/Godot when he is describing Maggey Byrde's supposed guilt: "Using the dark, aromatic depths of coffee to conceal the poison...classy lady!" It really hits home when you find out Armando himself was poisoned by the murderous bitch Dahila Hathorne and got put into a five-year coma, during which time Mia Fey, the love of his life, was murdered. Poor guy really had in rough...
- In Halo: Reach we get an in-story example. Noble Six is notified to be a soldier with a hyper-lethal skill set and a lone wolf personality. Carter, Noble Team's leader and Noble Six's new commander, upon meeting Noble Six tells them that he is happy to have a soldier with Noble Six's skill set on the team but that those lone wolf tendencies should stay behind now that he/she is part of a team. Near the end of the game Noble Team is assigned to defend the Pillar of Autumn and all of Noble Team dies in the process except for Noble Six (and Jun who escaped with Dr. Hasley according to Word Of God) who stays behind on Reach to make sure the Pillar can escape Reach. Carter's statements become sadly ironic as Noble Six is left alone as the only Spartan, or UNSC soldier period, on Reach and all he/she can do is watch as Reach is glassed by the Covenant. Forced to become a lone wolf once again Noble Six's final actions are to fight against unrelenting waves of Covenant forces in a Last Stand that lasts for several hours until he/she is finally subdued and killed. Decades later the only reminder on Reach that any sort of conflict had ever occurred is the shattered remains of Noble Six's helmet, a lone wolf but a noble and courageous one indeed.
- An in story example for Assassins Creed Revelations. On the final mission Ezio goes into the library in Musayaf...there are absolutely no books or anything at all, save a ring of chairs, with only one occupant, the skeleton of Altair. You then have an Altair Memory, of him dousing all of the torches in the hall to the library (mirroring Ezio relighting them as he goes into it) and then hiding the Apple of Eden behind a wall. The final mission statement? Take a seat and rest for a bit.
- In Ghost Recon, released in 2002 and set in 2008, a war between NATO and an Ultranationalist Russia starts off with the Russians backing Georgian separatists in an invasion of Georgia. Fast forward to 2008 and...
Web Comics
- Extremely fast one in Scary Go Round, which introduced a parody of Michael Jackson with a Creepy Child servant just a couple weeks before his death. The author commented:
John Allison: The last thing anyone expects, when they have introduced a character who is a kind of grotesque version of a world superstar, is for that superstar to die. It is entirely possible that Michael Jackson sat down to read Scary Go Round yesterday, began to turn slowly purple at what he saw, and collapsed clutching his arm. Actually I know that isn't true. Jackson was on record (citation needed) as more of a Dresden Codak man.
- xkcd: The mouseover text for strip #625, "Collections", reads: "You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection."
Web Originals
- Yaoi-tastic crossover fan-flash Anime Munters at one point shows Hetalia's Japan waist deep in water.
- More 9/11 premonitions on the Dark Roasted Blend website.
- When The Nostalgia Critic was doing his take on the truly atrocious 1998 Godzilla movie, the bombing of the World Trade Center is mentioned in the film's dialogue. NC is about to comment on it, but good taste prevailed and the joke was aborted.
- Later, he complained about Splinter in the CG Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie sounding like "Mr. Miyagi if he smoked a million Marlboros". Splinter was voiced by Mako (see Western Animation, below), who died shortly after the film was completed, with Walker's comments inciting a massive backlash. He later apologized, saying he didn't know anything about the actor, but commented on how bad the Marlboro line looked after learning that Mako died of cancer.
- The Nostalgia Chick got a hell of a lot bitching for her Schedule Slip in 2010. Then it got revealed she had an abortion in December 2009 and was spending most of her time doing a documentary about it for her final year in school. Give the woman credit for even being around as much as she was and making funny internet reviews. *
Of course some people have started going the other extreme and gone into White Knighting mode. Fun. - Spoony's Twitter poems and declarations of love to his girlfriend Scarlett became harder to look at after they broke up in March 2011.
Western Animation
- Blitz Wolf, an MGM Wartime Cartoon, features the Three Little Pigs blowing japan off the face of the earth. This was three years before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukings.
- Betty Boop has one in the short A Language All My Own, which has Betty coming to Japan as a goodwill ambassador. Its quite uncomfortable to watch when you know what would happen a decade later.
- 101 Dalmatians: The Series, which released in 1997, had an episode "Alive N Chicken" where Spot the chicken tries various methods to fly. The episode was banned because of the 9/11 attacks, especially the part when Spot flew into the Dog Chow Tower.
- In a late first season episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Cool Old Guy Iroh declines an offer to have his fortune told, saying that, "At my age there is really only one big surprise left, and I'd just as soon leave it a mystery." Roughly a year later, just after finishing recording his lines for the second season, his voice actor (Makoto Iwamatsu, best known by his stage name "Mako") died of esophageal cancer at 72.
- Remember that awesome finale of Justice League Unlimited? Where you have Batman, Lex Luthor, and Superman facing Darkseid. Remember when Batman refused to use a gun Lex offered him against Darkseid? Or when Batman dodged Darkseid's Omega Beams? Not so awesome after Final Crisis where Batman used a special Newgods gun to mortally wound Darkseid before being hit with the Omega Beams is it?
- To be fair, the JLU situation also wasn't as dire — all we saw Darkseid and his forces do in JLU was trash some stuff including the Daily Planet building. JLU Darkseid didn't bodyjack people, kill Orion, take free will away and enslave people, or throw the Earth (and The Multiverse) out of whack by his first "death". Things in the comics universe during Final Crisis were at the Godzilla Threshold at that point.
- From the same universes and again involving Darkseid is Dan Turpin's fate. In the earlier Superman: The Animated Series, Darkseid killed him out of spite during his retreat in "Apokolips...Now!" In Final Crisis, with the death of his original body and his current body burning out, Darkseid basically bodyjacks Turpin. Animated Turpin got off light.
- Episode of Spider-Man: The Animated Series had Kraven the Hunter track The Punisher and Spider-Man's mutated Man-Spider form down to a parking garage because of the smell of gunpowder and ash and soot left in the Man-Spider's webbing residue. ...from the World Trade Center parking garage bomber. Guess which bit got cut out after 9/11.
- The Gary Coleman Show ("Seriously, this is a cartoon"), featuring Coleman as an angel, will be tough to watch now, as Coleman has passed away.
- The Koos is Loose episode of Dexter's Laboratory is hard to watch after Dom DeLuise's death now, what with the episode ending with Dexter imagining Koos away and Koos' line "Goodbye Dee Dee, goodbye Dexter. You'll never see me again..."
- Looney Tunes: in the cartoon "Often an Orphan", Charlie Dog's Freak Out includes the line "Look! It's the towers! THEY'RE FALLING!!"
- The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "The Smoking Peanut" is about a clam at a zoo going berserk after SpongeBob throws a peanut at it. Several years later, a tiger escaped from its habitat and attacked three teenage boys at the San Francisco Zoo. Some people believe the boys had taunted it. Also in that same episode, the clam throws one of the zookeepers while on a rampage. In 2010, an orca killed one of its trainers at Seaworld.
- The opening of Oliver and Company shows shots of the World Trade Center, followed by a box of orphaned kittens. The orphaned kittens were probably sad enough before 9/11, but now, this troper found that scene to be gut-wrenching, because of the connection one can make between the two towers and the orphans.
- The Simpsons episode "All Singing, All Dancing'' had Snake bothered by the family's constant singing and threatening them with a gun. To stop the end credits music he fires, as Phil Hartman's name appears. Hartman would be shot by his wife months later.
- Speaking of The Simpsons, it's a little unsettling watching the musical version of A Streetcar Named Desire where they call New Orleans "The Sodom and Gomorrah of the Mississip'" after God agreed with them.
- Try "Bart of Darkness" where Bart witnesses Flanders scream bloody murder over killing something, the entire episode it is implied to be Maude until the last second, with "She's with God" meaning Bible Camp. Now try watching that episode after watching the one where Maude dies.
- In "Bart The General", Bart has a nightmare where he's killed by Nelson and Nelson walks up to Bart's corpse in a casket saying "Here's one for the road" followed by punching his corpse. Now try watching that when you find out that the bullies who drove Phoebe Prince to suicide laughed at her casket.
- Speaking of Phoebe Prince, try watching "The Boys Of Bummer" (which already left a horrible taste in the collective mouths of whatever fans remain of the show due to how cruel the townspeople treated Bart over his botched play during a Little League game) with her in mind. It will make you want to send death threats to the writers.
- The scene in "Lisa's Date with Density" where Milhouse ends up getting wheeled to the hospital after Nelson beat up Milhouse over a love note that supposedly was from him stops being funny thanks to the recent rash of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual teens getting physically and emotionally abused in school (some of which have taken their own lives because of it).
- In "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling)," one of the many failures at Burns' casino is that Siegfried & Roy are mauled by their own tiger while entertaining. Ten years later, it happened in real life to Roy Horn.
- The writers mentioned in the DVD commentary that the incident was bound to happen sooner or later.
- "We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little."
- "They put all the jerks in Tower One!"
- In episode "Downtime" (aired March 4, 2011) of Young Justice, Superman tells Aquaman that "The Justice League have a problem in Tokyo". A week later, Japan was hit by a devastating earthquake.
- The Real Ghostbusters: the episode where the boogieman returns has Egon fall off the roof of the World Trade Center.
- In The Incredibles, Violet worried that her parents lives were in danger, and then started worrying about their marriage. Her brother Dash laughed at the idea of villains wanting to ruin the marriages of superheroes. Three years later...
- The Critic has two:
- The episode "Sherman, Woman and Child," (aired in March 1995) had a scene in which Jay's chain smoking make-up artist Doris Grossman attempted to make a smoke ring bunny but it ended up turning into a shape with a demon-like appearance which told her "Doris...Tick! Tock!" Seven months after it aired, her voice actress Doris Grau died from emphysema. Also counts as a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment.
- One can't help but feel a little bit sad watching "Siskel and Ebert and Jay and Alice" due to the death of Gene Siskel, especially when seeing Roger Ebert on a see-saw all by himself and then he and Siskel singing about how they miss each other.
- In-universe example - In the South Park episode "Cartman Joins NAMBLA", the boys are playing some Life-esque board game. Cartman gives Kyle AIDS in the game. The other characters are horrified by this. In the episode "Tonsil Trouble" (which aired 8 years later), Cartman literally infects Kyle with AIDS.
- "201" reaveals that Scott Tenorman and Cartman were brothers, due to having the exact same father, which meant that Cartman killed his own father. Cartman doesn't seem too concerned about having commited patricide, though.
- In the Family Guy episode "Dog Gone", Brian unties a large dog left outside, only for said dog to violently attack and kill a smaller dog (before being shot to death by cops), this scene became even more uncomfortable to watch after something similar happened in real life. [1]
Real Life
- September 11. As you've seen above, the September 11th attacks in 2001 left a lot of ill tastes in a lot of media. Even having a birthday on that day is considered a downer (cf. Christopher "Ludacris" Bridges).
- It gets worse. Americans actually backed (re: funded, armed, and trained) some of the people who would eventually become the Taliban against the Soviet Union when they were fighting in Afghanistan. Yeah.
- Also that same day, a blue-ribbon panel released the final and definitive report, roughly an hour earlier, concerning another massive sneak attack on the USA: Pearl Harbor.
- War of Machines contains the line "Japanese scientists further advised their government that neither the Germans nor the Americans could possibly deflect enough of their productive resources to a bomb project to have a weapon [usable] in the current war."
- During World War One, the Entente frequently propagated that Germany and its allies were committing genocide in its occupied territories. They were, but nowhere near the level that they were accused of being, which ironically led to most dismissing the entire issue out of hand, and thus when the same accusation was made two decades later, not a lot of people believed it.
- An American journalist, Eugene P. Lyle Jr., wrote that by 1938 a defeated Germany would rise again to start a war of "monstrous proportions". This was in 1918, two months before the end of WW1 (which caused everyone to forget about the article, according to the link). Clearly, this guy was one Genre Savvy propagandist.
- He wasn't alone in this prediction, either—the list of people who expected this to happen (especially at the end of World War One as the peace was negotiated) is sufficient and push it through this trope and into wondering how unGenre Savvy you'd have to have been to think it really was going to be the War to End All Wars.
- It was a great war. They were bound to make a sequel!
- When Ferdinand Foch took one look at the Treaty of Versailles, the agreement that ended World War One, he said "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years." Guess what happened about 20 years later?
- This is a bit of an unusual example, however, if only because unlike most modern commentators, Ferdinand Foch's argument was not that the Treaty was too harsh but rather that it wasn't harsh enough. Foch was among many French statesmen and military figures who believed that Germany after WWI should have been partitioned and forcibly disarmed.
- Of course, we nowadays all know what happened when they did try that...
- "I'm finally getting optimistic. Now, at last, things are going well! They really are! Great news! An assassination attempt has been made on Hitler's life [...] the prospect of going back to school in October is making me too happy to be logical!" That's the second-to-last entry in Anne Frank's diary.
- German romantic-nationalist poet and liberal thinker Heinrich Heine is most famous today for his observation that "Where they burn books, in the end they will burn people too", made in 1821 in a play about the Spanish Inquisition. Heine's works were censored in his own time and later literally burned by the Nazis. Heine was a Jew.
- This is the concluding passage of Heine's Religion and Philosophy in Germany, written in 1832: "Christianity — and that is its greatest merit — has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame...The old stone gods will then rise from long ruins and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and Thor will leap to life with his giant hammer and smash the Gothic cathedrals....Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder...comes rolling somewhat slowly, but...its crash...will be unlike anything before in the history of the world. ...At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in farthest Africa will draw in their tails and slink away. ...A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."
- Not quite as prescient as it might seem. Hitler knew how to appease the population and could pander to Christians in order to win their acquiescence. Worth watching: http://nobeliefs.com/images/HitlerOath.mpg (which is as chilling now as it was then).
- The opinion of William Jennings Bryan (prosecutor in Scopes Trial among other things) that Social Darwinism was undermining morality in Germany. The resulting eugenics movements of course being implemented in varying degrees involuntarily on the disabled or otherwise "handicapped (mentally or physically)" in Nazi Germany until the Catholic Bishops in Germany let it be known they considered the issue was non-negotiable, and Hitler needed all his troops available for his invasion of the Soviet Union. Also, by then Germany had newly conquered territory, so his killers were sent abroad to set up death camps for the Jews (though his eugenics movements continued on a smaller scale unofficially).
- Somewhat funny in hindsight in that Hitler technically died a Catholic (the only Nazi to be excommunicated was Goebbels - for marrying a Protestant, while Hitler had long ago stopped actively participating he was never formerly separated from the church). Hitler promised religious education for youths in return for endorsement from the Church. Now the Church supports the theory of evolution and the average American is woefully ignorant of it. Not to mention the US was conducting sterilisation programs and the Tuskegee syphilis trials at the time.
- Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten, in her profile, listed "jealous people" as a turn-off. In 1980, she was murdered by her jealous husband, Paul Snider.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech, in which he relates being stabbed in the heart years before, when if he had even sneezed he would have died. He goes on to list all the remarkable things he had done since then, from sit-ins, to freedom rides, to telling the USA about a dream he had, all of which he could not have done or seen had he died. He then goes on to acknowledge the threats that have been made against him, and states that "like anybody, I would like to live a long life", but concludes by telling his audience, "I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man!" King gave this speech on the night of April 3, 1968. His assassination was on April fourth. To a point he may have been expecting it or at least anticipated that someone might try to kill him, since he often gave versions of the "Promised Land" speech when violent events were happening, like the riots that had just broken out in Memphis.
- The Boondocks referenced this by positing an Alternate Universe where King merely lay unconscious in a coma until very recently, and how he reacted to the modern world when he woke up.
- To fully understand the speech, you must remember that Dr. King was a minister, and you need to read Deuteronomy.
- The musical 1776 actually changed a quote of the real John Adams to avoid this. His comment on removing the slavery clause in the Declaration of Independence: "If we give in on this, there will be trouble a hundred years hence; posterity will never forgive us." He was off by a decade and a half. This and Reality Is Unrealistic: the writer feared the audience would think he was Anvilicious, not realizing Adams actually said this.
- Three time Formula One champion Ayrton Senna once said this:
I want to live fully, very intensely. I would never want to live partially, suffering from illness or injury. If I ever happen to have an accident that eventually costs my life, I hope it happens in one instant.
- That's exactly what happened when he crashed and died at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
- On top of that, he denied the opporturnity to drive in the Indy Car-Series in 1992, because he was too scared of crashing into wall with more than 220 miles per hour.
- French author Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's book Annals of a Fortress goes through two thousand years of siege warfare and then ends with an examination of the feasibility of reinforcing the entire Franco-German border. He decides it would be cripplingly expensive and easily neutralized by advances in cannons and tactics. This was written in 1876.
- Which is six years after the Germans defeated France and beseiged and conquered Paris in the Franco-Prussian War. It's not like Germany never fought France before WWI or II.
- The real irony is that the French ignored this advice and after WWI constructed the Maginot line, reinforcing the border to the point that it would have been suicidal to go through it. Hitler being Genre Savvy, he followed the Schlieffen Plan. And the Allies expected them to do the same in 1940, and deployed most of their forces into Belgium to meet the Germans head on. Only problem was the German Panzers were rolling through the Ardennes forest, the weak point between the Maginot Line and the main Allied armies, the rest being history. Given that the Germans were actually going to follow the Schlieffen Plan until General von Manstein got his way in early 1940 and that the Ardennes were widely considered unfit for large scale armoured deployment, the Allies were not as stupid as it might sound.
- In 1969, John Lennon remarked in an interview that he tried to be as humourous as possible with regards to his political agenda because 'all the serious people, like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi, got shot." Just over ten years after that interview, Lennon crossed paths with Mark David Chapman...
- Many of Lennon's interviews of 1980, some of which were recorded on December 8, 1980, find Lennon looking forward to the future, discussing plans for a tour and a musical based on his life with Yoko, and state "when I'm dead and buried—which I hope is a long time from now". Also, one unreleased demo from that period is titled "Life Begins At 40". Not to mention that John, Paul, George, and Ringo had patched up their relationships and had begun talks of a massive Beatles Reunion tour...
- In an interview in the sixties, John was asked how he expected to die. He replied "I'll probably be popped off by some loony."
- At the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery, which houses the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the archway leading into the amphitheater is inscribed with words from Horace: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" - "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country." The Memorial Amphitheater was opened in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson. By the end of World War One, those words would be inextricably linked to Wilfred Owen's poem about the waste and futility of war Dulce et Decorum est indeed. Worse, Owen was killed just days before the Armistice occurred.
- "Pistol" Pete Maravich, at age 25: "I don't want to play 10 years and then die of a heart attack when I'm 40." After a 10-year NBA career, Maravich collapsed and died of a heart attack on January 5, 1988 — a little more than six months shy of his 41st birthday.
- During an interview, Jim Morrison heard about the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Turning to the interviewer, he held up his glass and said "You're drinking with number three." Not too long afterwards, he was gone.
- This board game. Or maybe it's Hilarious in Hindsight, depending on your sense of humor. (And yes, your rig could blow up in the game, for a penalty of one million dollars. I guess that one actually had the safeguards installed.)
- Once during the 50's, a Japanese girl called Michiko Shouda went through an arranged date with a promising novelist named Kimitake Hiraoka, but they didn't marry. She went on to marry none other but Crown Prince, later emperor Akihito...and in The Seventies, her ex-boyfriend of sorts Hiraoka (now known as Yukio Mishima) staged a coup to give Akihito's father The Emperor (Hirohito, properly known since his death as Showa, after the name of his reign) back his powers as the leader of the country, and committed seppuku when it didn't work.
- In this interview, David Foster Wallace talks about how, even though there have been hard times in his life, and he doesn't have a clear path or motivation going forward, it's not like he's going to kill himself or anything.
- Before his Vigilante Execution by Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald was told (jokingly) by the policeman he was handcuffed to that if someone was going to shoot him in the mob of press they'd be walking out into, he hoped that they'd be a good shot. Oswald told the man he was being melodramatic and that nobody was going to shoot him. Shortly after they entered the mob of reporters, Jack Ruby shot Oswald.
- On a related note to the above, John F. Kennedy's very famous inaugural address to his nation in 1961 features some very jarring examples.
All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
- To elaborate, the life of his administration, which only lasted one thousand (actually 1,036) days, was ended along with his own when Kennedy was sadly assassinated in Dallas, Texas in 1963.
- At Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral, Adlai Stevenson said to President Kennedy, "It may be some comfort to you, sir, to know that the White House is not the end and that you may find something to do when you leave here, whenever that may be." Obviously, Kennedy never got to retire from the White House, being that he was then assassinated that following year.
- In an interview, a Christian radio host tried to persuade Christopher Hitchens that if God exists, surely Hitchens would feel some indebtedness to him - for everything from the fame he enjoys to his good health. A few years later, Hitchens was diagnosed with cancer of the throat and lungs at the not-tremendously-advanced age of 61 and has stated he is unlikely to live another five years. Listening to that interview now makes the host seem like an extra naive dunderhead. Hitchens, of course, has vowed he will not make a last-minute conversion, and should not be believed if for some reason he did cave in.
- After his Gemini 3 mission in 1965, astronaut Gus Grissom said at a press conference, "If we die, we want people to accept it. We're in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life." Grissom and his crew mates Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in the Apollo 1 fire two years later.
- Michael Jackson had publicly announced to his fans & the world in early 2009 that he's launching his final tour called "This Is It!". Later during the summer on June 25, 2009, he died.
- Rosie O'Donnell made a comment about not ever wanting to see Anna Nicole Smith again just hours before she died.
- Before the start of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili's last phone call to his father included "I'll win or die trying."
- Sarah Palin's "Take Back the 20" website showed crosshairs over various states, including the very district in Arizona Gabrielle Giffords was elected for. A fundraiser event for Gifford's opponent, Jesse Kelly, featured shooting a fully automatic M15 with Kelly. Then Mrs. Giffords was shot in the head...However, she survived.
- Related to the above note, a blogger had stated that Giffords was, "dead to me", just days before her shooting [2] It should be noted it was a figure of speech.
- In January 2001, Oklahoma State University basketball coach Eddie Sutton aired a broadcast of his regular OSU Basketball show, which opened with a CGI plane flying over an open field. The guest was OSU point guard Nate Fleming. The show ended with Coach Sutton thanking the OSU donors who provided the planes to transport the OSU players and staff to and from various road games. However, on the return trip from the following road game, one of the planes crashed in a field, killing ten passengers, including Nate Fleming.
- The fact that Demi Lovato has been criticized for being 'larger' than the average Disney star, when in reality she actually has an eating disorder.
- The "Church of Happyology's" introduction film ends with "If you leave this room after seeing this film and walk out and never mention [Happyology] again, you are perfectly free to do so. It would be stupid. But you can do it. You can also dive off a bridge or blow your brains out. That is your choice." Would jumping out of a building and blowing someone else's brains out (three times!) suffice? On a lighter note, the film's host has since quit the church and wants his money back.
- When Pat Nixon died on June 22, 1993, an observer opined that Richard Nixon, without his wife, "wouldn't last a year". He died on April 22, 1994, four days after having a massive stroke.
- In 2006, Bam and April Margera said that they had Jackass co-star Ryan Dunn "in the death pool" for "death by vehicle". On June 20, 2011, Ryan Dunn and his friend died in a fiery car crash after a night of drinking.
- Amy Winehouse once said that one of her fears was joining the 27 Club (the name given to singers who have died at age 27). On July 23rd, 2011, Amy's fears have come true.;'
- At the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner, Seth Meyers joked that Osama bin Laden was hosting a talk show on C-SPAN. The next day, Obama announced Bin Laden's death. This one was arguably Hilarious in Hindsight for most people.
- A New Hampshire Christian teenage girl was forced to repent in front of her church for sexual misconduct leading to pregnancy. She had been raped by a deacon of that church.
- The pastor allegedly had even told her that "she was lucky not to have been born during Old Testament times when she would have been stoned to death".
- Jokes about former NFL bust Ryan Leaf are a lot harsher since he got cancer.
- For Halloween, Kelly Ripa and Nick Lachey dressed up as wedding Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries on Live with Regis and Kelly. . .an hour later it came out that Kim had filed for divorce.
- Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story. Too Soon?
- On another tragic Elton John note, Elton was consoled at the funeral of his best friend, designer Gianni Versace, who died in July of 1997 from a gunman's bullet, by Princess Diana of Wales. In August of that year, Diana would die in a car crash while fleeing paparazzi. Elton would be called to sing "Candle In The Wind" at her funeral.
- Even harsher as Elton had already (successfully) fought a battle with tabloid newspapers in 1987, while Versace's death, in a way, would echo the murder of his friend John Lennon in 1980.
- The 1928 Republican Party platform stated, "Under this Administration the country has been lifted from the depths of a great depression to a level of prosperity." The very next year, the stock market would crash, plunging the US into the Great Depression.
- At the end of his Roast William Shatner joked that Greg Giraldo would have been wearing a Red Shirt and would have been dead by the end of the episode if they were in Star Trek; four years later Giraldo died of a prescription overdose.
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