Hilarious In Hindsight / Arthur

• S1's "The Scare-Your-Pants-Off Club" features a parents group called "PAWS" getting a popular book series banned from the library due to thinking it's inappropriate for kids to read despite none of the people in group having actually read the books themselves. This became a lot funnier when many libraries in Florida banned several books due to parental complaints (primarily due to governor Ron DeSantis's overly broad and restrictive policies that allowed such bans to happen in the first place) for utterly ridiculous reasons, with one district even banning several "Arthur" books.
• S5's "Arthur and the Big Riddle" had Arthur appearing on an in-universe game show, Riddle Quest, hosted by Alex Lebeck (voiced by Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek). Arthur's opponent was a contestant who had been winning repeatedly for weeks. In contrast, the actual Jeopardy show had a five-day limit on returning champions. A few years later, that limit was removed and along came Ken Jennings, who won 74 straight games in a row and over 3 million dollars.
• S7's "Prunella Sees the Light" has Prunella telling Muffy, "Marina's blind, not in a wheelchair." 7 seasons later, S14's "The Wheel Deal" introduces Lydia Fox, a fan-created character in a wheelchair.
• "Buster's New Friend" has D.W. comment that "maybe Buster doesn't like Bionic Bunny anymore." As of "Buster Gets Real", that's totally true.
  • While on that note, Season 3's "Arthur's Almost Live Not Real Music Festival" features Buster questioning what's so great about stuff being real. Come the aforementioned "Buster Gets Real", in which he stops liking Bionic Bunny because it's "not real". It doesn't stick though.
• S2's "Play it Again D.W." has D.W. obsessing over the song Crazy Bus. It is catchy, but it drives Arthur crazy, a gag that carries over to the 1998 character album The First Almost Real Not Live CD (Or Tape). In 2005, eight years after the episode premiered, a Venezuelan video game called CrazyBus was released, garnering infamy for its catchy and even more obnoxious title screen music.
  • In the same episode, D.W. sees a live show based on the Crazy Bus song. 22 years later, a live stage show based on a children's song actually became a reality when Baby Shark Live! shows began popping up in North America and Asia.
• In the season 2 episode "Arthur Makes a Movie", Buster complains that by the time the kids will be old enough to see a James Hound movie James will get old and not be as good as he used to be.
• In "Meet Binky" Arthur finds out that a band he adores (who happens to share their name with the character Binky) is entirely virtual and performs concerts via holograms. Fast-forward to 2009...
  • And even earlier.....
  • And nearly a decade earlier.....
  • The computer that powers the concert was mistaken for a garbage pail by Arthur. Frame step to 2013...
• "Draw!" has Buster drawing a comic he calls "The Big Clumsy Moose With Big Feet Named Franny". In 2006, PBS Kids began airing a cartoon called Franny's Feet about a girl called Franny who wears people's shoes and gets transported to places relevant to the episode.
• Season 10's "The Squirrels", from 2006, has Arthur and his friends scared of squirrels after watching the eponymous horror movie, until they ultimately learn that squirrels are harmless. A "Squirrels" horror movie, unrelated to the cartoon, was made in 2013.
• In Season 1's "Arthur and the Real Mr. Ratburn", Prunella tells the class that Mr. Ratburn eats nails for breakfast without any milk.
• In S2's "Arthur's TV-Free Week", Arthur and his friends accept a challenge to not watch television for a whole week. The idea of such an event being held is quite hilarious now with the rapid rise of the internet, which most people now heavily rely on for many of their daily needs with the added bonus of downloadable content and video streaming sites like YouTube where much of what we see on TV is now readily available for viewing. Gets even funnier with S22's "The Longest Eleven Minutes", where Arthur and his friends struggle to cope with the internet connection going out.
  • On a related note, "Arthur's First Sleepover" has a scene where Arthur tries to bring a TV into the tent, but Mr. Read tells him he can't do that, even with an extra long extension cord, because then they wouldn't be able to see the stars or trade cool stories. With the rise of cell phones, this may very well have turned that fantasy into a reality.
• In S8's "Bugged", the Brain questions Mr. Ratburn about the controversy over whether Pluto really is a planet or not. Guess what happened three years down the road?
• In "Binky Goes Nuts", Muffy says, "Note to self: Orange Is the New Black" after seeing a monarch butterfly.
• Season 16's "Buster's Book Battle" contains a Bland-Name Product of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series called Loki Benediktssen, based on Norse mythology rather than Greek. Fast foward to 2015 and Percy Jackson author Rick Riordan debuted Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, which is essentially a Defictionalization of the Loki Benediktssen books seen in Arthur.
• "Return of the King" essentially is a Stealth Pun regarding Arthur pulling a sword out of a stone, because...y'know, King Arthur. Then a few months later, an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood featured Arthur being a prominent focus, and when he's in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, one thing he has to do...is assure King Friday that he is not King Arthur.
• A S6 episode is entitled "The Secret Life of Dogs and Babies."
• The line "Who's Dewey?" from the song "Library Card" becomes hilarious in hindsight if you've seen the pilot episode of DuckTales (2017).
• In "Sue Ellen and the Brainasaurus", Brain has a dream of Mr. Ratburn failing him and Sue Ellen because their T-Rex model was made out of cake. A later episode in the same season, "Dad's Dessert Dilemma," would reveal that Ratburn loves cake.
• This YouTube Poop and this theory video state that Mr. Ratburn is gay. Fast forward to 2019 and it's revealed that he is indeed gay and gets married to another man.^note Though to be fair, he might also be bisexual since the episode in question never explicitly calls him gay.
• "Bitzi's Beau" has Buster imagining his mother marrying Mr. Ratburn, thinking that she was dating him. With Mr. Ratburn's recent marriage to his male partner, this far-fetched notion on Buster's part indeed could never have taken place.^note Assuming Ratburn really is gay and not bisexual, that is.
  • Its Sequel Episode "Bitzi's Break-Up" has Buster imagining his mother's new boyfriend being a boring telemarketer, followed by him saying "I hate Martin Spivak!" back in reality. A later episode "Buster Isn't Buying It" would show that there's not only a person named Martin Spivak but he's the host of Buster's favorite TV show The Factoid Front, which would be cancelled due to pseudoscience leading to Buster becoming disillusioned with cryptozoology and UFOs.
• In "Arthur's Substitute Teacher Trouble", Arthur's friends were worried that Mr. Ratburn and his little sister Ms. Ratburn were competitive siblings over intellectual matters. They find out that Rodentia Ratburn is a marshmallow Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher that bores them to death and worships her big brother Nigel. Come "Mr. Ratburn and the Special Someone", it turns out that they have an older sister named Patty who is a competitive Control Freak. Nigel doesn't compete with Patty, however, and defers to her on all decisions. So it turns out all the Ratburns get along.
• "Arthur's Almost Boring Day" has Brain "scientifically correct" the "Rain Rain Go Away" nursery rhyme, saying "Rain, rain, go away. Evaporate and re-condense combining with vapor molecules to return in a low-pressure front on a more appropriate occasion. Hey! Hey!" In other words, Brain invented Increasingly Verbose Memes.
• In "Sue Ellen Gets Her Goose Cooked", the characters enjoy playing a video game called Virtual Goose.
• In "The Tattletale Frog", Bud throws his red hat out the window, which boomerangs right back to him. This becomes a major gameplay mechanic in Super Mario Odyssey.
• Remember "D.W. Gets Lost" from Season 1, Episode 24? One of the earliest things D.W. does to get earrings is glue her mother's earrings to her hair, leading to the phrase, "glue is for paper, not for skin". Over two decades later, some woman decides to use Gorilla Glue Spray on her head!
• In "Shelter from the Storm," Buster says that "Hurricane Sadie" is too nice of a name, and it should be "something scary, like Nigel" (Mr. Ratburn's first name is Nigel). Hurricane Nigel has been confirmed as one of the names for the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season.
• The second half of the first episode in Season 3 (along with the original song performed by Art Garfunkel for the episode) is named "The Ballad of Buster Baxter". 20 years later, we'd get a completely unrelated movie with a very similar title. Making this even more hilarious is that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was first released to a wide audience exactly 20 years after "The Ballad of Buster Baxter" first aired.^note "The Ballad of Buster Baxter" aired on November 16 of 1998. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was first shown at Venice International Film Festival on August 31st, 2018, and then had a brief theatrical run from November 9th of the same year, and was finally released on Netflix on November 16th, exactly 20 years after "Baxter".
• PeanutButterGamer is known for his love of Arthur. Come the finale, where a Time Skip shows Arthur as a 28-year-old... and he looks like PBG.
  PBG: I hate this so much.
  • There's also AOK Ruins Your Childhood's Adult Arthur series, which began several years before the finale came out and is now often referred to as a Bad Future in light of it.
• In a few episodes, Mrs. MacGrady's first name was Sarah. Starting with "The Great MacGrady", her first name was Leah. Put those names together, and you've got the names of two members in a rival school idol group.
• The very first book in the series, Arthur's Nose (a rather infamous case of Early-Installment Weirdness), is all about Arthur's insecurity over his large nose (he's drawn more like an actual aardvark in that book, and thus has a long snout). Thanks to Art Evolution, Arthur didn't even have a nose anymore within a few years.
• Two years before "Kiss and Tell" aired, the album "Arthur's Really Rockin' Music Mix" included a Cover Version of "Brass in Pocket" by Pretenders, a song which tells of the female singer's attempt to get romantic attention from a man, sung in-character as D.W. The premise of "Kiss and Tell" is D.W. trying to get a kiss from a boy.
• In "Poor Muffy" the brand of electric foot massager Muffy uses is called Happy Feet.
• In "Buster Baxter, Cat-Saver", Arthur mentions Buster is thinking of making his own Edutainment Show, which makes the others gag. 6 years later, Buster would indeed get his own show.
• "The Perfect Brother" has an Imagine Spot of Arthur and Brain making a Time Machine, and it turns out it only goes backwards in time since Brain doesn't know how to go forwards. In 2010, the Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry" would have Professor Farnsworth build a time machine that can only go in one direction in time, albeit forwards. Had Arthur's fantasy been real, let's hope that his universe also repeats itself like in Futurama.
• In "Sue Ellen Chickens Out", Sue Ellen mentions she doesn't like chicken as part of her protest against the Sugar Bowl being replaced by a Chicken Lickin' restaurant. Cut forward to "Sue Ellen Vegges Out", where she becomes a vegetarian.

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