Hilarious In Hindsight / SpongeBob SquarePants

• In "As Seen on TV", Squidward is hired to make a commercial for the Krusty Krab, and arranges for an exact replica of the restaurant to be built right next to it because "everyone needs an understudy", greatly annoying his boss. In The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Mr. Krabs himself proudly inaugurates Krusty Krab 2... which is also a carbon copy of the original, located at the same place as the previous duplicate.
• In "Sandy's Rocket", when SpongeBob tries to convince Sandy that there are aliens on the moon, his "evidence" of aliens' existence consists of cowlicks, ninety-nine cent stores, and Atlantis. Four seasons later, in "Atlantis SquarePantis", he and Sandy, and a few others, would later visit Atlantis, and the people there are an alien race that traveled to Earth to protect a bubble.
• In "Wet Painters", SpongeBob and Patrick are misled by Squidward to believe that hurting themselves will attract customers. In "No Hat for Pat", Patrick hurting himself actually turns out to be what attracts customers.
• Patrick's memetic "Is mayonnaise an instrument?" line in "Band Geeks" was just a way of showing how dumb Patrick is when the episode aired. Along comes Makey Makey in the mid 2010's. Now mayonnaise CAN be an instrument!
• The episode "Boating School" had Patrick reading SpongeBob's diary and laughing. Soon, the entire town of Bikini Bottom (sans Mr Krabs) would end up doing just that in "Little Yellow Book".
• Plankton's snarking about never having children in "CopyBob DittoPants" became even more hilarious after he and Karen actually had a (robotic) child called Chip in "Karen's Baby".
• Episodes with rocks that move on their own seems to be Rule of Funny at first but many years later in real life, there is a phenomenon known as the sailing stones, which is pretty much what you expect.
• In "Idiot Box", SpongeBob makes a rainbow between his hands as he says the word "Imagination". Kind of reminiscent of Ressha Sentai ToQger and its Rainbow Line fueled by imagination. They even use the English word instead of the Japanese for "imagination"!
• In "Gullible Pants", one of SpongeBob's fake advice taken from Squidward is selling Krabby Patties with his feet. Come "The Clash of Triton", SpongeBob is once again using his feet to to do his job but on purpose this time, because of the Krusty Krab's "Work Without Your Hands Day".
• The premise of "Krusty Dogs" involves the Krusty Krab getting a new menu item and changing its name. In Summer 2018, IHOP temporarily did the same, changing their name to "IHOb" to promote their new "Ultimate Steakburgers" (though unlike the Krusty Krab, they did not remove their signature menu item).
• In WhoBob WhatPants, SpongeBob becomes mayor of New Kelp City. Nine years later, SpongeBob SquarePants joined the likes of Big Bird, Capn Crunch, Daffy Duck, Donald Duck, Jon Snow, Wonder Woman, and Yoda in getting one write-in vote for Mayor of New York City.
• Karen's name, by itself, would just become unfortunate relation to the "Karen" stereotype, except it becomes this with the fact that she's married to a manager.
• In "Bossy Boots", a fish mocks SpongeBob by offering him a ride to a "big doofus convention". We do see a society of idiots in "The Nitwitting", complete with rules and traditions, and SpongeBob joins them for a day.
• Steven Hillenburg might've been onto something with Pearl being really small for a sperm whale, as there is a not-as-well-known marine mammal called the Dwarf Sperm Whale, which is around the size of an average human, though Pearl is way~ smaller than even that.
• In "The Night Patty", when Mr. Krabs walks in on SpongeBob in the Krusty Krab, he says "Guess I must've been sleep-working!" The next season, with "Plankton's Intern", we see that SpongeBob has a habit of going into work in the middle of the night to cook Krabby Patties, doing it entirely in his sleep.
• In "Squid Plus One", when Squidward talks to Norton the mailman, he names SpongeBob as a thing he hates (Norton says clarinets). Later, in "Sea-Man Sponge Haters Club", we see that Norton attends Squidward's "We Hate SpongeBob Club".
• In “SB-129,” Squidward travels to the future, and future SpongeBob (AKA, SpongeTron) tells him that everything is chrome in the future. In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Pokémon Violet version in particular, there are robotic versions of certain Pokémon from the future, and all of their shiny versions are made of chrome.
• "No Weenies Allowed" focuses on SpongeBob's futile attempts to get into the Salty Spitoon, the roughest, toughest sailor club ever to be built under the seven seas. Ten seasons later, in "Salty Sponge", SpongeBob would not only finally be allowed to properly enter the Salty Spitoon, but actually win over the whole club and its manager with nothing more than their favorite meals and his usual self.
  • The drifter also looks exactly like SpongeBob, only with black hair. Years later, several users in the "GoAnimate" community would give Caillou hair, with a few portraying Caillou with hair and Caillou without hair as two different characters.
• In "Life of Crime", Patrick says that he and SpongeBob didn't commit "some mail fraud scheme or hijacking!" In "Patrick the Mailman", they do both: they steal important mail, such as jury duty notices, and intentionally deliver it to the wrong person, and hijack a mail truck.
• In "Chimps Ahoy", one of Sandy's bosses at Tree Dome Enterprises Limited is named Dr. Marmalade.
• In "CopyBob DittoPants", Mr. Krabs comments that SpongeBob's clones are "multiplying faster than sea bunnies!" Two seasons later, in "Bunny Hunt", sea bunnies actually appear on the show. SpongeBob adopts one and it falls in love with a female rabbit and quickly has dozens of babies.
• "Krabby Land" has Mr. Krabs creates a carnival in order to get the money of children on summer vacation. Mr Krabs, being the cheapskate that he is creates it out of garbage without any care. Almost twenty years later, The Willy's Chocolate Experience event in Glasgow made Krabby Land's cheap nature oddly prescient.

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