Throwaway Jokes That Eventually Became Real

But very occasionally, that broad scattershot approach shows a glimpse of the future with laser-like precision. We all like to forget the disastrous last season of Game of Thrones where every character behaved so irrationally it was like they had finally succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning from all the dragon farts. A season that then jumped and then BBQ'd the shark when Queen Daenerys decided to burn the biggest city in Westeros because of bell-related PTSD.

And if that scene looked mighty familiar, even as you were watching it with slacked jaws, it might be because you had been keeping up with The Simpsons. In its Game of Thrones parody episode "The Serfsons," the family stares impotently as a mad rider and his red dragon lay fiery waste to building after building.

Except that was in 2017, two whole years before the GOT Season 8 twists, a time when throngs of fans were still #TeamTargaryen and before thousands of nerd parents seriously started regretting calling their baby girls Daenerys. The similar aesthetics really are striking, showing that the Simpsons team can still have their finger on the pop culture pulse. Either that or David Benioff and D.B. Weiss saw the episode and figured, if they can't have their usual old sea boat captain tell them exactly what to do, they'd just crib their visuals from Groening instead.

But no one could've been more surprised by this implausible turn of events than the creators of the post-apocalyptic punk rock comic book Tank Girl -- because they predicted this exact event in 1994. In issue 40 of Deadline Magazine, one of Tank Girl's pals Sub Girl (imagine the Spice Girls if funded by Halliburton) tries to puzzle together the history of The Smiths with the limited knowledge she has in our bombed-out future. While getting most of the iconic events and songs slightly wrong (though "Vicar With A Yo-Yo, Oh-Ho" does sound like an upgrade), Sub Girl also claims that, eventually, an embittered Morrissey sells out and trades whatever respectability he has left to rake in money at a Vegas Show. Specifically, Caesar's Palace.

The resemblance is uncanny, despite the difference of 25 years and what looks like 250 pounds. Though with Morrissey's alleged all-carb diet, the crouton bars at Caesar's shrimp buffets will soon fill out even that discrepancy.

Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was one of the most expensive flops in Broadway musical history. Despite/in part due to music from Bono and The Edge, the confusing arachno-rock opera had no mass appeal, with audiences uninterested in spending Hamilton money on seeing yet another Spider-Man origin story and watch some dude in tights swing around on stage wires like a panicked spider trying to escape a bathtub. But the producers could've saved themselves a ton of cash if they had watched the 2000 episode of Batman Beyond, "Out Of The Past." Set in 2039, multiple iterations of Batman (sound familiar, Spider-Man franchise?) are watching a very similarly tone-deaf superhero musical of the caped crusader crooning with Commissioner Gordon. Though there's two major differences between Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark and Batman: A Hero In The Wing -- the latter has a much better title and much catchier tunes.

Just like a lot of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark's audiences, the episode shows old Bruce Wayne leaving halfway through, the joke being that the weird musical just makes Batman feel old and outdated for wanting the real deal. But guess that's a tough lesson to figure out for people who thought it was smart to make a U2 rock musical in the 2010s.

But the Diogenes of slacker a-holes does offer some insight into the human psyche. When asked on a tame TV dating show if he would ever make "whoopie" in public, Brodie counters with a 'true story' about his cousin Walter and his near-plane crash. After the initial shock of dropping doom wore off, Walter and the other passengers didn't weep, didn't curse the gods, but instead collectively whipped out their assorted fun parts and started masturbating like crazy, staring Death in the face and giving him a load of their humanity ... before becoming real embarrassed when everything turned out to be fine.

While both the uptight '90s audiences in and of the movie were not very convinced by Brodie's Air Wank story, Smith was vindicated more than twenty years later in 2018, when the people of Hawaii were also given a false alert warning of their impending doom, with the government texting them that missiles were about to say aloha (which means both hello and goodbye) to them and all their loved ones.

While we cannot know all that goes through a person's mind when the apocalypse comes a-calling, Pornhub did provide a clue, publishing traffic data that proved people panicking over being pounded into the pearly white sands quickly chose to do some pounding of their own. After an initial drop in Pornhub traffic (it's hard to get a decent WiFi connection when you're running around screaming that the world is about to end), Hawaiians returned on masse to the porn site, with 48% more Hawaiians feeling the need to come to grips with their complicated emotions by coming to grips with our unspoken fight-or-flight horniness.

A particularly poignant pre-pubescent moment came on March 11, 1992, when Calvin questioned what future teens would listen to now when even punk rock artists can become "45-year-old zillionaires." How does one create a counter-culture against a counter-culture?

But with childlike clarity, Calvin simply pushes that swinging pendulum all the way back, devoting his rebellious preteen ears to monotonal, easy listening muzak, making something revolutionary out of old bleeps and bloops and -- vaporwave. Calvin was talking about vaporwave.

For the uninitiated, i.e. everyone who hasn't had to cram for an exam in the past decade, vaporwave is a modern fringe genre that falls under the lo-fi banner. It borrows from the same places as (as joked about by Watterson) muzak, sampling basic synth, jazz, elevator music and just about any easy to listing music you'd expect playing in the background of a corporate video on the dangers of operating heavy machinery while wearing oversized shoulder pads. Just like Calvin predicted, those simple sounds also carry an ironic counter-culture message. Like its pseudo-namesake, vaporwave repurposes outdated modals and screws around with them to create a false nostalgia. (In this case, a nostalgia for the corporate and futurism obsessed culture of the '80s and early '90s that seems downright quaint now.)

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Top Image: 20th Century Fox Television