Not quite the same as tiger lily’s thread, but I didn’t want to hijack hers.
Not so much stuff that would never happen today, but scenes that seem more ominous now, or seem like a foreshadowing.
The whole second half of Ghostbusters is very difficult to regard as lighthearted now. Besides the premise of New York in peril, you’ve got the government agent who shuts down defenses, against repeated warnings; you’ve got the guys climbing a skyscraper in 50 pounds of gear; and you could even make a case for Weaver and Moranis as the hijacked passengers. I can’t even laugh at “When someone asks if you’re a god…say YES!”
Then there’s H2G2. I’m sure I’ve said this before, but although:
is not quite what happened on 9/11, it’s a remarkably succinct way of describing the impact of the towers collapsing.
Air Force One is as goofy as ever, but as a piece of escapism, I think it’s not as good. However, terrorist Gary Oldman’s line about “you would murder a hundred thousand Iraqis to save a nickel on a gallon of gas” rings just a bit truer than it did ten years ago. Or maybe that’s just me.
Hijack: related question - Was the Seinfeld show on TV after 9/11? I can’t imagine those characters staying in character and reacting to the event in a nonoffensive way. But how could they ignore it as New Yorkers?
I find the opening to Barney Miller a little Heart Wrenching and of course the Dance number on top of the WTC in Godspell are eerie now.
Ghostbusters does not really bother me at all, but Remo Williams makes be think about the response the NYPD would have made to the characters in the Statue of Liberty scene.
I nearly forgot, the one Tom Clancy book where the Japanese Pilot suicides into DC is very disturbing now. I read it in 2000.
Similarly, I’ve always wondered how the characters of ‘Sportsnight’ would have reacted to it, especially since they were pretty much all liberal, patriotic Manhattaners, and given that they work high up in a Manhattan skyscraper. (Rockefeller center, IIRC.)
Neither of my examples is from fiction, but they are worth mentioning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay “My Lost City” describes his reaction to going up the Empire State Building for the first time and includes the line that “the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.” This was used to conclude a Ken-Burns-style US documentary series on the history of NYC that the BBC only ran in the UK a few months after 9/11. They had to prologue the final episode with a disclaimer that it’d been made beforehand, purely on account of this passage.
The more startling example is from the conclusion to the episode in Robert Hughes’s excellent BBC series American Visions that concentrates on the late 19th century Gilded Age. As a bridge to the next episode, it ends with a scene where he’s standing on the Jersey shore with lower Manhattan in the background, dominated by the WTC, as he does his final bit to camera. About how there would then be a decisive shift and that New York became “ground zero” for 20th century American art.
The movie Escape From New York prominently featured both a hijacked plane crashing in New York City and the World Trade Center (though not together).
I gotta say that Iron Eagle comes off a lot differently now, not least of all because of all the numerous stupid ways that Doug Masters could have lost his pilot’s license and/or gotten people killed even before stealing a pair of F-16s to rescue his dad from the mustache twirling Arab villain. That said, much of this might just be that I’m older and have actually learned a good bit about aviation regulations and such, but I just bought the movie on DVD and hadn’t seen it since well before 9/11.
Oh, you want a better one, there was a documentary about the World Trade Center produced around 2001, and it didn’t air until after 9/11. When they showed the documentary on TV, they put up a disclaimer saying that it was produced before everything happened, and warning that there was a segment where they discussed that the towers could survive a direct hit from a Boeing 707 Airliner.