And that the Berlin Wall would come down around the same time!
This book was first published in 1914. AFAIK, it’s still in print.
There was also the time Yoko Ono displayed an artwork consisting of a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat.
After the first Willie Wonka movie came out I remember there was Wonka branded candy; still is?
‘Major League’ (1989) anticipated the Cleveland Indians finally breaking the Cleveland Curse.
Science fiction of course anticipated numerous things that later became reality. We’re up to robot dogs now.
From my OP:
I’m taking about very specific things like this, not future technologies or fashions that happen to have been accurately “predicted”, like old movies using ray guns and someone eventually inventing the laser.
I wasn’t sure what was narrow enough to be a specific thing; the first moon landing? The first atomic bomb?
I was really looking for extremely specific: Cypress Hill would never have played “Insane in the Brain” with the London Symphony Orchestra if it were not for that happening in a Simpsons episode; the Alamo would never have bought a weird bicycle if it were not for the movie Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. That level of specificity. Things that would absolutely never have happened except for being referenced in a work of fiction, and they happened in the real world specifically because of that work of fiction. So the first moon landing definitely would not count. That Apollo spacecraft would never have been named Charlie Brown and Snoopy if there had never been a comic strip created by Charles Schulz is as close as the moon landing gets to what I was thinking about.
Every year, there is the annual Catalina Wine Mixer, based on the event from Stepbrothers.
But Cleveland still hasn’t won a World Series. And they’ve changed their name to the Guardians, so the Cleveland Indians will actually never win another championship.
Does the movie Marooned count? It came out in 1969. It was about three astronauts facing death when there’s a malfunction on their spaceship.
Four months later, three real life astronauts faced death when there was a malfunction on Apollo 13.
Not similar enough, I think. In Marooned astronauts returning from a Skylab-type space station suffered a malfunction of their propulsion system and so could neither reenter nor return to the station. Apollo 13 was crippled by an explosion that caused a critical loss of electrical power.
The first Space Shuttle was named Enterprise, after the fictional space ship.
The 9/11 attacks came seven years after Tom Clancy’s novel Debt of Honor, in which someone crashes an airliner into the U.S. Capitol building, and the Capitol was a possible target on 9/11. But that may not be as specific as the OP wants - it didn’t involve the World Trade Center.
My point was that Buzz Lightyear was originally a fictional toy and then became an actual toy, and when it was a fictional toy it was based on a fictional movie that was actually released later on.
I don’t think your examples track with the thread.
But is it going to be put on display in the basement?
Mexico City has a Dia de Los Muertos parade, inspired by a fictional version in a James Bond movie, Spectre
From the description, it’s a fax machine rather than a mobile phone with a camera.
Not that much of a prediction, really. The technology to send pictures by telegraph already existed.
The first space shuttle was named Columbia, Challenger was the second… Enterprise came much later
No.
Back to the Future Part II (1989) largely took place in 2015. In the 2015 section of the film, the Chicago Cubs were shown to win the World Series that year, ending their long championship drought. The filmmakers’ prediction was off by just one year: the Cubs finally won the Series in 2016.
Also, they got the opposing team wrong: it wasn’t Miami (which did not have an MLB franchise yet when the film was made); in reality, the Cubs beat…
The Dagwood sandwich: a towering, overstuffed monstrosity of meat, cheese, and pure sandwich audacity, was named after Dagwood Bumstead from the Blondie comic strip (created by Chic Young in 1930).
After World War II (when prosperity emerged), diners and delis across America started slapping the name “Dagwood” on their biggest, messiest sandwiches. It was shorthand for “stack it high and don’t hold back.” The trend had its moment in the spotlight, but like many fads, it slowly faded—though never completely disappeared.
You can still find the real deal at Blondie’s in Universal Orlando’s Toon Lagoon—“Home of the Dagwood Sandwich”. It serves the traditional Dagwood: multi-layered with ham, turkey, roast beef, American & Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, mayo, mustard, all piled on onion-poppy seed bread. It’s not just a sandwich—it’s a slice of American comic-strip history.