I’m a long-time Futurama fan but only just discovered tonight that in the original pilot, when Fry is cryogenically frozen, you can see the shadow of Nibbler pushing him into the freezer, when it previously appeared he had just felt from leaning back too far on his chair. A few years (and seasons) later, the pilot episode was revisited in another episode and we learned the truth about what happened in that scene, but more amazing to me than the fact that I didn’t notice Nibbler’s shadow until now (despite having seen the pilot ep dozens of times, and knowing the extra backstory) is the fact that the creators of Futurama really did plan ahead.
This sort of thing is one of my favorite parts of any kind of fiction and I’d like to make a thread for everyone to post their favorite examples of this kind of thing in all forms of fiction. What are your best examples of something being mentioned, shown, referenced or just implied in a TV show, movie, cartoon, book series, whatever, a long time before that thing became relevant or important? I don’t specifically mean regular foreshadowing, since that is mainly open to interpretation, but rather examples of this kind of faith to the original story arc that really took genuine planning and were absolutely intentional. In other words, I’m not really after things that can be ambiguous, like foreshadowing of deaths just because five chapters earlier the dead guy was the 13th man to sit down at the dinner table or something. The kind of thing you may only catch on your 2nd or 3rd reading or viewing, or like me, not even know until you read about it online.
To give a few more examples, here are a few from the Harry Potter book series. Granted, the HP series has it’s fair share of things Rowling just kind of stumbled into, but there are some good instances of this kind of forethought in the books:
[ul]
[li]Philosopher’s Stone: The Weasley twins get in trouble for bewitching snowballs to follow Professor Quirrell around, smacking off the back of his turban. As we find out at the end of the book, what was actually going on was Fred & George were thumping snowballs off Voldemort’s face.[/li][li]Order of the Phoenix: Hermione, despite trying to stop Fred & George’s sweet shop business, inadvertently contributes to their success. Harry gets his hand sliced up by Umbridge’s detention quill: Hermione recommends he use Essence of Murtlap to heal the wounds. A hundred pages or so later, Lee Jordan gets in trouble with Umbridge and is subjected to the same quill. Harry tells Lee to use the Murtlap. Another hundred pages go by, and one of the twins’ best candies for faking illnesses is ready, thanks to the fact they recently found a way to cure a bad side-effect. They say they used Essence of Murtlap to remove this side-effect, and that “Lee put us on to it”.[/ul][/li]
Another example: I don’t watch a lot of TV beyond cartoons, and admittedly this isn’t stunningly clever, but rather it was nice: in NCIS, in the first season the agent Kate Todd makes a passing reference to her sister. Several seasons later (5 or 6), we meet a woman trying to become an NCIS agent, and later learn she was Kate’s sister, trying to find out how her dead sister lived. My memory’s a little hazy on this (I don’t watch a lot of TV), but I think they went so far as to have Kate say “My sister in California” or something of that effect, and then, years later, introduce this new woman as being from the same place, and it’s one of those things that jumps out at you the 2nd time you watch the series all the way through.
Anyone got some good examples of this kind of thing?
