This past Wednesday, Modern Family aired an episode titled “The Last Walt”, which was a play on the title of The Band’s concert film “The Last Waltz”. That happened to be the same day that it was announced that The Band’s drummer, Levon Helm, was gravely ill (and who died the next day).
Similarly, an episode of Modern Family a few weeks back had a “Monkees” joke the same day as (or within a couple of days of) Davy Jones’ death.
One other one I thought of was that Roger Bowen, the actor who played Col. Blake in the movie version of “MAS*H”, died the day before McLean Stevenson, who played Col. Blake in the TV series.
What other odd coincidences in the media can you remember? It doesn’t necessarily have to be related to someone’s death, those were just the only examples I could think of off the top of my head.
On Thursday, I went to see the touring company of Memphis. In the second act, they made a mention of a TV host in Philadelphia named “Richard Clark.” There was a gasp of recognition in the audience as they realized it referred to Dick Clark, who had died just the day before. True, the line was in the show every night, but it was a strange coincidence.
Six months before September 11th, 2001, the X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen’s pilot featured a plot by rogues within the US government to fly a commercial airliner into the World Trade Center, blaming it on middle-eastern terrorists in order to justify a war for which they had ulterior motives.
A show that’s entire concept is based around the playful use of the tropes of conspiracy nuts neatly anticipated the conspiracy nuts’ main obsession of the new millennium, predicting their most paranoid fever dreams pretty much exactly.
Nitpick: it’s really not a whole “plotline.” There’s a scene where a character is seen loading a powerful rifle in a clock tower. History and pop culture tell us that this is prelude to a mass murder, but in fact he was planning only to kill himself.
This isn’t exactly what you’re talking about, but it’s interesting, and I never get a chance to tell this story.
In the spring of 1963, I lived in Niagara Falls, NY, and my mother and my teenaged self went downtown to watch the crew of Route 66 film an episode. It was to be called"I’m Here to Kill a King", and according to the IMDB, it was scheduled to air in March of 1964. It was never shown because by then the nation was still in shock over the Kennedy assassination, which occurred in November 1963.
In 1997, John Byrne was writing & drawing the comic book Wonder Woman and ran a storyline in which a powerful super-villain managed to kill her (she of course eventually got better, as all super-heroes do when they are fatally struck down.) The issue in which Wonder Woman (who at the time did not use the name “Diana Prince” as a secret identity and was well-known in the DC universe as “Princess Diana”) came out at the end of August - about a week before the death of England’s real life Princess Diana. The cover of the issue in question had a close-up of a “Daily Planet” front page reading “Princess Diana Struck Down.”
Another DC comics coincidence, they had some line-wide alien invasion storyline going on in 2001 or so, and showed the WTC being destroyed (or at least heavily damaged) in the background of a few panels.
Glee had a Whitney Houston song in an episode that aired far to soon after her death for it to not seem like a strange coincidence. They have another “tribute” episode airing soon, but that’s obviously a reaction to events.
There was suppose to be reporting today on KONY 2012’s Cover the Night campaign. This morning, I read The New York Times before work, and there was no mention of KONY 2012. Ironically, though, there is a story about a bunch of kids smoking marijuana. I wonder what Jason Russell, the group’s leader, was doing yesterday.
I guess finding two radio stations playing the same song at the same time is a common enough coincidence, but the other day, two stations in L.A. were playing “Legs” by ZZ Top, except one was playing the album version while the other played the single version, which I believe are two different recordings, although the arrangement is the same. They were synched up exactly.
And it may been a problem for the show and its parent - reality caught up with and surpassed its fiction, to the point where their efforts at cutting edge paranoia was widely viewed as old hat.
There was also a planned (but understandably cancelled) Jackie Chan movie where he would star as a window washer stopping terrorists from blowing up WTC.
Two big news stories broke the same day. I was sleeping with the radio on, so my dreaming mind did a mash-up of the two stories: Nelson Mandela, released from prison, knocked out heavyweight champ Mike Tyson. Not really a coincidence (although Mandela had been a boxer), but an irresistible image nonetheless.
That’s not really a coincidence though. Jackie Chan and Osama bin Ladin chose it for the same reason, it had already been a terrorist target once before.
The winner of the 2001 FOX summer replacement series Murder in Small Town X was a firefighter who died in the 9/11 attacks.
Interestingly enough, had the show not been doing so horribly in the ratings, the final episode would have aired on September 11th. However, FOX decided to show the final two episodes back-to-back on September 4th to make room for another reality show, this one with cleavage on a beach.
When I was in High School, there was a show called “Police Squad,” which was later made into the “Naked Gun” movies. At the beginning of each episode, they would introduce a guest star who would die in the opening credits and never actually appear in the episode. Supposedly, they filmed an opening with John Belushi, but could not air it, as Belushi died between the time they filmed and the time it was supposed to air.
Speaking of Glee - they did their Saturday Night Fever show just as news of Barry Gibb being in a coma was all over the news. (Update: He has awoken from the coma - maybe from the shock of listening to the cast of Glee singing the songs?)
I think if I were an aging pop star, I wouldn’t want Glee to cover any of my songs - there seems to be some kind of curse going on.
