On Gary Unmarried last night, the guys went to Las Vegas where they kept talking about having tickets to see Danny Gans. Kind of creepy, though obviously when they shot the episode, Danny was alive and doing fine.
Any other examples of shows that reference a now dead person as if they are still alive.
I have a lot of examples from the Fifties and Sixties, and a slightly lower count for the Seventies. For instance, I recall Nixon being mentioned often on “All in the Family.”
Is this what you are looking for?
It’s always weird to watch the Seinfeld “Contest” episode, where John F. Kennedy Jr. is in Elaine’s aerobics class.
Though, if you mean people who died between the filming of the episode and its initial airing, I can’t think of any…
Right. I’m looking for people who died between shooting & airing.
Adrienne Shelley - the writer/directer & co-star of Waitress. She was murdered three months before this movie (her feature film debut) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Photos of Shelley were also used in poster ads for the film festival, and had been plastered around Manhattan just days before her death.) Knowing that fact really made watching the film an odd experience, to say the least.
No way! I liked Waitress and had been hoping to see something else from the writer director, that’s crazy.
I can’t think of any good examples off the top of my head.
There was a film that came out last year called “Synechdoche, New York” starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman. At one point, Hoffman’s character is reading the newspaper and says, “Harold Pinter died. (Pause) No, wait, he won the Nobel Prize.”
When the film was shot, and indeed first released, Harold Pinter was still alive. But by the time I saw it (still in the theater) in January, Pinter was dead.
An episode of The Simpsons featured a joke about a bug spray so strong, James Coburn’s picture was on the bottle. Coburn died a few weeks before the episode first aired, so the gag was changed to Lee Marvin instead. Coburn was reinstated in reruns and syndication. (This may not actually fit the thread- it’s more of a preventing-from-referencing-now-the-recently-deceased, sort of how like in another episode Homer’s stolen Oscar was changed to read “Don Ameche” instead of “Haing S. Ngor” after the latter was murdered to avoid any macabre inference.)
In Back to the Future II a USA Today headline from the year 2015 mentions Queen Diana’s upcoming state visit.
“Airheads” with Brendan Frasier and Adam Sandler.
A struggling rock band takes a radio station hostage to get their music played.
One of their insane demands of the police is for “naked pictures of Bea Arthur”
Not quite the same, but in Dr. Strangelove, Slim Pickens’ character, while briefing his crew on the contents of their survival kits, muses “A fellow could have himself a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all this.” After filming, but before the movie was released, JFK was killed in Dallas, and the line was redubbed “A fellow could have huimself a pretty good weekend in Vegas…”
True story: When I was working in radio, we were running commercials for Six Flags over Mid-America that mentioned the Sky-Roll ride. One afternoon that summer, three people had died in an accident on the ride. We called the advertising agency and asked if we should pull the commercial. They told us to keep running it until the new commercials arrived. So for several days we ran commercials for a ride that had killed people.
In the movie Shallow Hal a character tells Jack Black he has tickets to a Beatles reunion, with Eric Clapton sitting in for Lennon. As I recall, George Harrison was dead before the movie came out.
French Policeman: Ze stupid bodyguard is drunk. He says he crashed because a car swept in front of him and disappeared in a flash, leaving fiery trails in the road.