# The most prescient words ever uttered in film or fiction **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [March 9, 2009, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804 "2009-03-09T04:26:32Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/21 "2009-03-11T19:05:29Z")
One that apparently isn’t true was the D-Day crossword puzzle. The story I had heard was that a week before the Normandy invasion, a British newspaper ran a crossword puzzle in which the answers included Gold, Juno, Mulberry, Omaha, Overlord, Neptune, Sword, and Utah - all of which were codewords for the upcoming invasion. The truth was less prescient. The words listed above had appeared in The Daily Telegraph’s daily crossword puzzles, but not all in a single puzzle. They had appeared in different puzzles spread out over a period of weeks. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/22 "2009-03-11T19:53:37Z")
“You know, Fox became a hardcore sex network so gradually that I hardly noticed.” - Marge Simpson, 1994 ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/23 "2009-03-11T19:58:49Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > I’ve posted this one before, but in both the short story _Lost Legacy_ and the juvenile novel _Space Cadet_, Robert Heinlein foresaw that cell phones would become a royal pain in the ass. > > Predicting the cell\* phone? Trivial. > > Predicting that people would find them annoying, and deliberately leave them behind, because they didn’t want to be reached? Brilliant. > > - Heinlein called it a “pocket” phone, same diff. I’m not nearly enough of a science fiction buff to do it myself, but I think it would be a hoot to try to describe an ordinary day in some ordinary schmuck’s life in the year 2009 in 50s science fiction terms, using prescient but wrongly-named monikers like “pocket phone”, “seashell buds” and the like. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 8:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/24 "2009-03-11T20:14:03Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > In **Sleeper** one of the future scientists showed a clip of Richard Nixon and said, “We think this man was president of the United States, but did something so horrible that all records of him were erased.” It came out in late 1973 and was filmed just as Watergate was breaking, and long before Nixon resigned. This, and the Ronald Reagan reference in All In The Family, are no big surprise. Reagan was already a nationally known conservative who was anathema to most people on the left wing, especially young adults and students, whom “Meathead” represented on the show politically. Same with Nixon, although it’s not so clear that Woody Allen was intentionally aiming for a left wing or liberal audience. Certainly a good many of his social and cultural views seem to point that way. Nixon was already reviled for expanding the war into Cambodia; Watergate just gave us a purely ethical and non-political reason to disapprove of him. He wouldn’t have had to resign from office with impeachment nipping at his heels, if all he’d done was make executive decisions in good faith that the Left happened to dislike. ---
**Author:** ![Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/earl_snake-hips_tucker/32/3269_2.png) [@Earl\_Snake-Hips\_Tucker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/25 "2009-03-11T21:07:57Z")
September 27, 1963 “In Praise of Pip” from “Twilight Zone:” \*Pip is dying. My kid is dying. In a place called South Vietnam. There isn’t supposed to be a war going on there, but my son is dying. \* ---
**Author:** ![ShibbOleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/848f3c/32.png) [@ShibbOleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ShibbOleth)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/26 "2009-03-11T21:19:26Z")
U.S. “advisors” first appeared in Vietnam during the 1950s - remember the French failed following the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The Eisenhower administration introduced the Domino Theory. We had combat troops there by 1965. This was just observant, not prescient. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/27 "2009-03-11T21:45:08Z")
> [@tesseract](#): > > I have been thinking about plastic a lot recently, too. I used to wonder what the new asbestos and Thalidomide would be – what common, supposed-to-be-safe substances are we using every day and thinking nothing of it, meanwhile they’re killing us? Is it plastic? I’m too tired to look for cites right now, but supposedly you’re supposed to throw away all your #7 hard plastic bottles, right? And not heat your food with plastic wrap…(?) Does it cause all sorts of cancer? Maybe it’s plastic and not Jenny McCarthy that causes autism? OK, I’m just kidding about the last part, but…plastic, indeed. It’s a common urban myth, but there’s no medical evidence for it. Snopes link. ---
**Author:** ![Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malleus_incus_stapes/32/3293_2.png) [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malleus_Incus_Stapes)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/28 "2009-03-11T21:45:41Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > [_Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futility,_or_the_Wreck_of_the_Titan) > > Sorry, I posted a work rather than a quote. But I imagine if I went through the text I could find a few choice bits, something like “Psaw, man, this is the greatest luxury liner ever built! Utterly unsinkable! Icebergs? _Fiddlesticks!_” I’m thirding this one. Freaky. Apparently, he also wrote one about a war with Japan that was similar to WII, also. ---
**Author:** ![whitetho](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/whitetho/32/1059_2.png) [@whitetho](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whitetho)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/29 "2009-03-11T22:16:32Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > I’ve posted this one before, but in both the short story _Lost Legacy_ and the juvenile novel _Space Cadet_, Robert Heinlein foresaw that cell phones would become a royal pain in the ass. > > Predicting the cell\* phone? Trivial. > > Predicting that people would find them annoying, and deliberately leave them behind, because they didn’t want to be reached? Brilliant. > > - Heinlein called it a “pocket” phone, same diff. An entry in “Topics of the Times”, [A Triumph but Still a Terror](http://earlyradiohistory.us/1906triu.htm), in the December 17, 1906 _New York Times_, worried about the prospects for a wireless telephone, asking: “How will it be when we’re told, not that somebody’s ‘on the wire,’ but that somebody’s ‘on the air,’ and we are exposed to answer calls from any part of the atmosphere?” In the January 3, 1910 issue of the _Times_, Michael Pupin was quoted as saying: “You see, we could never get away from it. What privacy would we have left? It’s bad enough as it is, but with the wireless telephone one could be called up at the opera, in church, in our beds. Where could one be free from interruption?” Also, on a more humorous note, from the January, 1916 issue of _The Electrical Experimenter_: > [@](#): > > Many a man in the spring of the weather and of youth has stood on his doorstep and longed to be able to shout his thoughts to all the world. Many have felt this, but few have ever thought they could do it. Wireless telephony has made such a scheme within the range of the possibilities. If your wife is cross, or your enemy is hot on your trail, or the partner wants to tell you that note falls due to-morrow, don’t think you can go to San Francisco or China and get away from her or them. Gadzooks: You can’t–the wireless 'phone will get you. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Mudd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f14d63/32.png) [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/30 "2009-03-11T22:52:14Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Lester del Rey wrote a book, _Rocket Jockey_, about the first moon landing in 1952 - and the name he made up for the first man to set foot on the moon was Armstrong. Heinlein wrote _Requiem_ in 1940. Its protagonist is Delos “D.D.” Harriman, the man responsible for the first manned lunar expedition. “Delos” is an odd name for an American industrial capitalist; Delos is the birthplace of Apollo. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![ivylass](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@ivylass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivylass)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2009, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/31 "2009-03-11T23:19:23Z")
One that stuck with me was _Demolition Man_. In the shot of the prisoners in cryo-freeze is one named Scott Peterson. Not exactly earth-shattering, but it was a bit of a minor “hey!” ---
**Author:** ![Unintentionally\_Blank](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/unintentionally_blank/32/5418_2.png) [@Unintentionally\_Blank](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Unintentionally_Blank)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/32 "2009-03-12T00:28:12Z")
> [@ivylass](#): > > One that stuck with me was _Demolition Man_. In the shot of the prisoners in cryo-freeze is one named Scott Peterson. Not exactly earth-shattering, but it was a bit of a minor “hey!” Actually, what got me was ‘All Restaurants are Taco Bell’. Taco Bell is owned by Pepsico…which gives us Long John Silvers/A&W/Pizza Hut/KFC/Taco Bell all in one shiny restaurant! ---
**Author:** ![Kozmik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/8dc957/32.png) [@Kozmik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kozmik)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/33 "2009-03-12T01:28:18Z")
[QUOTE=Dark Angel (2000) set in 2019] They used to say one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day. It was sort of a joke, until the June morning those terrorist bozos whacked us with an electromagnetic pulse from 80 miles up. You always hear people yapping on how it was all different before the pulse. Land of milk and honey blah, blah, blah… The thing I don’t get is why they call it a depression. I mean, everybody’s broke… but they aren’t really all that depressed. Life goes on. … This used to be the financial district. America really thought they had it dialed in, money hanging out the butt. But it was all just a bunch of ones and zeros in a computer someplace. So, when that bomb went ka-blooey and the electromagnetic pulse turned all the ones and zeros into plain old zeros, everyone’s like, “No way!” Now, America’s just another broke ex-super power **looking for a handout** and wondering why. [/QUOTE] [Dark Angel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Angel_(TV_series)) ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/34 "2009-03-12T01:49:09Z")
> [@SomeBodyUK](#): > > [Pretty famous scene from Network regarding big business democracy from 1976](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeCMSLP3Wy8) Jeeze, the whole damn movie came true, figuratively. ---
**Author:** ![Uosdwis\_R.Dewoh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/9e8a1a/32.png) [@Uosdwis\_R.Dewoh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uosdwis_R.Dewoh)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/35 "2009-03-12T01:52:59Z")
In Path to Paradise: The Untold Story of the World Trade Center Bombing, a tv movie made by HBO in 1997, the final words of the movie is the bad guy saying. > [@](#): > > Next time, we will bring them BOTH down. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/36 "2009-03-12T03:09:20Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > How about this headline in The Onion of January 17, 2001: [Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’](http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784) You stole my post! ---
**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/37 "2009-03-12T03:23:11Z")
> [@Scougs](#): > > Not prescient as such, but sent a shiver down my spine when I saw it post-2001. > > Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains The Same”, when Robert Plant introduces Stairway to Heaven with the words “this is a song of hope…”, what’s on screen? > > The twin towers of the World Trade Center, reflecting the pinkening sunset. slight nitpick: "[_I think_ this is a song of hope . . ."](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kNEo8OxrT8) ---
**Author:** ![Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/7cd45c/32.png) [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/38 "2009-03-12T04:35:39Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > …Just one word. Plastic. > > Indeed. An earlier thread on that very word: ["The Graduate" and plastics - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=385407) ---
**Author:** ![DWMarch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dwmarch/32/1010_2.png) [@DWMarch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DWMarch)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 9:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/39 "2009-03-12T09:29:57Z")
The move **Three Kings** , filmed long before Gulf War Part Two, featured a character telling George Clooney off when he suggests invading Iraq: “Do you want another fuckin’ Vietnam?!” ---
**Author:** ![Scissorjack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Scissorjack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scissorjack)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2009, 10:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804/40 "2009-03-12T10:12:13Z")
> [@Kozmik](#): > > [Dark Angel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Angel_(TV_series)) That sounds suspiciously similar to the backstory of _Freezone_, a John Shirley short story from 1985 in which Arab terrorists take out the American banking system with a hydrogen bomb launched in a shuttle which triggers an EMP from orbit: “The Arab terrorist cell responsible - hardcore Islamic fundamentalists - had been composed of seven men. Seven men who crippled a nation. But America still had its enormous military spread, its electronics and medical innovators. And the war economy kept it humming. Like a man with cancer using amphetamines for a last burst of strength.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-most-prescient-words-ever-uttered-in-film-or-fiction/488804.md?page=3)