Hilarious In Hindsight / Print Media

• Nintendo Power:
  • The Mario Vs. Wario comics printed in Nintendo Power shortly after Wario's debut in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins said that the reason for Wario's grudge against Mario was when they were playing cowboys as kids, he got to be sheriff only once. Ten years later, the GBA game WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$ features a hidden version of Nintendo's arcade game Sheriff with Wario taking over the title role. Wario also gets to be a sheriff in Mario Party 2.
  • Another Nintendo Power example: when Lucario was suggested as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the letters to the editor, it was juxtaposed with a suggestion of Dora the Explorer and laughed off by the responder. Later along the line, Lucario was announced as a playable character. (Sadly, Dora didn't make the cut.)
  • During the early days, the Player's Pulse section once featured a topic of the issue being the most infuriating gaming moments for players. One such player ranted about something involving his sister, and ended his post with "God must be a girl!"^note  Ironically, this was a time when Nintendo of America didn't allow religious references in any games it licensed, and since NP was an American magazine... Thirteen years later...
  • A fan letter published the December 1991 issue' detailed a fantasy game system which would come bundled with a game "better known as Super Mario Bros. 24", but would actually have the title of Super Mario Galaxy.
  • Another letter in the mid-90's had someone writing in about how awesome a game set in a courtroom would be, which the editors replied would've been a stupid idea. Capcom, apparently, was reading that letter, and came with the Ace Attorney series.
• Electronic Gaming Monthly made an April Fools' Day joke about a code to get play as Sonic and Tails in Super Smash Bros.. Melee (even photoshopping an extremely convincing pic). Come the Wii generation and Brawl, Sonic (but not Tails) joins the cast of playable characters.
• TV Guide:
  • A tradition for the magazine was every Fall Preview to gush on shows that would quickly be canceled while virtually ignoring series that would end up running for years.
  • For Super Bowl XXXII in 1998, TV Guide had five covers, one for Denver Broncos star John Elway and four for the Green Bay Packers, who were going into the game heavy favorites. Elway and the Broncos pulled off an upset victory.
  • The magazine had four alternate covers in 1999 for the Cleveland Browns with the headline "The Browns Are Back!" The Browns went 2-14 that season.
  • An annual event in September would be TV Guide doing regional covers for local NFL teams and thus often boasting of a great year for a team that went on to have a losing season.
  • The 2000 Fall TV Preview featured four major stars in anticipated sitcoms: Michael Richards (The Michael Richards Show), Geena Davis (The Geena Davis Show), Bette Midler (Bette) and John Goodman (Normal, Ohio). All four shows were quickly canceled flops.
  • The July 12, 2003 issue featured a cover star of Travis Fimmel, who was starring in the WB version of Tarzan, called "soon to be TV's hottest star." The series was canceled after eight episodes.
• Entertainment Weekly had to endure quite a few miscues over its 32 year existence.
  • As with TV Guide, it's impossible to count how many times the Fall TV Preview spent pages talking about a "sure thing" show that was canceled fast while brushing over what became the season's biggest hits.
  • Of all the movies of 1991 for EW to put on the cover of their Summer Preview? The infamous flop Hudson Hawk.
  • A 1997 cover story talked about "the big gambles of '97" which included the Star Wars Special Editions. Just a few weeks later, EW was talking about the Special Editions breaking box office records.
  • Among the many movies covered by the 1999 Summer Preview, one that wasn't even mentioned? The Sixth Sense.
  • The 2008 Fall Movie Preview boasted a big cover story for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince which was to premiere in November. Literally hours after EW announced the cover and just as it was to hit newsstands and subscribers, Warner Bros announced the movie would be delayed until July of 2009.
  • In a 2013 cover story on the huge success of Pretty Little Liars, EW had to acknowledge that not only did they give the show a poor review when it premiered two years earlier but even listed it as one of the "5 Worst Shows of 2011."
• In September of 1993, The Hollywood Reporter did a review of a new Fox TV series with a "labored premise," and finishing with the line "though the show works with a certain unintended camp kick, at the moment “X” doesn’t mark the spot where viewers can find involving drama by way of Stephen King-esque actions" and down on its chances of lasting a full season. The series in question? The X-Files.
• Cracked when it was still a humor magazine:
  • A 1970s issue predicted youth culture 30 years later pretty well.
  • A 1984 issue featured parodies of recurring features in rival MAD, including two Don Orehek cartoons done In the Style of Don Martin. Six years later, Don Martin left MAD over a salary dispute and started working for Cracked.
• This◊ Sports Illustrated cover taken during the 1984 Summer Olympics and its boycott from Soviet nations shows the red olympic ring in the far right corner fallen apart. Now here's the ring sculpture from the 2014 Winter Olympics' opening ceremonies◊.
• The infamous Sports Illustrated cover jinx has been providing laughter for decades. It ranges from teams called sure-things proceeding (sometimes almost immediately) to lose major games; pre-season predictions for "championship" teams who end up having losing seasons; to scores of "future stars" who never come close to fulfilling their potential.
• Even without the above jinx, SI has often gotten stuff very wrong:
  • A 1965 story declared Arnold Palmer was through as a golfer. Palmer would win 16 tournaments over the next six years.
  • They said the Green Bay Packers were just having an off-year in a losing season in 1968. It would take 28 years for the Packers to win another Super Bowl.
  • Their 1984 college football preview said unranked LSU was "in a rebuilding year." The Cougars not only went 13-0 but won the National Championship.
  • They called Wayne Gretzky "old and out of gas"...in 1990. Gretzky would score an NHL-best 878 points over the next nine seasons.
  • A 1991 story discussed how the New York Yankees were likely never to recapture their old magic. Within five years, the Yankees had won the first of four World Series within a decade.
  • The December 2023 issue discussed the Georgia Bulldogs, who were coming off back-to-back National Championships and an undefeated regular season with talk of them going for a threepeat. By the time the issue was published, the Bulldogs had lost the SEC Championship to Alabama, which cost them a shot at the College Football Playoffs.
  • It can't be counted how many times the NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL preview has predicted "Division/Conference/World Champions" for teams that end up having losing seasons while teams not expected to break .500 are the ones hoisting a trophy at the end of the year.
• Wizard Magazine:
  • In issue #112 (January 2001), there's a funny little comic about the employees discussing possible directors for the Spider-Man movie. Copy Editor Andy Serwin thinks Disney should make it, believing Spider-Man is for kids. Eight years later, Disney owns Marvel Comics, and there are plans for an animated Spider-Man movie (though it'll be released by Sony Pictures). It'll be seven more years later for Spider-Man to finally appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe alongside the Avengers.
  • The April 2001 issue had a fancast for a live-action Titans movie. While many of the choices were questionable (like 39-year-old Tom Cruise as Nightwing and Sean Connery as Deathstroke), one of the ideas put forth was Kelly Hu as Cheshire. About a decade later, Kelly Hu would voice Cheshire in Young Justice.
  • Likewise, in both a 2001 "Casting Call" and a mock movie poster, Wizard suggested that if a G.I. Joe movie was ever made, Ray Park should play Snake-Eyes. Sure enough, Park played the role in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
  • That same mock G.I. Joe poster suggested Jennifer Garner as Scarlett. In Rise of Cobra, Scarlett was played by Garner's Alias co-star, Rachel Nichols.
  • A 1997 "Casting Call" on an X-Men movie choosing Patrick Stewart for Professor X wasn't too surprising given how fans had wanted that for years. But a 2000 call for a sequel suggesting Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler? Maybe someone at 20th Century Fox was a fan of the magazine...
  • In a fancast from issue #105, the magazine suggested John Turturro for the role of Alberto Falcone in a hypothetical adaptation of The Long Halloween. 19 years later, Turturro was cast as Carmine Falcone, Alberto's dad, in The Batman.
• The Sep. 07 '18 cover for The Week is titled "Swamped," showing Trump sloshing through a swamp that has encompassed the White House. MAD's 20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things of 2018 parodies Trump himself as the Swamp Thing.
• A cartoon in Road & Track featured a car called the "Bug Royale" which had the front end of a Bugatti Royale and the rear of a Volkswagen Beetle. The cartoon was featured in an early 1990's issue, a few years before Volkswagen actually took ownership of Bugatti (1998).
• In 1977, long before the book Night at the Museum was ever published, a commemorative book from the Smithsonian opened with an essay titled "I Wonder What Happens at Midnight", about everything in the museums magically coming to life after closing time. In 2008, Night at the Museum 2 came out, with that exact premise.
• A 1995 issue of Odyssey Magazine had an article titled "A Note from the NASA Administrator". The accompanying photograph showed the author of the article, then-administrator Daniel Goldin, and astronaut Charles Bolden talking to schoolkids about space exploration. In July 2009, Bolden was appointed as... NASA's Administrator.
• This Entertainment Weekly story mused about the possibility of Paula Abdul dancing with Fred Astaire after seeing Elton John playing with Louis Armstrong for Diet Coke. Well, it wasn't Fred, but it was close enough... One wonders if that writer has ever played Super Castlevania IV...
• On the subject of academic writings...
  It follows from such a view that psychology may be an interim science destined to wither away as neurology advances. I think this is about as imminent as the withering away of the Soviet dictatorship but I would not deny the possibility. — Roger Brown, Words and Things, 1958
• In this 1997 interview, the reference to Tom Cruise at the very end is pretty hilarious in retrospect. So is the earlier part about how good she is at picking projects, considering that she hasn't had a major starring role since that interview came out.
• This 1835 British children's book◊ says about the Chinese, "It is from China that we obtain tea and silk, and fine muslins." Little more than a century later...
• Some 1970s newspapers abbreviated "Three Mile Island" as "TMI", which creates some chuckles when reading through newspaper archives several decades later, now that people often use the exact same letters to mean "too much information". "Senator Calls for TMI Investigation" indeed...
• Kitchen Confidential:
  • New York chef Anthony Bourdain remarked in the foreword to his tell-all memoirs that the book would not get him his own show on the Food Network. The book made Bourdain a celebrity chef, who ended up getting his own show on, yes, the Food Network.
  • Later in the book, Bourdain and a fellow chef dismiss the Spanish chef Ferran Adriá, and his molecular gastronomy, as "bogus", "shock value" and "that foam guy's shit". Adriá went on to completely revolutionize fine dining, and Bourdain would later make a fawning documentary about Adriá and his cooking.
• The 1995 book Unuseless Japanese Inventions featured a selection of humorous gadgets that "performed a useful function, but were too impractical or embarrassing to ever actually use." On page 250 is a couple using a camera mounted on a stick to take a self-portrait, 20 years before selfie sticks became the hottest fad item. Apparently, people got over their embarrassment.
• Because of a long gap time for print in the 1980s and '90s in order to make an early January release date, Pro Wrestling Illustrated's Year-End issue with the "PWI Awards" would only cover events up to, at the latest, the first week of November. Which means often PWI would miss some important items in the last two months of a year to affect their awards:
  • The 1988 "Inspirational Wrestler" award went to Jerry Lawler for restoring the AWA World title to prominence. Shortly after the issue hit, Lawler and the AWA had a huge falling out with Lawler stripped of the belt, which set the AWA on a path to being out of business in two years.
  • The 1989 Tag Team of the Year was Arn Anderson and Tully Blanchard. Both men had left WWF by early November.
  • The 1990 issue discussed Sting defeating Ric Flair for the NWA World title and articles basically saying Flair was done as a major star. By the time the issue came out, Flair had regained the title from Sting and would hold it about a dozen more times (not to mention numerous other championships) while remaining one of the top stars in the business for another two decades.
  • The very first winner of the "Comeback of the Year" award in 1992 was Ultimate Warrior. Warrior had left WWF in mid-November.

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