Cartoons Predict Good Things!

 

• Around the time when Molly of Denali first premiered, GoAnimate users claimed that the show was a ripoff of Wild Kratts. Three year later, the Kratt brothers themselves would guest-star on Molly of Denali.
• On October 9, 2010, an episode of The Penguins of Madagascar had Private be offended that Kowalski would mock his favorite show about unicorns. It was meant to be a joke that Private was weird in the fact he liked something for girls. Only a day later, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic happened.
• A Robot Chicken sketch parodying Sesame Street features Oscar noting that Sesame Street is the only New York neighborhood that hasn't yet been gentrified, and Grover saying that will change thanks to Hannah from HBO's Girls Joining the cast. Two years later, the show moved to HBO, and the set was changed to what could only be described as a cleaner, gentrified street.
• Phineas and Ferb depicts Perry the Platypus as a bright teal color which creator Dan Povenmire simply thought was a fun artistic choice. Then came the 2020 discovery that platypus fur under a blacklight has a bio-fluorescent glow that is the exact same shade of blue-green as Perry is...

• In the 1938 short Daffy Duck in Hollywood, Daffy puts together footage from several different films to make a bizarre patchwork feature that heavily resembles today's YouTube Poop videos.
• The episode "Animaniacs" (no relation to the series) featured a film festival. Dizzy Devil's entry was a crudely drawn animation of him swallowing the entire planet titled "Dizzy Eat World". A few years later came the rock band Jimmy Eat World. Although considering how the band got their name, it's entirely possible the cartoon indirectly inspired it
• One episode of The Looney Tunes Show has a scene where Daffy is looking for a tiny license plate with his name on it and finds a plate with the name Darvin instead; he then proceeds to question why anyone would name their kid that. Funny enough, in the Looney Tunes fandom, fans who ship Daffy with Marvin the Martian typically call the ship Darvin.

• Until late in The '90s, Doug was the only Nicktoon that wasn't a Grossout Show, and would later double as the one that got sold to Disney (although Nickelodeon would still keep it under the brand and air everything prior to that point in reruns). Eventually, The Atlantic would write this article, about how Nick, once the "splattery" opposite of the squeaky-clean Disney, had come to be more or less of a clone.
• The My Life as a Teenage Robot episode "This Time With Feeling", in which Fembot Jenny upgrades herself with a nervous system that allows her to be tickled and feel pain, predates the creation of a real nervous system for robots
• The episode of Rugrats where the kids find a stork egg and think it will hatch a baby brother for Tommy becomes ironic when Dylan is born much later in the series
• Arthur:
• The 2002 special It's Only Rock 'n' Roll has D.W. drawing trading cards based on members of U-Stink, and she writes their names wrong; Fern's card calls her Ferb.
• In the episode "Meet Binky", the eponymous band is outed as being a bunch of holograms when Arthur tosses a banana peel into a bizarrely cylindrical computer, mistaking it for a trash can, causing the system to glitch out. Fast forward to 2013 when Apple announces a brand-new Mac Pro that looks almost exactly like that As a bonus, one of the most common uses of Mac Pros is in media production, which is exactly the sort of thing the computer on the show was doing.

An episode of The Backyardigans had Uniqua as a flower seller who turned into a pink-clad superheroine with flower-themed powers. Later, HeartCatch Pretty Cure! comes along with a protagonist who had those exact traits

• The Cleveland Show:
• In an early episode, there's a cutaway gag of Uncle Thomas the Tank Engine. A few years later there were accusations of subtle racism in the children's show.
• Daria had a section on 'Sick Sad World' featuring a story involving a princess turning into a frog after kissing an enchanted prince.
• The Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "It's Way Ed in which the Eds try to come up with some wacky fashion trends with random everyday objects these days wouldn't be out of place in Lady Gaga's wardrobe.