Did Captain America predict the coronavirus?
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The Simpsons have proven adept at doing it, so why not the MCU?
Marvel heroes have saved the world on more than one occasion, but until now no one has accused the films based on popular comic book characters of being able to predict the future. Until now.
An intriguing theory started to make the rounds recently after an Instagrammer circulated an image from 2011’s first Captain America film, which showed Chris Evans in New York’s Times Square. The billboards behind Evans show a bottle of Corona beer and what looks like the fuzzball image we’ve come to associate with the coronavirus
Film critic William Mullally tweeted out the image, writing it was given to him by a “friend who’s fully into the covid conspiracies … that says Captain America predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 2011.”
Calling the theory “BS” Mullally, though, sought to figure out what the image that was being purported to be the coronavirus in Captain America really was.
After learning that the scene was shot in April 2011, Mullally scoured through “every movie and Broadway show released from April through the summer” to no avail.
With the help of a friend, Mullally revisited street-view footage from Bing and Google when a close-up image revealed a familiar logo.
After spending hours to uncover the mystery of the secondary billboard, Mullally was able to correctly identify the image some Internet users had conspiratorially theorized was an early warning of the pandemic to come.
“It’s spaghetti,” Mullally tweeted, sharing an ad for Barilla-brand pasta.
Earlier this spring, fans of the long-running animated hit, The Simpsons, pointed out how that series eerily predicted the coronavirus and murder hornets in a May 6, 1993, episode titled Marge in Chains — which featured a fictitious disease dubbed the “Osaka Flu” that everyone contracts after an ill factory worker in Japan coughs into boxes that are shipped to Springfield.
Later in that same episode, when the townspeople of Springfield demand a cure, they accidentally topple a crate marked “Killer Bees.”
But Bill Oakley, a co-writer on the episode spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, downplayed the notion that the series acts as a modern-day Nostradamus saying, “It’s mainly just coincidence because the episodes are so old that history repeats itself. Most of these episodes are based on things that happened in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s that we knew about.”
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