Daily Times

The whole world is talking about the coronavirus, and it’s understandable. Never in our lifetime has something like this impacted the world as a whole.

Over this past weekend, “What was the name of the kingdom in ‘Tangled?’” was the most Googled question. And the answer to that question is very fitting to today’s time.

Yes, the name to the Kingdom where everyone got sick, then Rapunzel was taken away and distanced from society was called “corona.” And the similarities didn’t end there. People on Twitter started to share the other similarities they found in the 2010 Disney movie.

Likewise, whenever there’s a tragedy, people always find dubious “predictions” of it in popular culture. People are claiming a 1993 Simpsons episode predicted the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

Images have circulated on social media showing Kent Brockman, the news anchor from The Simpsons, with the words “CORONA VIRUS” on the screen. The episode is about a fictitious disease called the “Osaka flu.” Simpsons screenshots have been edited to make them appears to mention the coronavirus.

Some fans believe the film’s fictional portrayal of destruction and high death toll are signs of what is to come, and suggest that officials are hiding information from the public.

Moreover, nine years after its release, Contagion has become the movie du jour as the world grapples with a very real disease: Covid-19, which has infected more than 126,000 people in dozens of countries.

Burns says Contagion was inspired by his father, who often worried about the possibility of bird flu becoming a human pandemic. The film’s scriptwriter conducted months of in-depth research into the science of pandemics and hired epidemiologists to develop a realistic plot.

Lastly, the fictional “Umbrella Corporation” from the game “Resident Evil” shares a logo with a biotech lab in Wuhan, Hubei Province in China, where a new coronavirus is believed to have originated.

In the video game series “Resident Evil,” a virus created by the pharmaceutical company “The Umbrella Corporation” turns many of the residents of Raccoon City into zombie-like creatures. While the events in this game were obviously fiction, some social media users pointed to a few strange coincidences in January 2020 as China and other countries responded to the real-world spread of a new coronavirus.

Social media posts claimed that the logo of a biotech lab in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the January 2020 outbreak, was eerily similar to the logo of the Umbrella Corporation. Furthermore, these posts noted how “corona” was an anagram for “racoon,” the city at the center of “Resident Evil.”