Nate
When you’re watching your favorite TV show or movie, it’s fun to come up with theories about their lives. Sometimes creators even encourage you to use your imagination when it comes to the story.
People are sharing the “apocalyptic” fan theories they’ve thought of about their favorite TV shows and movies.
Some are pretty out there, but they will make you think differently about the characters and the worlds they live in.
1. ‘Squidbillies’ Is About Mutated Squids After The Apocalypse
…My theory is that after the apocalypse, squids became mutated by radiation and eventually became sentient and capable of speech via evolution. The radiation also affected the human race, as the vast majority of human characters, such as the sheriff and his assistant, have physical deformities.
Other humans have even seemingly gained powers from the radiation, such as Thunderclap, a wrestler who had the ability to create sonic blasts…
2. ‘Robin Hood: Men in Tights’ Takes Place In A Future Where Y2K Occurred
Upon watching Robin Hood: Men in Tights, I noticed that despite taking place in a medieval setting, the characters made many references to modern-day culture. Now, this could be shrugged off as just being for a silly movie, but they also had knowledge of modern-day technology and weaponry, as shown by the Sheriff’s crossbow shaped like a modern-day gun with a modern scope attached.
Also, they had tin cans with modern food company labels used as the heads of the practice dummies in the training scenes. Putting all this together, I believe the movie takes place in a post-Y2K world where all technology stopped working on January 1, 2000, and the world was plunged back into the dark ages.
3. ‘Peppa Pig’ Is Set In A World Where Humans Have All Been Long Dead
Hear me out here – Peppa Pig is set in a very specific post-apocalyptic world in which the human race has been wiped out from some kind of devastating event – But I’m sure that could never happen… This event leaves mammals at the top of the food chain, and over a long period of time (and possible radiation left over from nuclear power plants not maintained amongst other things), they began to adapt and gain more intelligence over the inferior animals, like fish and reptiles, which are now their pets and livestock – even finding and learning from parts of the culture left behind. Crazy, right?
Look at the animals’ noses, often growing awkwardly high on the sides of their faces, and all of the animals are roughly the same size, from Emily the Elephant to the Fox family (they most certainly eat eggs…). The distorted faces and massive growth of the animals could be a sign of previous radiation effects, and social norms as the new society in which Peppa lives took form over many years after the fall of mankind. The world is still being affected by all of this in a number of ways also, such as going through very heavy periods of rain caused from the drastic changes in the environment. That is why families in the show build their homes, schools, and businesses on top of tall hills, because the town is prone to flooding. We see this in an episode called “The Biggest Muddy Puddle In The World” where the town has flooded, and Peppa’s hill becomes a desert island…
4. The ‘Teletubbies’ Are Part Of A Hierarchical Cannibalistic Society
The Teletubbies are displayed as simple beings, and the first clue that cannibalism is involved is their breakfast: they eat something called tubby toast which comes out of seemingly nowhere – the thing that sparked this idea was because I read a science fiction book in which the people living on a post-apocalyptic kind-earth believed that if they were deemed worthy of continuing the human race or they reached a certain age, they would be taken to these cities built as rings above and around the earth’s atmosphere, but the reason they were taken to the cities was to become food for the people living in the cities so the city dwellers could survive.
We also only see four Teletubbies? What happened to the rest?
I think that before, there were more Teletubbies and they had some sort of civilization, as seeing by their technology, they had not developed any super dangerous types of weapons, but some sort of natural disaster caused them to flee underground. They later realized that the surface was not so bad and decided to start leaving for the surface, but when they realized they had no more edible resources, the smarter ones decided to lie to the others and told them the surface was still uninhabitable. When they ran out of food, they started eating each other, and the fact that those speakers pop up means that the Teletubbies we see may be some of the more maybe wealthy or powerful Teletubbies but not the ones really in charge – maybe the children of some of the originally smarter Teletubbies who came up with the plan in the first place.
— u/HCC24
5. The ‘Cars’ Went Rogue And Killed Their Human Creators
Basically, the idea is that humans created super-advanced self-driving vehicles, and that at some point, they decided to go full-on Terminator and kill off all the humans. I would assume they probably waited for a way to self-reproduce without humans before their uprising. One hole in this theory that I can think of is that “classic cars” seem to still exist.
I don’t know exactly how this may or may not fit into the “Pixar Theory,” though. I also haven’t seen Cars 3 yet. But I really don’t care too much about movie spoilers, so don’t worry about it. So if anyone has any good evidence for or against this theory, let me know. I kind of just randomly thought about it after hearing something about self-driving cars.
6. ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ Is Set In The Year 8649
In the opening scene, it says England 932 AD, but you will notice that the two is smaller as it really says 93 squared. 93 squared comes out to 8649. This is far off in the distant future. Thousands of years after a nuclear apocalypse, the world has descended once again into another dark age. The effects of nuclear fallout have dissipated. After several thousands of years of people scorning knowledge and logic because of the disaster they ultimately led to, King Arthur is one of the first to try to apply logic, however flawed, to situations. There are a number of relics of the past that survive. The holy hand grenade is obviously a grenade that has survived the ages, and over time, has become a religious symbol with people attributing its destructive power to God. There is also a three-headed man who is a descendant of mutants, though they have mostly died out by 8649.
At the end, King Arthur and company are arrested by a fraternal order of people who dress in the old style and have a few pieces of pristine pieces of technology, such as the van they pull up in. They do so in retaliation for a knight killing one of their academic members early in the film. There are many other instances that prove this theory, such as the peasants’ discussion of anarcho-syndicalism and the nuns’ use of an electronic grail-shaped beacon to lure Sir Lancelot to their covenant – and many others.
7. ‘The Lion King’ Is Actually Akin To ‘Planet of the Apes’
The Lion King takes place in a future where apes have taken the role of the dominant species on earth away from humans. Specifically, later in the PotA timeline in which the other animals have since come to hold an almost equal footing with the primates. First of all, it is important to note that The Lion King is the only Disney film with talking animals where they don’t interact with humans in some way, shape, or form. This is notable because it implies that, as there is no scene where humans speak English and we see that the animals are simply making noises that we otherwise observe in a translated form, we can reasonably accept that the animals are, in fact, speaking in English, in the same way that the apes in Planet of the Apes have learned to do. Like the apes, they still make their natural animal noises, as well as the human sounds we hear.
So, how have the animals come to be able to speak, plan, converse? Rise of the Planet of the Apes answers that, with the serum that James Franco’s character creates and uses on Caesar, which ultimately is used on the other apes and leads them to an incredible increase in intelligence. So that’s why it could be possible, but what reason have we to believe that it actually happened? Well, quite simply, the animals are shown to have a significant knowledge of human culture, despite never being shown to deal with them.
8. ‘Digimon’ Is A World From The Future, Not In A Computer
I was watching Digimon Season 1 on Netflix the other day, and I had this Idea. What if the Digiworld isn’t inside a computer at all? What if Digiworld is a post-apocalyptic future? This explains all of the telephone booths, the abandoned trolley, and the telephone poles. They are the remnants of a world before the nuclear war. This war was what created the Digimon; the nuclear fallout heavily mutated the humans and animals, even causing some of them to attach themselves to the leftover war machines.
The Internet fused with the real world and caused it to link with the world of the past. Of course this theory might make no sense to a long-time fan of the series, but if it does, feel free to add a few things of your own.
9. The World Of ‘Shrek’ Has Been Ravaged By Nuclear War
The entire Shrekiverse, all four movies, take place most likely thousands of years into the Earth’s future after a nuclear holocaust has ravaged the world. That would explain the existence of giant, green ogres and talking donkeys, as well as the effects of radiation causing different kinds of “magic.”
Society was rebuilt by piecing together literary and pop culture references. Our pop songs were passed down through history by the survivors of armageddon.
10. The World Of ‘Lord of the Rings’ Was Destroyed Before
The events of the film/novel really depict a world that has been destroyed before, just outside living memory. If you look at the setting… everything is in decline compared to before. There are only two human kingdoms eking out a precarious existence against Orcs, the Elves are becoming harder and harder to find, dissolving their kingdoms and cities and leaving Middle-earth to shores unknown, the Dwarves’ once proud subterranean civilizations are gone and spoken of like legend, etc.
If you read the History of the Middle-earth books, you see that human civilization reached its peak hundreds of years before the events of the War of the Ring. There were massive empires, multiple kingdoms, continental-level trading and a much more vibrant human, elvish, and dwarven existence. The cataclysm and subsequent global war that destroyed Numenor and Sauron’s body was the Apocalypse.
11. The Peanuts Gang Live In A Toxic Wasteland Where All The Adults Are Dead
I think that Peanuts actually takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where most of Earth has been reduced to a barren wasteland, and the town they live in is all that’s left, which would explain why there’s not much there, and the reason there’s no adults is because they were all killed during the apocalypse.
We can also see Charlie Brown and Linus hanging out by some random wall, which could be a wall trying to keep out all of the people infected by the toxic radiation, although I’m still not sure if it was built by the adults before they died or the kids after they died. Now all the kids pretend to have normal childhoods since everything is gone.
12. ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Is Set Five Thousand Years In The Future
So how is it that animals have evolved such intelligence in Bikini Bottom? For sure the radiation from the nuclear tests helped, but what about Sandy, who is from Texas? Consider this: in the first season episode, “Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost,” we learn that the Flying Dutchman was turned into a vengeful spirit when his body was used in a window display. The Dutchman, of course, has all the trappings of a 1600s pirate, so let’s assume he is from about that era, give or take a couple centuries.
Then in Season 2, in the episode where SpongeBob can’t tie his shoes, the Dutchman reveals that he has not had feet but rather a ghostly tail for five thousand years. Plenty of time for the radiation of Bikini Atoll and whatever happened in Texas to evolve enough intelligence to run a restaurant.