Absolutely. It's like people watching Psycho for the first time and recognizing it before the scene happens.
Although I have to say that my favorite missed reference, is the Akira ending. Something similar happens in a bunch of animated shows(South Park as an entire episode about it, which most fans don't realize is a direct reference). And so many people have a huge "Oh shit" moment when they see the movie and realize.
Are you talking about the trapper keeper episode? I never made that correlation until you just mentioned it! And I've seen Akira many more times before and after that episode originally aired many years ago.
One thing that has always troubled me about that episode, ever since I went on a watch through several years ago, was he said the phrase "the buffalo is off the nickel", and in context, I'm assuming that it meant something along the lines of believing something that isn't true, but since we don't use buffalo nickels anymore, that phrase has exited common parlance, and it threw me for a loop to hear old slang.
I think it's like saying "there's no guard rails now" because you are not in safe and regulated society where all the wild animals you see are on your coins, but you are now outside of that safe comfortable world and the wild animals are actually wild animals.
It reminds me of the saying "when you hear hooves, expect horses, not zebras" because you'd really be somewhere exotic if the sounds turned out to be a zebra.
Well you'd really be somewhere outside of your regular comfort zone if the buffalos were sitting in the grass instead of sitting on your nickle.
Trying to find the origin and meaning of that. This talks about a bull, not a buffalo, and oddly references a twilight zone episode, though I think this is a different episode than what we are talking about.