History Main / DeweyDefeatsTruman

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[[quoteright:249:[[Film/BackToTheFuturePartII https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/princess_diana.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:249:In 1989, this seemed like a reasonable thing to expect in 2015.]]
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Sometimes, a writer inadvertently creates an AlternateHistory, which causes problems when referencing later events. The reason? Real life has simply progressed beyond the fictional events, meaning that the work suddenly becomes inaccurate. Adventure thrillers are especially vulnerable to this, as they are often written TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture. Sometimes, the writer will refer to later events such as 9/11, InSpiteOfANail. In other cases, what was a series of adventure novels experiences a GenreShift and becomes some kind of science-fiction or true Alternate History.

Anything that doesn't have TheInternet is prone to this, which is everything written before the mid-90s but set after. Anything vaguely similar to the 'net as we know it, tends to be limited to looking up a remote, probably centralized, database. The idea of it being a many-to-many medium doesn't seem to have occurred to many people until it actually happened.[[note]]This is mostly due to the fact that the Internet as it is today evolved, rather than being specifically developed: the ''designers'' of [=ARPAnet=] had no idea what it would become until it actually did.[[/note]] For examples of fictional not-quite-Internets, see TheAlternet.

The science-fiction version is a special case, where dates or [[ScienceMarchesOn rates of technological advance]] become invalidated by the march of time. {{Zeerust}} is an aesthetic version, where "futuristic" designs wind up dated.

The title comes from a famous newspaper headline. In the 1948 American presidential election, most people predicted New York Governor Thomas Dewey would beat incumbent President UsefulNotes/HarryTruman. The ''[[UsefulNotes/AmericanNewspapers Chicago Tribune]]'' printed "Dewey Defeats Truman" in reference to this prediction on the front page of its November 3 edition (the day after the election). [[AssumedWin By morning, the headline was proven wrong.]] The gaffe became infamous as a photo of the victorious Truman holding up the paper in triumph became an iconic image.

See TheGreatPoliticsMessUp for a particularly frequently encountered example.

[[noreallife]]
----
!!Examples:
[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder:Anime & Manga]]
* ''Anime/MazingerZ'' spin-off ''Manga/NewMazinger'' was written in 1988, but the story happens several centuries after that World War III between America and Soviet Union left the planet devastated in the early 21st century. It is the early 21st century now, and not only nothing of it has happened, but also the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after the story's publishing.
* ''Anime/{{Macross}}'': The original ''Anime/SuperDimensionFortressMacross'' was broadcast in 1982 but featured an alternate history of humanity after 2009 when humans and aliens fight a devastating war over a transforming mecha battleship. It's beyond 2009 now, and we haven't even fought [[Anime/MacrossZero World War III]] and built mecha like they did in the series[[note]]nobody's complaining about that first one though...[[/note]] -- we're behind schedule, in other words.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Comic Books]]
* ComicBook/MartianManhunter was originally from a thriving and prosperous Mars. After space probes found Mars to be barren, a RetCon was introduced to explain what had happened to J'onn's people.
* A 1986 issue of ''ComicBook/SwampThing'' took place during the temporal distortion period of the ComicBook/CrisisOnInfiniteEarths. Amidst the dinosaurs and aliens is a 1997-model car, which the artist renders as something out of ''WesternAnimation/TheJetsons''. In the actual nineties, car designs leaned toward a much more streamlined and conservative direction.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Fan Works]]
* ''Fanfic/RocketshipVoyager'' is [[{{Kayfabe}} ostensibly]] a sci-fi magazine story written in 1954, and has the first astronaut to reach Outer Space be an American woman by the name of Shanna O'Donnell.

[[/folder]]

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* ''Film/BackToTheFuturePartII'''s version of 2015:
** A Cubs-Miami World Series in 2015 became impossible as long as both franchises remained in the National League. Of course, the fact these teams had the two worst records in the NL in 2013 would've made a World Series by either squad unlikely, anyway. [[SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome (Although the Cubs did come closer than anybody thought they would]], defeating [[TheRival the St. Louis Cardinals]] to win the 2015 NLDS, [[YankTheDogsChain only to lose to the hated Mets]]. [[FunnyAneurysmMoment On October 21, 2015.]]) Good job predicting there'd ''be'' a Miami team, though (the Florida Marlins were formed in 1993 and became the Miami Marlins in 2012), even if they got the name and league wrong. The Cubs World Series happened in 2016, with them winning and ending the century-drought that was still very much in effect during the ''Back to the Future'' trilogy.
** In one that crosses with FunnyAneurysmMoment, "Queen Diana visits Washington". Not only did Princess Diana leave the royal family through a divorce and then die tragically long before, but UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen was still reigning in 2015. On October 21, 2015, the real-life ''USA Today'' [[https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/10/22/back-to-the-future-newspaper-success/74418826/ issued a special edition]] replicating the front page from the movie, but omitting the Queen Diana headline.
** As shown above, the newspaper that mentions "Queen Diana" also suggests a female president. If it's referring to the President of the United States, that still hasn't happened (as of 2020).
** One of the more amusing mispredictions: The continued existence of Pontiac. Why they even decided that a Toyota dealership would switch to selling American cars in the first place is a mystery, especially since '80s futurism was heavily inspired by a JapanTakesOverTheWorld mentality; which will not likely happen after Japan's bubble economy burst during TheNineties.
** Another amusing misprediction is the existence of ''Jaws 19''. The ''Film/{{Jaws}}'' franchise ended after the [[Film/JawsTheRevenge fourth movie]] (this one may be intentionally mispredicted, seeing as how the ''Jaws 19'' poster with the "This time it's '''REALLY''' personal" tag was a TakeThat to ''Jaws: The Revenge'' after that film was ripped apart by critics and audiences and became an instant OldShame to Creator/{{Universal}} Pictures and its crew).
** The films predicted some form of sensor technology for video games (as suggested by Creator/ElijahWood's character's comment remarking on the Nintendo Zapper being "like a babies toy" for using his hands). The prediction rang false however, as while such technology does exist (Xbox Kinect), it has a slim following among the industry at large at best and is ridiculed at worst, resulting in people still using their hands.
** Fashion styles are a whole category of mispredictions, but one of the more obvious is that no one is using two ties, quite the opposite, ties are nowadays falling out of favor in all but the most formal occasions, let alone office environments.
* ''Film/TwoThousandTwelve'' intended to predicted TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt without success... Although one could make the case that it was just Creator/RolandEmmerich using the silly "Mayan prophecy" mumbo-jumbo [[RuleOfCool to cram as many natural disasters as he could into one film]].
* ''Film/SplitSecond1992'': This dystopian sci-fi action movie predicted that London would become partially flooded by 2008 as a result of GlobalWarming, giving the monster in the film a place to hide in the mass of abandoned buildings and subway stations. Suffice it to say, this prediction was a bit off.
* ''Film/DemolitionMan'': An especially weird case. Released in 1993 (so not long after the L.A. riots, which undoubtedly informed a lot of its themes), it predicted that Los Angeles would turn into a criminal-run hellhole by 1996 and that convicts be turned into {{human popsicle}}s.
** Among the frozen inmates is Jeffrey Dahmer, the real life cannibalistic SerialKiller. Dahmer was sentenced to [[LongerThanLifeSentence over 900 years]], so his still being in prison 2032 actually fits. However, the real Dahmer was killed by a fellow inmate roughly a year after the movie was released.
* The original ''Franchise/PlanetOfTheApes'' pentalogy eventually fell victim to this. [[Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968 The original film]] was released in 1968 and focused on a space crew that set out for an interstellar mission in the far-off year 1972. [[Film/EscapeFromThePlanetOfTheApes The third movie]], released three years later, had two talking apes arrive from the future one year after the mission from the original, which was two years away at the time. By the time the [[Film/ConquestOfThePlanetOfTheApes fourth movie]] was released, it was the same year interstellar travel was supposed to be possible according to the original, and when the [[Film/BattleForThePlanetOfTheApes fifth movie]] was released another year later, there were no talking apes from the future, obviously.
** Sadly the film franchise did get a prediction almost right (though not to the extent predicted, thankfully): the film predicted that a virus would kill all cats and dogs in the world sometime in the 1970s. In 1978, the canine parvovirus pandemic did kill thousands of dogs worldwide, and a similar virus affected cats in the UK but was much more localized.
* The ending of ''Film/MemoriesOfMurder'' assumes that [[spoiler:by 2003, the Hwaesong serial murderer would still be at large.]] But in September 2019, the murderer was identified via DNA evidence as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Choon-jae Lee Choon-jae]], who had already been imprisoned since 1994 (with his original death sentence being commuted to life imprisonment) for murdering his sister-in-law in a similar fashion.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Literature]]
* Deliberately spoofed in ''Literature/MoreInformationThanYouRequire'', which is apparently set in some kind of AlternateHistory where, among other things, Dewey Defeats Truman, and in the follow-up volume, ''Literature/ThatIsAll'', we learn that Hitler drowned while on vacation during the 1930s. Roosevelt was right there and he ''allowed it to happen''.
* Creator/TomClancy's ''Literature/JackRyan'' series gradually developed from a series of "Well, it ''could'' have happened in real life" techno-thrillers into a full-blown Alternate History.
* ''Literature/LordOfTheFlies'' features a nuclear war breaking out sometime in the late 1950s, making it this trope if you block out all the heavy-handed symbolism.
* ''Literature/SometimeNeverAFableForSupermen'' has a nuclear war where there shouldn't have been, though Creator/RoaldDahl is just looking for a convenient time to kill humanity.
* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey''. All of the ''Space Odyssey'' series have already been invalidated this way, one way or another. For example, the first three books all feature a still-existing USSR; the backstory of 2061 involves a revolution in UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica in the 2030s which overthrows the apartheid regime; then of course there's the invention of HAL. Creator/ArthurCClarke went on record to state that the 'sequels' were actually stories taking place in [[AlternateUniverse alternate universes]] when current events surpassed his stories.
* Creator/IsaacAsimov's short story "{{Literature/History}}" was published in 1941, where a character recites the historical "fact" that UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler died in Madagascar. This prediction would be disproven four years later when Hitler committed suicide in Germany.
%%** Creator/IsaacAsimov's novels have RidiculouslyHumanRobots, but no personal computers and (in most novels) even no television.
%%** Asimov also has a short story happening in the 21st Century where the world is thoroughly split between the capitalist West and the socialist East to the point that Cuba became capitalist and South Korea was absorved by the North with no proxy wars or any other fighting among the sizes. Of course as we know, the USSR collapsed in 1991.
* ''Literature/RobotsAndEmpire'' claims nuclear fission power fell into disuse following the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979. Chernobyl is conspicuously not mentioned, despite having been far worse, since it occurred shortly after the book was published.
* Averted in a Creator/MarkTwain [[http://www.cracked.com/article_18846_6-eerily-specific-inventions-predicted-in-science-fiction.html short story,]] "From The London Times Of 1904", which predicts the Internet and social media (actually ''far'' ahead of their time).
* Creator/LarryNiven's Literature/KnownSpace has humanity midway through colonizing the solar system and beginning to get slowboats to nearby habitable systems ready by this point in its history, as well as widespread death penalties to force organ donation. Many of its more fanciful aspects that happened in the late 20th century (legal rights and translators for dolphins, mining and colonies on Mercury and Venus) have changed from prediction into alternate history as the decades since the series started have passed. On the bright side, organ harvesting isn't ''nearly'' as bad as it predicted either.
* ''Literature/NineteenEightyFour'' predicts a decidedly dystopian '84 that did not come to pass. Not that we wanted it to anyway. Although it did predict iPods and flatscreen [=TVs=]. And the NSA's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A warrant-less surveillance of everything on the internet]]. Of course, it wasn't specifically said that the book takes place in 1984 (Winston explicitly says he's ''not sure'' what year it ''really'' is) -- Orwell simply flipped the last two digits of the year it was published (1948). The book was originally to be called "The Last Man in Britain"; a trace of this remains when O'Brien tells Winston that "if you are a man, then you are the last man". And given Big Brother's ability to lie about ''everything'' to the point of altering the definition of "truth," [[FridgeBrilliance there's no way for anyone in-story to be sure what year it is, either.]]
* ''Literature/DreamPark'' by Niven and Steven Barnes has California decimated by an earthquake and associated tsunami in 1985. The second sequel bumped this to 1995, after which the authors threw up their hands and let it stand as an alternate-history Verse.
* Creator/RobertAHeinlein is often credited with inventing the idea of an author linking his works into a single timeline and coining the term "future history." Nonetheless, he eventually had to declare his Future History to be an alternate universe (and he then introduced inter-universal travel so those characters could visit worlds more like our own).
* Averted in Creator/GKChesterton's ''Literature/TheNapoleonOfNottingHill''. After an introduction in which he pokes fun at authors and pundits who make authoritative-sounding predictions about the future only to ''inevitably'' run afoul of this trope, he announces that he is setting his story the better part of a century in the future, and that apart from [[OneBigLie one major, and deliberately silly, change to the operation of the British government,]] he is assuming that the future will be exactly like the present. The marvelous thing is that, a hundred years later, his book actually ''does'' stand up to this trope ''far'' better than most of his contemporaries. Make of that what you will.
* ''Literature/TheManWhoBroughtTheDodgersBackToBrooklyn'' was written in 1981, but largely takes place in 1985–88. A few of the changes are necessary for the story to work; for instance, the LA Dodgers' mid-Eighties stats ended up being pretty good in RealLife, but had to be abysmal in the book to help the characters buy out the team.
** A minor aversion occurs with the 1988 World Series; the Dodgers make it to the Series in the book, just like they made it to the actual '88 Series.
** Played straight with the book's central premise, though. As of 2014, the Dodgers are still in Los Angeles.
* ''The Literature/ChaletSchool in Exile'' (1940) has the Chalet School relocate from Austria to Guernsey to escape the Nazis. Shortly after it was published, the Nazis invaded Guernsey. ''The Chalet School Goes to It'' (1941) establishes that they almost immediately ''re''-relocate to Wales.
* ''Literature/ReadyPlayerOne'' was written and released in the middle of the Great Recession. The book takes place in a world where the Recession never ended, stretching into the 2040s. The real Great Recession officially ended in 2009, but most people had felt the last of its effects by 2015. . . only for another Recession to hit in 2020.
* An example is the 1980s series ''The Zone'' by James Rouch about WorldWarIII in Europe.
* Creator/JulesVerne's ''Literature/ParisInTheTwentiethCentury'' -- written in the 1860s, and set in the ''1960s''. Its description of the future is ''surprisingly'' accurate, all things considered, though it does imagine a world that runs largely on compressed air.
* Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's ''Literature/{{Warday}}'' (1984) depicts a "limited" nuclear war in 1988. In a case of WriteWhoYouKnow the authors recount their (fictional) experiences in the war and travel across a devastated and depopulated America to show the consequences of the war. The eastern half of the country has been destroyed by bombings on San Antonio, New York, and UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC and the breakdown of order while California is pretty much untouched and has become an undeclared separate country with closed borders.
* In ''Literature/{{Eon}}'' from ''Literature/TheWaySeries'', the book ends with [[spoiler:Patricia escaping from The Way to an alt-earth where the Ptolemy dynasty never fell, and is now a member of a Mediterranean federation.]] The asteroid ship ''Thistledown'' also hails from an alternate universe, one where the Industrial Revolution took place in East Asia rather than Europe. It was written in 1975 and did not anticipate the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. In this reality 2005 has come and gone without a nuclear war.
* Alan Steele's ''Jericho Iteration'', written in 1994 and set in 2013: St. Louis has not been destroyed by a massive earthquake and Cascadia, a nation consisting of Washington and Oregon, has not seceded from the Union.
* Creator/GregEgan's ''Zendegi'', written in 2009 it has the Iranian theocracy overthrown in 2012.
* ''An Island Called Moreau'' by Creator/BrianWAldiss has World War III happening in the mid-1980s between the USSR and "its Middle East allies" against NATO, Israel and China.
* ''Literature/WorldWarZ'': The exact date is never openly established but the fact that Fidel Castro is still alive allows you to presume it's intended to be in or near the date it was published (2006). The most obvious failed prediction (thankfully) is the ZombieApocalypse, however a series of political and geographical changes that happen as consequence of the war include: peace between Israel and Palestine (renamed Unified Palestine), the independence of Tibet from China, Russia turning into the theocratic Holy Russian Empire, Mexico changing its name to Aztlan and the aforementioned Fidel Castro not only alive but leading the democratization of Cuba. Of course some of these events may still happen but none of them would happen before the death of Castro who died in 2016.
* ''Literature/LookingBackward'' The book correctly predicts the invention of radio, credit cards and skyscrapers but strikes out for the social changes, predicting the US and most of the West would become socialist states.
* Hector Bywater's ''Literature/TheGreatPacificWar'' was actually written as fiction (it was published in 1925, the war in the book takes lasts from 1931 - 1933), but the naval conflict in the book had so many similarities to the actual Pacific war that happened soon after that it now seems like an alt-history novel.
* ''Literature/KamalAndBarnea'': Though the series is not explicitly about this, it quickly becomes so. It started as being set in some near future where the Israelis largely pulled out of the West Bank, and Yasser Arafat was President of the Palestinian state. After this was written, Israel eventually did pull out of Gaza, but Arafat died in 2004 and the West Bank remains occupied. Nor unfortunately is peace any closer more than twenty years on, contrary to what these books show.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* ''Series/TwentyFour''. Season 1 was written and filmed pre-9/11 but was set in 2004. By the second season, 9/11 had happened, and the Department of Homeland Security suddenly existed when it hadn't before.
* ''Series/{{Space 1999}}'', like Arthur C. Clarke, was covered later by stating it had taken place in an AlternateUniverse.
* The ''Franchise/StarTrek'' franchise initially had the Eugenics Wars occurring in the 1990s. There were a couple of attempts to fix this one. ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Deep Space Nine]]''[='=]s [[Recap/StarTrekDeepSpaceNineS05E16DrBashirIPresume "Dr. Bashir, I Presume"]] claims that it actually happened later sometime, while a series of books suggests that they were "secret wars" where the actual historical events were being manipulated from behind the scenes. The ''Star Trek: Khan'' comic book just says "screw it, we're going all in" and actually has Khan ''destroying Washington D.C. and Moscow'' in 1992, making it straight-out {{alternate history}}, which is probably better.
** There is also an episode of The Next Generation that states Ireland was unified in 2024 as a result of effective terrorism (presumably the IRA forcing out the British occupation) that aired years before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 that saw the conflict heavily reduced and made it unlikely for anything but a peaceful unification to take place. [[note]] Except Brexit and the re-establishment of a border between Northern Ireland and the ROI have caused some diplomatic and political tensions that mean politically-motivated violence might end up coming back. [[/note]]
** Zig-zagged with "Assignment: Earth". The ''Enterprise'' is observing Earth on an unspecified date in 1968, and Spock mentions two major historical events happening on the day in question: an important assassination and the launch of an orbital nuclear warhead platform by the United States, the latter of which ends up being disrupted by the events of the episode, causing it to crash. Six days after the episode aired, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, on the same day NASA also launched a Saturn V rocket which suffered a malfunction and ended up going way off course. (The Saturn V was not actually carrying weapons and the problem was caused by a mechanical failure, but {{fanon}} is that the official story about Saturn V was a coverup.) On the other hand, Spock also mentions a coup in Asia on the same day and indicates that the nuclear platform launch was just one of many that occurred, such that "the sky was full of orbiting H-bombs" at some point, but neither of these came to pass. (Spock's prediction of an uprising in Asia is sometimes tied to a coup in Iraq, but that was over three months after the King assassination and the Saturn V launch.)
* With frightening accuracy, ''Series/RowanAndMartinsLaughIn'' averted this. In their "News of the Future" segment they mentioned that in 1988, twenty years from the time the episode was telecast, UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan would be the U.S. President and the Berlin Wall would come down. (Okay, the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989, but still close enough for jazz.) [[note]] And this prediction spawned an aversion of its own in a 2011 Cracked article: https://www.cracked.com/article_19146_8-absurd-jokes-that-predicted-real-life-events.html [[/note]] [[note]]("''Of course, a little more than a decade later, Reagan did win the presidency, his term ending the very year their "news of the future" segment took place. So, has anyone done a wacky "Donald Trump as president" sketch yet? Laugh all you want, it may seem strangely prescient in, say, '''2017'''''".[[labelnote:*]] [---emphasis added by TV Tropes contributor ---] [[/labelnote]]"''[-And we're legitimately sorry if this comes true.-]''") [[/note]]
* ''Series/BuckRogersInTheTwentyFifthCentury'' quite possibly has the most ballsy prediction on this list. The show, which aired from 1979 until 1981, took as its main premise that Captain William "Buck" Rogers would be lost in space during a NegativeSpaceWedgie that would engulf his deep-space ''Ranger 3'' exploratory craft sometime in the far-off year... of '''1987'''. As of 2018, humanity is still trying to get back to the moon, let alone anywhere further afield, with a manned mission. [[HarsherInHindsight And, more to the point of 1987, in real life, no space launches of any sort happened in the US that year, due to the Challenger disaster the previous year.]]
* ''Series/LostInSpace'' has the interstellar Jupiter 2 vessel sent from Earth to Alpha Centauri in October 16, 1997.
* The ''Series/{{Spooks}}'' spin-off series ''Spooks: Code 9'' started with a nuclear attack during the London 2012 Opening Ceremony - an event that thankfully never happened.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Radio]]
* ''Radio/JourneyIntoSpace'': The original series was produced from 1953 to 1958 and featured manned missions to UsefulNotes/TheMoon in 1965 and UsefulNotes/{{Mars}} in 1971 and 1972. In ''Frozen in Time'', which was produced in 2008, it is mentioned that the ''Ares'' embarked on a mission to explore UsefulNotes/TheSolarSystem on June 8, 1973 and had reached UsefulNotes/{{Neptune}} by 1977.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]
* ''VideoGame/ModernWarfare'' predicted a civil war in Russia by 2011 which obviously did not come to pass.
* ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsII'' predicted that David Petraeus would be Secretary of Defense in 2025. Given the fact that Petraeus was caught up in an extramarital affair in late 2012 and ended up resigning as Director of the CIA just three days before the game came out, that seems really unlikely.
* ''VideoGame/CallOfDutyBlackOpsIII'' predicts the collapse of the UsefulNotes/EuropeanUnion by 2025. It predicted that Italy, Spain and Greece would leave the EU by 2021. By that year in real life, only the UsefulNotes/UnitedKingdom had left the union. All things considered, the EU is in a lot better shape than predicted in many works, including this one.
* The original ''VideoGame/GhostRecon'' predicted an ultranationalist party gaining power in Russia and launching an invasion of the Republic of Georgia to annex it in 2008, which quickly escalates into essentially WorldWarIII as NATO intervenes in their subsequent attempts to do the same to other former Soviet satellites like Lithuania; while Georgia and Russia did get into a war in 2008, it did not escalate into the larger conflict that is the focus of the game. Its expansions likewise predicted the death of UsefulNotes/FidelCastro in 2006 and a second Eritrean/Ethiopean War in 2009. While the first has since come to pass (albeit ten years late and without democratic elections as a result) there has still been no new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
** ''{{VideoGame/Endwar}}'' has '''another''' World War Three, kicked off by a preceding [[NukeEm nuclear]] war in the Middle East in 2014.
* ''[[VideoGame/MarioAndSonicAtTheOlympicGames Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games - Tokyo 2020]]'' is set in the summer of 2020 when the Olympics are happening, when in real life, months after the game was released, the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
* The background history of the ''VideoGame/StarControl'' franchise has the ''Small War of 2015'', in which a small nuclear exchange took place between Middle East countries that year, killing several million people. [[CaptainObvious That fortunately never happened in the real world]].
* The FramingDevice of the original ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreed'' was set in the not-too-distant future of ''2012''. As 2012 came and went in real life and the MayanDoomsday behind the use of this date was thwarted in-universe, the series dropped overt references to modern real-world events and dates.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Web Original]]
* Website/{{Fenspace}} has made it an official editorial policy that no real-world elected officials from after 2006 will appear to avoid bringing partisan political squabbles into the process of creating a shared universe. One story does mention Edward Snowden in passing though, and establishes that he did basically the same thing as in RealLife except for seeking asylum in near-Earth orbit instead of Russia.
* In the lead-up to UsefulNotes/SuperBowl LII in 2018, the UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague got in trouble when their Facebook page posted a promotional picture showing the Minnesota Vikings (whose home stadium, U.S. Bank Stadium, was the site of Super Bowl LII), and the New England Patriots (who were the defending Super Bowl champions) as the two Super Bowl teams. This notably occurred about a week before the conference championships were scheduled to take place. While the Patriots made it to Super Bowl LII, pulling off a 24-20 comeback win against the Jacksonville Jaguars, [[CurbStompBattle the Vikings were demolished 38-7 by the Philadelphia Eagles]].
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* Zig-zagged on ''WesternAnimation/{{Freakazoid}}'': When Freakazoid goes back in time and averts World War II, he returns to the present [[ButterflyOfDoom and sees things have changed]]: Creator/SharonStone can act, Radio/RushLimbaugh is a bleeding-heart liberal, and thumbing through a newspaper: "Cold fusion works... Euro Disney packed... No more Creator/ChevyChase movies!" There’s just one catch to all of this: Now [[WesternAnimation/PinkyAndTheBrain The Brain]] is President.
* The original last few episodes of ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark''[='=]s season 20 StoryArc described UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton defeating Mr. Garrison in the presidential election, an obvious parallel to her expected win over UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump. When Trump won, the seventh episode had to be entirely rewritten between the time it was announced (1 AM of the day after the election took place) and the premiere of the episode that same day specifically to avert this.
* In the ''WesternAnimation/BatmanBeyond'' episode "Mind Games", as Terry and Max are going over U.S. Presidents for school, Max describes UsefulNotes/BillClinton as "the fun one, then came the boring one.", with Terry retorting "They're all boring.". The episode aired during the 2000 presidential election, and the writers apparently expected UsefulNotes/AlGore to win, but instead, UsefulNotes/GeorgeWBush ended up winning, and his stint as president was many things, though it's probably safe to say that "boring" wasn't one of them.
[[/folder]]

!In-universe examples

[[folder:Comic Books]]
* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'': Discussed and averted when Lex Luthor ran for President. [[DaEditor Perry White]] asks Lois & Clark which headline they should post ("Luthor Loses" or "Luthor Wins") and says he doesn't want another ''Dewey Defeats Truman''. Fortunately, they learn about Luthor's victory on time to avoid having to guess.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
* ''Series/SabrinaTheTeenageWitch'' spoofed the famous ''Dewey Defeats Truman'' moment when Jenny won the race for Class President against [[AlphaBitch the popular cheerleader, Libby]].
* In the LiveEpisode of ''{{Series/Roundhouse}}'', the dad (John) insists that the family eat out to celebrate the son's (Ivan) victory at the Anytown Little League tournament, which was to happen the next day. When Ivan corrects John, the latter states that "tomorrow, Anytown will beat Rivaltown just like we've done for the past 30 years. Don't you read the papers?" He then whips out a newspaper where the top headline is "Anytown Defeats Rivaltown". Ivan goes, "Hey, why did they print that already?!?" to which John replies that they'll have something to shred for the ticker-tape parade. Bonus points for the newspaper having the trope name as the second headline.
* The opening of ''Series/{{Cavemen}}'' has a news paper saying "Caveman Defeats Truman" as a HistoricalInJoke.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Western Animation]]
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': In one episode, Bart Simpson is so sure he'll win the election for class president he decides to hold a victory party during recess. Unfortunately, recess is the voting time and everyone who would vote for him attended the party instead and Martin Prince wins the election by 2 votes to 0. The school newspaper allows Martin to mock a "Simpson Beats Prince" headline the same way the "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline was mocked.
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** In one that crosses with FunnyAneurysmMoment, "Queen Diana visits Washington". Not only did Princess Diana leave the royal family through a divorce and then die tragically long before, but UsefulNotes/HMTheQueen was still reigning in 2015.

* ''Film/TwoThousandTwelve'' intended to predicted TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt without success... Although one could make the case that it was just Creator/RolandEmmerich using of the silly "Mayan prophecy" mumbo-jumbo [[RuleOfCool to cram as many natural disasters as he could into one film]].

* Creator/IsaacAsimov's novels have RidiculouslyHumanRobots, but no personal computers and (in most novels) even no television. His short story ''History'', published in 1941, mentions that Hitler died on Madagascar.
** Asimov also has a short story happening in the 21st Century where the world is thoroughly split between the capitalist West and the socialist East to the point that Cuba became capitalist and South Korea was absorved by the North with no proxy wars or any other fighting among the sizes. Of course as we know, the USSR collapsed in 1991.

* The original last few episodes of ''WesternAnimation/SouthPark''[='=]s season 20 StoryArc described UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton defeating Mr. Garrison in the presidential election, an obvious parallel to her expected win over UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump. When Trump won, the seventh episode had to be entirely rewritten between the time it was announced (1 AM of the day after the election took place) and the premier of the episode that same day specifically to avert this.

* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'': Discussed and averted when ComicBook/LexLuthor ran for President. [[DaEditor Perry White]] asks Lois & Clark which headline they should post ("Luthor Loses" or "Luthor Wins") and says he doesn't want another ''Dewey Defeats Truman''. Fortunately, they learn about Luthor's victory on time to avoid having to guess.

* ''Anime/{{Macross}}'': The original ''Anime/SuperDimensionFortressMacross'' was broadcast in 1982 but featured an alternate history of humanity after 2009 when humans and aliens fight a devastating war over a transforming mecha battleship. It's beyond 2009 now, and we haven't even fought [[Anime/MacrossZero World War III]] and built mecha like they did in the series -- we're behind schedule, in other words.

[[caption-width-right:249:In 1989, this seemed like a reasonable thing to expect in 2015. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Diana,_Princess_of_Wales Eight years later, on the other hand]]...[[note]]And one year before ''that'', her divorce from Prince Charles in 1996 formally ended her from ever becoming Queen Consort.[[/note]]]]

* Zig-zagged on ''WesternAnimation/{{Freakazoid}}'': When Freakazoid goes back in time and averts World War II, he returns to the present [[ButterflyOfDoom and sees things have changed]]: Creator/SharonStone can act, Radio/RushLimbaugh is a bleeding-heart liberal, and thumbing through a newspaper: "Cold fusion works... Euro Disney packed... No more Creator/ChevyChase movies!"

* ''Film/SplitSecond1992'': This dystopian sci-fi action movie predicted that London would become partially flooded by 2008 as a result of ClimateChange, giving the monster in the film a place to hide in the mass of abandoned buildings and subway stations. Suffice it to say, this prediction was a bit off.

** The films predicted some form of sensor technology for video games (as suggested by Creator/ElijahWood's character's comment remarking on the Nintendo Zapper being "like a babies toy" for using his hands). The prediction rang false however, as while such technology does exist (Xbox Kinect), it has a slim following among the industry at large at best and ridiculed at worst, resulting in people still using their hands.

* ''Film/SplitSecond'': This dystopian sci-fi action movie predicted that London would become partially flooded by 2008 as a result of ClimateChange, giving the monster in the film a place to hide in the mass of abandoned buildings and subway stations. Suffice it to say, this prediction was a bit off.

* The ending of ''Film/MemoriesOfMurder'' assumes that [[spoiler:by 2003, the Hwaesong serial murderer would still be at large.]] But in September 2019, the murderer was identified via DNA evidence as [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Choon-jae Lee Choon-jae]], who had already been imprisoned since 1994 (with his original death sentence being commuted to life imprisonment) for murdering his sister-in-law in a similar fashion.

* ''Film/SplitSecond'': This dystopian sci-fi action movie predicted that London would become partially flooded by 2008 as a result of GlobalWarming, giving the monster in the film a place to hide in the mass of abandoned buildings and subway stations. Suffice it to say, this prediction was a bit off.

* With frightening accuracy, ''Series/RowanAndMartinsLaughIn'' averted this. In their "News of the Future" segment they mentioned that in 1988, twenty years from the time the episode was telecast, UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan would be the U.S. President and the Berlin Wall would come down. (Okay, the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989, but still close enough for jazz.) [[note]] And this prediction spawned a DDT of its own in a 2011 Cracked article: https://www.cracked.com/article_19146_8-absurd-jokes-that-predicted-real-life-events.html [[/note]] [[note]]("''Of course, a little more than a decade later, Reagan did win the presidency, his term ending the very year their "news of the future" segment took place. So, has anyone done a wacky "Donald Trump as president" sketch yet? Laugh all you want, it may seem strangely prescient in, say, '''2017'''''".[[labelnote:*]] [---emphasis added by TV Tropes contributor ---] [[/labelnote]]"''[-And we're legitimately sorry if this comes true.-]''") [[/note]]

* With frightening accuracy, ''Series/RowanAndMartinsLaughIn'' averted this. In their "News of the Future" segment they mentioned that in 1988, twenty years from the time the episode was telecast, UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan would be the U.S. President and the Berlin Wall would come down. (Okay, the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989, but still close enough for jazz.) [[note]] And this prediction spawned a DDT of its own in a 2011 Cracked article: https://www.cracked.com/article_19146_8-absurd-jokes-that-predicted-real-life-events.html [[/note]] [[note]]("''Of course, a little more than a decade later, Reagan did win the presidency, his term ending the very year their "news of the future" segment took place. So, has anyone done a wacky "Donald Trump as president" sketch yet? Laugh all you want, it may seem strangely prescient in, say, '''2017'''''".[[labelnote:*]] [---emphasis added by TV Tropes contributor ---] [[/labelnote]]
"''[-And we're legitimately sorry if this comes true.-]''") [[/note]]

** There is also an episode of The Next Generation that states Ireland was unified in 2024 as a result of effective terrorism (presumably the IRA forcing out the British occupation) that aired years before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 that saw the conflict heavily reduced and made it unlikely for anything but a peaceful unification to take place. [[note]] Although [[UsefulNotes/WithEuropeButNotOfIt Brexit]] and the re-establishment of a border between Northern Ireland and the ROI has caused some diplomatic and political tensions that mean politically-motivated violence might end up coming back. [[/note]]

"''[-And we're legitimately sorry if this comes true.-]''") [[/note]]

** There is also an episode of The Next Generation that states Ireland was unified in 2024 as a result of effective terrorism (presumably the IRA forcing out the British occupation) that aired years before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 that saw the conflict heavily reduced and made it unlikely for anything but a peaceful unification to take place.

* With frightening accuracy, ''Series/RowanAndMartinsLaughIn'' averted this. In their "News of the Future" segment they mentioned that in 1988, twenty years from the time the episode was telecast, UsefulNotes/RonaldReagan would be the U.S. President and the Berlin Wall would come down. (Okay, the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989, but still close enough for jazz.)