History Main / MessageinaBottle

* Defectors who've escaped North Korea have sometimes resorted to attaching messages to balloons and releasing them when the wind is blowing back across the border, for lack of any other way to inform their relatives that they made it out alive.

-->-- '''Music/ThePolice''', ''Message in a Bottle''

* In ''ShoulderACoffinKuro'', Kuro once communicated with a girl with this, but the bottle somehow disappears and appears on its own, and it happens on land, not sea. [[spoiler:It got delivered by a motorbike guy]].

* You can send and receive messages in a bottle in ''AnimalCrossing: Wild World''.

* Defectors who've escaped North Korea have sometimes resorted to attaching messages to balloons and releasing them near the border, for lack of any other way to inform their relatives that they made it out alive.

* Researchers who release things into the air or water - free-floating weather balloons, rehabilitated or tagged wild animals, colored floats to trace currents or underground streams - will often label them with an ID code and toll-free phone number or e-mail address, with the expectation that people who find them later may report where the object of their study turned up.

* This is the impetus for all of the action in ''Disney/TheRescuers''. Penny sends the message which causes the mouse rescue society to come and try to save her.

* The ''WesternAnimation/MikeLuAndOg'' episode "The King of Curtains" has the islanders finding a message saying that the King of England is coming for a visit, despite Mike's objections that the message over 500 years old. The situation is made all the more difficult when the titular curtain salesman arrives and the islanders mistaken him for the king, though they grow wise to it after they find another old message saying that the visit mentioned in the first one has been cancelled.

* OlderThanRadio: The first ''verified'' user of this trope is Chunosuke Matsuyama, whose ship crashed on a Pacific island in 1784 while they were searching for buried treasure. Before they all starved to death, Matsuyama carved their story in wood and floated it in a bottle. His message took 151 years to wash ashore -- ironically in Hiraturemura, the Japanese town where Matsuyama was born.----

* Subverted in ''ClerksTheAnimatedSeries''. Randall makes one of these while trapped in the Pyramid, desperately hoping that Dante will somehow get his message. Through a series of ContrivedCoincidence after Contrived Coincidence, the message actually does get to Dante in the form of a pop bottle that a member of his Little League team gives him to celebrate a victory -- but upon seeing that there's something in the bottle Dante just throws it away and makes the kid get him another one.

* Appears in a ''KingdomOfLoathing'' adventure. Bottles found on the beach may contain messages reading "Help me, I'm trapped inside a Cloaca-Cola bottling plant!", magical scrolls, or for some reason blank paper.

* An episode of ''DetectiveConan'' had the Detective Boys find a message in a plastic bottle reading "SOS" washed toward the shore. The message was written recently by a woman who was near unconscious in a tide cave.

* The ''WesternAnimation/MikeLuAndOg'' episode "The King of Curtains" has the islanders finding a message saying that the King of England is coming for a visit, despite Mike's objections that the message over 500 years old. The situation is made all the more difficult when the titular curtain salesman arrives, though the islanders grow wise to it after they find another message saying that the visit mentioned in the first one has been cancelled.

* The ''WesternAnimation/MikeLuAndOg'' episode "The King of Curtain" has the islanders finding a message saying that the King of England is coming for a visit, despite Mike's objections that the message over 500 years old. The situation is made all the more difficult when the titular curtain salesman arrives, though the islanders grow wise to it after they find another message saying that the visit mentioned in the first one has been cancelled.

-->-- '''ThePolice''', ''Message in a Bottle''

* In ''{{Sinfest}}'', [[http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3093 Slick tries it.]] [[http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=3099 Monique mocks the desperation.]]

* The framing device of ''Yosl Rakover talks to God'' is that the novella is a crossover prayer/diary written by {{Holocaust}} victim Yosl Rakover, hidden in a basement in the ghetto of Warsaw, and found after the war. In reality, it was written in Argentina in the late forties by Zvi Kolitz, and Yosl Rakover is a fictional character. This important fact was dropped in some [[KeepCirculatingTheTapes inofficial reprints]], leading people to believe that the framing story was true, something the author never intended. When faced with the existence of an author, many chose to denounce the story as a fraud, rather than laud it as a marvelously insightful piece of fiction. A meta case of MisaimedFandom?

* The premise of the ''PlanetOfTheApes'' novel is that a couple on an intergalactic cruise ship finds the whole story written and put inside a bottle that's out InSpace, combining this trope with the LiteraryAgentHypothesis and SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale.

* EdgarAllanPoe's ''Manuscript Found In A Bottle'' (1833).

* In TrumanCapote's short story, "Hello, Stranger", a respectable family man happens upon a message in bottle while swimming in the ocean. He replies to the sender, a 12-year-old girl named Linda Reilly, which starts a chain of tragedy.

* The Pioneer and Voyager plaques and records: no one really expects that anything will discover them, but wouldn't it be cool to think someone could?* [[http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/us/dean-bumpus-89-whose-bottles-mapped-the-ocean-s-currents.html Dean Bumpus]] used this technique to map ocean currents from the 1950s to about the 1970s.* Supposedly there was once a job in the British Royal Navy called "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles" as captains sometimes use sea bottles to carry secret messages back to shore or stuff their log books into a empty cask to serve as a "black box" of sorts. Anyone found uncorking a bottle with a message in it in Elizabethan England is guilty of a capital offence.* A German boy [[http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_ODD_RUSSIA_LETTER_IN_A_BOTTLE?SITE=VASTR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT tossed a bottle into the Baltic Sea]], and a Russian boy found it on a beach 24 years later.* OlderThanRadio: The first ''verified'' user of this trope is Chunosuke Matsuyama, whose ship crashed on a Pacific island in 1784 while they were searching for buried treasure. Before they all starved to death, Matsuyama carved their story in wood and floated it in a bottle. His message took 151 years to wash ashore -- ironically in Hiraturemura, the Japanese town where Matsuyama was born.----

* In the new ''TwilightZone'' episode "A Saucer of Loneliness," Shelley Duvall's character is scanned by a small flying saucer in view of several people. Afterwards, she keeps getting bombarded by government agents and false friends trying to find out what information she was given. She later reveals that the saucer was no more than a high tech ''MessageInABottle'' and its message was private and only for her.

[[AC:RealLife]]* The Pioneer and Voyager plaques and records: no one really expects that anything will discover them, but wouldn't it be cool to think someone could?* [[http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/us/dean-bumpus-89-whose-bottles-mapped-the-ocean-s-currents.html Dean Bumpus]] used this technique to map ocean currents from the 1950s to about the 1970s.* Supposedly there was once a job in the British Royal Navy called "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles" as captains sometimes use sea bottles to carry secret messages back to shore or stuff their log books into a empty cask to serve as a "black box" of sorts. Anyone found uncorking a bottle with a message in it in Elizabethan England is guilty of a capital offence.* A German boy [[http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_ODD_RUSSIA_LETTER_IN_A_BOTTLE?SITE=VASTR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT tossed a bottle into the Baltic Sea]], and a Russian boy found it on a beach 24 years later.* OlderThanRadio: The first ''verified'' user of this trope is Chunosuke Matsuyama, whose ship crashed on a Pacific island in 1784 while they were searching for buried treasure. Before they all starved to death, Matsuyama carved their story in wood and floated it in a bottle. His message took 151 years to wash ashore -- ironically in Hiraturemura, the Japanese town where Matsuyama was born.----

* The page quote comes from the song "Message In a Bottle" by ThePolice.

[[AC:RealLife]]
* The Pioneer and Voyager plaques and records: no one really expects that anything will discover them, but wouldn't it be cool to think someone could?
* [[http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/08/us/dean-bumpus-89-whose-bottles-mapped-the-ocean-s-currents.html Dean Bumpus]] used this technique to map ocean currents from the 1950s to about the 1970s.
* Supposedly there was once a job in the British Royal Navy called "Uncorker of Ocean Bottles" as captains sometimes use sea bottles to carry secret messages back to shore or stuff their log books into a empty cask to serve as a "black box" of sorts. Anyone found uncorking a bottle with a message in it in Elizabethan England is guilty of a capital offence.
* A German boy [[http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_ODD_RUSSIA_LETTER_IN_A_BOTTLE?SITE=VASTR&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT tossed a bottle into the Baltic Sea]], and a Russian boy found it on a beach 24 years later.
* OlderThanRadio: The first ''verified'' user of this trope is Chunosuke Matsuyama, whose ship crashed on a Pacific island in 1784 while they were searching for buried treasure. Before they all starved to death, Matsuyama carved their story in wood and floated it in a bottle. His message took 151 years to wash ashore -- ironically in Hiraturemura, the Japanese town where Matsuyama was born.

----

* Literature/JamesBond leaves a message taped inside an aeroplane toilet in the novel ''Film/{{Goldfinger}}''.

* ''TheLandThatTimeForgot''. The original book by Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as the FilmOfTheBook.

* ''Film/TheThing1982'' (1982). [=MacReady=] is shown dictating an ApocalypticLog into a tape recorder, which he states he intends to hide in the faint hope that it would be found by a search party if they're all killed. [[YouWillBeAssimilated Or worse]].

* The short story "A Saucer of Loneliness" by Creator/Theodore Sturgeon, which was adapted into an episode of the new TheTwilightZone.

* In TrumanCapote's short story, ''Hello, Stranger'', a respectable family man happens upon a message in bottle while swimming in the ocean. He replies to the sender, a 12-year-old girl named Linda Reilly, which starts a chain of tragedy.

* One episode of the Swedish ''Literature/PippiLongstocking'' television show had the eponymous character asserting that her father had been captured by pirates because he sent her messages with bottles- something which most of the townspeople understandably regard as being utterly preposterous. But this being a children's show, this is naturally exactly what has happened.

* In the original ''Radio/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' radio series, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are stranded on prehistoric Earth, and attempt to attract the attention of a passing spaceship by waving a towel at it. A volcano then erupts, covering the towel with lava. When the Earth is blown up six million years later, the now-fossilized towel gets launched into space and found by Zaphod Beeblebrox in the spaceship Heart Of Gold, who travels back in time and rescues them. (Things like this tend to happen whenever you use the Heart Of Gold's "Infinite Improbability" drive.)

* In ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'', Link gains access to Jabu Jabu by presenting a MessageInABottle written by Princess Ruto to the King, asking for rescue as she is trapped inside Jabu Jabu's belly. Interestingly, the message turns out to be several months old and Ruto has long since figured out how to leave Jabu Jabu- it turns out that her recent absence was for a completely different reason.

* Parodied in ''Webcomic/{{Freefall}}'' - Florence needs to relay a message, but no one will help her and email is unavailable. When she unsuccessfully tries putting a message in a bottle down the drain of a sink, she muses, "either I need a bigger sink, or a smaller bottle."

* Subverted in ''ClerksTheAnimatedSeries''. Randall makes one of these while trapped in the Pyramid, desperately hoping that Dante will somehow get his message. Through a series of Contrived Coincidence after Contrived Coincidence, the message actually does get to Dante in the form of a pop bottle that a member of his little league team gives him to celebrate a victory - but upon seeing that there's something in the bottle Dante just throws it away and makes the kid get him another one.

--> '''Shaggy:''' No deposit - no return.