History UnintentionalPeriodPiece / SpecialCases

The technology present is also particularly dated. The protagonist Niko uses a big, chunky black cell phone with a monochrome screen for most of the game, with the [[http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mobilephone-GTA4.jpg color-screen camera phone]] he receives halfway through the game treated as a luxury item (smartphones are never even mentioned).[[labelnote:As for the expansions...]] In ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIVTheLostAndDamned The Lost and Damned]]'', Johnny's [[http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mobilephone-TLAD.png older, monochrome cell phone]] symbolizes his rough-hewn, impoverished life as an outlaw biker, while in ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIVTheBalladOfGayTony The Ballad of Gay Tony]]'', Luis starts out with a [[http://gta.wikia.com/wiki/File:Mobilephone-TBOGT.png fancy camera phone]] to symbolize his comparatively glamorous lifestyle.[[/labelnote]] The in-game Internet is filled with parodies of Website/MySpace, Yahoo!, Jamster, Website/YouTube (back when they were first getting embroiled in {{DMCA}} takedown controversies), Napster, ''VideoGame/SecondLife'', ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', and many, many Geocities lookalikes, and is most conveniently accessed by way of Internet cafés, which were already on the way out by the time the game was released.

The technology present is also particularly dated. The protagonist Niko uses a big, chunky black cell phone with a monochrome screen for most of the game, with the color-screen camera phone he receives halfway through the game treated as a luxury item (smartphones are never even mentioned).[[note]]As for the expansions, in ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIVTheLostAndDamned The Lost and Damned]]'' Johnny's older, monochrome cell phone symbolizes his rough-hewn, impoverished life as an outlaw biker, while in ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIVTheBalladOfGayTony The Ballad of Gay Tony]]'', Luis starts out with a fancy camera phone to symbolize his comparatively glamorous lifestyle.[[/note]] The in-game Internet is filled with parodies of Website/MySpace, Yahoo!, Jamster, Website/YouTube (back when they were first getting embroiled in {{DMCA}} takedown controversies), Napster, ''VideoGame/SecondLife'', ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', and many, many Geocities lookalikes, and is most conveniently accessed by way of Internet cafés, which were already on the way out by the time the game was released.
** And of course, there's ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoV'', set in Southern California circa 2013. It's the height of the Great Recession; the first teaser for the game prominently showed a "foreclosure" sign being put up in front of a house, as well as homeless people living in tent cities under Los Santos' overpasses, and in the finished game, one can find a "dignity village" in the northern part of the map that contains a lot of imagery lifted from the Occupy movement. [[HonestJohnsDealership Simeon's business]] also exploits people who try to keep up with the Joneses by using cheap credit to live beyond their means, a clear reference to one of the main causes of the recession. The technology has advanced with the times; all of the main characters, even the [[LowerClassLout white-trash]] Trevor and the {{gang banger|s}} Franklin, have smartphones with full internet access, and on that internet, one now finds parodies of Website/{{Twitter}}, Tinder, Kickstarter, and most notably Website/{{Facebook}}, whose CEO and headquarters actually show up in the game in a vicious TakeThat at contemporary Silicon Valley tech culture. (Fittingly, it has rendered the aforementioned [=MySpace=] parody DeaderThanDisco.) Beyond that, the [[Radio/GTARadio in-game media]] is filled with parodies of such early '10s touchstones as ''Literature/FiftyShadesOfGrey'', ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'', the New Atheism movement, and the push for marijuana legalization.

* Episodes of ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'', thanks to its musical guests and its use of topical, current events humor (from [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalissimo_Francisco_Franco_is_still_dead "Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead"]] to [[TinaFey "I can see]] [[SarahPalin Russia from]] [[MemeticMutation my house!"]]), can be dated almost to the year.[[note]]For those guessing, the Franco one is from 1975, ''SNL'''s first season.[[/note]]

** The Franco one was called back when Chevy Chase hosted and appeared on Weekend Update along with then-host Kevin Nealon, using 1975 news-jokes whom Nealon immediately complained about afterwards.

** Many videos from UsefulNotes/TheNewTens will refer to ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', ''WesternAnimation/RegularShow'', ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'', ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'', ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', ''Disney/{{Frozen}}'', ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'', ''VideoGame/AngryBirds'', ''VideoGame/{{Bayonetta}}'', ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'', ''Manga/AttackOnTitan'', ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball'', ''Webcomic/OnePunchMan'', ''Disney/WreckItRalph'', ''WesternAnimation/DespicableMe'', ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', ''VideoGame/BlazBlue'' and more. By the time TheNewTwentys roll around, even those videos will become dated.

** Bashing videos in general instantly become dated as the community moves on from the moment certain characters and/or users were bashed. [[RuleOfCautionEditingJudgment We will not name any bashed users here]].
** Character choices in general. For example, [[VisualNovel{{/Air}} Misuzu_M]] was really popular during the heyday of Markyjoe1990 and has long faded into obscurity.

The technology present is also particularly dated. The protagonist Niko uses a big, chunky black cell phone with a monochrome screen for most of the game, with the color-screen camera phone he receives halfway through the game treated as a luxury item. (Smartphones are never even mentioned.)[[note]]As for the expansions, in ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIVTheLostAndDamned The Lost and Damned]]'' Johnny's older, monochrome cell phone symbolizes his rough-hewn, impoverished life as an outlaw biker, while in ''[[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIVTheBalladOfGayTony The Ballad of Gay Tony]]'', Luis starts out with a fancy camera phone to symbolize his comparatively glamorous lifestyle.[[/note]] The in-game Internet is filled with parodies of Website/MySpace, Yahoo!, Jamster, Website/YouTube (back when they were first getting embroiled in {{DMCA}} takedown controversies), Napster, ''VideoGame/SecondLife'', ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'', and many, many Geocities lookalikes, and is most conveniently accessed by way of Internet cafés, which were already on the way out by the time the game was released.

* The Literature/NancyDrew and Literature/TheHardyBoys books, which have been written ''non-stop'' since the late 1920's, always give an interesting cross-section of culture at the time. The originals actually had to have their very 20's sensibilities modernized during the 60's, where it happened all again. It got worse after they switched publishers in 1979, since the new publishing house was a lot more prone to using much more topical themes. Two 80's spinoffs, ''The Nancy Drew Files'' and ''The Hardy Boys Casefiles'', had stories taking place in very 80's settings, such as on a soap opera (at the peak of ''Series/GeneralHospital'' supercouple Luke and Laura) or horror movies (back when ''Friday the 13th'' and ''Nightmare on Elm Street'' were churning out sequels left and right). Similarly, the most recent series, ''Nancy Drew: Girl Detective'' and ''Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers'', are even moreso, with stories about reality TV and cyberbullying.
* Some of Creator/BillBryson's travelogues; In ''The Lost Continent'' Bryson is startled to see how much America had changed since TheSixties. Reading it today reveals how much the country has changed since 1987-88. It's certainly one of the last works to mention strip clubs in Times Square; similarly in ''Neither Here Nor There'' Bryson discovers how much Europe has moved on since he backpacked around as a student in the 1970s. Being written in 1990 it has a pre-single European currency Europe and [[UsefulNotes/TheYugoslavWars pre-Balkan war Yugoslavia]] and pre-[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge Oresund Bridge]] Denmark, as well as relying on printed guidebooks for European train times; in ''A Walk in the Woods'' the gizmo-crazy hiker is kitted out with technology that was advanced in 1997 (GPS, self-pitching tent) but is fairly standard fare now; ''Notes from a Big Country'' mostly deals with a mid-90's world just before the internet and cellphones became ubiquitous - Bryson mentions the difficulty of finding change for a payphone at the airport, the amount of mail order catalogs he's sent, sending faxes to the UK, and renting movies on videotape.

* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' has a bit of this as Mina scoffs at the whole fad of the "new woman" culture which was arising in London at the time focusing on women becoming more independent. Course Stoker is using it as an allegory to the subject, including being more sexually forward, which likewise ties to vampirism and its lack of morality as demonstrated by the count's vampire brides earlier in the story. Although this is often pegged as HypocriticalHumor; Mina is by far the most proactive and competent of the hunters and every time the party tries to restrict her to a traditionally feminine role it backfires horribly.

** The Franco one was called back when Chevy Chase hosted and appeared on Weekend Update along with then-host Kevin Nealon, using 1975 news-jokes who Nealon immediately complained about afterwards.

** Even {{Rockapella}}'s theme song had to change with the times; After the '93 season, Carmen no longer traveled from Chicago to Czechoslovakia, but to ''Czech AND Slovakia''. And back.

* Episodes of ''Series/ThePriceIsRight'' from the 20th century often included outdated technology such as [=VCR=]s and phonographs, the vehicles offered during the 80s BLED then-contemporary structure and design, and showcases often included pop music from the 80s. At one point the Giant Price Tag was very, VERY 80s, featuring the show's logo on a Space/Futuristic background. As the contestants were always pulled directly from the audience, the fashions and cultures of the 70s and 80s were very prevalent.
** ''Price'' actually stayed stuck in the 80s well into the early 2000s, given their insistence on using physical props instead of video monitors, a set that went mostly unchanged for 20 years, and of course, the prominent use of Edd Kalehoff's Moog synthesizer in their theme song (it's still there, by the way).

** For example, the first episode (made in 1996) had the drummer from Dodgy as one of the guests (the band faded into obscurity in the late 90s) and one of the intros was "I Love, You Love, Me Love" by Gary Glitter who didn't have a joke made at his expense. [[note]]Not long afterwards, his reputation was destroyed by a pedophilia scandal[[/note]]

* WesternAnimation/{{Arthur}} has this tendency as well, but it's not as obvious as some other shows. Technology of the era are shown. One episode has him watching an {{Expy}} of "The Magician's Secrets Revealed" or refer to Literature/HarryPotter releases. Since they use expies, they're not as blatant.
* EdutainmentShows are prone to this due to ScienceMarchesOn and HistoryMarchesOn.

** The Arroyo Seco Parkway between Los Angeles and Pasadena is now an intentional PeriodPiece; as the first freeway in the region, it's a designated historic landmark and will likely never be updated. Many of its ramps are more like hard turns onto/off the freeway, and are signed as slow as ''5'' MPH due to the extremely tight curvature.

* [[Wiki/TVTropes This very wiki]]. Given its reliance on informal writing style and pop culture references, it can be very apparent when a certain entry or article was made ([[ExamplesAreNotRecent even when there are efforts to minimize such datings]]). For example, something written in the mid-to-late 2000's containing plenty of references to ''LightNovel/HaruhiSuzumiya'' or ''Anime/TengenToppaGurrenLagann'', while something from 2010 on will instead repeatedly refer to ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica'' or ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic''. In a few years, even those entries will inevitably seem dated.

* You can tell the decade by those recyclable jokes about famine-struck areas. The same joke would be told in the 1960's about Biafrans, in the 1970's about Cambodians, in the 1980's about Ethiopians, in the 1990's about Serbians, and in the 2000's about Darfurians - the words would be absolutely identical, only the location and nationality changed.

* Most low-budget movie logos from the 1960's - 1980's use very cheap animation set to synthesizer sound and sometimes, if they were expensive enough, to small orchestras. While in their time most people saw them as futuristic, you would nowadays see a lot of people that find them legitimately scary, as NightmareFuel.VanityPlate demonstrates.

* Any work that references five and dime stores will date itself to the early to mid-20th century. Said stores fell out of favor by TheSeventies with inflation not helping matters.
* Any work revolving around the MayanDoomsday is instantly dated to before December 21st, 2012.
* Any work that references "Don't ask, don't tell" as a current policy of the US military is instantly dated between 1994 at the earliest, when the policy was first instituted, to 2010 at the latest, when the policy was repealed.
* Any work that references or features video rental stores date themselves to the 1980s at the earliest and the mid-'00s at the latest, as the rise of online streaming services in the late '00s and early '10s caused many, if not all, of these stores to go out of business.
* Since 1928, the back of a United States ten-dollar bill has had a portrait of the U.S. Treasury building. The Bureau designer decided to park a car in front of the building which would make it vintage-era today. Therefore, the portrait became this by the time new $10 bills were printed in the 1950s. Averted when a new depiction of the U.S. Treasury featuring just the building was introduced for Series 1999.

** Many videos from UsefulNotes/TheNewTens will refer to ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', ''WesternAnimation/RegularShow'', ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'', ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'', ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', ''Disney/{{Frozen}}'', ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'', ''VideoGame/AngryBirds'' and/or ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball''. In a few years, even those will become dated.

** Many videos from UsefulNotes/TheNewTens will refer to ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', ''WesternAnimation/RegularShow'', ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'', ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'', ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', ''Disney/{{Frozen}}'', ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'', ''VideoGame/AngryBirds'' and/or ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball''.

* Also true of other parody artists. For instance, Music/CledusTJudd's first few albums usually parodied country songs from the past two years, sometimes going back even further (his first album in 1995 had spoofs of "[[Music/{{Eagles}} Hotel California]]" and "We Are the World", while his second parodied "[[Music/JohnnyCash Jackson]]" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"). By 1999, his turnaround was a bit quicker, to the point that his fourth album spoofed "Livin' la Vida Loca" only five months after that song's release. Later albums zig-zagged this, with some parodies ranging from only a few months after the original's release to two or three years. But probably his quickest examples came on 2012's ''Parodyziac!!'', where Little Big Town's "Pontoon" was parodied less than two months after it hit #1, and Music/EricChurch's "Creepin'" was parodied ''while it was still on the charts''.

* A trivia game published in the 1980s with "West Germany" as an answer is moot because that country no longer exists by itself anymore, having reunited with East Germany.
** Trivia games in general can fall into this. Aside from political changes like TheGreatPoliticsMessUp, many are pop culture based, or have pop culture categories, and make no sense to someone just a few years out of the original audience. Plus, what was obscure trivia when the game was published might be common knowledge a few years later (like the fate of Apollo 13 before and after the release of the movie). And that's ignoring cases of ScienceMarchesOn, DatedHistory, and other things that can make the "correct" answer just plain wrong.

* The EdutainmentGame genre is full of games that have aged poorly due to facts being debunked, new facts being discovered, or history changing. Unless it's something that changes very slowly like math or grammar it's unlikely a game will be accurate within fifteen years.

** Many 2010s videos will refer to ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', ''WesternAnimation/RegularShow'', ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'', ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'', ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', ''Disney/{{Frozen}}'', ''VideoGame/ShovelKnight'', ''VideoGame/AngryBirds'' and/or ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball''.

** Cheap busting videos were a big fad before 2010, as were "retarded" (i.e poorly made) character beatdowns and "'x' hates [[WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons Homer]]" videos, using a popular spriteswap of a VideoGame/CapcomVSSNK styled [[VideoGame/TheKingOfFighters Iori Yagami]].

** Many 2010s videos will refer to ''WesternAnimation/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'', ''WesternAnimation/RegularShow'', ''WesternAnimation/AdventureTime'', ''VideoGame/{{Undertale}}'', ''WesternAnimation/StevenUniverse'', ''Disney/{{Frozen}}'', and/or ''WesternAnimation/TheAmazingWorldOfGumball''.

** Cheap busting videos were a big fad before 2010.

** Anything mentioning a retired player.

** Even just a road map of an individual city or state can become a period piece due to new roads being built, existing roads being realigned, highway numbers being decommissioned or moved to different routings, etc. This is especially noticeable in the 1960s and 1970s while the construction of new Interstates was at its peak — they were often built in segments, and many had significant gaps in their routing. (For instance, Interstate 75 in Michigan was first designated in 1958 over a freeway south of Detroit that previously bore another designation, but it had a gap in mid-Michigan that was not filled until 1973. Interstate 95 has a gap in New Jersey that has still not been filled to this day.)

** The Arroyo Seco Parkway between Los Angeles and Pasadena is now an intentional PeriodPiece; as the first freeway in the region, it's a designated historic landmark and will likely never be updated.

* Due to DevelopmentHell causing the game to be delayed continually since its inception 13 years prior to its release, ''VideoGame/DukeNukemForever'' (released in 2011) has the unintended disadvantage of playing as though certain parts were only added in a certain year when they were the latest trend in gaming. The gameplay borders on GenreRoulette as it tries to mimic [[VideoGame/{{Sin}} late-90s cornball camp shooters]], [[VideoGame/{{Doom3}} early-2000s dark sci-fi shooters]] with [[VideoGame/{{Halo 2}} frequent, lengthy turret sections]], and [[VideoGame/{{Killzone}} late-2000s grim realistic shooters]] practically in sequence - ''WebVideo/ZeroPunctuation'' noted that "you could practically cut it in half and see the entire fourteen years of shooter evolution it's tried to keep up with, like the rings in a tree stump" - the humor is outdated by several years, the references to previous installments are years (and even decades) out of date, and as a whole the game is much slower-paced than 2010-era FPS's. In addition, several of the "topical references" include {{Exp|y}}ies of the [[Creator/MaryKateAndAshleyOlsen Olsen Twins]] (last relevant in 2004), an out-of-date TakeThat directed at ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' (height of the Master Chief's popularity was in 2007), a [[RedShirt quickly-killed character]] named after LeeroyJenkins (a resilient joke, to be sure, but one from 2005), and a near-exact replication of the infamous Creator/ChristianBale rant from the set of ''Film/TerminatorSalvation'' (already fading by late 2009). Because of this effect, the mechanics that were added more recently (RegeneratingHealth, Duke only being able to [[LimitedLoadout carry two weapons at once]]) stick out like a sore thumb instead of "making the game to today's players".

* Each game in the ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBros'' series is designed to be ContinuityPorn for a huge variety of Nintendo franchises, but obviously they can only do so up to the time of their release. Therefore, as more Nintendo games come out, each ''Smash'' game becomes dated as its content becomes more and more behind the curve. For instance, ''Melee'' is clearly dated to 2001, seeing as how it only features Pokemon from the first 2 generations, and its character designs are derived from the most recently released game in each series at that time.[[note]]Fox and Falco look as they did in ''VideoGame/StarFox64'', and Link, Zelda and Young Link use their designs from ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime Ocarina of Time]]'' and ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaMajorasMask Majora's Mask]]'', the former 2 of which were updated in later games to their ''[[TheLegendOfZeldaTwilightPrincess Twilight Princess]]'' designs, and the latter was replaced with Toon Link, based on the Link from ''[[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaTheWindWaker Wind Waker]]''.[[/note]]

* Since 1928, the back of a United States ten-dollar bill has had a portrait of the U.S. Treasury building. The Bureau designer decided to park a car in front of the building which would make it vintage-era today. Therefore, the portrait became this by the time new $10 bills were printed in the 1950s. Averted when a new depiction of the U.S. Treasury featuring just the building was introduced for Series 1999.

*** In "Stark Raving Dad" (1991), all of Springfield becomes obsessed with Music/MichaelJackson, dating it to pre-summer 1993 and MJ's drop in popularity domestically after he chose to settle instead of fight a child molestation suit.

* The failure of MySpace was largely because the website didn't innovate in time. The design during its zenith (2005-2008) was largely what one could expect of most websites in the early 2000s. The problem was that the internet moved on from that. The bulky, cumbersome, and unintuitive design of flash over substance that MySpace reeked of was quickly supplanted by sites like Facebook, which went for quick, efficient access, and sleek design. MySpace often had an air of a very high-end GeoCities type of website. And that was further hurt by profile customization: Anyone with the power to create a MySpace profile had the power to show everyone just how terrible they were at web design. In the age of easy access with simplified layouts (which is especially a MUST for the mobile aspect of the internet, which was another failure on MySpace's behalf), MySpace clung to a bulky, unintuitive interface (that was still very buggy to boot) for too long. And once it stagnated as the once popular party that most people abandoned, it especially couldn't shake the stigma of being "so 2005".

* Any work that references or features video rental stores date themselves to the 1980s at the earliest and the mid-'00s at the latest, as the rise of online streaming services in the late '00s and early '10s caused many of these stores to go out of business.

* Many of the early ''ComicBook/TheAvengers'' comics ended up becoming incredibly dated, not just due to the DirtyCommunist type villains common in that era, but also because of many pop culture references included in the stories.

* In general, a film shows its age if the credits are in the beginning. Most films nowadays put the credits after the movie nowadays, in two sets, a CreativeClosingCredits followed by a much longer list. But in pre-80s films, the shorter credits list would be in the front of the film, or sometimes even the entire list. This is due to old Director's Guild guidelines, since the opening credits were viewed as important for displaying the big stars and crew members. In the case of Creator/GeorgeLucas, he was kicked out of the Director's Guild after he insisted on starting ''Film/TheEmpireStrikesBack'' without the opening credits (he got a pass for ''Film/ANewHope'' because [[ItWillNeverCatchOn none of them thought it would succeed]]). After Lucas proceeded to become a powerful filmmakers without the aid of the Guild, the rules were softened to say the "big credits" could be put in the back instead before the main list of credits.

* Q:How do we know Adam and Eve were computer nerds?\\
A:God gave Eve an Apple and Adam a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories Wang]]

-->A man went on a sea trip with his wife, but his wife died on the trip. The captain said they did not have the facitities on board to store a body for burial on shore, they would have to do a BurialAtSea. The husband knew his wife would never stand for it, but understood and allowed it anyway. That night, sleeping in his cabin, the man kept hearing a voice softly repeating "It floats... it floats... it floats". The next night he heard it again, and he knew it must be the ghost of his dead wife. The third night, exasperated, he finally responded to the voice "''What'' floats? And the voice said "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivory_%28soap%29 IVORY SOAP!]]"

--> "In would city would you like to die?" "St. Petersburg." [[note]]The joke is it's all the same city[[/note]]

** TheNineties featured strips such as the [[Music/SpiceGirls ''Space Girls'']] and [[UsefulNotes/TonyBlair ''BLAIR 1'']] (a parody of ''MACH 1'', an early strip from 1977) in order to stay relevant. These were not well-recieved.

* Many superheroes have dated origins, according to either comics canon or tradition. Bruce Wayne became Franchise/{{Batman}} after seeing his parents get shot outside a movie theater showing ''The Mark of Zorro'' (1940), while Bruce Banner became TheIncredibleHulk in the early 1960s while trying to stop a beatnik-like teenager from wandering onto a nuclear testing site. Understandably, many of these details have been [[{{Retcon}} altered by later stories]].

* Creator/PGWodehouse's books took place in a kind of flexible ComicBookTime version of the GenteelInterbellumSetting that he originally began writing them in, and he kept them coming until his death in the 1970s. In one interview, he noted with bemusement that he was was writing "historical novels".

* Some of Creator/BillBryson's travelogues; In ''The Lost Continent'' Bryson is startled to see how much America had changed since TheSixties. Reading it today is reveals how much the country has changed since 1987-88. It's certainly one of the last works to mention strip clubs in Times Square; similarly in ''Neither Here Nor There'' Bryson discovers how much Europe has moved on since he backpacked around as a student in the 1970s. Being written in 1990 it has a pre-single European currency Europe and a [[UsefulNotes/TheYugoslavWars pre-Balkan war Yugoslavia]], pre-[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge Oresund Bridge]] Denmark, as well as relying on printed guidebooks for European train times; ''A Walk in the Woods'' the Gizmo-crazy hiker is kitted out with technology that was advanced in 1997 (GPS, self-pitching tent) but is fairly standard fare now; ''Notes from a Big Country'' mostly deals with a mid-90's world just before the internet and cellphones became ubiquitous - Bryson mentions the difficulty of finding change for a payphone at the airport, the amount of mail order catalogs he's sent, sending faxes to the UK, and renting movies on videotape.

* ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'' has a bit of this as Mina scoffs at the whole fad of the "new woman" culture which was arising in London at the time focusing on women becoming more independent. Course Stoker is using it as an allegory to the subject including being more sexually forward which likewise ties to vampirism and it lack of morality as demonstrated by the count's vampire brides earlier in the story. Although this is often pegged as HypocriticalHumor; Mina is by far the most proactive and competent of the hunters and every time the party tries to restrict her to a traditionally feminine role it backfires horribly.
* ''Literature/HarryPotter'' plays with this trope. [[Literature/HarryPotterAndThePhilosophersStone The]] [[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheChamberOfSecrets first]] [[Literature/HarryPotterAndThePrisonerOfAzkaban four]] [[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheGobletOfFire books]] were written between [[TheNineties 1990-1997]], while the [[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix last]] [[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheHalfBloodPrince three]] [[Literature/HarryPotterAndTheDeathlyHallows books]] were written between [[The2000s 2000-2007]]. However, they are appropriately set in the 1990s (1991-1998, specifically), since that was the time Rowling did the most writings. In addition, the books proper generally avoid using references to the real-life pop culture of the 1990s. An InUniverse explanation is simple: The [[TheMasquerade Wizarding World lives a different lifestyle from that of the Muggle world]] by using medieval technology, and most wizards don't understand Muggle culture and technology. Furthermore, the Wizarding World is too busy worried about [[BigBad Voldemort]] to name drop 1990s pop culture anyway.

* Happens a lot more in ''Series/StarTrek'' than you would think at first glance. The more obvious examples are of how Kirk's ''Enterprise'' looked, essentially, like a 1950s-60s naval vessel in its design and style, and how Picard's ''Enterprise'' was comparatively bright and pastel, just like the [[TheEighties decade]] in which it was envisioned, but more glaring is the almost total lack of anything resembling pop culture in the Star Trek universe from after the end of the second millennium. Everybody listens to jazz and classical music, reads classical works of literature or, at most, stuff like pulp or noir, enjoys classical plays, and the most popular games seem to be variants of ancient games such as chess or racquetball. Movies, television and video games are practically non-existent, the writers never saw the internet coming, and there are scant examples of ''any'' post-20th century media. It's as if human culture essentially stopped after a certain point, even as TechnologyMarchesOn.

** The page for PresentDayPast has a description that treats 2004 as recent enough for the trope to take effect, suggesting that people may accidentally leave their 2010 cultural artifacts in a story set back then.

Here's a page of UnintentionalPeriodPieces from multiple decades, or that are OlderThanRadio.