Reality Is Unrealistic - Television Tropes & Idioms

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
— Oscar Wilde

Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things. Well-known fact.
- Granny Weatherwax, Wyrd Sisters

Truth of course must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
—GK Chesterton

It probably says something about certain segments of the population that many people, when exposed to an exaggeration or fabrication about certain real-life occurrences or facts, will perceive the fictional account as being more true than any factual account of the same. In effect, some perceive the TV/Hollywood version of something real as being more true than the real thing. This may cause viewers to cry foul when things on a show work out in a way that actually is realistic, or complain of the "fake Scottish accent" of the real Scottish actor. Part of the problem is fiction being held to higher standards of realism than reality itself is.

Very widespread in fiction. Sub Tropes include:

Contrast with Uncanny Valley (where a certain amount of increased realism causes the remaining unrealistic aspects to become extremely obvious and disconcerting), Not Making This Up Disclaimer (which is to avoid this).

See also Based On A Great Big Lie (something that seems "based on a real story") and But It Really Happened (too cruel to be realistic).

Examples:

Actual rain never looks like real rain on film, which is why they use a hose and sprinkler. But now that you know that, rain will never look real.
- You also don't get rain recorded when you just film it. To get it visible on camera, it's back-lit.
- For the famous scene of Singing In The Rain, the water was mixed with milk so it would show up on camera. The smell on set afterwards can only be imagined.
Mice don't particularly like cheese. They like peanut butter, seeds, nuts and chocolate. They ate cheese because in an average household... what was most smelly and edible? Also, in the past it was likely to be left exposed in the larder. Creepy rat-guy The Exterminator points this fact out in the film version of Wanted. Trapping rats using peanut butter plays a major part of the very explosive finale.
On a related note, rats and mice in children's films like An American Tail are often depicted as friends, or at least sociable neighbors, united by their mutual fear of cats. But real wild rats kill mice on sight, both as prey and as competitors for human-discarded food.
In Slacker, a videogeek mentions that he recently saw a real-life shooting, and complains that it didn't look realistic. "The blood was the wrong color."
Generally speaking, gunshots don't make gigantic bangs and ring out across three city blocks. Real gunshots are often mistaken for firecrackers. Larger rifle calibers will indeed give you a big bang. However, the bang will be a very sudden loud noise that ends almost as abruptly as it starts, not a "rolling thunder" with several seconds of reverb like in movies.
Silencers are way more effective in movies or television than in real life. Although, again, caliber can mean a lot. The best silencer a .45 is still as loud as a young man slamming a door for effect. But a quality silencer on a .22, or a .17? An integral silencer, with the designer not worried about weight or bulk? Like someone dropped a dictionary. In the next room.
- Supposedly, the integrally silenced WWII-era Sten was "almost inaudible at a few yards distance - most of the sound came from the mechanical bolt movements".
One other "unrealistic" part of reality- the sound of the projectile impacting the target and the brass ejecting and hitting walls and other hard surfaces is actually really loud, especially on larger caliber weapons. Even if silencers worked like in movies and removed the entire muzzle report, they wouldn't remove the sound of a piece of lead hitting someone at 700+ mph or the sound of the slide moving back and forth in the blink of an eye (hitting metal at both ends of the stroke) or the brass flying out and hitting the wall at 50 mph.
On most hand grenades, pulling the pin isn't what makes them go boom; the pin is just a final safety catch for the lever, which when released sets off the time-delayed detonator. However, there are a number of exceptions to this rule...
- Notable being the German M...24? The Potato Masher, where pulling the cord would set of the fuse.
- Trying to pull the pin with your teeth is usually a good way to break a tooth.
- Avoided in a Malcolm In The Middle episode, where the pin on a grenade is pulled, causing Reese and his grandfather to have to hold onto the grenade until its dropped and Malcom shuts it in the Fridge.
- Equally avoided in an episode of MacGyver where the bad guys capture Mac and Pete and restrain them by locking them in a basement with their hands tied behind their backs holding grenades with the pins pulled out. They escape when Mac replaces the pins on the grenades with pieces of wire from the guest passes around their necks (causing a tense moment when Pete has to hold the grenade with his chin). The kicker of this? Replacing the pins was Pete's idea!
- Of course, you can't put the pin back in a grenade (or put in a replacement) if the part the pin was holding in the first place has been released now. Even if you try to replace the handle, the fuse has started.
- Notable in First Person Shooters where holding a grenade too long will result in the player blowing themselves up or the grenade exploding as soon as it leaves the players hand. Apparently, FPS heroes don't know how to handle grenades properly. May be justified in that in FPS games, the heroes uses an unsafe (but sometimes effective) practice of "cooking" the grenade.
- Used in an episode of The Venture Brothers. When he needs to get an operation from a very shifty doctor in order to get Helper's head out of his chest, Brock pulls the pin on a grenade, and places the thing in Helper's mouth, with the implication being that Helper will chomp down on the lever if the doc tries anything funny while Brock's under.
As a side effect of Dawson Casting, some people perceive actors that actually are as young as their characters as being too young for their roles.
The same thing goes double for voice acting just about anywhere. This is particularly evident with voice acting for prepubescent boys, where a vast majority of executive producers find the voices of 30 to 40 something year old women to sound closer to the mark. This is more for the purpose that there are advantages to working with an adult over a child. Producers don't have to deal with labor laws regarding children, voice changes as a boy begins puberty, and a child's immaturity.
In an episode of Babylon 5, Centauri women (a type of almost Human Alien) were depicted as being completely bald or bald except for a ponytail. They were played by actresses who wore latex caps, except for one extra who actually was bald. Supposedly, one of the production crew commented that her cap looked fake.
- Later in the series, the accent of the actress who played President Clark's successor was widely derided as blatantly fake. It was the actress' real accent.
- This criticism was also aimed at Mira Furlan, who played Delenn using her native Yugoslavian/Croatian accent, leading detractors of the show to complain that the character's accent sounded "fake."
- This was picked up on in Lost, when fans asked why the French woman trapped on the Island by herself for 16 years is speaking with a Croatian accent. The producers regularly discuss this on their podcasts for Rosseau-heavy episodes, pondering if her traumatic experiences are responsible for the accent shift.
- In yet another episode, many complained about a villain's "fake" scar. In fact, the actor had gotten that scar while trying to stop a mugging, and as a consequence he'd been out of work for years until B5.
Given the changes made to the story of the von Trapp family in The Sound Of Music, viewers might be forgiven if they assume that Georg's membership in the navy of landlocked Austria was invented by the producers as well. But they'd be wrong: before World War I, Austria owned all of Croatia and part of modern Italy, including numerous sea ports that were protected by a small but well-respected navy.
In the film A Bout De Souffle, the American actress Jean Seberg played an American character who lived in Paris and spoke French with an accent that was presumably Seberg's own. A poster on the IMDb forums labeled her a French actress that had put on an unconvincing American accent.
- Amazon reviews for a fairly recent BBC radio production of Sherlock Holmes complained about the actors' "obviously fake" British accents.
- Also with videogame dubbing. Luke's Cockney accent in Professor Layton And The Curious Village is a healthy target for criticism, as he's voiced by an American woman.
- A review of Miller's Crossing complained about Gabriel Byrne's "fake" Irish accent.
- "That Bridget Jones gal, Zellweger, when I heard her American accent in Chicago I was amazed. It seemed dead-on perfect. Completely convincing. Similarly in Nurse Betty. But then I saw her in Cold Mountain and that completely destroyed the illusion." (She is from Texas.)
While working in The Lord Of The Rings, American actor Brad Dourif (Wormtongue) always spoke in an English accent in order to maintain it, and upon reverting back to his American accent at the end of filming Bernard Hill (King Theoden) wondered why he was suddenly using such a fake American accent.
- For the curious: the interview.
- During the filming of Dr Strangelove, something similar occurred. The B-52 scenes were filmed in Britain. The film crew thought that Slim Pickens was putting on the 'Texan' accent, and someone on the crew expressed surprise when he spoke that way after a shoot, until being informed that that was the way he normally spoke. He wasn't 'putting on' an accent.
- In a Better World, Dourif would have put on a Peter Sellers "American" accent c. 1960, and responded, 'Pull the other one, it's got bells on.'
Common in regard to historical fiction; if a certain fictional account becomes popular enough, people often believe that it is an accurate representation of history.
- Case in point: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart once alleged that Antonio Salieri had pulled strings to ensure that Mozart's opera Le nozze di Figaro would be a major flop. Later the two collaborated on composing a song; Salieri was given the task of teaching Mozart's son and he also promoted Mozart's compositions on a number of occasions. Six years after Salieri died, Aleksandr Pushkin wrote a play based around the original allegation depicting Salieri as greatly envying the genius Mozart, thus beginning the tradition of showing a Salieri hostile to Mozart. The prominent use of this fictional invention in the play Amadeus and the film based on it has led many to perceive the fiction that Salieri was responsible for Mozart's early death as a historical truth.
- Ditto for the play and film Inherit The Wind, which took many, many liberties in depicting the actual Scopes Trial (and not just the names), but are more or less accepted as historical fact today.
- Lastly, when asked about the American Civil War, most people recall scenes from Gone With The Wind which portrayed a very rose-colored picture of the South. Gone With The Wind is the result of that rose-colored picture already being popular.
- Napoleon Bonaparte is always portrayed with a French accent. Yet in actuality, during his lifetime some of his French contemporaries complained that his thick Corsican Italian accent made his French nearly impossible to decipher. (Which may be why a few of his comedic appearances instead depict him as muttering incomprehensibly and needing to have someone else translate for him.) Also, Napoleon was not quite as short as he is often depicted in fiction.
- For the sake of clarification: most generals or leaders would ride into battle on a horse. This had the effect of making them look much bigger—however, this also had the effect of making them much easier targets. Napoleon knew this, so he would eschew riding onto battle on a horse. Of course, this would thus make him look much smaller than a leader of his position would be!
Galileo was not imprisoned because of his dispute with the Catholic Church on matters astronomical. He was imprisoned because he was a Jerk Ass who wrote a thinly-veiled parody which insulted the Pope.
This trope is pretty much the same as Umberto Eco's hyperreality theories.
When the Mythbusters bust a Hollywood myth, like, say, Blown Across The Room, you can be almost certain that there will be a large portion of fans who clamor about having the myth re-tested because they're so used to seeing such myths on the media for so long that they have difficulty believing that real life won't live up to what they expect based on said myths.
- It gets even worse when they test myths based on the real-life physics of one thing goes contrary to the real-life physics of something completely different, but somehow became associated with the first in fans' minds. For instance, the infamous "Plane on a Treadmill" myth is based on the assumption that, upon take-off, a plane's wheels mechanically move to help it get up to speed like a car's wheels do, and would thus keep the plane in place if it was on a treadmill going in the opposite direction at the same speed; even when the Mythbusters proved that wasn't the case (a plane's wheels are actually free-moving, not mechanically-moving, and it always gains its speed and thrust from the air displacement from its engines, so being on a treadmill would mean nothing to it), the fans still refused to believe it, because the "plane-as-car" theory seemed more plausible to them.
- In essence, all that the treadmill does to the planes takeoff, is that the wheels spin much faster. As mentioned above it doesn't have any effect otherwise.
- The reason that myth was so pervasive and argued was not that people believed a plane was a car with wings, but because the two sides of the argument have always been arguing different things. One side is the planes can't take off without moving (no matter how fast their propeller is spinning) and the other side is the wheels are free spinning side. If an aircraft pushed enough air backwards, enough air might flow over the wings to lift it; but then you have an aerodyne, not an aeroplane. Normally a plane is supposed to take its lift from the air flow on the whole wing, while engine only propels it forward ensuring the wing meets the air fast enough. The small airscrew wash is far less than what's needed for a full lift, so no easy VTOL. Conversely, the plane can "take off" without moving in a strong (hurricane) wind. Though it'll just crash to the ground without someone handling it properly.
This is referenced in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Wyrd Sisters. The witches hide the crown of Lancre (a simple gold coronet) among the prop crowns used by a group of traveling players, and the youngest one, Magrat, comments that the real crown looks out of place among the elaborate and ostentatious fake crowns. As Granny Weatherwax tells her, "Things that try to look like things often look more like things than things. Well known fact."
- An even more specific example of this trope: in Moving Pictures, the movie-set version of Anhk-Morpork used to film Blown Away is described as looking more like Anhk-Morpork than the city itself does. The movie-set version, of course, is nothing but painted canvas and plywood nailed to the fronts of crudely-built shacks, which have yet another faux-frontage nailed to their backs.
- Possibly lampshaded in Guards! Guards!, during a discussion about Carrot's sword, an astoundingly non-magical and weathered (but still very functional) specimen. Sgt. Colon very briefly wonders if old kings' swords weren't really marked by their glinting light or impressive sounds, because the kings that were around in the old days wouldn't need something showy, but something that needed to be bloody good at cutting things. In the next City Watch book, Men At Arms, the sword proves so sharp and durable that Carrot nails a bad guy through his midsection to a stone pillar.
- Referenced in Men At Arms, that a bloke who could put a sword through a stone would have more right to be king than one who could pull it out. Perhaps he'd be an ace.
- Possibly referenced in Good Omens, when War has her sword delivered. The narration points out that it's not a fancy magical sword, just one obviously designed to hurt, kill, and maim as many people in as efficient a manner as possible.
Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin impersonation contest, where the objective was to adopt his famous Little Tramp persona, in San Francisco. He came in third.
- Likewise, Dolly Parton once entered and lost a Dolly Parton lookalike contest.
- Michael Buffer had a similar experience over a contest to say "Let's get rrready to rrrummmmbllllllllle!"
Jess Harnell was once told that his Wakko Warner impression "Didn't sound anything like him!" Ditto for Kevin Clash.
An audience member at a late showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show was asked to leave the theater for being a Tim Curry impersonator. The member? Tim Curry.
One of the members of the band Barenaked Ladies was shown playing a karaoke game at the first Gphoria (G4's annual video game award show). The game rated his attempt to sing the song "One Week" as "Bad," to which he replied, "Bad? I wrote this!"
The rock band Rush attempted to play their song "Tom Sawyer" on the Rock Band game and got a failing grade. This is actually quite common - playing a real instrument and playing with a game controller shaped like on are still two different skills.
One of the members of DragonForce tried to play his song "Through the Fire and Flames" in Guitar Hero, and failed at 2%.
Here's a video showing Scott Ian of Anthrax failing his own band's song on Easy mode.
When James Bond used a Bell Rocket Belt in Thunderball, its natural sound was replaced by a supposedly "more realistic" fire-extinguisher sound.
UK edutainment show Brainiac Science Abuse got in a spot of bother for pandering to this trope. The alkali metals (group one on your periodic table) get more reactive as their masses increase. The show demonstrated this by dropping them into water and watching the increasingly loud bangs as the metals liberated and ignited hydrogen gas. Unfortunately when they reached caesium, the large atomic mass meant, pound for pound, it was far less dramatic than the rest. Rather than show this interesting result to the audience, they repeated the experiment with numerous pyrotechnic charges in the tank. "Science abuse" indeed. [1] Funnily enough on a small scale caesium is far more impressive. While the lower number metals fizz and occasionally burn in water, caesium will quite happily make the tank explode.
One claim made by those who believe the Apollo moon landings were faked is that there is no visible starfield in the photos, as one frequently sees in movies. In reality, those photos were taken during the lunar daytime, and despite the fact that the sky is black, the light from the sun and the camera's brief exposure time prevents any starlight from being captured on the film.
- Another claim is that two sets of shadows can be made out in some of the videos, which means there had to be more than one light source. But contrary to what the conspiracy theorists believe, that doesn't mean it was filmed in a studio. There are two significant light sources on the moon: the sun and the highly reflective lunar dust itself.
- The above claim was busted (and the lunard dust explanation confirmed) by Mythbusters in a recent episode, where they replicated the shadows with one light source, just by adjusting the shape of the sand in their model.
- When the Apollo lunar modules lifted off the Moon's surface on live television, they just went straight up, with no visible flames or smoke coming out — completely unlike anything ever seen in a sci-fi movie. This helped fuel speculation that the landings were faked. The reality is that while it's perfectly possible to make fire in space (you just have to mix the fuel and oxidiser together before igniting them), flames and billowing smoke are the result of the contents of your fuel (see 2061) and the interference of an atmosphere — and the moon's atmosphere has a total mass of 104 kg, for all intents and purposes it's total vacuum.
- It is also claimed that the landing was a hoax because the flag the astronauts placed is not limp (as normal flags would be in an airless environment). However, this was because the vacuum environment of the moon means that there is almost no air resistance, so when the flag was waved, it just kept waving on and on.
- A fun explanation, but not true - the real reason the flags look "wavy" is because the supports inside them, to hold them out in the airless environment of the moon, didn't quite deploy all the way. Of course,
- Basically, the entire hoax belief boils down to "it must be fake because it doesn't look like it would if they faked it."
- Apollo 13 was said by some reviewers to have an unrealistic ending, in the astronauts coming back to Earth alive. Heh. One thing was added to serve the Rule Of Drama - Marilyn dropped her wedding ring in the shower, but the drain holes were too fine for it to go down and be lost.
- One of the more vocal, popular, and outright weirder of the conspiracy theorists points to a small shadow shaped like the letter C on a rock in one of the photos. His claim is that a prop maker on set forgot to turn it over so the 'C' which marked its location on set wouldn't be visible. Penn and Teller did a hilarious send-up of the conspirator, explained the most likely culprit (a hair from whoever developed the film), and shot the elephant in the room. Who the heck would label prop rocks rather than just scatter them around?
A character designer for God Of War details his encounters with this trope in some making-of bonus material, as the rest of the dev team would say authentic Ancient Greek costumes and armor were "not Greek enough," and were only satisfied with the pop-culture versions of Ancient Greek garb.
Parodied in The Simpsons, where a Hollywoodesque special effects team paints a horse's skin in a cow pattern, because "real cows don't look like cows on-screen." When asked how they would make something look like a horse on-screen, they suggest stringing a bunch of cats together.
In another episode of The Simpsons, the guest star was John Waters. John Water's real mustache is basically a very straight thin line across his upper lip. however, in the cartoon, he had a wavey moustache. In the audio commentary, the reason John Water's straight thin moustache was replaced by a wavey line was because John Water's real moustache looks too much like a cartoon. John Waters said he actually liked it, but considered that it would be difficult to shave his moustache to look like that. So what we have here is, The Fake moustache looks more real than the real moustache. John wants to make his real moustache look more real like the fake moustache that looks more real. However, he can't make his fake-looking real moustache look more real because it is just too dificult to shave in a wavey line like the fake moustache that looks more real even though it's too hard to shave in real life. This trope is weird.
Similarly parodied in Monty Pythons Flying Circus. While filming "Scott of the Antarctic" on an English beach, the crew cover up the sand with white foamy mats, which supposedly, "on screen, look more like snow than snow!"
The New York Supreme Court is actually the lowest state-level court in the New York judicial system (county and municipal courts being below it). It's a trial court where felonies, large civil lawsuits, and divorces are tried, whereas other Supreme Courts only hear appeals of issues of major national or statewide legal importance. This all means that to anyone who doesn't know how the New York courts are set up, works that get the name right (like Law And Order) sound wrong, while works that get the name wrong sound right. A few early episodes of Law And Order erroneously referred to the 'superior court.'
While Armageddon is largely scientifically inaccurate, it actually got one thing right: sending the shuttles around the far side of the Moon to create a “slingshot effect” to steal a little momentum and kick them on their way. The effect has been used by space agencies for decades to launch deep-space probes such as Voyager, often looping from one planet to another to gain multiple slingshots. Ironically, the movie was criticized in some quarters for being unrealistic because of this, the argument being that cars tend to fly off corners when you go around them fast. And as we all know, spaceships behave exactly like cars.
Happens a lot in music; the advent of the synthesizer allowed amateur songwriters to fake any number of musical instruments and other sounds to near-perfection. Because of that, people who enjoy the synthesized stuff would be mighty surprised when they're told that their favorite song was, in fact, played by a real band with real instruments.
- Same thing with singers; lip-syncing scandals (like with Britney Spears) have become so prevalent in the public memory in recent years, that it comes as a shock to listeners when they're told a performer they swear is lip-syncing actually isn't.
- In an article about the use of pitch-correcting software in the music industry, one producer noted that singers who don't use the software get criticized by fans for sounding "pitchy". Ironically the article was mainly about rappers who use the software to intentionally distort their voices.
May, Dawn, and Misty are often accused of being unrealistically "well-developed" for a 10-year-old. In reality, puberty for young girls has gotten much lower in recent generations, and the average age for this to start in girls is actually at nine and ten years old. Not surprisingly, this shocks people in real life as well.
On a completely different tangent is Brock's ethnicity. Most Americans think that he is Latino or Black or so on. Turns out that it's really not that uncommon for Asian people to get that dark.
Glass tends to be used instead of real jewels on the stage - gems are too subtle, basically, and the audience too far away. One reviewer, having missed publicity about actual crown jewels or something being used in a production of Shakespeare, criticised them for looking so fake.
Used outright in Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, where the Nazi commander chooses the most ostentatious goblet from the table of possible Holy Grails, drinks, and promptly dies horribly. Indy and his love interest quickly search the table for the least ornate cup, because that's the kind of cup a simple carpenter would actually have.
- Although the actual Grail is only vaguely described, most depictions of it are rather more fancy than the wooden cup of Last Crusade. Then again, artistic interpretations of religious elements tend to be glorified.
- The funny thing is that in Jesus' time, being a carpenter was a very high-end job that paid very well (akin to being an electrical engineer today). But he had spent the previous three years or so as an wandering preacher instead, so maybe ....
- Except that the importance of the Grail wasn't that Jesus owned it, but that he made it himself. When Indy says it's the cup a carpenter would have, it means the cup a carpenter would have crafted; considering we're talking about Jesus "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven" Christ here, he probably wouldn't be too ostentatious with the Grail's decorations.
Groucho Marx's greasepaint mustache looks far more real than the natural mustache he wore during his later years, especially on "You Bet Your Life". There may be an Uncanny Valley here: Marx's greasepaint mustache was "realer" than his later, real one only in the way Marlon Brando's "Vito Corleone" was "realer" than DeNiro's—more iconic, well-defined, and memorable. Given that he was an actor, there is a very good chance that Marx's later mustache looks a bit fake because he may well have been dyeing both it and his hair.
There's a Channel 4 made film called ''Yasmin' where in one scene, a Muslim woman is being abused by children on the high street and at the end an old woman comes out and apologises in a really badly acted way that completely ruins all verisimilitude . Apparently this old woman was a random person off the street who didn't realise there was filming going on and the director decided not to reshoot the scene.
In many movies, when an eagle is shown calling, the sound of a red-tailed hawk's screech is dubbed over it. Apparently the red-tailed hawk's cry is stronger and more dramatic than the eagle's (and audiences have come to associate the red-tailed hawk's sound with eagles.)
Coconuts in fiction are depicted as fuzzy brown things hanging from trees, sometimes with apertures in the surface. Coconuts are actually green with smooth skin until one cuts them out of the pod then dries the second layer which then turns brown and fuzzy. That gives extra dimension to the trope name The Coconut Effect!
- Super Mario Sunshine has coconuts that look more realistic than most other coconuts; This led to some people believing them to be fake.
- As do the Animal Crossing games.
- And Castaway
Narbonic [2] stated that a person exploding in the vacuum of space was "an old wives' tale". Apparently, the author wasn't lying.
Which also means that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was correct in stating that you could survive in the vacuum of space for 30 seconds (provided you hyperventilate and then exhale right before exposure). Fortunately, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect were picked up by the Heart of Gold in this time after being dropped into space from a Vogon ship.
A more realistic version of exposure to hard vacuum is also famously shown in 2001ASpaceOdyssey via astronaut Dave Bowman's last-ditch attempt to get back aboard the Discovery minus his spacesuit's helmet. However, 2001, whilst portraying space travel in much harder a way than is usual on film, still had its share of inaccuracies: the Discovery's centrifuge section is too small and rotates too slowly to produce much useful artificial gravity. In reality, it'd have little effect but causing nausea.
Written (and often spoken) dialogue seems more and more fake and becomes less and less comprehensible as it gets closer to how people actually speak. A good explanation for this can be found here.
Parodied in Supernatural's self-referential episode Hollywood Babylon. There's a real black-and-white ghost woman with rope burns on her neck and the producer just says "Not sure about those neck wounds, though. They need to be red."
A common complaint about driving games is that a speeding car can easily yank a metal lamp post out of the ground with little loss of speed, while being stopped dead by a humble tree, which makes no sense to most people. In reality, modern lamp posts are intentionally designed to buckle in the event of a car crash as to not harm the passengers, while trees are rooted in the ground and require much more force to uproot. This complaint still has some merit though if a game depicts something like a fast semi truck or tank being unable to damage a thin palm tree.
A studio executive allegedly complained that the actor playing Senator Joseph McCarthy in the historical biopic Good Night and Good Luck was overacting badly. Actually all of Senator McCarthy's scenes consisted of Stock Footage of the man himself. In his defence, the real McCarthy did overact badly.
A documentary of hostage situations included a police sniper lecturing on the difficulty of actual marksmanship compared to that shown in movies. He complained that he regularly had to defend himself to laymen asking, "Why don't you just shoot the gun out of his hand? The Lone Ranger does it every week!" Not that it can't be done...you just have to be a really, really good shot. Like the sniper in this video.
The makeup artists in the movie Hannibal went through several iterations of Mason Verger's mangled face before getting to the one you see on screen. The first few they did looked how somebody who had cut his own face off would actually appear, but they realized that it looked ridiculous. So they made his face less realistic and more disturbing.
Despite what the movies would have you believe, charging a door with your shoulder in an effort to break it down is more likely to damage your shoulder than the door. More effective is to kick it right next to the lock/handle. Got right in Spider-Man 2 when Peter Parker tries to shoulder-bash a door down and gets only a bruise for his efforts. He then kicks it open.
- Interestingly, kicking the door near the lock does not work well in Europe, where the locks are much heavier and more robust than locks in America. If you were wondering why, it's not for a lack of pride in craftsmanship... it's building codes and safety. Less robust doors are easier for firefighters to kick in during an emergency. All interior doors must be hollow. Firefighters are appreciative. And so are the people they save.
- One proper version of breaking down a door is shown in Call Of Duty 4, where the Marines breach a door by shooting off the hinges with a shotgun, and then kick the door in.
- The designers must have stopped smoking whatever they were while making Callof Duty 3. In it, not only do soldiers break down doors by charging at them with their shoulder, it also reduces the door to splinters. To be fair, 3 was developed not by Infinity Ward (1/2/4/6) but by Treyarch (3/5/unfortunately 7).
- Likewise SWAT 4 — breaching a locked door is done either with the breaching shotgun or an explosive charge. They never actually kick doors.
- There's an even more practical reason for kicking a door as opposed to a shoulder charge. Even if one did manage to bust the door open with their shoulder, they'd be careening into the room off-balance and in no position to engage targets. By kicking the door in the officer/soldier can either immediately plant their foot and be in a position to engage, or retreat and let the rest of the team rush in (which is more the case with soldiers and SWAT.
- Burn Notice: Sam has to break down a hotel room door. He fails utterly.
- Subverted in Watchmen, particularly in the movie. In a movie where punches can break arms open and men can jumped their own height in the air, whenever Rorschach breaks a door down he gives it a strong kick by the doorknob. Which makes for a more badass entry, IMO.
- Demonstrated in Chuck — Chuck, attempting to save somebody on the other side of a door, rams it with his shoulder and ends up with a very hurt shoulder. After a few seconds of feeling sorry for himself, he opens it with a well-aimed kick.
- Jamie Hyneman breaks through three of the four locks on the "test door" when Myth Busters tried this, and probably would have gotten the fourth had the build team used the attachment screws that came with the lock. But there's a reason everyone else on the show talks about him being unusually strong, and according to fan sites Jamie did hurt his shoulder in the process.
- Also, it should be noted that a shoulder works great for jammed doors. No more effective than a kick; however, it takes less effort. It can also convince someone who's stubbornly refusing to open the door to do so, if only to come yell at you to cut it out. It also depends on the door.
- Justified in Artemis Fowl. A reinforced door crumples like so much rice paper when Butler runs into it shoulder first. Butler is about as strong as a human can reasonably be and the door was reinforced from the point of view of fairies, a people who are generally about half the size of humans. He could have eaten that door.
A lot of reviewers of Kanon complained that the scene in which Akiko gets hit by a runaway car looks unrealistic, since the victim cannot be seen anymore. In reality that is likely to happen when the car actually covers the victim or when the victim gets catapulted out of sight, as can be seen on footage of real accidents. And, after that episode was aired, people found an accident footage on You Tube which was identical to that scene. It's quite possible that it was the one used by the animation team as a reference.
In the movie Cloverfield:
- They first used accurate measures for the head of the Statue of Liberty, but test audiences complained that it looked too small. For this reason they made it 50% larger than it really is. Even then some people still complain that it looks too small.
- Again, some people took issue with one of the characters using his cellphone while underground in a subway station. In fact, you can really do this in quite a few subway stations in Manhattan.
Lampshaded in one Spongebob Squarepants episode in which Mr. Krabs pulls his way to use the sponge himself as a promotional money-making tool for the Krusty Krab, after a food critic complimented him. He makes him leave his current position to manually work on a ride, having set up Squidward, in costume, for his place. After tiring out, Spongebob gets attacked with insult and mockery for not looking like the real thing. It was not until the end of the episode where Mr. Krabs fixes things up.
John Barrowman, who is openly gay, tried out for the role of Will from Will And Grace. According to the producers, he wasn't gay enough. They then proceeded to hire Eric McCormack, who is straight.
Perhaps the greatest example of this trope is ninjas. Despite how they are shown in the media, ninja operated more like medieval James Bonds. No sneaking in at night wearing a pitch-black suit with a sword over your back; a ninja was more likely to get in as a carpenter contracted to do some work on the target's house and beat him to death with a hammer. Or better yet, get onto the cooking staff and poison the target's food. If they used a sword, it would've been stolen from the target or one of his guards; ninja clans couldn't afford to send one of their agents out with a proper sword (Japan is an iron-deficient country, making steel very expensive), ninja were only ever sent out with equipment that could be easily and cheaply replaced.
- The traditional ninja garb is taken from the dress of stagehands in kabuki theatre. They'd dress in all black and the audience would, by convention, pretend not to see them. A ninja character dressed as stagehand used this convention to emulate a character striking from the shadows, since the audience would be surprised to see a "stagehand" suddenly interact with the real actors.
- For that matter, the James Bonds of the real world don't act like James Bond. Spys tend to be extremely normal looking people who actually spend a lot of their time doing paperwork and laborious scut work. This gets discussed in Moonraker (the novel, not the movie): Bond only gets two or three assignments a year; his job the rest of the time consists mainly of reading intelligence reports.
  - Well, actually, if you think about it in the films Bond only gets one or two such missions (counting teasers) every two-four years, and these usually last only a few days to a couple of weeks within the film. In On Her Majestys Secret Service we see Bond's desk where he presumably does his paperwork.
  - In fact, James Bond is in many ways a faithful- if (really) exagerrated- look-in at certain parts of the intellgence service. For example, many of the worlds top criminals and dictators really are a bunch of egomaniacs with wierd personality quirks (Gaddafi, for instance, has an all-female amazonian virgin bodyuard- yes, they are babes◊) and MI 5 and MI 6 actually do have a secret lab for developing crazy spy gadgets. This makes sense when you remember that Bond creator Ian Fleming was actually a quite high-ranking member of Naval Intelligence in WW 2; many Bond plots in the books were based off actual ploys by Germans, Communists etc. from then and the decades prior, such as a plan by Germany to rob the gold in the Bank of England.
- The Western equivalent of the "ninjas in kabuki black" could be how the Knight In Shining Armor trope has usurped the King Arthur myth. Plate armor hadn't been invented at the time the King Arthur legend is set, yet plenty of people wouldn't even recognize an Arthur who wore chainmail or Roman-style banded armor. Older Than Print, as medieval artists invariably painted Arthur and his knights decked out in whatever the knights of the painters' own era would wear.
The game show QI (hosted by the genius Stephen Fry) lives and breathes this trope. For example: we have more than one moon, Jesus probably wasn't born December 25th, quite a few words rhyme with "Purple", goldfish have respectable memories, and they say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is, that there are no straight lines.
There are people of Hispanic ethnicity who have light skin tone and blond hair. The majority do have dark hair and tan skin like Antonio Banderas and Jennifer Lopez, but try to find an actor or actress portraying a light skinned Hispanic. This definitely crosses over with The Coconut Effect.
- The U.S. Department of Transportation defines "Hispanic" as, "persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central or South American, or others Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin, regardless of race". Even ignoring this, the term "Hispanic" could be said to be more a matter of culture and language than race. Which begs the question why they think all Latin Americans are "otherwise Spanish or Portuguese in culture and origin", or even, that Spanish people are of "Hispanic race". Most Latin Americans are Indian and a mix of European immigrants, but people assume only descendants of Spanish colonists live in, say, Mexico, or vice versa. This like calling US Citizens "other persons of British culture and origin".
  - So that makes Cameron Diaz, Martin Sheen or Christina Aguilera as Hispanic as Salma Hayek, Shakira or Gloria Estefan. Otherwise, Catherine Zeta-Jones starred as a spanish woman in "The Mask of Zorro" when she is from Wales. Also, Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz or Enrique Iglesias are from Spain, like Pau Gasol or Javier Bardem. I don't know if that makes them Hispanic or not.
- The same goes for Italians. Ironically the trope cut both ways when The Godfather was cast: the fact that there are fair-haired Italians was offered as justification for trying to cast Robert Redford as Michael. Yet the final cast (while mostly genuine Italian-American) was overwhelmingly dark-haired. This may have something to do with the fact that most Sicilian-Americans (who by and large make up most of the Cosa Nostra) are dark-haired and dark-skinned.
  - This is used in Questionable Content. Faye is rather surprised when Dora admits that her natural hair color is platinum blond (and explains what her last name, Bianchi, means).
  - Although he could be considered a questionable example, the Emperor Nero was described by Suetonius as having blond hair.
- This is done right for once in Michiko To Hatchin, where Hatchin is depicted as a very fair-skinned Hispanic girl, in contrast with the more stereotypically dark-skinned Michiko.
In the nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (later made into the popular TV series Homicide) it's mentioned that fingerprint experts are routinely called to testify in trials where no fingerprints where found at a crime scene...in order to explain to jurors that, contrary to television, fingerprints aren't found at most crime scenes.
- A "professional" television or film burglar will often be shown using a cloth to carefully remove fingerprints from a doorknob. In fact, most fingerprinting experts won't bother dusting a doorknob at all, as it will almost invariably reveal a mottled pattern of overlaid prints from which no useful information can be gathered.
A group of Native American actors appearing as extras in the series Wild Wild West were asked to speak in their own language for a scene, only for the director to change the dialogue as it didn't sound 'Indian' enough.
In Transformers Cybertron, Jetfire was voiced by a different actor than in the previous two seasons, Armada and Energon. The Powers That Be wanted the new version to sound Australian. The kicker? (No, not that annoying kid from Energon.) The old actor, Scott McNeil, is Australian. The new one, Brian Drummond, is Canadian. As the Transformers Wiki puts it, clearly, McNeil was insufficiently Australian.
Many people think that, as portrayed by virtually every Rome-related work of fiction ever, gladiatorial matches were nearly always to the death. In reality, being killed during a match did occur, but it was somewhat rare. Also, they were not no-holds-barred brawls—fights were regulated by a very strict set of rules defining what sorts of gladiators could fight each other and what weapons and tactics they could use.
As video games strive to become more realistic, the colors have become darker, mostly greys and browns. Particularly First Person Shooters. Take a look outside and tell me how much brown and grey you actually see. In their defense, you probably aren't looking out your window at the kind of blasted hellscape most shooters are set in.
- Have a walk around London Bridge Station in London on a rainy day. Or Midtown Manhattan. Grey and brown is what ageing cities are made of.
- Ageing perhaps, but abandoned cities would very quickly turn green as the truly inexorable inhuman destroyers, plants, swarm in.
- To be fair to developers, this is partly due to genuine limitations in graphics technology which are only just being overcome. In real life, brightly coloured surfaces effect the colour of reflected light, an effect known as Radiosity. See this discussion.
- Professional summary: Light that bounces off of blue things turns blue. Limiting the number of colors in a scene prevents this from becoming noticeable in its absence.
Used extensively, and influentially, throughout Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers, with realistically low-key bullet impacts and deaths as well as explosions that are more concussive than firey. Furthermore, several of the acts perpetrated by Allied soldiers were deliberately un-Hollywood, such as shooting enemy soldiers In The Back, and killing soldiers who were in the process of surrendering, although this tendency also dates back to revisionist war films of the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Dirty Dozen, Kelly's Heroes, and Robert Aldrich's Attack. On the other hand, Saving Private Ryan also suffered from Painting The Fourth Wall, with its jerky cinematography and desaturated colour palette (despite being set in the middle of Summer in Northern France).
And another war movie example: In The Big Red One the soldiers hide from a group of German soldiers. After the Germans have passed by the American soldiers get up and want to walk on, but find one of their comrades is dead. Upon finding his body in the hole he was hiding in, a soldier comments that he had not even heard a shot being fired. The experienced squad leader just explains that the dead guy is not the first soldier to die from a heart attack in the middle of a war and won't be the last.
If years of Hollywood influence has taught us one thing, it's that cars explode after crashes, even fairly minor ones (or occasionally, explode in mid-air before touching the ground). Reality disagrees, and modern cars don't explode readily at all. Nonetheless, the public is largely convinced that cars present a serious danger of explosion after a crash, which has resulted in many, many cases of well-meaning members of the public pulling injured victims out of cars, causing further injury to them, to get them away from the car before it explodes. It is better to not move a victim unless there are clearly visible flames burning the car, or if there is some other form of explosive involved.
- Inversion: While cars in a hard crush will usually just crumple up into hunks of metal, commercial jets frequently will explode dramatically on a direct impact, thanks to the sheer force of it guaranteeing that their heavy loads of volatile fuel won't stay safely contained - as seen in footage of the 9/11 plane crashes. This is demonstrated to be an inversion, not an aversion, by the number of conspiracy theorists who contend that the effect noted above proves the towers were rigged with pyrotechnics.
- Another jet example: it's not possible to cause explosive decompression on a plane simply by shooting out the windows. On Myth Busters, shooting the windows either failed to break the window, or if the window did crack, didn't lead to explosive decompression like in the movies. The effect was only replicated wtih plenty of explosives.
- To "spice up" the field test on Ford Explorer rollovers, Dateline relied on this fact for cover as they rigged the trucks to explode. When they were found out, they issued an apology.
- There's also the widely-held belief that if a tire (especially a front tire) blows out the car will inevitably roll. Car and Driver, investigating the rolling Explorers, deliberatly tried to roll one by rigging the tires to blow out on their test track. They couldn't get it to flip. It's the driver, stupid.
- The actual Ford Pinto that formed the basis of Every Car Is A Pinto isn't nearly as ready to explode as the popular image of the car suggests, let alone cars in most visually-based fiction.
About fifteen years ago, there was a foiled bank robbery where one of the robbers had a submachinegun, and fired a couple bursts at the guards, with video shown on the news. There were accusations that the video was faked because none of the guards were hit, let alone shredded to pieces as they would have expected. This objection eventually was raised as the story developed, with a clip of a gun expert basically explaining that submachineguns aren't known for their fantastic accuracy, especially when you're holding it wrong, not even really trying to aim or keep it under control.
- The Dark Tower: The Drawing of the Three; Near the end of the first segment, a Mook opens fire with an M-16 assault rifle, which he calls "The Wonderful Rambo Machine." He promptly cuts one of his own allies in half. The narrative then pauses to point out that with a weapon like the M-16, More Dakka will send you off target after abut four or five shots. It describes the look of amazement Eddie's face as the bullets miss him by a mile. The idiot in question is screaming "I got him!", "unable to distinguish between the script in his head and reality" when he is shot.
- Compare common graphic portrayals of people getting shot to this story, including a video of a man getting shot five times, which made the news rounds because it doesn't seem that "graphic".
Remember those "Ask Dr. Z" commercials for what was then Daimler-Chrysler, with the actor with an odd-looking fake mustache and goofy German accent purporting to be the company's CEO and taking customers' questions? That was the actual CEO of Daimler, and the accent and mustache are both real.
William Goldman in 'Adventures in the Screen Trade' writes about worries that Ryan O'Neal looked too young to play a Brigadier General in 'A Bridge Too Far' - despite Ryan O'Neal being exactly the same age as the real life Brigadier General was at the time of the movie's setting.
As mentioned in the DVD commentary of the U.S. series premiere, the creators of The Office run up against this problem quite a bit. It's a fictional show done in documentary style, which means it needs to look "realistic", but to achieve this, it often needs to look less professional than an actual documentary. Suspension of disbelief isn't necessary for a documentary filmmaker, because by its very nature a documentary is assumed to be true and uses no actors or sets. Therefore, they often strive to make their footage look as artistic and professionally staged as possible. But if The Office did that it would probably look like a regular show, hence it has to be "behind the times".
Christopher Lee has told a story (in The Films of Christopher Lee) that when he tried to perform a scene of his being shot the way he'd seen people shot in WWII— "I put an expression of slight surprise on my face and slowly sank to the floor with great dignity"— the people on set found it hilarious. To clarify for those who didn't see the DVD extras, Christopher Lee served with the Special Operations Executive in World War Two. The SOE's job was to fuck shit up for the Nazis across occupied Europe. While the actions of all SOE agents are still classified, during filming of Lord Of The Rings Christopher Lee told Peter Jackson how it would look when Saruman was fatally stabbed in the back. Because he knows exactly how that looks. Probably because he's stabbed people in the back.
Invoked in Girl Genius by Master Payne's Circus of Adventure, whose crew explicitly avoids everything that looks too realistic: Most notably, for a talking cat, they use a man in a cat costume rather than Krosp.
Fictional example: in Survival Of The Fittest, Quincy Archer, a v3 character, did a review for the first season for his blog, and dismissed it as being unrealistic, unaware that the "characters" in the show were in fact real people being forced to kill each other. He was severely shocked when "his favourite character" (Adam Dodd) showed up in Southridge. The scene that revealed this also had a Shout Out to the Discworld example above when he briefly thinks the (real) blood everywhere is artificial because it doesn't look anything like the blood he had seen online. However, he was originally open to the concept of the game being real, the "unrealistic" parts just made him dismiss the idea. Said unrealistic parts included Made Of Iron and Made Of Plasticine, which were (and for the latter trope, still is) quite conspicuous features of the series. He also hung a lampshade on a few of the series' more unusual, Jason-esque deaths and the collaborative nature of the RP board. Ultimately, he described SOTF as 'a massively multiplayer slasher flick', which, while not the entire purpose of the series, is certainly the most important aspect.
The television show The Nanny featured a British butler working for a British Broadway producer. The show would repeatedly get fan mail suggesting that the guy who played the butler (who is from Arkansas) coach the guy who played the producer (who is from London) to make his accent more believable.
The volatility of gasoline has been overstated by Hollywood to the point that all gas stations have warning signs regarding cigarette smoking posted at the tanks. However, there has never been any recorded instance of a cigarette or other open flame igniting any gasoline (or petrol) tanks anywhere. The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms experts have thoroughly debunked this, yet the signs remain. Further, dropping a lit cigarette or match into gasoline does nothing more than extinguish it. In order to start a fire, an actual flame has to be held in the fumes rising above it; the ember of a smoldering cigarette will not trigger a blaze.
- At a gas station, signs only remind the people working immediately with light fuels. When a spark just somewhere around can make a fireball, it'd be an emergency already. As to the ATF "experts", it's a bad consolation: they used to say ludicrous things.
- The Mythbusters took great care to bust the myth of cellphones making gas stations explode, repeatedly calling a dozen cellphones of various make over an hour in a sealed environment filled with the 'perfect' ratio of gas fumes to oxygen. Nothing happened. When they didn't optimize the fumes they couldn't set it off even on purpose.
- The British show Brainiac: Science Abuse not only demonstrated that a mobile phone causing a spark is virtually impossible, but also that the static electricity caused by the rubbing together of polystyrene or other similar fabrics is more likely to cause petrol explosions. You'll note that you don't see a ban on polystyrene clothing in petrol stations.
- One Darwin Awards article involved someone who tried to douse a cigarette in gas, per a demonstration he had seen. Problem was, he used the wrong type of gas. Then there was the guy who held his lighter near the entrance of his gas tank so he could see inside. In both cases, flamarity ensued.
In Apollo Justice:Ace Attorney the first victim is killed with a glass bottle to the back of the head, leading to people to question why it didn't shatter, leaving it to be presented in court intact (made worse by the fact that the series is based on finding such contradictions, but asking this in game isn't an option). Glass is not as fragile as depicted in Hollywood.
A bizarre Real Life example: optical proportions, intentionally unbalancing the design of a flag to account for the distortion caused when the flag is flying in the wind.
- Ancient Greco-Roman columns were built with a bulge in the middle to make them look straight from far away.
- Similarly, door hinges are often not equally spaced; this is done to create the appearance that they are equally spaced, because you're typically not looking at a door from the exact centre, but slightly higher up. If the hinges were really spaced equally, they would appear not to be. Confused yet?
- The Eiffel Tower is actually painted three different shades of brown-gray so that it appears as one color to observers on the ground.
- The mat in some framed art is wider at the bottom to make the matting appear equal on all sides of the work.
One of the The Spill.com's biggest complaints is about the Animated Adaptation Movie "TMNT" is that Splinter's voice didn't sound Asian, when in fact it was voiced by the famed Japanese actor Mako Iwamatsu.
The 1999 American Civil War film "Ride with the Devil" suffered a delayed release because of controversy resulting from it having an African American character who fought on the Confederate side, due to the popular misconception of Confederates as basically 19th Century Nazis. The character was based on a real person, John Noland, an African American who did fight on the Confederate side.
In Milk, a number of reviewers complained that a scene involving a gay kid being unable to flee his abusive parents because he's in a wheelchair — and then turning up safe and sound in Los Angeles at Milk's moment of triumph — was unrealistic and played only to tug at the heartstrings. Because gay people in wheelchairs don't exist, apparently. Never mind that it actually happened, as documented in Randy Shilts' biography The Mayor of Castro Street.
One of the oft-cited "absurdities" of George Miller's Happy Feet is that the main character somehow ends up far out his region, washed ashore and stranded. This has happened more than a few times, the most recent and talked about being the African Penguin who ended up a world away, and the King Penguin who'd somehow spirited himself beyond the Falklands. Penguins have even wound up in Alaska - admittedly, most likely by boat (escaped ship's pets), but still...
Deliberately avoided by the producers in the HBO adaptation of Generation Kill. No doubt the best example would be Captain America, who is toned down from Evan Wright's account of things as seen in the book, for fear that the audience wouldn't believe it.
- The series still suffers from this trope played straight; it's not uncommon for viewers to think the show is completely unrealistic and an insult to military personal when they don't know the characters, Wright included, are real people actually followed around by a reporter. The Marines being more vulgar and shameless than military characters portrayed in the John Wayne-era or even newer World War II films just seem unrealistic to civilians after decades of Hollywood painting the battlefield with an air of civility. Beyond this, some will still justify calling bullshit on it through the idea that Evan Wright is biased at best, and fabricating things at worst, the fact that the real Marines portrayed have no problem sitting down with him and talking about what goes on in the series seemingly irrelevant. The real Brad Colbert actually mentions this trope in one such discussion, he and the other Marines having what is essentially this entry as a conversation.
- Never mind the fact that one of the actual marines was an actor in the series. Fruity" Rudy (The marine who played himself in the show) would likely also qualify as reality is unrealistic. Nobody would find a fictional Marine like him believable.
- This also carried over to Army Of Two, which was based partially on GK and partially on actual accounts from mercenaries.
Real life example: The platypus.
- Similarly, archaeopteryx.
- Also see: The Blobfish
- How about humans? They have faces like giant monkeys, a weird mix of near-bald with hairy patches, and walk on their heelbones. The only reason we can ignore the absurdity of this is because we have to deal with it every day. Creationists bank on this effect; they dismiss the (now nearly irrefutable) fact that many of the "raptor" dinosaurs had feathers as some sort of silly nonsense talk: Dinosaurs? With feathers? Yeah, sure, the T. rex evolved into a chicken! Tell me another one!
- Heh heh heh... My, how the tables have turned, mighty T. Rex.
Anyone not familiar with local council bureaucracy would think that the Melbourne comedy series Grass Roots was an hilarious send up. My father, who's worked for or with local councils most of his professional life, can't watch it because it's like being at work. They might have been trying for unrealistic, but he swears he knows the real events and people that inspired the plots.
IMDB's trivia page for The Man Who Knew Too Much includes this tidbit:
The plot calls for a man (Daniel Gélin in the role of Louis Bernard) to be discovered as "not Moroccan" because he was wearing black makeup. The makeup artists couldn't find a black substance that would come off easily, and so they painted the fingers of the other man (Jimmy Stewart) white, so that he would leave pale streaks on the other man's skin (according to Patricia Hitchcock, this idea was suggested by Daniel Gélin).
In the early days of Seinfeld, Jason Alexander complained to Larry David of the way George was written, saying that no person could possibly sink so low as to do some particular thing in some episode (I can't remember what it was), that it was completely unrealistic for one person to be that selfish and stupid. Larry informed him that he himself HAD done that very same thing in real life. This changed how Jason saw the character when he realized it is possible for a person to sink that low. Also lapshaded in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm- playing himself, Jason complains to Larry that he always gets typecasted as schmucks and assholes because of George. Larry asks what he meant, Jason said something like "Well come on, George was an asshole! He did {lists off various misdeeds of George}" to which Larry angrily replies "I did those things!!!"
Subverted in Stephen Fry's novel The Liar, in which the main character finds a body with the throat cut. His first thought is that it doesn't quite look realistic, but then he reasons that he's never seen a real dead body before, and maybe real-life gore actually looks less real than the movie stuff, just like how real-life gunshots don't sound as real as movie ones. Turns out it actually was fake.
The laughter track on the pilot episode of The Mighty Boosh is actually a quiter version of the laughter heard on the day. However, the audience who attended felt the laughter track was too much on the filmed episode, despite it being their laughter.
Many people have questioned the famous scene from The Dark Knight in which the Joker's request for a phone call in jail is refused. In reality, there is no law or precedent requiring people in jail to get a phone call. Of course, that being said, most police officers are more than happy to let a prisoner make a telephone call from a department phone. The reason being, unless the prisoner speaks to his or her lawyer, whatever he or she says over the phone isn't confidential speech, and the police are more than free to listen in and/or record the conversation.
- One awesome example occured on The First 48, when the suspect calls his house and asks them to hide the murder weapon. In Creole, just in case the cops were listening. They were, and since it was South Florida, the cop who actually spoke Creole sat watching the monitor while the normally sedate detectives tried to keep their laughter down to a giggle.
On the forums of the America's Army game, a game created by the U.S. Army, people often complain that certain aspects about the game are less realistic than other games. The actual case is inevitably that America's Army is the first game to get that particular aspect right and the people aren't used to that. Common examples of what uninformed posters complain about are what weapons the Army uses (specifically the lack of expected weapons), the slow speed of the reloading animations, the dramatic stun effects of flashbangs, the frequency of weapon jams, the slow movement and gameplay speed, the lack of some ridiculous practices, and other things commonly misrepresented by other games. You know a media-caused misconception is ingrained firmly when people think they understand something about combat better than the actual Army.
When Nuclear Apocaluck was launched—a site with simulations of damage caused by nuclear attack—the overwhelming response was "I know that a nuke would do more damage than that." Nukes are powerful enough in their own right, but they've been so over-dramatized that people don't recognize the insane horror of their power when they do see it. What some people don't realize is that the way the system is set up is kind of off; unless a city is at fatal ratings for 12 months a year, they don't get glowing brightly, and "glowing" (with no shockwave or heat blast) can range anywhere from being 40-90 rads or deadly for seven months of the year and very bad for you another five.
Players and reviewers of D 20 Modern often complained about how unrealistic it was that wielding a weapon with a burst fire setting doesn't give you the effects of the game's Burst Fire feat. As the game's designers have pointed out, the point of the burst fire setting on guns is to ensure you only fire the three to five rounds in an automatic burst that have any realistic chance of actually hitting the target, and if you don't know how to effectively fire an accurate burst with an automatic weapon, this setting won't make it any easier.
To Hell and Back is the true story of Audie Murphy, a WWII combat vet, except it's not. He had to ask the writers to take out some parts that were included in his autobiography, for fear that he would be called a liar. The full details of just what he did show up in Cracked.com's article ''Real Life Soldiers that Make Rambo Look Like a Pussy''.
Any media portrayal of any of the more shockingly extreme, sadistic, and/or brutal atrocities performed by an actual historical figure or group may get this reaction from who just can't believe that anyone would be that depraved. The portrayal of Amon Göth, the commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Płaszów, in Schindlers List was attacked by one critic as being "too unrelentingly brutal" to be believable. In reality Amon Göth's depravity was downplayed for the movie.
- In the same vein, the Chinese movie Men Behind the Sun was criticized as being an explotation film and being too over the top with its violence, despite the fact that everything in the film is based on some experiment the Japanes scientists actually performed.
- A variant would be extreme ideological and bigoted behavior as well. Many portrayals in films of real life actions or even just statements by the more extreme racists, supremacists, or any other highly-charged hate groups often ellicit eye-rolls from many in the audience and often accusations of being Anvilicious. Even the extent of how deeply things like racism was once accepted in casual society falls into this. For example, the commercials in the the Faux Documentary CSA: The Confederate States of America which featured products with over-the-top-sounding racist names (such as Darkie Toothpaste and Coon Chicken Inn). These often get the aforementioned disbelieving eye-rolling from viewers until the end credits of the film show that such products were, in fact, real products in the past. True, the Darkie toothpaste was Asian made, but it was introduced to some Western markets, where few whites batted an eye at its racist name at the time, decacdes before its Western acquisition and subsequent name change to Darlie in 1985.
One example from the filming of the movie JFK: Two railroad employees' testimonies of seeing smoke behind the grassy knoll fence on November 22, 1963 is used by Oliver Stone as undisputable proof that there was a second gunman present to help kill President Kennedy. Problem was, during filming of a flashback, none of the rifles they used emitted any visible smoke. The special effects team had to be brought in with a smoke machine to complete the illusion.
In Joyeux Noel, a very historically accurate film about the impromptu Christmas truce of 1914, in the early months of World War I, a Catholic bishop at the end preaches to Scottish Highland troops about how the Germans should be given no Christian mercy, as they "crucify Belgian children," a ridiculous and horrible piece of black propaganda the British made up. Reviewers said this was an unreal note in an otherwise good film. Sadly, it comes from a real sermon made in Westminster Abbey by the Anglican vicar there. Likewise the jingoistic poems recited by French, British and German schoolboys at the beginning calling for war are totally authentic. It's sad of course but all true.
SFX artist Tom Savini, who often uses his memories of dead bodies he encounted during his tour of duty in the Vietnam War to create his gore effects, is criticized by some because his makeup effects look "faker" than others.
British TV show Cardiac Arrest was written by a practicing doctor in a hospital about his experiences as a junior doctor. It was slammed as an unrealistic portrayal of life in a hospital by critics who had never been in one.
The Passion Of The Christ was accused of being too gory. Real crucifixions were apparently worse. Real crucifixions could go on for days. The most typical cause of death was from exposure. Technically, Gibson did add in caning, which if you read the original text (the Bible is very clear about what exactly happened to Jesus) never happened.
Godzilla fans have complained about the about the Heisei Mothra prop looking like a plush toy, and how the Showa and GMK Mothra are "so much more realistic"; nevermind real moths can look quite toylike when viewed in extreme closeup.
Halo pulls an interesting version of this - only Spartans can go Guns Akimbo. Lampshaded by a marine:
"I’ve seen a Spartan use two SMGs at once, tearing the crap out of the little ones; sending the big ones down in bloody heaps. But I guess that’s what ya gotta be to pull it off: an action-movie hero or a seven-foot-tall walking tank..."
In The Shining (1980), apparently for the scene in which Jack breaks down the bathroom door, the props department built a door that could be easily broken. However, Jack Nicholson had worked as a volunteer fire marshal and tore it apart far too easily. The props department were then forced to build a stronger door for the storyline and dramatic effect.
When the state of Maine began to produce a new style of personalized plates, they were originally going to paint the living lobster in it realistic colors (a greenish-black), but instead painted it red so that it would be recognized as a lobster, despite the fact that lobster is only red when cooked.
When Maxis created Sim City 4, they believed that desaturating the colors and intensing the sunlight would make the buildings look more realistic, as well as avoiding using colors like deep reds, orange, yellow, and many others. Instead, the created a blatant recreation of Southern Californian buildings, which some argue makes the game less appealing. What's shocking about this? Real buildings often may be painted with very deep and saturated colors, and sometimes in very odd colors like purple or orange (especially businesses, using such odd colors catches your attention). Also, building colors do indeed fade to some drab color, but then again, people will often repaint buildings to help keep them looking fresh and restored.
Some viewers of Munich complained that the scene in which the Mossad agents dress as women in order to approach the apartment they are raiding in Tarifa without suspicion was ridiculous, contrived, and ruined the realism of the film. Presumably they were unaware that this particular sequence was closely based on Operation Spring of Youth, a real Mossad operation, in which the men did indeed dress like women to approach their target.
Ridley Scott actually declined to include any reference in Gladiator to the historical practice of gladiators endorsing products from their sponsors, specifically out of fear of this trope.
A number of people have complained about Irish-American actress Alyson Hannigan playing the Jewish Willow Rosenberg in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Hannigan is in fact Jewish as well.
More than one review of GI Joe:The Rise Of Cobra complained about Destro's "fake" Scottish accent. It was Christopher Eccleston's real accent. The English, not Scottish thing does have some merit, as people usually have an accent similar to the people they live with/grow up around. Thing is, he's a Northener, and people from some parts of the North can sound very scottish.
The Bad Guy's lair in the first Dungeons And Dragons movie not only looked fake but actually a bit on the nose and over-the top evil. Turns out, it was filmed in a real Bone church made out of actual human bones during the Black Plague.