Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Butterfly Effect 
Here is the real Butterfly Effect.
Martha: But are we safe? Can we move around and stuff?
The Doctor: Of course we can. Why do you ask?
Martha: It's like in the films! You step on a butterfly, you change the future of the human race!
The Doctor: I'll tell you what then, don't step on any butterflies. What have butterflies ever done to you?
Want to go back in time to stop your parents from losing their retirement money in the Dotcom crash? Save a loved one from a fatal accident? Even just nudge a closet a little to the left to avoid hitting your toe? In some universes, you're not just going to run into You Cant Fight Fate, but into Finagle's Law on a grand scale: the Butterfly Of Doom. Any and every change made in the past will always have an unintended and horrible secondary side effect. Much like a temporal Monkey's Paw, the initial effect might come to pass, but at a terrible cost. Telling your parents to move their money elsewhere gets you arrested for inciting a financial panic and insider trading, the loved one you saved develops a wasting terminal cancer, the closet you moved is now on a weak floorboard and crashes through it, which because of termite damage, collapses the rest of the house.
Generally part of an Anvilicious story about accepting things as they are, this is the sword held over the head of repeat offenders of Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act who insist on changing the past. The resulting world can range from a dark Alternate Universe to a full-blown Mirror Universe. Heroes can usually Set Right What Once Went Wrong, by undoing the original change that started it with a bit of Rubber Band History. Curiously, though, although it leads to major changes and effects, these changes are never positive, suggesting in all cases shit happens for a reason.
Human intuition says that big changes need big causes, and small causes only cause small changes. This trope is named partly for the Butterfly Effect, an observation made in meteorology: That in the large-scale computer simulation of weather systems, a minuscule change in temperature or the wind's direction (about the bat of a butterfly's wings) would drastically alter the weather (sunshine instead of hurricanes) simulated at a later point. Even if the models used would work, it would be impossible to achieve sufficient accuracy when entering the measured data, thus computer-assisted long term weather forecasting is considered a joke even by meteorologists.
This alone may be a bad reason to argue for an universal butterfly effect. But it's really all that Edward Lorenzes Chaos Theory is based on - The idea that a sufficiently complex system is unpredictable and a small change can have a large impact in the long term.
Mind you that forecasting for merely tomorrow's weather already has such a low hit rate that you might as well not bother. This doesn't mean that Science Is Bad or wrong but we're simply not much better at weather forecasting than the ancient Mesopotamians, had they had IR cameras on satellites.
The butterfly effect also refers to Ray Bradbury's seminal time travel story A Sound of Thunder, which centered on the disastrous consequences of a butterfly's death in the past. By a marvelous coincidence, this was written some ten years before Lorenz started pondering the inaccuracies of his forecasting computer.
In theoretical discussions of Time Travel, this is sometimes referred to as "Avalanche Time", evoking an image of ever-growing cascading changes that race forward through the timeline, obliterating everything familiar to the time traveler who set it off.
There is a philosophical history regarding this one as well. Leibniz famously theorized that God made this the best of all possible realities. Ergo, any change would be tampering with perfection. The Butterfly of Doom is therefore in Western media God being sort of a dick. (Leibniz's philosophy was famously parodied by Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide, who, no matter what horrendous atrocity he beheld, would exclaim how this is necessary in a perfect world).
The most common aversion of this trope is based on the idea that large scale historical processes happen for large scale reasons. The Butterfly Of Doom may alter the course of a hurricane, it can't stop winter from changing into spring.
The Aesop of Wonderful Life. See also Finagle's Law, Hitlers Time Travel Exemption Act, You Cant Fight Fate. A subtrope of For Want Of A Nail. Make A Better World is the opposite scenario. Has been known to team up with Schrodinger's Butterfly to cause mind breaking havoc. See also Save This Person Save The World for when the Butterfly Of Doom is a person.
Godwins Law Of Time Travel is a subtrope of this.
Examples
Anime/Manga
- Almost the entire point of all events in xxxHolic. Made doubly ironic by the fact that Yuuko's symbol is a butterfly.
- In an episode of Penguin Musume, Kujira learns that she confessed her love to Sakura when they were both young girls (Kujira was raised as a boy.) Embarrassed into action, Kujira takes the Time-Penguin-X1 (yeah, you heard me) back to prevent herself from confessing. After older-Kujira realizes she's made a horrid mess, she works to repair the timeline, causing her younger self to instead make a marriage vow. Hilarity Ensues.
- Basically the entire plot of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Though Makoto never tries to change anything particularly big (she only ever uses it for stuff like repeating a karaoke session over and over for several hours), once or twice she changes something apparently rather small that has massive and very unexpected repercussions. After several failed attempts at getting a friend of hers to accept a confession from a girl who likes him by leaping back and changing certain scenarios so that things might work out, she finally gets it right. This directly results in him borrowing Makoto's bike, which in turn results in the brakes snapping and both him and the girl them dying in a train accident that Makoto herself only narrowly avoided earlier. Fortunately, Chiaki was around to fix things.
Comics
Films
- The majority of the first Back to the Future movie is Marty trying to reverse the effect of him saving his father from being hit by a car.
- Arguably subverted over the course of the trilogy — ultimately, changing the past has nothing but positive effects for most involved castmembers.
- But not intentionally. In fact, almost all of Marty's intended timeline changes end up nearly erasing him from existence. All the positive changes came from unintentional changes - most notably his "Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan" schtick, intended to spook his teenage dad into asking for a date, instead inspires him to become a professional science-fiction author.
- "Timewaves" are the result of the change in history in the very loose film adaptation of A Sound of Thunder.
- And let's not forget the movie The Butterfly Effect, named for the effect which names this trope, and is the most notorious embodiment of this.
- The Butterfly Effect is also notable for the fact that the protagonist not only learns that messing with time can have disastrous consequences, he also realises that he himself is a product of someone's tinkering with fate, and the world can't truly be righted unless he is no longer in it. But only in the director's cut, not the limp-wristed original theatrical ending.
- The title for this movie is an interesting choice. The whole point of the "butterfly effect" theory is that very small actions have very big consequences over time. Throughout the film, the consequences of his actions are either directly proportionate, or smaller than the actions dictate. Seems more like the butterfly effect means that a hurricane in china will cause a butterfly in America to sneeze. The most egregious example? Slamming his palms on spikes in grade school has NO effect whatsoever. Except for the scars. At that point it made a resounding bang as it hit the wall.
- This is played with in Donnie Darko; the setup is used without the character messing up the past, and the plague of strange events that follow him all lead him to go back in time and allow himself to be in bed when an airplane crashes into his house, thus saving his girlfriend's life in a roundabout way.
- More than that, the DVD commentary says that Donnie's purpose was to give the plane engine a reason for existing, preventing the collapse of the universe.
- Inverted in 2002's movie adaptation of The Time Machine, wherein Alexander Hartdegen's repeated attempts to go back in time to save his fiancée Emma inevitably go wrong, leading to her death in another way. Later, the Uber-Morlock explains that the reason he cannot go back in time to save Emma is that her death was his prime motivation for building the time machine in the first place.
- Subverted in the film Frequency. A shortwave radio and the Northern Lights allow the main character to communicate with his father thirty years back in time, and he succeeds in saving him from the fire that he died in (among other things). Unfortunately, the father's presence where he should have been absent indirectly saves the life of a serial killer, and things only get worse from there. However, instead of the characters learning a lesson about messing up history, they continue to use the radio to try to track down the killer, and by the end of it, all the characters (save, perhaps, the new victims of the serial killer) wind up with lives much better than where they started.
- Better still, it's extremely unlikely that said serial killer was able to claim more victims, since by the end he's had his true identity discovered by the police and had his right hand blown off with a shotgun.
- The movie Sliding Doors had a non-timetravel variation, the movie follows the events following the protagonist either missing the subway or getting on just in time, and then some...
- You invoke Sliding Doors, I shall raise you Lola Rennt.
- If only I had something that good to contribute. Instead, I put forth the So Bad Its Horrible Time Cop starring The Muscles From Brussels.
Literature
- The archetypal example — from which the trope name and the page quotes descend — would be Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story A Sound Of Thunder.
- Similarly, the science fiction story Aristotle and the Gun by L. Sprague de Camp has an arrogant time traveller trying to change history, and achieving the exact opposite of what he intends.
- Both the novel and the film Millennium conclude with a runway "timequake" obliterating the future, because of an accidental change made to the timeline in the present.
- An Animorphs Super Special dealt with a villain changing time around. Some things were better, some things were worse; World War II, of course, was one of the affected areas. Much of the conflict of the book is over whether to restore the world or keep it the new way, and what justifies preserving bad pieces of history.
- The fourth Megamorphs was arguably a Butterfly Of Doom, as the Drode convinces Jake to allow Crayak to alter time so the Animorphs will never have met Elfangor. Which all goes horribly wrong, when the Animorphs try to meddle accidentally, leading to a brutal, all-out military invasion of Earth by the Yeerk fleet. Then Cassie destroys the timeline somehow, and everything goes back to normal.
- Literary example: The Green Futures of Tycho by William Sleator involves a time traveler teenager making repeated trips into the future. Each time he discovers a bad future, and tries to fix it in the present or past. Each time, his actions only make it worse. He eventually realizes the reason ( In all futures, he has the time machine and he's using it to control events), but not before he gets his time-traveling Evil Overlord future self chasing him to stop himself from messing up the past (present for the teenager) that lead to his present (future).
- Isaac Asimov's novel The End Of Eternity. Only in this case, the constant changing of the potential timelines by a secret trans-temporal time agency resulted not in unpredictable chaos but in a static history, because the time agency tried to erase, with the best intentions, every invention, trend or development that they regarded a danger to Mankind and human life in general... erasing wars, but also deliberately killing all attempts at space exploration throughout the various millennia the agency's computers had access to. In the end, only the destruction of the time agency itself allowed the restoration of Mankind's original timeline: a life full of risks in search for the Unknown, but also with the potential to colonize the galaxy and survive into the distant future after the Earth's sun had gone nova.
- This was subverted in Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent. When the faculty of the Unseen University find themselves trapped centuries or even millennia before they were ever born, Ponder Stibbons invokes the ever-popular "kill your own grandfather" example of why you shouldn't muck around with things in the past. Archchancellor Ridcully dismisses Ponder's concerns with a rather more logical "whatever happens stays happened" attitude, pointing out that, having killed one's own grandfather and ceased to exist, no one would exist to step on the ant, meaning your grandfather was never killed, thereby creating a circular paradox wherein doing something makes you unable to do it. He also observes that he is unlikely to kill his own grandfather, as he "rather liked the chap." He then elaborates that, therefore, since they're in the past, they were very clearly there once already (ie now), and therefore any ants that are stepped on, are vitally important in their capacity of being stepped on. The Bursar later attempts to take this to heart by jumping around on ants in between walking into trees.
- This subversion of the Butterfly Of Doom theory is itself a well-respected alternate theory of how time travel might work; in a real sense Ridcully is simply the Discworld inventor of an idea that many writers of time travel stories already accept in our world.
- There is also Lords and Ladies: "The Universe doesn't much care if you step on a butterfly. There are plenty more butterflies."
- Averted in Poul Anderson's series of Time Patrol novellas and short stories. Anderson posits a kind of "temporal inertia" which makes drastic effects resulting from changes in the past just about impossible — it takes a real effort at key points in the timeline to effect changes. The reverse side of that coin poses a challenge to the hero of the stories, for once the timeline has been changed the same temporal inertia makes it extremely difficult to get it to revert to its original flow. In some cases the titular Time Patrol has to settle for merely mitigating the damage caused by changes to the timeline.
- Pretty much the impetus for the plot of Madeline L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet: Mad Dog Branzillo will succeed in nuking the earth (why, exactly, he's decided to do this is never really explained, except that it's generally a major temper tantrum directed toward the West for screwing up the environment) unless Charles Wallace goes back in time and changes the Might-Have-Beens in humanity's history. Thus, Branzillo's very distant ancestors never waged fratricidal war; his ancestor Zylle is never hanged as a witch for being an Indian with blue eyes; and the descendents of the two brothers married, everything was changed, so "Mad Dog" Branzillo was always El Zarco, "the Blue-Eyed".
- In the third book of The Pendragon Adventure, The Never War, the characters at first think that in order to make the turning point go correctly, they must stop the Hindenburg from being destroyed. However, they ask the Traveler from Third Earth (the far future) to analyze what would happen if they did it. It turns out that the world would pretty much be destroyed if they go through with it. After a rather huge misunderstanding because one character didn't get that last bit of info, they finally manage to let time go on its proper course.
- And then, in the later books, Mark brings incredibly advanced technology into the past, jumpstarting the computer industry and advancing technology's development. Of course, also thanks to Mark, we also get the future dystopia seen in Raven Rise because of a stupid decision he made in 1939.
- In Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, it's implied that the apparently futile actions of a single patient in a mental institution will affect whether the future holds a sustainable, egalitarian utopia or a polluted colony of virtual prisoners and sex-slaves.
- Subverted in Timeline by Michael Chricton, where this point is brought up in the story. The scientist then replied that the changed details are so minute that it has no real consequence to the overall timeline.
- Um...if referring to the book...It's also an Alternate Reality that they go to, so our time would not be effected, anyway.
- Except that the end of the book clearly indicates that it certainly had an effect on our timeline.
- Alfred Bester's The Men Who Murdered Mohammed plays around with this. A scientist attempts to erase his wife out of existence after he finds her cheating on him. He whips up a time machine, and goes back in time to kill her grandfather. The catch? It doesn't work. So, he works bigger, rampaging through time, killing more and more famous people with absolutely no effect on the present until, finally, he meets a fellow time traveler who explains that the past he's killing is his own, and he's unhinged himself from reality because of his actions.
- The Children of the Lamp series has a non time traveling example. Philipa (a djinni) grants an innocent wish of removing all foie gras from New York city. But it takes a horrible turn in that through an unusual series of events it destroys her mother's body in a volcanic eruption. Fortunately her mother is a djinni thus she was able to survive and a friend had earlier been in an accident that had left that friend brain dead.
- A literal example of this shows up in a Phillip K. Dick story, where traveling to the future causes hordes of blue winged, acid secreting butterflies to show up and kill everything.
Live Action TV
- Subverted in an episode of Scrubs appropriately entitled "My Butterfly," where a butterfly affects what happens for the rest of the day, ending in the death of a patient. When the butterfly changes where it lands, the episode features an alternate future where everything goes better, but the patient that J.D., Dr. Cox, and Turk are involved with still dies on the table. However, the second time around Elliot, with help from the Janitor, is able to find her patient's toy animal before her patient enters surgery.
- Another fine example of how one man's repeated attempts at changing the past to find the "perfect" timeline are leading to ever more disastrous consequences is the two-parter episode ''Year of Hell''
 from the 4th season of Star Trek: Voyager. Things are spiraling out of control, precisely because the timeship is based on the idea of Laplace's Demon which is contradicted by both Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory. In the end the original timeline can only be restored by destruction of the timeship (which had existed "outside time" while aboard centuries of subjective time passed), which Captain Janeway brings about by ramming it with the Voyager, destroying both ships in the process and "resetting" the timeline back one year. Basically, a giant Reset Button finale, but one of the few times in the Voyager series in which the Reset Button actually made sense from the context of the episode.
- In what is widely considered to be the best episode of Star Trek (TOS), "The City on the Edge of Forever", the world falls to Nazi Germany and Starfleet never forms because one woman didn't die when she was supposed to.
- Played with in the MST 3 K episode, Time Chasers, which is about a nerdy scientist who invents a time machine, and then has to go back in time and prevent an earlier version of himself from giving it to a Corrupt Corporate Executive. The original versions of the scientist and his girlfriend end up dying while the "earlier" versions of them manage to keep the time machine from falling into evil hands. The movie's premise gets parodied in the between-movie skits, in which Crow goes back in time to prevent Mike from taking the temp job that results in his being shot into space. Unfortunately, Mike dies in his alternate fate-line and his Evil Twin brother Eddie gets shot into space in his stead. Crow goes back in time again to tell the earlier version of himself not to warn Mike, and, as a result, the earlier version of himself gets stuck in the past where he will presumably remain, as an employee of the cheese factory where "earlier" Mike worked.
- There is a sort of this in Seven Days. It's stated that simply backstepping (Going back in time one week) already changes the timeline because the Sphere materializes and changes air currents, causing airplanes to land a bit sooner/later and the like. Of course, I don't think it was ever explained further than that.
- There was further explanation. The protagonist is actually insane. We don't know if any of the stories really happened.
- Hysterically parodied in a The Whitest Kids U Know sketch. Everytime Trevor and Sam try to change history, random things seem to happen (because that's how physics works). They go back in time, and kill Hitler, which cause JFK turns into a panda bear. They try to stop two Godzilla-esque monster from attacking each other and accidentally caused the Vietnam War (they call it a draw). After preventing 9/11, one of the character's sister start to disapear from a picture (a parody of Back to the Future). In response, they then scream out (rather cruelly) "We have go back and save 9/11!" Seems the maker of the show didn't know anyone close to the attack.
- A big part of Heroes, where time travel (mainly by Hiro Nakamura, and later Peter Petrelli) and precognition is used to fix, suddenly make worse, and then fix the future many times. Featured most prominently in the episode, The Butterfly Effect, where Future Peter screws up the past so badly, that he leaves things for Present Peter to fix it since he had "stepped on too many butterflies."
- Possibly subverted, or at least morphed into You Cant Fight Fate, during Volume 4 where all of the things that happened in the "averted" future are happening anyway (Sylar can heal and shapeshift, Nathan has turned on the mutants, Sylar-As-Nathan is gunning for president, etc..
- Supernatural covers this in two different episodes, although they aren't played straight. In one, Dean is tricked into believing a Djin has taken him to an Alternate Universe where his mom never died, and none of his family members became Hunters. Everyone's living happily, but as a consequence, his relationship with Sam is estranged because of their lack of time together, and all the people he saved as a Hunter died in their "accidents" without the brothers there to prevent them. Luckily, it was All Just A Dream, averting the trope. In the second episode, Dean is actually taken back into time by Castiel, who warns him that any attempt to save his mother will inevitably result in the death of the innocents he has saved. Subverted in that no matter what Dean did, things ended up going exactly the same way anyway.
- In Smallville, Clark goes back in time to save Lana's life. However, in preventing the accident, his dad, no longer having a reason to stay and console Clark, goes straight to his meeting with Lionel Luthor. The scuffle that ensues causes him to have a heart attack, ultimately killing him.
Tabletop Games
- Averted in the Tabletop RPG Feng Shui, where the universe actively resists attempts to change it. To illustrate it, the sourcebook gives the classic example of a man going back in time to kill his own grandfather. If Johnny Chang goes back in time and kills his grandfather, he returns to the present to find that his name is Johnny Fang now but nothing else has changed. In Feng Shui, world history bows to the whims of the people in control of the world's feng shui sites, and anything done by insignificant time travellers just gets corrected for.
Video Games
- Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within actually uses this trope, but with a twist — instead of unexpected consequences, there is an actual guardian of time that hunts the Prince in order to restore time to its original flow.
- Played straight in Prince Of Persia: Two Thrones where the events of Warrior Within have undone the events of Sands of Time meaning the Vizier from Sands of Time is still alive and still searching for the titular sands, sacking Babylon in the process.
- This is pretty much the entire premise for the DS game Time Hollow. Where the player makes small changes to the past and watches the subsequent results.
- The basis for the Red Alert series. The whole thing started when Einstein went back in time to kill Hitler, resulting in WWII taking place between the Soviets and the Western Allies.
- And in Red Alert 3, the Soviets go back in time to erase Einstein in order to save the Soviet Union, weakening both the Aliies and the Soviets(no nukes) and creating the Empire of The Rising Sun, resulting in a three-way world war.
Web Comics
- In the now likely defunct webcomic Adventures of John and Dave, Dave goes back in time about three weeks to play a prank on Air Force One and finds that this caused Germany to win World War II.
Web Original
- The Alternate History Forum, home of Look To The West and Decades Of Darkness among others, is divided on the issue. There are purists ("step on a butterfly and everything changes") and non-purists ("consequences of an event ought to follow on logically: things take a while to change, and sequences of reasons can be made"). People who don't include any "ripple" of changes are laughed at. To quote veteran member Jared "In 1618, Australia will be discovered on time and the effects [of a sedentary yam-farming aboriginal civilisation] will spread. Anyone asking "Great! How does this changed Austrlia affect World War 2?" will be fed to the blobfish."
Western Animation
- Time Squad: Planet of the Flies, a parody of ''Planet Of The Apes". Tudrussel squashes a fly in the Stone Age, altering history so that the world is ruled by giant flies. Complete with a ruined Statue of Liberty scene. "You maniacs! You blew it all up!"
- In the Family Guy episode "Meet the Quagmires", Peter travels back in time to 1984 to enjoy a night of carefree teenage fun. As a result of his antics, upon his return to the present he's married to Molly Ringwald, President Al Gore has eliminated terrorism and pollution, Dick Cheney accidentally shot himself, Karl Rove and Tucker Carlson, and (oh horrors!) Chevy Chase is the host of the Tonight Show.
- This is arguably a subversion, or at least an inversion, of the usual Butterfly Of Doom effect: instead of fixing what turns out to be a petty personal problem at the expense of ruining the entire world as he knows it, Peter unwittingly ushers in (what some might consider to be) a utopian alternate history- his own marriage being the only casualty. (Except Dick Cheney)
- And late night television, of course.
- Lampshaded in Teen Titans: Cyborg accidentally time travels to ancient times and reminds himself, "Don't do anything, don't touch anything. Sci-Fi Rule #1: You start messing with the past, you end up with monkeys ruling the future." Of course, in the end, his actions are for the better.
- Invader Zim gives an even bigger Lampshade Hanging in the episode "Bad, Bad Rubber Piggy." Professor Membrane explains that any attempt to travel back in time and change history is likely to create a future that is worse for the traveler (and cause further bad effects like, say, a giant fish in a bear suit). The Professor finishes, "Anyone who would want to build a space-time object replacement device is a complete moron!" Of course, the next thing we see is Zim saying "Gir, the space-time object replacement device is ready!"
- Naturally, as Zim uses the device, a giant fish in a bear suit DOES appear to terrorize downtown.
- And in an amusing twist, pressing the reset button at the end brings everything back to normal for everyone except Zim, who is now in even worse shape (Of course he's back to normal by the next episode.)
- In one The Simpsons Halloween Special, Homer is sent back in time by a toaster and tries to avoid altering anything because he knows this will have a catastrophic effect on the future (having been warned about this by his father on his wedding day). Of course, he does squash a bug and change the future and has to go back and try and put things right. Again. And again. And again...
- This is taken to its logical conclusion when Homer simply stops caring about pussyfooting around prehistoric animals. He goes back with a baseball bat, exclaiming "Don't touch anything?! I'LL TOUCH WHATEVER I FEEL LIKE!!!" He then proceeds to attack everything he can with the bat.
- There is arguably a subversion, in that one of the alternate timelines Homer creates is rather positive; he is rich, has wonderfully behaved children, Patti and Selma are dead, and it rains donuts! Regrettably, Homer never discovers the latter fact and continues on his quest to set the timeline straight
- Note that the future Homer settles in isn't the original timeline. He can deal with foot-long tongues though.
- Futurama subverts/plays with this horribly, as not only does Fry KILL his own grandfather, he ends up sleeping with his Grandmother. meaning, He's his own Grandpa. Also, Bender gets lost on the trip back home. They find him after a bit, seeing as how he is a robot and therefore technically immortal...as long as his fuel source didn't run out.
- Professor Farnsworth also seems to adopt the same attitude as Homer by the end of the episode. After spending the whole adventure warning his crew to be careful not to change history, he finally declares, "Oh, a lesson on not changing the past from Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandpa! Screw causality! Let's just get out of here!"
- Not to mention how Fry's "past nastification" allows him to save the world from the brain spawn. So (literally) screwing around with history is a good thing.
- Jimmy Neutron travels back to give his dad an investment tip which pays off... but his parent become spoiled jerks. To get his loving parents back, he has to Set Wrong What He Made right.
- Danny Phantoms' Ultimate Enemy has more of a Donnie Darko approach to this trope. Cheat on your SAT, create hot aged up alter ego voiced by the Master.
- Timmy Turner on The Fairly Odd Parents. After accidentally melting his father's prize trophy, Timmy wishes for a time machine and travels back to the 1970's. He accidentally alters time and when he goes back, his father never met his mom and is a dictator of the world.
- Lilo And Stitch has a whole episode dedicated to this trope. One of the experiments has a time traveling power and, while Lilo and Stitch were trying to capture it, Nani lost her job. So Lilo goes back in time to stop the event which leads to her making various mistakes, one of which leads to a cruise ship smashing into a hotel. One of the events that triggered these terrible events? Lilo disturbing a butterfly on a tree.
- In the Phineas And Ferb episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo", a future version of Candace manages to use the time machine at the Natural History Museum to bust Phineas and Ferb during their very first escapade from the very first episode. This has the unfortunate side effect of leaving Perry the Platypus grievously injured instead of his arch-nemesis Dr. Doofensmirtz. The end result of all this is a Bad Future in which kids are kept in People Jars until adulthood, fun and creativity are banned, and Doofensmirtz rules the Tri-State Area with an iron fist.
- In a Christmas Episode of American Dad, Stan traveled back in time where he met Jane Fonda and got Martin Scorsese off of drugs, among other things. When he got back to the present, he found the United States under communist control.
- The timeline justification being that Martin Scorsese on cocaine makes "Taxi Driver", which influences John Hinckley Jr. to attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan, which garners enough of a sympathy to allow Reagan to win his re-election and help bring down communism. In this alternate timeline, a sober Scorsese doesn't make "Taxi Driver", no one attempts to assassinate Reagan, Walter Mondale wins the 1984 elections, and immediately surrenders America to the Soviet Union. Stan's solution for rectifying this is to make "Taxi Driver" himself, which turns out to be a colossal failure, and which John Hinckley Jr. is apathetic towards. Stan's ultimate solution is to shoot Reagan himself.
|
|
