Cowboy Bebop At His Computer - Television Tropes & Idioms

The picture above shows the archetypal example, whence the trope gets its name. For the unfamiliar: The character is female. She is named Ed. And she is a supporting character at best. Cowboy Bebop is the show's name, where "cowboy" is a slang term for bounty hunter, and Bebop is the name of the main characters' ship. Also, for some reason, they capitalized the second "B" in Bebop. At least she's at a computer.
- A computer that appears to be seven feet tall.
- They wrote it as BeBop, with the second capital B, because that's the way it's written on the ship itself. Since the title only appears in all caps elsewhere, that's the official lower-case spelling. So Yeah...
The internet was swamped in the early 2000s with ads for porn featuring "Dragon Ball fucking Sailor Moon".
- One gossip magazine during the 2003 Finnish accusations of pedophilic content in the recently arrived Dragon Ball manga (the usual story and accuracy). It opened by calling the comic Dragon Balls and went from there.
  - The most hilarious research failure was how the Moral Guardians commented how the neighbouring country of Sweden is free of such vile products...when their most sold comic that year was none other than Dragon Ball.
- TV Guide years ago that reported on the popularity of the anime at the time. While not negative in tone, the writer openly admits his bafflement, titling the article "Fusion Confusion" and claiming "It's harder to understand than computer schematics." He also credits Goku with protecting us from "the ferocious Saiyan", a statement that's not too wrong, per se. He then adds that he only understands as much from reading some fan sites. He lists Goku's sons as "Gohan and Gotan", and closes by saying that he watches the show for its "fantastic" animation. Well, there's far worse media coverage examples in this list, but this one is amusing as well as heartwarming in a "He's trying his best" sort of way. It also demonstrates the principle of the Generational Gap, where "grown-ups" just can't get "kid's stuff", something we see time and again in this list.
- A French article about manga had a picture of Krillin/Kuririn from Dragon Ball Z with a legend along the lines of "When little Trunks goes mad, there's going to be hell to pay!".
A newspaper article on Yu-Gi-Oh confusingly stated that Joey had made the common mistake of using powerful cards. This was the only information on the character. In actuality, the problem was that Joey used powerful monsters and nothing to support them.
- A review for The Movie said it was 11 years old. The 11-year-old movie never got to America, and this one (Pyramid of Light) is completely different.
In late 2007, several kids were suspended from school for bringing Death Notes to school with them. Many of the news organizations didn't even seem to realize there was a manga, reporting the Notes as hit lists, portraying the children as either disturbed and possibly planning soon-to-be-real murders, or as kids who took a joke too far by keeping Death Journals. (To be fair, if those kids were writing down the names of people they dislike as if they were putting it in a Death Note, it's still a little creepy.)
In March of 2008, a ten-year-old boy died from being buried alive in his sandbox. The news claimed this happened by him and his friends imitating "Nurutu", which the news described as a television show where samurai use sand as a tool and to kill each other. It's also been called "Nurutu Sand Ninjas". This story in particular has several major mistakes.
1. Mispronouncing "Nerutu", despite featuring clips with the correct pronunciation "Nah-Ru-Toe"
2. Despite avoiding calling it "Sand Ninjas", the reporter says that it is ABOUT Sand Ninjas.
3. Suggesting Gaara buries himself in sand, when showing him doing his Armor of Sand Jutsu. The only legitimate "sand burial" techniques are used against enemies.
4. Relying on You Tube clips to inform themselves about the show.
- Not to mention that "sand ninja" sounds uncomfortably like an ethnic slur.
An infamous article by The Edmonton Journal from Canada◊ features gems such as "Hentae" and that all hentai is essentially lolicon-BDSM-rape.
- Just for the hell of it, let's count the ways they stuffed up; A) Anime = Animation Manga = Comics (You'd think they'd at LEAST get it right when the word comes from English) B) Are you CERTAIN Sailor Moon was "Made for Children"? C) someone already said it's "Henti" not "Hentae" D) "Black eye" or made Awesome? I mean, in japan, everyone reads comics. D) If you think "bound and raped" is all Henti is about you have a REALLY limited imagination. E) "Doesn't believe it's a new trend" I coulda told you that in the 90s!
TV Guide once described Tenchi Muyo in Love as "Police partners hunt an escaped convict," which is technically accurate, but didn't even bother mentioning that they're Space Police, or that there's time travel, alien princes, or any other elements that are fundamental to the plot.
TV program guides seem to suffer from this a lot. While describing Rurouni Kenshin (which was being aired on Animax), they said Kaoru was a guy, indirectly calling Kenshin gay, and mixing her up with the other Kaoru that was airing in the same channel.
An interesting example here. If the link is broken (or you don't speak Swedish at all), it talks about the American television series Yu-Gi-Oh GX, in which Yugi's grandfather is kidnapped by Pegausus...
There has been an advertisement appearing on this very site, saying, "What female Naruto are you?◊" On top of that, it and the "What 'Avatar' Character Are You" ad were clearly drawn by someone who watched one episode of the show. After suffering severe head trauma. (Thankfully, they've been using images from the shows lately.)
A September 11th, 2008 MSNBC report on "sexy anime going mainstream". It said "Lolicom" is a combination of "Lolita" and "comic". And that "Otaku" is a word meaning "Techno-geek". And then there was this quote:
"But sexually-suggestive and explicit anime like "Gurren Lagann" and ''Legend Of The Overfiend..."
- Not to mention that one of the girls' "maid costumes" in the supplied photograph is actually a cosplay of Nagisa.
A review of the Digimon apparently never actually saw the movie, as she claimed that "the original Digidestined children are abducted by Diaboromon, and a new group of kids must save them". The same malicious lie was perpetrated by the back of the VHS. Diaboromon never abducted anyone. He just stalked a twelve-year old boy and then tried to blow up the world. Then, when the new kids get involved, it isn't even to deal with Diaboromon. It's to deal with Antylamon/Cherubimon.
- Not to mention the fact that Antylamon/Cherubimon only abducted anyone in the Japanese version, that particular plot was completely cut out of the American version. Which may make this a case of someone doing too much research?
Read the Netflix summary for either Yu Yu Hakusho movie. If you don't have Netflix, it's pretty much what you'd expect.
- Netflix is pretty bad about this in general, especially when it comes to animated films and programs. Guess what show, popular amoung tropers, this description came from:
"The Teen Titans are a motley crew of five teenagers, each one gifted with a superpower to put to good use. Robin the Boy Wonder is the default leader of the troupe, which roams the planet to protect it from those who aim to harm it and its citizens. But on their days off, they still have to deal with the typical problems that plague teenagers, such as making good grades and forming friendships at school!"
- Really funny, since there was never a single episode that showed the characters outside of their secret identities or at school. The last episode does show Terra restarting her life by going to school and making friends, but she's not on the team anymore...
- Not to mention that they all have superpowers but Robin who is just a well trained human.
- Or that they almost never leave that one bloody city that you start to think of as something the Justice League assigned them as a sandbox. After Bruce put up the funding for that techy tower they keep trashing....
Even magazines dedicated to anime itself wind up making these mistakes:
- Protoculture Addicts is particularly guilty of this. When reporting on Gundam Wing, PA decided to completely ignore most "r" and "l" translation conventions and generally go with "it's always l," giving us characters like "Heelo Yuy" and "Lelena Peacelaft."
- The early issues of Anime Insider. Particularly horrible errors include listing the character of Lacus Clyne from Gundam Seed as "Fllay Allster" (another character from the same show, who doesn't even share the same hair color). Their entire article on G-Gundam reached levels of CBAHC that must be seen to be believed. Things such as listing Schwartz Bruder as Domon's Master and the previous King of Hearts (Master Asia is both) and giving the Master Gundam the profile of the Dark/Devil Gundam.
  - One of the first AI issues captioned a picture of Ashitaka from Princess Mononoke by identifying him as "Mononoke".
  - Anime Insider's sister magazine Wizard once ran a review of The Slayers saying Lina Inverse travelled with the sorceress Naga *and* 'a girl named Gourry'.
  - I'm pretty sure that there was an AI issue with an article about the (thankfully aborted) live action Evangelion adaptation that said Shinji was a girl.
An article on the Oregon Daily Emerald criticizing anime for destroying American society says that Pokémon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh (which at first is spelled "Yugio", but after that, "sorry, Yu-Gi-Oh!") all began life as trading card games. In reality, while they all have had card games, none of them started out as that. Pokémon began life as a Nintendo game created by Game Freak (and the card game came to the U.S. just a few months after the video game was released there), Digimon was originally a virtual pet (hence "Digimon", or Digital Monsters), and Yu-Gi-Oh! started out as a manga written by Kazuki Takahashi.
- Well, what do you know they should've replaced all three of those things with a certain Danish card game.
  - Which started life as a clone of Crazy Bones.
While reviewing a Ranma 1/2 fighting game for the PC Engine, GamePro Magazine must have thought Ranma to be some sort of transforming superhero, having summarized the title character's background thus:
"[Ranma] fell into a well where a great female warrior had drowned. Now, when he gets wet, he gets wild! Bad guys learn not to spit when Ranma's around."
In Mexico, in the year 2000 an "investigative program" called "El Ojo del Huracán" (transmitted over TV Azteca) released once a documentary about Satanism, where it blamed the perversion of youth to Pokémon, and presented a lot of facts which made NO DAMN SENSE WHATSOEVER, like for example, Pikachu spelled backwards meant "More powerful than God" in Hebrew, Gyarados meant "Great Orgy", and Alakazam was a representation of Satan because its head formed five points; and also, mentioning the wrong names to several Pokémon. The sad part, a lot of people actually believed it and it began a nation-wide witch hunt against everything that was about Pokémon.
- Made much worse because the whole "investigative report" was made only to destroy the success that Pokémon was enjoying on a rivaling channel, and taking in account TV Azteca just had bought the rights for several Disney cartoons...
A caption on this names the green-haired girl from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni on the picture "Rena", who is actually a different girl with orange hair; the girl in the picture is Mion. Also, she doesn't have a split personality; you could say that it's slightly implied at first, but those implications were dashed against the rocks in the arc before the DVD being advertised.
The blurb before each episode of the Swedish dub of Sailor Moon went "Now it's time for the adventures of the girl Sailor Moon and her magical cat Luna!" While technically right, it still comes off like Luna is the most special thing about the show.
- Speaking of Sailor Moon, this commercial seems to get everything as wrong as it possibly can. For starters, Usagi is suddenly Victoria...
  - There is an excuse for that, as it was an early promo tape made before the show even started, so they had very little infomation to give their marketing department.
Naruto Forever: The Unofficial Guide repeatedly refers to Hinata Hyuga as "Hina" (possibly the result of her abbreviation in pairings like PortmanteauCoupleNames like "NaruHina"), only getting it correct in the character index, and even refer to "Hina" as him.
Recently, I've been seeing some ads on this site for a Bleach quiz that says "Can you roll with Rukia and the Soul Reapers?" Sure they got a name right, but shouldn't she be in the front of the ad instead of Ichigo? (Not to mention she's hardly visible in the given her height.) And while we're at it, why are Uryu, Chad, and Orihime there, if they're not Shinigami? They should have at least thrown in Renji, Kenpachi, etc. Even more bothersome, they're shown in their school outfits (except Ichigo).
An article in a Swedish newspaper about a comics/art workshop or somesuch being hosted at a local library featured a most amusing comment about how "Jolina Homlström, [class] 8E has chosen to draw the motives the way the Japanese Asian comic artist Manga does them."
Netflix did this with the third Death Note movie "L: Change The World" summary. They call L's sidekick Maki (a little girl) a "fledgling scientist".
The Fullmetal Alchemist offical guide to the first anime constantly refers to Envy as a 'she', even going so far as to call "her" Hohenheim's daughter.
- It's a common mistake.
Back when Sailor Moon was still airing in Russia, a local newspaper containing TV program guides would occasionally write something about it in the kids' section. This sometimes resulted in the Sailor Moon-themed mini-articles mixing up the timeline (i.e. calling the Crystal Tokyo the capital of the destroyed Moon Kingdom) and/or mixing up the continuity (calling Anime!ChibiChibi Sailor Cosmos). One would think they could've at least visited one of the local fan websites or ask somebody familiar with the show...

Close Anime

A British newspaper once featured a picture of Captain America, captioned as Captain Planet, apparently failing to spot the colossal A on his helmet and American flag shield.
An Australian newspaper condemned the depiction of women in comic books. They cited one of the earliest examples of poor treatment being Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen Stacy. So far, correct. Then they wrote about her terrible demise by being killed and stuffed in Spider-Man's fridge.
- And somewhere, Kyle Rayner, Alexandra DeWitt, Peter Parker, Mary-Jane Parker, and Gwen Stacy all threw up their hands and said "Wait, what?" So not only did they manage to confuse the fate of a woman that was dating a different character entirely, they managed to somehow confuse the company's universe they're working in? Wow, man.
  - When she was killed by the most awesome revocation of comic book physics ever, too...
The media brouhaha surrounding the fact that in-real-life beleaguered Prime Minster Gordon Brown appeared in the Marvel Comic Captain Britain and MI:13 had several paper's calling him SuperGordon and/or saying he "leads a counterattack" on the invading Skrulls, making him sound like Prime Minster Action. In the comic itself, he shows competence and resolve, but doesn't do much; he does give commands, but seems to be a little bit out of the loop when it comes to the world of magic and superheroics.
- Special Fail in the Daily Mail article linked to above- they refer to "an unseen character called Alistaire" yet the pictures they include alongside the article clearly depict the character in question!
The comic strip Zits did a week of strips parodying Love Is titled "Love Isn't", starring Jeremy and Sara as everyone's favorite married naked 8-year-olds. At least one newspaper editor not only completely missed the parody aspect but ID'ed the naked couple as Jeremey's parents.

Close Comic Books

One (Christian ultra-extremist) review of Disney's Dinosaur said that it was the (satanic) story of Aladar in his quest to have sex with as many dinosaurs as possible, of both genders. If that alone wasn't bad enough, it goes on to rant about how the dinosaurs are having sex outside of a Christian marriage (1. How would dinosaurs have a Christian marriage, 2. The only "sex" is implied - and that by the presence of baby dinosaurs. No more.), and bashing the film for its inaccuracy by not depicting humans in the story. If anyone could find the link to this review, I'd much appreciate it, as I seem to have lost it.
In a ridiculously inaccurate negative review for X2: X-Men United by Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post it quickly became clear that he did not see the movie. At one point, he said that Rogue had the power to reverse time, even going so far as to call her "the Mistress of Rewind." The same review also repeatedly referred to "Dr. Jane Gray" (better known as Jean Grey, to the rest of us).
- The Rogue thing may be explained by misinterpreting the one time in the movie she uses her power, when she takes Pyro's power at Bobby's house to put out the fires he started. It's still a critical research failure though.
- Another review, this one appearing in the New Times Los Angeles, blasted the first X-Men movie for departing from the comic's signature yellow-and-blue costumes, and for giving Magneto, the "master of all evil", a sympathetic Holocaust-survivor backstory. Which shows that he did actually read the comic... in the '60s, and not once since.
- A review of X2 in the Irish Times complained that a character who had been killed in the first film was somehow alive in the second... except he wasn't: Mystique the shapeshifter had taken his place. This was not only pointed out explicitly in the first film (for those viewers too sleepy to notice the characteristic flash of yellow eyes) but was a pivotal plot point in the second, which makes you wonder if the reviewer actually bothered to watch the film.
  - Mad Magazine makes the same mistake in its spoof of X-2. There are times when it deliberately ignores or changes what happens in a movie for the sake of humor (the endings are usually substantially different from the film — and often completely different), but this seemed like an oversight on their part.
- A negative review of the first movie in People Magazine, among other things, said, "Since when do superheroes have such traumatic backstories?" Oh, since about 1939?
- Or, if you prefer, since about 2500BC — Hercules didn't exactly grow up in a happy and stable home.
A talking head on CNBC reported that the just released Pirates Of The Caribbean 2 movie had broken the opening box office record held by the movie "Aquaman". However, Aquaman was a fictional movie within the universe of Entourage, and has never actually been made, to say nothing of breaking any box office records.
- On the Entourage note, a music news soundbite on a local radio station talking about how Vincent Chase, star of Aquaman, had been chosen to play Joey Ramone in a Ramones biopic. He still doesn't know whether they were kidding or not.
One article about the fifth Harry Potter movie showed a picture of Harry and Cho about to kiss, but the caption read that he was puckering up for Hermione Granger. The canon shippers were not amused.
- An amazing number of film critics, including Roger Ebert, described the ending of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as involving a duel with a dragon, whereas the creature Harry fought was actually a basilisk. This may be rather nitpicky, but the fact that the creature was a snake was a bit of a plot point.
- Robert Pattinson appeared properly in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but wasn't in the next film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, unless you count a two-second Flashback. Of course, reporters covering Twilight say he was in two Potter films (after all, that's how it shows up on IMDb) or even mention Phoenix exclusively, since it was more recent.
- When reviewing Phoenix on At The Movie, Richard Roeper bizarrely (and hilariously) pronounced "Voldemort" as "Voltemort".
- Hilarity Ensues when the cast and crew are interviewed by people who know little or nothing about the series. A particular standout is Emma Watson's 2009 appearance on The Late Show in which, among other things, David Letterman seemed to be under the impression that the movies were shot in New Zealand, apparently confusing them with Lord Of The Rings. However, Martha Stewart topped that. In a 2005 episode of her show, she asked Daniel Radcliffe in total seriousness if he had moved in with JK Rowling.
The local Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St.Paul, MN) paper's movie review of the 2007 Transformers movie repeatedly referred to the Autobots' human buddy as "Spike". Spike was the equivalent human in the original comic and cartoon.
- Oddly, the above may be a case of "Doing too much research", as the writer of the Twin Cities article apparently knows more about Transformers canon than Michael Bay.
- It's got nothing to do with him knowing more than Michael Bay. Considering the first thing Bay did when he came on for the movie was binge on the comics and TV series, he knew full well that the character was named Spike. He just kept it as Sam because you can't take a guy named "Spike" seriously.
  - Are you sure about that?.
  - The singing Voldemort in 'A Very Potter Musical' reminds the watcher irresistably of the above-referenced vampire name of William. So Yeah.
A review for the Lord Of The Rings films decried the fact that Arwen gets such a small role (whereas in the books, she has all of one line, near the end of Return of the King), and another which assumed that Eowyn's killing of the Witch-king was an expansion of her role in the books (whereas there is very little difference apart from her lines).
- Was the complaint about Arwen's role compared to the books or in general (in the latter case, it would be more justified to complain about a major character's lover getting so little exposure)?
  - Frankly, they played up that my-distant-ancestor-was-your-father's-brother-but-otherwise-we're-two-utterly-sundered-races situation more than it needed. Her coming to the rescue after the wraith-blade thing was pure affirmative action, but awesome. (There was a sword!) Where is the problem here?
- At least one review of the Lord Of The Rings movies put forth the opinion that the reason the filmmakers put so much painstaking effort into Gollum's portrayal was simply because CGI is a new toy and they wanted to show it off as much as possible.
- The Tolkien Sarcasm Page is a deliberately erroneous, tongue-in-cheek summary of Lord Of The Rings. A writer for the London Sunday Times took it seriously and used it in preparation for an interview with Cate Blanchett.
- A newspaper synopsis of The Lord of the Rings read "Frodo and friends go on a quest to find a magic ring." Some quest that would have been, given that one of the first things that happens in the story is Frodo getting the ring from Bilbo.
A review of Chasing Amy by Roger Ebert switched the male Heterosexual Life Partners' personalities and quotes (but not roles in the movie) around, rendering poor Ebert confused and disappointed.
- He also mixed up the characters of Brodie and Banky in his review of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. However, as they are both played by Jason Lee, have similar names, appeared as snarky sidekicks in previous Kevin Smith films, and have a comparatively minor role in this one, it is probably understandable.
During the long, long summer of '77, one TV-news reporter referred to Chewbacca as "Choobie", and another referred to the Millennium Falcon as "Darth Vader's ship".
- This sort of thing still happens in journalism. People, especially on television, love to call the main villain "Dark Vader", and use the title in the singular, as in, "Here are a group of Star War fans." This is spoofed on Arrested Development, wherein Lucille Bluth tells her adopted Korean son, "Here's some money. Go see a Star War."
  - Incidentally, Darth Vader is officially known as Dark Vador in French-language versions.
- When Star Wars Episode I hit the cinemas, an Austrian magazine attempted to introduce uninitiated readers to the film's universe. There was mention of the fan outcry about the small green Jedi Master named Ewok being too cute, and confused the Neimodian Trade Federation mooks with Sith Lords.
An NPR reporter once talked about the "Lord of the Narnia" series, apparently mixing two franchises.
The Boston Globe reviewer of Donnie Darko seems to have taken a bathroom break during half of the film and walked out fifteen minutes before the ending. No other explanation would suffice. However, he admits to not paying attention to the part where Frank explains to Donnie that he (Frank) comes from outer space. Because the reviewer seemed sure that scene appeared in the movie.
Colbert struck again when commenting on the story of a British Airways passenger who was booted from his flight because his Transformers t-shirt was considered "a terrorist threat" (because the robot was armed). Colbert IDed the character as Megatron, and spent the entire segment espousing the threat a robot that turns into a gun poses (complete with original cartoon footage). The Transformer in question was the movie version of Optimus Prime. This may be a case of Did Not Do ALL The Research, since the BA official in question is quoted as calling it "Megatron", though it may also have been Rule Of Funny — a gunbot is easier to incite fake terrorist panic over than a truckbot.
The whole kerfuffle that erupted over the film The Last Temptation of Christ was because people were informed about scenes of Jesus settling down, getting married, and having sex. What they weren't informed about was that said scenes were a hallucination caused by the Devil in order to try and convince Jesus not to fulfill his destiny, walk away and have a normal life, a temptation Jesus rejected. You know, as sort of described in the name of the film. Nobody listened, however, and due to staunchly Catholic Media Watchdogs, the film wasn't premiered in Mexico until 2005!
A Chilean negative review of the Rocky And Bullwinkle movie called Rocky (who is a flying squirrel) "a beaver". Rocko feels his pain.
This article from EW.com was written by someone who, commenting on the upcoming Prince Of Persia movie, was apparently completely unaware that the series had new installments in the last 20 years. As many of the commentators on the page point out, 30 seconds on Google would have cleared things up.
In the UK series of Gladiators, a character refers to Spartan saying 'he doesn't have 299 friends to back him up now!'. About a second later, the commentator says '300 Greeks fought for Rome, but there's only one Spartan!'. Walls hurt.
For a time, Hulu described the scene from Back To The Future Part II where Doc whisks Marty and Jennifer off to 2015 as "Doc surprises Marty and Lorraine with an urgent request to come into the future to save their kids." Marty and Lorraine's kids? Ick!
A certain critic watches all movies at double-speed, directly leading to her insistence that, in The 13th Warrior, the Viking language was learned in "one magical night".
One critic bashed Disney's Pocahontas for having a male lead named John Smith, "a made-up name if I ever heard one." John Smith was a real person, and the movie was (very loosely) based on his writings.
- He claimed the last-minute princess rescue thing happened in Persia first, too.
The Quentin Tarantino release of Hard Core Logo describes the movie as "A hilarious rockumentary in the laugh-packed tradition of This is Spinal Tap. . . As magnetic lead singer Joe Dick holds the whole tour together through sheer force of will, all the tensions and pitfalls of the rock nd roll lifestyle come bursting hilariously to the surface! Featuring a memorable appearance by punk rock legend Joey Ramone. . . settle in and enjoy this offbeat comedy as it REALLY cranks up the laughs!" HCL has its funny moments, but it is decidedly not a hilarious comedy. Joey Ramone is in it for maybe five minutes at the beginning, and is quickly forgotten.
This article from the New York Times wrongfully calls the film Godzilla VS Biollante "Godzilla VS Bioranch". It's made even more annoying by the fact that the article even has a poster from the film that shows the actual title of the film.
- This is probably due to a mis-transliteration. The syllables that make up the monster's Japanese name are pronounced "Biorante".
David Edelstein, reviewing the Bewitched movie in Slate: "Using R.E.M.'s impassioned 'Everybody Hurts' — written by Michael Stipe after the suicide of Kurt Cobain — to underscore shots of Kidman and Ferrell feeling blue about their inability to pair off is an aesthetic crime." Take Th... uh, wait a minute, that song was recorded in 1992, while Cobain died in 1994. To his credit, Edelstein quickly issued a (very snotty) retraction. "I don't like having to change something after it's published." Dude, then don't make a mistake on an easily checkable fact.
- Not to mention that that's not even the right song. The song about Kurt Cobain was "Let Me In", a less well-known song off the album Monster. When Cobain died, Stipe had already been mourning friend River Phoenix. He had been reluctant to write about grief and retread the ground of previous album Automatic for the People. Cobain's death convinced him to get his feelings out. The song is unmistakable because it's such a departure from the rest of the album. Also unmistakable is Everybody Hurts, a comfort anthem with suicidal teenagers in mind. It's intentionally simple, as personal crises may not be the best time for complicated literary interpretation. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of R.E.M.'s entire body of work. Confusing these two songs is no small error from a fan's point of view.
One particularly scathing movie review for Silent Hill derided the film for being based on a video game series, but praised the movie's composer for at least writing a unique cinematic score instead of relying on the video game's "beeps and whistles". The music in the movie, of course, was taken directly from the games.
- Another negative review noted that the monsters look like they're from some video game...
  - Coming at this from another angle, a newspaper blurb on the game Silent Hill: Homecoming described it as being based on the movie.
  - It was. Watch the movie, then play the game. It's not a stretch in the least to call Homecoming "Silent Hill: The Movie: The Game".
  - Didn't Yahtzee trash it for being too close to The Movie instead of the earlier games?
- "I do have one question, however, who plays a video game like this? And what the heck is the object of the game."
Iron Man, starring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony◊ Spark. I would pay good money to see a Tony cameo in Girl Genius.
A History's Mysteries episode on zombies has somebody say that the North American image of zombies was something like "Freddy from Friday the 13th..." Freddy's in A Nightmare On Elm Street. Jason Voorhees is in Friday the 13th. At least they could both be considered zombies, depending on who you ask.
A Mexican movie magazine did a report about San Diego Comic-Con, which, apart from treating the comic geeks attending it with various levels of contempt got a picture of two girls cosplaying with this caption "80's fever: Mario Bros princess, is still in fashion", the movie the girls in the picture were actually cosplaying... Enchanted. Which at the time had not even been out of theatres a year. Have I already mentioned this is a magazine about movies?
An article on a magazine about Quantum Of Solace stated that James Bond allied with the exiled General Medrano from Chile to destroy the Quantum Organization. Medrano is actually a Complete Monster and part of Quantum's plan (he's to be installed as dictator). Oh, and it's Bolivia, not Chile.
Australian newspaper The Age had a still from the movie Watchmen and credited it as being from the upcoming movie The Spirit.
Box summaries of movies are great for this (see also the Anime examples above). From the back of the DVD of A Christmas Story: "(Ralphie) also endures all kinds of childhood calamaties from snowsuit paralysis to the yellow-eyed Scotty Farkus affair to the dreaded tongue-on-a-frozen-flagpole gambit." Ralphie's brother had the snowsuit paralysis (which was never called as such,) his friend Flick did the flagpole (which was not a gambit,) and the yellow-eyed bully was actually named Scut Farkus.
There's been an assumption on the part of some of the reviewing public that Coraline is a Tim Burton film, due to both the animation style and the fact that the trailers hype it as being by "the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas". The director, for both films, is in fact Henry Selick, and Burton has nothing to do with Coraline. Neil Gaiman, author of the original book, has expressed his annoyance with this, and it's been mocked in webcomics.
- Of course, the ads are probably doing this on purpose.
  - Sure, they purposely namedropped Selick each time they said it just to get you to think it was a Tim Burton movie.
- Another blame for this is the In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It for Nightmare. (In other words, its full title is Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Mind you, Burton was only responsible for the concept of that movie as he was busy directing Batman Returns at the same time.)
Marcus Berkmann in the Daily Telegraph reviewed Batman And Robin without, apparently, bothering to see the movie, as he confidently informed readers that Mr. Freeze was motivated to avenge the death of his wife, whereas in the movie the fact that his wife is very much alive (albeit, y'know, frozen) at the beginning and end of the film is an important plot point.
- This could have been bad phrasing, at it's technically true — what motivates Freeze heading into the climax is a mistaken belief that Batman unfroze and in the process killed his wife.
Sam Wollaston, TV critic for The Guardian, reviewed a TV documentary titled The Human Spider, about a guy who climbed a big building dressed as, obviously, Spider-Man. His review, however, referred to the guy as being dressed as Batman. Because those costumes look so much alike...
The Metro even went so far as to call the main character of The Matrix Reloaded Nero and claim the film was about his adventures in Another Dimension.
- Another reviewer somehow confused the three main female characters in "Reloaded", stating that "Hero Neo must also enlist the aid of a virtual beauty named after Hades' wife, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, who captains a ship of her own." (Now we know that it's possible to be too high while watching this trilogy.)
An Indiana Daily Student review of Last Man Standing noted it was a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo but said, "It may seem strange to remake a Kurosawa film as a Western." Not that strange. Oh, and speaking of ''Yojimbo''? So... Yeah.
- Let's not forget that Yojimbo itself was already sort of a remake of Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett.
A review of Dragonball: Evolution opened with the following informed lines.
Another Japanese manga bites the dust with its cinematic adaptation: in this case, the "Dragonball Evolution" series.
A "parent's review" (we're already in Wall Banger territory, but bear with it for now) of the Watchmen movie adaptation, instead of reviewing the actual film, listed every single instance of violence or sexual content without mentioning anything else, then concluded that the ultimate message of the story was that "humankind is inherently savage". What? Even more hilarious, another blurb stated the movie's premise as: "After the death of one of his colleagues, the masked vigilante Rorschach sets out on a mission to kill all superheroes."
Kroger, an American grocery store, was once running a promotion for kids with the prize being a meeting with Corbin Bleau of High School Musical. The promotion referred to Corbin as a female.
A review of Fanboys by Robert Wilonsky shows that he neglected to watch the full film. At this point in time to save from possible spoilers here is the link to the review for those of you who have seen the movie [1]
The very worst example I've ever seen first hand involved Spy Kids 2. The review said that Carmen and Juni have to fight the evil Romero, and team up with a new duo of Spy Kids to aid them in their battle... Which seemed to reverse the newcomer's roles; since Romero was a good guy (made clear from his first appearance) and the Cortez siblings had to race against, and battle, Gary and Gerti. It also completely ignored Donnagon's blatant corruption and the dangers of the Transmooker device. It was like they didn't even bother to watch the film at all.
A review for the GI Joe movie states "Formerly a Real American Hero, G.I.Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group)..." Funny... G.I.Joe has almost always referred to a group (the almost is there is because there was actually a namesake) and not a single person, even before the '80s (when they were first called Real American Heroes).
- Going back a little father: I don't know if I'd call the original G.I. Joe a "group." He basically started out as Barbie for boys and had no backstory of any kind.
A book about the Academy Awards completely screws up the plot of Unforgiven: "After the death of his wife, ex-outlaw (Clint Eastwood) returns to violence to punish corrupt sheriff (Gene Hackman) with the support of two companions (Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris)". He leaves retirement for bounty, offered by a prostitute (who lives in said sheriff's city) on the guys who slashed her face. The second companion is Jaimz Woolvett, and Richard Harris doesn't even share a scene with Eastwood!
A review of Return to Oz criticized the movie for having "unimaginative" characters, such as a man with the head of a pumpkin and a yellow hen. Problem was, those characters — Jack Pumpkinhead and Billina — are straight out of L. Frank Baum's The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, which Return to Oz was based on.
P.M. (a popular science magazine) ran a small article about nanotech "liquid metal", citing the Terminator as example of the principle. I can't recall if they at least cited the second movie, but the still they used for illustration certainly showed Robocop instead.
A commercial for the new movie "Gamer" staring 300 star Gerard Butler, delivered the line (from a deep-voiced Don LaFontaine-sounding man), "The last time Gerard Butler kicked this much ass was 300 years ago." 300 takes place in 480 BCE, making the ad roughly 2200 years off.
- Could be a bad read. "The last time Gerard Butler kicked this much ass was 300, years ago" makes sense, if awkwardly-phrased.
And here's a kicker: Ted Baher's Movie Guide did its review of the 2007 TMNT film shortly after its release, and did an utterly atrocious job explaining the film's content factually. For starters:
- Leonardo and Raphael's fight midway through the movie is described as a battle between Leo and Michaelangelo — at the film's beginning!
- There can only be a bad explanation for Casey crashing at April's place so often. How could the two of them possibly be chaste???
- "Stories went nowhere..." In other words, nobody at Movie Guide had ever heard of the 2003 animated series? Or the original comics?
  - The intro was a minimal effort to give newcomers an insight into the film's world, just in the bleak chance that someone going to see it had never been exposed to previous Turtles-related material.
- The thing with those stars aligning to unleash a beam of energy on Earth that unlocks monsters from another world is merely modification of a common plot device. A similar theme was used in the first Fantastic Four movie, with the cosmic beam storm. But somehow, this is an evil tactic by Satan to get us addicted to — no joke — looking for answers in -'astrology''! Never mind that not one single constellation in the Zodiac (Eastern or Western) was even once mentioned on screen.
- "Calm yourself" is not simple advice, according to Baher. It's an "evil and false Buddhist doctrine." What???
- Contrary to Baher's assessment of "a confused view," the movie actually has no problem with vigilantism per se. What it does have a problem with is Punisher-style vigilantism. The Foot Clan and monsters are what they are and are deemed as "worthy to die." Yet, ordinary criminals are not to be killed. They are to only be subdued and left for the police. That is the code of battle honor the Turtles fight with, and is very similar to Batman's.
  - The problem Leonardo has with the "Night Watcher" is because the news has led him to believe that this vigilante actually kills the criminals, making this an in-universe example of Cowboy Bebop At His Computer. Those who know the backstory will know that the Turtles once believed this about Casey, before befriending him. They know of Splinter's code of honor, similar in some ways to Bushido, and they don't trust vigilantes who are not trained in any known code of honor. Not that this matters to MovieGuide, which believes that "bushido" is just a buzzword for "a lie from Satan designed to drag you to Hell."
- The movie goes to great lengths to explain that without a strong family dynamic, one may never feel at home anywhere, even if they do get everything they originally thought they wanted. Since when does this Aesop constitute a "Romantic Pagan" view?
Ted Baher's review of Watchmen is littered with this sort of thing: by far the most hilarious is the lament that Rorschach is seen as a psychopath because he "believes in good and evil" and "truth and justice." Really? I'd have thought hurling a fake supervillain down an elevator shaft would have been more convincing evidence. Oh, and the review ends with a billious rant on how the film "strongly affirms humanist, socialist, anti-American values promoting a socialist utopia where liberty, justice and goodness are destroyed for the sake of a totalitarian peace."
This quote from The Dallas Morning News' review on G-Force:
- -> "Gee whiz, G-Force, are you really from the same studio that brought us Up?"
- Forehead, meet wall.

Close Film

Some paperback editions of Robert A Heinlein's Time Enough For Love indicate that Lazarus Long goes back in time to become his own ancestor. While he does sleep with his mother, this occurs after his birth, when he is a young child. A bit incestuous, true, but not paradoxical.
- The synopsis writer was probably thinking of a different Heinlein story, "All Ye Zombies," in which the protagonist not only becomes on of his/her ancestors, s/he becomes all of them.
The book Futurespeak: A Fan's Guide to the Language of SF contains numerous examples where the author Did Not Do The Research. One of the most notable (if only for SF critic John Clute's alleged claim it had "more mistakes than words") defines "Slan" as superhumans from a series beginning with Galactic Lensman, a 1925 novel by A.E. Van Vogt. (There was never a book called Galactic Lensman; the Lensman series started in 1937, with Galactic Patrol; the Slans aren't even from the Lensman series; van Vogt's name has a lowercase "v" on the "van"; van Vogt didn't write the Lensman series, E.E. "Doc" Smith did; the book in which van Vogt created the Slans was called Slan, and was published in 1948; and the entry is phrased as though "Slan" were the plural, which it isn't).
- A book erroneously titled The Anime Encyclopedia not only fell under this trope, they leaped under its wheels like crazed Kali worshippers beneath a juggernaut.
A popular history book described Conan The Barbarian as being the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. Um...no, although Tolkien once mentioned he 'rather liked' the Conan stories.
- The Writer's Almanac daily email celebrated J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday in 2006 with a lengthy and loving tribute ... in which they said that The Lord Of The Rings was "the story of Bilbo Baggins, a lowly hobbit who sets out on a quest to destroy a magic ring." As one commenter on Miss Snark put it, "For Bilbo, it was a short quest." (In fact, Tolkien at one point considered making Bilbo the protagonist of The Lord Of The Rings, but it would have contradicted too strongly the ending of The Hobbit, which said that Bilbo lived Happily Ever After.)
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman were interviewed for the book Good Omens by a New York radio presenter who hadn't quite figured out that the book was fictional.
- Out of curiosity, was the presenter in any way concerned about the fact that the world was going to end in less than a week and that the Anti-Christ was missing?
  - "It's less than one week to the Apocalypse. Do you know where your anti-Christ is?"
  - The interviewer hadn't read the book, and was (if I have it straight) just given some cards with notes on them by an assistant. My impression is that the interviewer thought that Gaiman and Pratchett were some sort of wackos who thought the world was going to end, instead of fiction writers. I would love to either hear that interview or find a transcript of it.
The Metro, when doing a piece on a village populated mostly by fans of Terry Pratchett who had gotten their road renamed to Peach Pie Street and Treacle Mine Road, offered a "comprehensive guide to the diskworld". Yes, with a "k". It then went on to compare Ankh-Morpork to London, listing the disc's newspaper as "The Truth Newspaper". Because that was the title of the book in which the Ankh-Morpork Times was introduced, and somebody couldn't even be bothered to read the freaking blurb.
To continue with Terry Pratchett, several news people have reported on the similarity between the Discworld series and the Harry Potter series based on the presence of a wizarding school (Unseen University, which is clearly a college parody and not a magical boarding school like Hogwarts) and the presence of the Christmas-like holiday Hogswatch, which sounds a bit like Hogwarts. Pratchett's responses to these claims have been polite, well-thought out versions of "What? No."
- This response is about the same for claims that he is jealous of Rowling's fame and gobs of money. This is a bit like trying to put down Richard Feynman by saying he wasn't as brilliant as Einstein.
  - This particular brainfart actually predates Harry Potter. As sir Terry himself put it at the time, "I don't think I've ever been critical of the money Douglas Adams makes, especially since, as has been tactfully pointed out, I myself have had to change banks having filled the first one up."
- He's also been accused of ripping off Harry Potter because Ponder Stibbons looks like him in illustrations (he was first illustrated in the Discworld Portfolio, which was released in 1996). This brought this response from Terry:
  "Ponder Stibbons was indeed first drawn in 1996. I, of course, used a time machine to 'get the idea' of Unseen University from Hogwarts; I don't know what Paul used in this case. Obviously he must have used something."
  - There is also the fact that The Colour of Magic was written about a decade before the first Harry Potter book was released.
  - Also, Hogwarts: 1997. Hogfather: 1996.
Similarly, Diane Duane's Young Wizards series has been accused of ripping off Harry Potter by people who don't realize that Diane was writing them twenty years before JK Rowling first put pen to paper.
Speaking of Harry Potter: Many websites professing that Harry Potter teaches witchcraft have cited the line from the first book, "There is no good and evil; there is only power and those too weak to seek it," as "proof". This takes the line completely out of context, as it was said by the villain of the book. A Christian media-review site cites that line among the many reasons to avoid the films — not ignoring the fact that a villain said it, but saying it doesn't matter who said it.
- Other Christian alarmists have cited an interview where JK Rowling proclaims her allegiance to Satan as proof of the series' evil. The source of this damning testimony? The Onion.
  - Someone sent Reader's Digest an angry letter after they had JK Rowling on the cover. They then sent another one that complained about their first letter being truncated when published, in which they revealed their source for their outrage was The Onion. Reader's Digest did the print equivalent of patting them on the head and saying, "There, there..."
- Prior to the release of the first film, Warner Bros. produced several board games based on the series, including a trivia game written by people who clearly had only read the first book as well as just the title of the second one. Consequently, they apparently decided that the "Chamber of Secrets" referred to the chambers Harry, Ron and Hermione passed through in order to get the stone. Uh... no.
- A series of articles published by a major newspaper prior to the release of the fourth book announced "sensational changes" at Hogwarts, such as the arrival of the new potions professor, a certain Lucius Malfoy. I think I've read that fanfic.
- One website quotes Professor Snape's line from the first book, "I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death", and says it's an intentional example of "drug use, and drug glorification". The scene where Hermione figures out which bottles are poison and which will get them safely to their destination is a "drug message", we're told: "To reach your goals in life like Harry Potter, you need to know how to make drugs and take drugs in just the right way or else you are a 'dunderhead' and will never succeed."
  - Which, to be fair, isn't far off the mark. Because to even reach SIMILAR goals to Harry Potter, you'd have to take something to make you think you're full of magic.
- A Swiss teenage magazine published an article right before the release of DH, claiming that the next book will contain "the first Harry Potter sex scene ever". They also published a list of possible endings for the book, including "Dumbledore isn't dead, he hid in the lake after Snape killed him," (er... what about the body?) and "Ron turns evil and slips poison into Harry's pumpkin juice". After DH was actually released, they claimed that "Ginny gives Harry her virginity as a birthday gift." They also published a Draco/Harry manip and seemed to believe that Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Felton came out of the closet and were in a relationship.
  - [sigh] If only...
  - To be fair, it's pretty clear that Ginny is trying to give Harry her virginity, but Ron messes it all up.
- If you speak German, you can watch the (infamous?) gag dub coldmirror have a field day with this trope [2], [3]. Harry's owl Hermine indeed...
- Also for the Potter books, there's this pathetic excuse for a reader's guide. It's full of mistakes that even a ten-year-old would recognize, ranging from the spelling of Hagrid's name to the plot of the second and third books, which the author seems to think are the same.
- I recal reading an article which quoted a section of HBP, which gave us a description of the Half Blood Prince (which would have been rather amusing, had they actually done that). Instead, the description was of Scrimgeour, the new Minister of Magic. I subsequently spent 90% of the book waiting for the big reveal, only to find out it was Snape, instead.
Speaking of alarmists, take a shot any time you read something (even on this very website) to the equivalent of, "The Golden Compass is an evil book where two kids kill God!" Um... no. What happens is a bit more complicated than we could adequately get into here, but suffice to say it does not involve two under-ten-year-olds walking up to the Judeo-Christian God and knifing Him in the back or anything. Anyway, the scenes that inspired the controversy happen in the third book.
- Why would you believe them anyway? They think the book is called The Golden Compass.
  - Because The Golden Compass is the title of the North American release?
  - So what you're saying is, that the entire United States of America invoked this very trope?
  - Sorry, our bad.
  - To make it even worse, the titular "golden compass" isn't actually a compass at all. It's an alethiometer, a truth meter. You twist the three knobs to point the three hands at the symbols on the face to ask it a question, which it then answers by pointing at three other symbols. Also, how many compasses can only be operated by prepubescent children. Grrr...
  - Watch where you're pointing that Single Issue Wonk. The alethiometer can be operated by anyone. It can only be understood by those who have studied its symbology for many years, and by Lyra. Lyra is the exception, and the fact that a prepubescent child with absolutely no training can read the thing better than anyone else, including those WHOSE lives are devoted to its study, is something of a major plot point.
  - Also, the reason the American version has a different name is because "The Golden Compasses" was originally the name for the entire series. The American publisher got the two names mixed up and by the time it was discovered it was too late to change. Just imagine what the Moral Guardians would have said if the book and film were called "His Dark Materials".
  - 'Cause quotes from seventeenth century puritan poets are suddenly super-controversial?
- Doesn't change the fact that The Golden Compass is the first book in the series, and that God doesn't die until The Amber Spyglass.
The Ottawa Citizen: in its story about Askjeeves.com, it claimed that the website took its name from a butler in some P.G. Wodehouse books. Trivial Pursuit made the same mistake. Jeeves was not a butler. He was a valet. Perhaps they were thinking of Beach.
- This seems Over The Top on the nitpickometer, since most people are at best fuzzy on the precise distinction and Wooster himself says that Jeeves "can buttle with the best of them."
- Trivial Pursuit also thinks Lord Peter Wimsey's valet is called Butler. Sorry. It's Bunter.
Dave Barry points this out brilliantly in his book Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far) with the page quote and this one as well:
We see this all the time. Journalists, rushing to get a story out under deadline pressure, will report, based on preliminary information, that a ship sank, and 127 people, many of them elderly, perished. Then, upon further investigation, it turns out that nobody, in fact, perished, although one elderly person was slightly injured by a set of dentures hurled by another elderly person in an effort to get the first elderly person to stop talking so loud. Then it turns out that this happened at a nursing home, as opposed to a ship, although the elderly people were watching a video of Titanic at the time, and although there were only four of them, as opposed to 127, the nursing home is located on Route 124, which is only three less than 127, which is not that much of an error when you consider the deadline pressure that journalists operate under.
- Dave Barry made an error in his sarcastic review of Independence Day ("Invasion of the Killer Lawyers"), claiming that Jeff Goldblum's character can upload a virus from his laptop into the aliens' computer system "because the aliens, like every other life form in the galaxy, have basically no choice but to use the Windows 95 operating system." This would be a fair joke if the laptop hadn't notoriously been an Apple Powerbook.
  - Are you saying it's impossible to send a virus from a mac machine to a windows 95 machine?
A webpage about the Spin Off board game for A Series Of Unfortunate Events claims that the characters include "Ruby Gloom and Emily the Strange", both completely unrelated goth girls.
A review was circulated on several sites of the Mortal Instruments trilogy by Cassandra Cla(i)re, formerly a Big Name Fan in the Harry Potter fandom. It claimed that she took the title of her books from a Harry/Draco Fan Fic she had once written, and quoted a few paragraphs. In fact they came from another of her stories, and the fanfic originally titled Mortal Instruments was a tale of Brother Sister Incest between Ron and Ginny.
- However, she had committed plagiarism in her fanfics previously, so this person had obviously done some research — making the errors all the odder.
A Game Informer preview of the then-upcoming Genji for Playstation 2 describing it as based on the Tale of Genji. Given that said work was a romance, it would have led to a very different game than the actual result... which was based on The Tale of the Heike.
- I would pay good money for a video game based on the Tale of Genji. What would it consist of, a series of linked minigames? Perform the best mock-duel with To no Chujo and get points for how badly it freaks out Naishi? Jostle with Lady Aoi for a good carriage-spot at the procession? Peep through the fence at little Murasaki without being discovered? A boss battle with Rokujo's ghost?
  - There actually is a Japanese-only DS game based on the Tale of Genji. Not much is known about it, besides that it's supposed to be unspeakably awful.
There are an awful lot of inaccuracies inside and outside of news media referring to the original novel of Dracula, ranging from claiming that the Count can be destroyed by sunlight to references to him being destroyed via stake through the heart. Clearly, most people have just seen one of the movies and called it good.
Parodied in the Teenage Worrier series when Letty gives advice to the reader on books: "If discussing a book you haven't read, don't pretend you have. I droned on about the Rainbow Lorikeet when Hazel's dad mentioned The History of Mister Polly."
One reviewer, apparently too busy/lazy to read Magician by Raymond E. Feist summarised the book as something like "a typical fantasy novel where a boy saves the kingdom from an army of trolls". Mr Feist himself suspects he just looked at the cover of the book for his review since there are a total of 2 trolls in the book, and they don't even survive for an entire chapter.
- The blurbs for the Riftwar series (at least in some editions) are so badly done that this is almost understandable. The worst is for A Darkness at Sethanon, which mentions "the evil necromancer Macros the Black unleashing his undead hordes". Macros the Black is a good guy, is not a necromancer, only a few of the enemy are undead, etc...
"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors," the Robert Frost poem, gets it two ways. First is the number of people who've never read it and think the title is a statement of the poem's message, when it's actually the opposite. But there are many people who do know that the poem doesn't actually assert that "good fences make good neighbors," but must not have read it either, because they think that the title and the poem are ironic, and that realizing that the title is not borne out in the text requires the reader to "get it," which is equally wrong. The poem is about the narrator and his neighbor fixing the wall that separates their properties. The neighbor keeps saying, "Good fences make good neighbors!" and the narrator reflects, perfectly straightforwardly, that he doesn't really agree with this and he thinks it's better to learn about the world around you and then decide whether you want anything to do with it or not. It doesn't take an English major to spot the message; it's spelled out in black and white.
- Speaking of irony, that poem is actually called "Mending Wall."
One review of the new Darren Shan movie said that it was a rip off of Twilight. Cirque Du Freak came out five years before Twilight. Screw that, the last book was out before Twilight! And anyway, the only thing they have in common is vampires.
- And the vampires in Darren Shan are also a good 200 times more badass.
Speaking of Twilight, ABC World News just did a story about fans' excitement for the second movie New Moon. In it, while talking about the books and their popularity and impact, they showed the book covers. Which is all well and good... except for the fact that the covers were for the 'House of Night' series and NOT the highly recognizable Twilight covers.

Close Literature

To those who are not Toku fans but know Power Rangers, they will immediately point out that any non Super Sentai tokusatsu hero is a "Power Ranger".
- During the murder trial of Skylar Deleon, much was made in the news of him having been a "star" of Power Rangers, thus leading many to believe he actually played one of the Rangers. He was an extra. In one episode.
- Taken to ridiculous levels with Engine-Oh G12. A couple sites saw this clip, and this clip alone, and thought it was a Transformers-ripoff series named "Engine-Oh G12". It took a lot of fan correction to get them to finally change their coverage. Not to mention the amount of comments talking about a Power Rangers ripoff—one commenter says it wouldn't ever fly in America. [cough]
  - For those who don’t know, Engine-Oh G12 is one formation of the mecha in Engine Sentai Go-onger, whose footage is used in Power Rangers RPM.
A paper treated the two-hour pilot of Star Trek Deep Space Nine as the ninth Star Trek movie. Therefore, it was described like that: "Star Trek 9: Deep Space". There's also a matter of many papers thinking that "Star Trek" is the name of the "titular" ship(s)...
- Our TV guide had the habit of describing every episode of the original Star Trek as "The Enterprise is in danger while Kirk, Spock and McCoy are on an away mission." Granted, this isn't actually all that inaccurate for most of the episodes.
- A local news anchor giving a review of one of the Next Generation movies described the crew with the phrase "...and the alien Data", even giving the alternate, but inaccurate pronunciation of "Data".
  Dr. Pulaski: Thank you, Data (pronounced "Dah-Tuh")
  Data: Data. (pronounced "Day-Tuh")
  Dr. Pulaski: What's the difference?
  Data: One is my name. The other is not.
Several morning news shows took a segment of The Colbert Report where Stephen Colbert asked Democratic Congressional candidate Robert Wexler (running unopposed in his district) campaign-killing questions ("Fill in the blank: I enjoy cocaine because...") seriously, comparing it to an earlier segment where Colbert exposed a candidate who decried the separation of church and state and yet couldn't name all of the Ten Commandments and asking, "Why do politicians keep going on The Colbert Report when it makes them look foolish?" Needless to say, Colbert took them down a notch.
- Wonderfully deconstructed in one episode that talks about a man's comments on the Large Hadron Collider and says that the scientists are "boldly going where no one has gone before", which is apparently a quote from Star Wars. Stephen Colbert protests that it's fairly obvious that it came from Star Trek, and that the quote is "where no man has gone". He then says that we need more nerds as scientists.
  - Err, the "where no man has gone before" is from the original show, while TNG uses "where no one has gone before". But hey, maybe Colbert denied the existence of TNG, like some do with Enterprise.
- Let's not leave out the nerdiest call-out of all time. Some CNN reporters needed a stock image of Satan as the backdrop for their ~~encouragement~~ coverage of the 06/06/06 "hysteria." They used an illustration of the Balrog from a 1977 Lord Of The Rings calendar, prompting Stephen to explain, "Devils and Balrogs are totally different. Devils are angels who refused to serve God and instead followed Satan into hell. Balrogs are Maiar who refused to serve Eru and instead followed Morgoth into Thangorodrim. Get your facts straight, CNN!" The best part? Stephen noticed it himself. He just happened to recognize the illustration because he has the calendar.
Back in 2005, just after the new series of Doctor Who began, there was an article talking about the Doctor and Rose battling against the evil Moxx of Balroom and the dastardly Face of Boe. Both of these were actually friendly party guests.
- This used to be even worse. Most D.V.D.s of Doctor Who serials from the '70s and '80s have continuity announcements (taped or audio-recorded by fans) as extras, which, more often than not, have something wrong with them. These range from mispronunciations of fictional aliens and planets to announcements that seem to be describing a totally different series. Also, many fans remember an announcer pronouncing the show's abbreviated title as a single word ("Drwho"), but no tape has surfaced yet to prove that it ever happened.
  - There was a Scottish BBC continuity announcer who during the end credits for the new series' first season pronounced the show's name as "Doctor Woo" repeatedly. Fortunately there's plenty of evidence of this given the proliferation of as-broadcast pre-DVD-rip torrents with the closing continuity announcements intact available online...
- Thankfully the frequent appearance of Kaled mutants in new series seems to have stopped people calling the Daleks robots.
- Thanks to the movie adaptations starring Peter Cushing, there are still people out there who insist on referring to the Doctor as "Doctor Who".
  - The original episodes had this in the credits, but it was changed around the Tom Baker era. Unfortunately the "modern" series credits him as "Doctor Who" too, and has reintroduced other things that were purposely abandoned before...
  - At David Tennant (#10)'s request, he's back to being credited as "The Doctor."
- Tabloid newspapers such as The Sun have regularly credited Russel T. Davies as the 'creator' of Doctor Who, which would be an incredible feat when one realises that the series premiered seven months after Davies was born.
- A documentary about science fiction credited the creation of the series to Terry Nation. Nation created the Daleks, not the series.
  - The BBC made that mistake. In Nation's obituary, no less. It's also listed in at least one edition of Trivial Pursuit.
- Picking up the false description of the Face of Boe as a villain, here is an actual article, for the 2007 series, describing the "evil Boe" as the Doctor's "arch-enemy." Not only was the character never a villain, but by this appearance, the character is a friend of the Doctor's and they've met amicably several times.
- The descriptive text on the V.H.S. boxes often seemed like they were written by someone who hadn't watched that serial (or Doctor Who in general). Some examples: The box for "Terminus" calls Terminus a planet when it's actually a space station. The box for "The Robots of Death" says it's about robot trying to enslave the Universe when it's actually about a murderer using the robot servants of his intended victims to kill them. The box for "The Rescue" ends with "...a rescue ship is on its way from Earth intent on revenge and time is running out for the planet." There's not a single part of that that's right.
- Previewing the first episode of the new series, the US TV Guide described the 9th Doctor as a "cockney dude". The 9th Doctor is emphatically not cockney — repeated reference is made to him sounding "northern" in the series itself and he speaks with Christopher Eccleston's natural Salford accent (for the benefit of non-UK readers, cockneys originate from an area of London and Salford is in Manchester, some 200 miles north of London).
At the 64th Golden Globe Awards, Tim Allen announced that Alec Baldwin had won the "Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series — Musical or Comedy" for his role in 3rd Rock. Pretty incredible, considering Baldwin never appeared on that show and it had been canceled for years. Either that, or Allen meant to say 30 Rock.
There is a biography of Robin Williams by Andy Dougan. In the chapter about Mork's first appearance on Happy Days, Dougan describes the episode... or so he thinks. What he actually describes is the fake flashback created for the first Mork And Mindy episode to tie it to its parent series. Mind you, this was long before the actual episode could be seen by anyone by simply searching You Tube... but you'd think a biographer would do the research.
Hilariously subverted in an episode of The Daily Show. Jon Stewart talks about how reporters claim that Hillary Clinton has bones of steel. Jon then remarks that this is like comic book character, Wolverine. Suddenly, a nerd comes out of the studio and informs Jon that Wolverine's bones are made of adamantium, not steel.
- Hey, Wolverine's bones are just COATED in adamantium, not made of it! Obviously, or else Magneto's "strip out the metal" incident would've left him a shapeless blob! Do the research, Daily Show!
- Something similar happened on the MTV Movie Awards a few years back. Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen were about to announce an award when a 'nerd' in the audience stands up to yell at them about turning the adult male character Banshee into a little girl in X2:X-Men United. Jackman and Janssen quickly reply that the character is obviously his daughter, Siryn, putting the nerd in his place.
  - Somewhat similar to Natalie Portman's SNL monologue.
- Jon Stewart got this done to him as well — Tucker Carlson was complaining about the host of the Daily Show, whom he referred to as "Jon Daily."
Fun Holiday Drinking Game: Take a shot for every time you get a sense of this during the running commentary for any televised parade. To wit:
"'Wally' is a Disney computer robot movie (wtf?!) sent to clean the Earth!"

Close Live Action TV

The Ottawa Citizen described U2 as "a Brit band". Apparently, the editor of that paper forgot that since 1922, Ireland is no longer part of the United Kingdom.
- A reccuring problem with Irish musicians (and indeed other celebrities). MTV has referred to Westlife as British (you would think they at least should know better).
- That depends on what you mean by British.
Beware the sinister cult of Emo! It refers to self-harm as an "initiation ritual" into the cult of Emo, and says that "The Black Parade" is a mysterious afterlife that Emo people believe they go to when they die — instead of being the name of an album by My Chemical Romance.
A song by The Arrogant Worms, "Forgive Us, We're Canadian" was written when they got a review complaining about "too much Canadian content" in a political show.
- Here's proof that even we're not immune. "Forgive Us, We're Canadian" was not by The Arrogant Worms. It is, in fact, by Local Anxiety — a small duo whose only song of note often gets credited to the much more well-known Worms. In fact, several lesser Canadian comedy bands suffer from this — so much so that The Arrogant Worms have a list of songs that "we do not sing, or have ever sung".
  - This same effect can be seen elsewhere, as many smaller parody artists have their work credited to the famous Weird Al Yankovic — even female artists and sometimes even well known comedic musical artists The Bloodhound Gang and Bob Rivers.
When Snoop Doggy Dog was on trial for murder, a local newscast referred to him as "Snoopy Doggy Dogg". Granted, the stage name was originally inspired by the Peanuts character, but...
- A similar newscast insisted he was "Snoopy Dogg Dogg".
- A broadcast of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade indentified Snoopy as "Snoop Doggy Dogg". Figure that one out.
As if its actual musical credentials weren't already questionable, Rolling Stone created a bunch of confusion by claiming that Outkast's "Hey Ya" was in 11/4, an almost unheard-of time signature for a mainstream pop song. The more plausible interpretation (endorsed by The Other Wiki and other web sources) is that it's in 4/4 with occasional bars in 2/4.
During the controversy over Hasbro's plans to sell a series of Pussycat Dolls dolls, the watchdog group who started the campaign against them claimed in a press release that "Don't Cha" "alludes to group sex." Several media outlets picked up on this and made it sound like the song itself was about group sex. This all came as a surprise to people who'd actually heard the song. As near as anyone can figure, the supposed allusion is an extremely tortured interpretation of the line "I know she ain't gon' wanna share."
Kids In The Hall theme song creators "Shadowy Men from a Shadowy Planet" are often referred to as a "surf band". Hence, their song "We Are Not A Surf Band".
For high hilarity, check out the US media coverage of the rise of Beatlemania. When the first reports of The Beatles and their massive British success started trickling across the ocean, it was portrayed as some sort of quasi-religious cult centered around a bunch of untalented losers who sing "yeah yeah yeah" over and over. When they hit America, many people struggled to understand what made the music so different. It sounded like rock-and-roll, but everyone knew rock-and-roll was that 50s fad that ended when Elvis went into the Army.
The Ambassadors of Funk produced an album titled Super Mario Compact Disco, in which they sang rap-based tunes about the Mario games. Throughout the album, they mistakenly stated that Princess Daisy from Super Mario Land was Mario's love interest, and even worse, their song about Super Mario Land 2 claims that Wario has "got the Princess bound up as captive", despite the fact that neither Daisy nor Peach not any other princess was even in that game.
People keep on writing Meat Loaf's name as one word, when it's actually two.
- To be fair, his early promotional material flip-flopped on this as well.
The artist that appears to suffer from this trope most consistently is Weird Al Yankovic. A huge amount of humourous music, especially music available for download on P 2 P services, is misattributed to him. This is something of a sore spot with the artist. He has gone on record saying that he doesn't mind people sharing his music; but strongly dislikes the misattribution, mainly due to the lyrical content. Although a frequent user of Double Entendre, he still makes an effort to keep his work family-friendly. Interestingly, the majority of the mislabled songs are the work of another, almost as well-known, parody musician, Bob Rivers and his Twisted Radio show. Rivers' work is decidedly less family-friendly than Weird Al's; and often includes profanity and sexual references.
While we're on the topic of misattributed songs, it's still common to see "The Legend of Zelda" attributed to System of a Down. The song is actually an Overclocked Remix song by ~~Rabbit Joint~~ Joe Pleiman, and System of a Down have denied having anything to do with the song in interviews.
Covers of video game tunes are commonly misattributed to the Minibosses.
The Brazilian network responsible for the Rock In Rio III broadcasts had some of those "about the band" blurbs. During Oasis' concert, it said "they've grown bigger than the band that influenced them, Blur". Not only the bands are contemporary, but they had a rivalry famously called "Battle of Britpop" (with Oasis' guitarist/songwriter Noel Gallagher going as far as wishing Blur's singer and bassist to "catch AIDS and die").
The book Encyclopedia of Indie Rock has several glaring errors in almost every entry, as if the authors had no clue what they were writing about. Among these:
- Confusing which members of At The Drive-In formed the bands Sparta and The Mars Volta
- Including entries on James Blunt and Flyleaf, neither of which could be considered indie rock at all
- A passing mention that an associate of the band Camper Van Beethoven had recorded an acoustic version of "Pink Floyd's classic "Stairway to Heaven"". In the same entry, there is a reference to a "new" Camper Van Beethoven song called "Tusk" which "might be an allusion to the Fleetwood Mac album of the same name". This was apparently a mangled reference to the band's affinity of performing that entire album live during their shows, which they've been doing for several years.
- Claiming that J Mascis left Dinosaur Jr. in 1988 (Lou Barlow was the member of the band to leave, and he was fired...by Mascis, who by 1994 was in fact the only original member remaining in the band until the original lineup reunited in 2005).
- There was a mention that Dischord Recrds was founded in 1970 (ten years before it actually was) that can be attributed as a typo, but listing Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea as being released in 2003 rather than 1998 has no excuse.
- Chris Funk of The Decemberists appeared on The Colbert Report...OK, so far so good..."hosted by Stephen Colbert, star of the NBC dramedy The Office"...what?
- In the Sonic Youth entry, it's mentioned that Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore divorced in the early 2000s (they're still married. The indie rock couple that divorced in the early 2000s was Robert Schneider and Hilarie Sidney of The Apples in Stereo)
- The sentence "The Nine Inch Nails won a Grammy for their cover of Johnny Cash's classic song 'Hurt'". It was their song to begin with, Cash's version was the cover.
  - Also, NIN plays industrial rock, not indie rock. Moreover, it's not a they.
A rare example of this being done on purpose, a report about Oasis on British radio station Radio 1 made several factual errors, including referring to the band as "The Oasis" (the band is just called Oasis, no The) persistently throughout. Unlike the other examples on this page, though, this was actually being done deliberately, almost like a public broadcast form of trolling.
The Partners in Kryme performed a Theme Tune Rap for the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Apparently they were not familiar with the franchise, because their song labeled Raphael as the leader of the Turtles, when everyone who's so much as heard the theme song knows that position is actually Leonardo's.
On his Theme Time Radio Hour show, Bob Dylan said he was in talks to be one of the celebrity voices for GPS car navigation systems, but it was actually just a deliberately corny segue to introduce Ray Charles' "Lonely Avenue". After the show was broadcast in the UK, The Telegraph reported it as a serious news story, and the BBC, The New Musical Express, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post all picked it up too. Of course, since this came just a few days after Dylan confirmed that he was releasing a Christmas album, this is an understandable mistake.
After they got tired of being asked why they picked the name Toto for their band, the members started claiming that it was in honor of the real name of lead singer Bobby Kimball: Robert Toteaux. Fine, except Kimball's real last name was actually Kimball. That didn't stop many reputable reference books from printing this "fact" for over a decade before it was finally cleared up. Similarly, Pearl Jam claimed in an early interview that their name came from a peyote-laced jam recipe that Eddie Vedder's grandma made, and several sources dutifully repeated the story before the band admitted it was a joke.
Sound collage group Negativland pulled off a media stunt, effectively lampshading this trope. It served as the premise for their album "Helter Stupid." The Bay Area band self-released a falsified news article based around the recent David Brom murders, in which the 16 year old boy was convicted of murdering his family with an axe. Negativland released a report that stated, in essence, "Negativland has been forced to cancel a planned tour because their song 'Christianity Is Stupid' is suspected of being a catalyst in inspiring the David Brom murders." In truth, David Brom had likely never even heard the song Christianity Is Stupid, but within months the story was in newspapers across the country, and was even made into a special report on a Californian news station. They were forced to cancel their tour for external reasons: They simply could not allocate the money necessary to provide for a full tour. This "report" was spread with absolutely no fact-checking or research; as stated earlier, the entire debacle can be promptly heard in an odd, documented form on the album Helter Stupid.
Check out this amusing article by writer Ingrid Schorr. Who? She was the college girlfriend of REM's Mike Mills, and the inspiration for "(Don't Go Back To) Rockville". As she reports, her relatively minor role in the early years of REM and the Athens, Georgia alternative music scene got more and more distorted over the years because writers and journalists were copying and magnifying each other's mistakes, without bothering to simply ask her what the truth was.
Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald recently did an article that quoted Australian rock band Short Stack's lead singer, Shaun. Unfortunately, not only did they get his age wrong, the picture accompanying the quote was actually of another band member, Andy. Oops.
When the band Journey got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one newspaper covering the story accompanied it with a photo of a completely different band, the Electric Light Orchestra.
Lampshaded by Pink Floyd in the song, Have a Cigar. "The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think, oh, by the way, which one's Pink?"

Close Music

The book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Professional Wrestling is filled with this type of error, leading many Smart Marks to claim it's "by complete idiots, for complete idiots". As just one example, the real name of wrestler The Rock (actual real name: Dwayne Johnson) is given as Rocky Melvin. Surprisingly, longtime wrestler and wrestling manager "Captain Lou" Albano is one of the co-authors; however, as anybody who's met Lou in person or seen him on TV will attest, the Captain is a real-life Cloudcuckoolander, so it's not all that shocking that he can screw things up this badly.
The documentary (which means that they should've had all the time in the world to do the research, which makes it even funnier) Exposed! Pro Wrestling's Greatest Secrets reveals some secrets that every knowledgeable wrestling fan already knew, and some they didn't... because no pro wrestling federation has ever used them. Two words: Stunt Granny.
Following the Chris Benoit murders in 2007, the Today Show did a report on wrestlers who died young. One of the reports said that Owen Hart died from a heart attack. For the uninitiated, Owen actually fell to his death while preparing for an entrance that would see him rappelling from the rafters into the ring at a pay-per-view event. It's only by the sheer coincidence that the WWE was airing a backstage interview at that moment that the moment of death wasn't broadcast on nationwide television. You'd think that might stick out enough for them to get the cause of death right, but apparently not. On that same broadcast, they broadcasted Owen's face on the British Bulldog's profile.
- Also, Nancy Grace mentioned something about Benoit "being demoted from the Four Horsemen to Raw". The Horsemen, of course, being a team that died when WCW went defunct in 2001, and Raw being the WWE's top brand. To prove here's the quote:
  Nancy Grace: "Mr. [Bret] Hart, question. Regarding [Chris Benoit's] career, I know that he had gone from the elite, one of the Four Horsemen, down to Raw. And that's a little bit of a demotion. How badly do you think he took that?"
- Grace also featured a list of wrestlers who died of drug induced and/or non-accidental causes during one of her shows. The list not only included the afformentioned Owen Hart, but also Bruiser Brody (who was murdered) and Junkyard Dog (who died in a car accident)
  - One of the heads of the CW Network shortly after the Benoit murders claimed that her network wouldn't be troubled by it because "Benoit was never featured on Smackdown". Apparently she never watched her own programming, as Benoit had been part of the Smackdown brand for two years before being drafted to the ECW brand, and for several years prior to a jump to Raw (when the CW Network was still UPN).
Former WWE play-by-play commentator Mike Adamle is a former commentator for this exact reason. His very first night on the job, he referred to Jeff Hardy as "Jeff Harvey", and, after he was assigned to WWE's ECW brand, made a habit out of referring to his partner, Tazz, as "The Tazz", among other gaffes that showed that he really didn't know a thing about WWE or wrestling in general. The latter, by the way, was a running gag in WWE right up until Tazz left the company, despite the fact that Adamle was wished well in his future endeavors long before Tazz was.
Muhammad Hassan was a controversial wrestler whose gimmick was that, despite being a born-and-raised American, being of Middle Eastern descent saw him face racism of all kinds on a nearly daily basis following the September 11th attacks. In 2005, as part of one of Muhammad Hassan's last appearances on WWE programming, he called forth a group of men dressed in ski masks to attack The Undertaker (a segment which had the misfortune of airing on the same day as an actual terrorist attack). In response to the backlash (besides the usual "It was only a 'terrorist attack' because I'm of Middle Eastern descent" defense), Hassan took things a step further and, in an in-ring promo, attacked a writer at the New York Times for an article in which was written "Undertaker attacked by Arabs in ski masks." Hassan said of the article: "They were in ski masks! How does he know they were Arab?" As Hassan effectively made that writer and the New York Times as a whole sound like a bunch of racist bastards, fans seemed to actually take his side...until he intimated that the article proved his point: ALL Americans hate Middle Easterners (which garnered Hassan a massive amount of heel heat). After that speech, UPN (the network that carried SmackDown! at the time) demanded that WWE take Hassan off TV. WWE did this, and following his final match (talked about below), he and his manager Daivari were sent down to developmental territories, where Hassan was eventually released. Many fans believed the Times influenced UPN's decision and really were (or still are) the racist bastards Hassan called them out to be.
- What makes things worse is that Hassan was massively over as a heel, and while his in-ring skill wasn't the greatest, he was improving over time; this actually led him to get a #1 Contender's Match for the World Heavyweight Championship against The Undertaker at The Great American Bash in 2005. Originally, he was scheduled to win that match and go up against Batista at SummerSlam, WWE's second biggest pay-per-view of the year. But when the pressure from UPN forced Hassan off of television, Hassan was booked to lose the match and never appeared on WWE programming ever again, which infuriated many fans who actually LIKED Hassan.
- No one ever called MNM's abduction of Trish Stratus a terrorist angle, so it probably was because he was Arab.
Parodied frequently through Santino Marella, such as him calling Rowdy Roddy Piper "Rodney the Piper" and Jimmy Kimmel "Jimmeny." His biggest faux pas may be when he messes up all of Stone Cold Steve Austin's catchprases, like "open the can of the ass-whip," "stomping a mudpie" and "those are the bottom lines."
In a Time web article on bad corporate name changes, the WWE was given a spot thanks to its tiff with the World Wildlife Fund. Not head-banging, yet. But then the author said of the reason Linda McMahon gave: "The comment didn't do much to stamp out persistent rumors that the fights are rigged — but hey, at least she was honest." Not head-banging in 1969, maybe, but in 2009...

Close Professional Wrestling

Any publication that has Pokémon being called "Pokey-man". Such as the official Time Magazine archives. Similarly, anything that refers to "Pokémons". (Pokémon is both singular and plural, like sheep, deer, or samurai.)
- There was an article (and interview) where a panicky watchdog-type proves, proves that "Pokey-man" is a tool of Satan by offering up an excerpt that reads "you can catch a Mew by cheating with a Gameshark." Proof that Pokémon is corrupting our children by teaching them to cheat, or evidence that the woman in question is far too stupid to realize that a Gameshark is a third-party cheating device wholly separate from Nintendo? ~~You decide~~ We'll decide for you: she's a total friggin' idiot.
- Heck, the show's dubbers themselves totally misnamed the Pokémon that appear in the 'Who's that Pokémon?' section of the first movie. Granted, it was Team Rocket naming the Pokémon...
  - According to the DVD commentary for the movie, they actually used that point to 'justify' their mistake, as well as it being "something for kids to spot".
- According to TV Guide and the Comcast information guides, the plot of Pokémon: The First Movie has Ash and friends battling Mewtwo and the scientist that created him — despite the fact that Mewtwo killed him within the first few minutes of the film.
- In the months leading up to the release of Red and Blue, he was reading an issue of Disney Adventures that gave an extremely vague description of a "fuzzy yellow creature named Pokémon."
  - Disney Adventures also made the mistake of labeling Tracey as Brock in a blurb for the second movie.
  - Even a magazine devoted to Pokémon ran an article on the second movie and somehow did not mention Tracey even once in the text.
  - Well, to some people, that makes a lot of sense. Tracey doesn't really do much in the movie other than watch Ash and to a lesser extent Misty save the day.
- The Italian Mickey Mouse Magazine published a Pokémon article naming all the characters with French names.
- Additionally, early Pokémon toy commercials had a lot of errors. Pronouncing the franchise name as "Poh-kuh-mon", calling Vulpix "Ponyta" while adding emphasis on the "ta", talking about certain first-gen Pokémon as if they'd never been revealed before, etc.
  - To be fair, "Poh-kuh-mon" is how you'd pronounce it with a New York accent. At least, that's what it sounds like around here, rather than "Poh-kay-mon". In fact, the latter pronunciation just sounds awkward...
- Countless publications in 1999 through 2000 seemed to think Marill was a new evolved form of Pikachu named "Pikablu".
- During a Trainer's Choice quiz during the Hoenn season, they asked which Pokémon evolved into Seviper. The answer was Arbok. Arbok doesn't evolve at all, and breeding Seviper doesn't get an Ekans (which evolves into Arbok). Ironically, the dubbers who made the quiz had been working on the series for years, proving how little they actually know about the series.
- "Pikachu, a character from the popular children's television show ''"Pokeman"'' (...)"
To be fair about the "Pokemans" thing, a lot of hardcore fans have started using it as a joke, so it's easy to see where they could have been misled.
The word "Chao" from the Sonic The Hedgehog series works this way too (pronounced 'chow'), so it's annoying when people try to make it plural by adding an "s" on the end, making it a totally different word.
- Not to mention that the same game introduced a character named Chaos (pronounced 'kay-os'), who is also directly related to the chao, which causes even more confusion!
A review of The Legend Of Zelda: The Minish Cap in a reputable British newspaper claimed that Link must rescue a petrified Princess... Peach.
- You'll immediately know whether someone is a gamer or not if they refer to the green-hatted, sword-wielding protagonist as Zelda.
- Dear game journalists: Ocarina of Time/Majora's Mask Link was the only Hero of Time. The other Links either have different titles or no in game title at all. And he's not an elf, dammit.
  - At least no one is calling Twilight Princess Link the Hero of Winds.
A review of the Double Dragon movie, when talking about the source material, gave a rather unfair description... of Mortal Kombat.
There was a newspaper article about how "Sega's mascot Mario" was more recognizable than Mickey Mouse. If he's so recognizable, how do they not know what company he's from.
A magazine was trying to establish a link between the shootings at Columbine and video games. They used an interview with a survivor's family, while the survivor was playing the video game Diablo... which was described as "just shooting" and was punctuated by the survivor's character being blown up. Those who are familiar with this game should catch the problems...
British teenage science magazine Flipside ran a small article on Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, listing a handful of returning characters as being 'Solid Snake, Roy Campbell, and Quinton Flynn'. The latter is the name of the voice actor for one of the characters.
Several fans for some reason refer to Sonic Adventure 2 Battle as "Sonic Adventure Battle 2". Of course, there was no "Sonic Adventure Battle 1", and SA2B is actually a remake of Sonic Adventure 2 for Dreamcast. The "Battle" refers to the slight improvements made to the two-player mode of the game.
- Gameplay footage on G4 which labeled the game as "Sonic Battle".
  - Which isn't helped by the fact that there actually is a game (for Game Boy Advance) called Sonic Battle.
- In Italy, it is common to see Sonic Heroes images in every Sonic-related article, even when talking about the 2006 Sonic game, Sonic Chronicles or Unleashed.
The BBC once did a report on Halo 3, and used footage from Killzone 2.
A PC Gamer review of the Half-Life 2 mod MINERVA: Metastasis reported that it was created by a "team." Another review by PC Zone stated that "even Valve [the creators of the Half-Life series] should doff their caps and might want to take notes." Adam Foster, who singlehandedly created Minerva (aside from the music, which was by Joseph Toscano (http://zhaymusic.com/)), actively sought out Valve's help in creating the last chapter, and got feedback on how to improve what he'd done so far (he'd been going to a modders' conference, which had gotten cancelled).
The official German Playstation Magazine reported that Final Fantasy IX was a continuation with a new character named Skylar Goodsworth. Turns out they were tricked by a fanfiction on what was then a rather obscure site, which not only lacked any form of professionalism, but had a url equal to beepworld.
- Ah, the German OPM. At least one of their articles (supposedly original content) was actually copied wholesale from the UK iteration, except peoples' quotes were randomly improved; a line about a fighting game handling like zombies suddenly revolved around drunk dinosaurs, for instance.
An early preview of Final Fantasy IX stated that it was to be a remake of the first game in the series. A writer clearly unfamiliar with Roman numerals claimed that Square had started development on "Final Fantasy 1 X".
A while back, the offical Nintendo Official Magazine in the UK described one of the Final Fantasy games as being in the top 150 of games. No problem? Well, they say it's Final Fantasy III and it's getting a DS remake, but the picture beside it is unmistakeably Kefka. The magazine apparently got Japan's Final Fantasy III (which actually got a DS remake) and the West's Final Fantasy III (which was Final Fantasy VI) confused.
Following Manhunt 2 being banned in the UK, an article ran in a local newspaper accompanied by a screenshot from Resident Evil 4.
The Fox News Mass Effect fiasco. Turns out that Cooper Lawrence, their invited speaker and a self-help author, hadn't even seen the game, and based her entire rant about the game's numerous, hardcore sex scenes and obsession with objectifying women on somebody in the studio saying it was "like pornography". Seriously, that comment was her entire exposure to the game. She finally apologised after watching someone play the game for two and a half hours, and after hundreds of scathing reviews of her latest book were posted on Amazon by gamers who had, of course, never read it (though even those who had read it tended to give it bad reviews).
- Compounded by the fact that most people, after hearing these scandalicious claims, were highly disappointed by the short, very PG-13 scenes in question.
- The Fox News Mass Effect fiasco also came on the heels of an article by conservative columnist Kevin McCullough that described the game's "virtual orgasmic rape." Uh... yeah. You go with that.
  - Either he or another commentator also said that the sex scenes and the bodies of the characters were fully customizable right down to breast size and sexual position. While the character sex (as in male or female) and body type can be customized, it's hardly to that extent.
- The best part of all this: Jack Thompson said there was nothing to it. Jack effin' Thompson.
- Add to all of that that the footage they used was taken from IGN, a fellow subsidiary of News Corp, without permission and then edited out the IGN watermark.
The Brazilian evangelist Josue Yrion plays this profusely every time he says "nintendo" instead of "videogame", and even lampshades it by saying "Segas, Super Nintendos, Playstations, whatever!".
Popular Science once had a short article on upcoming first person shooter games that showed a screenshot that was said to be from Doom 3. The problem? Not only was the screenshot from Quake III Arena, but Doom 3 hadn't even been announced yet.
A particularly egregious example was in a Guardian article about the then-upcoming Wii and PS3 systems. The article stated that one of the launch games for the Wii would be "something called Zelda Hands-On, a sword-fighting game".
An advertisement for the game MDK 2 identified Kurt Hectic as a mercenary. While it's true that Doc Hawkins hired him to do a job, that job originally had to do with scrubbing floors.
A fantastic example was created by English newspaper The Daily Mail, who wrote an article about CG images of Washington DC destroyed, claiming they were made by terrorists as a "terrifying vision". The reality? The images were promo shots for Fallout 3.
A videogame advert was banned for containing the sexually suggestive tagline: "Get your worm out for the birds." The game being advertised, according to the newscasters, was the curiously named Earthworm Joe.
In the 42nd issue of the Wonka Vision magazine, there was an article about SBCG4AP. They referred to the tenth anniversary toon as "the first toon featured on homestarrunner.com when it launched in 2000".
- A lot of Italian SBCG4AP reviews say that Homestar Runner is a Web Comic.
GamePro was (is?) a veritable factory of this. This was especially blatant in their coverage of RPGs, which they largely viewed as beneath them and thus didn't bother to do much research when they were involved. This attitude seeped into their reviews, either disparaging the title because it's an RPG or (in the case of reviews for "politically important" games such as Final Fantasy VII) heaping a ton of cynicism into their writing.
- Recently, they printed a guide to unlocking the secret characters in Super Smash Bros Brawl. In it, they made several glaring errors, such as calling Sheik Samus, and printing what they apparently thought was a picture of Marth, except it was a picture of Geoffrey, a totally unrelated Fire Emblem character who not only does not exist in the same universe as Marth, but fights with a lance instead of a sword, and on horseback. Apparently, everybody with blue hair is the same person.
- Speaking of Brawl, the woman who sang the part of Ashley in the game's rendition of "Ashley's Theme" stated on her blog that she was chosen to do a song for the upcoming game, "Super Mario Bros. Smash".
- In a preview for the original Smash Bros., IGN referred to Captain Falcon as "Blue Falcon," mistaking the name of his F Zero vehicle for his name.
One review of Lunar: Eternal Blue that heavily criticized the game while blatantly appearing to only be drawing from the beginning of it inspired Working Designs to publicly call them out and pull their advertising from the magazine. The magazine later admitted that they only played ~25% of the game.
Find the error in this press release for Nicktoons Nitro (somewhat related to the Nicktoons Unite series):
"Nicktoons Nitro is headlined by none-other-than SpongeBob SquarePants, the flagship cartoon character of the Nickelodeon Network of channels. Other playable Nicktoons Characters include Jimmy Neutron, Avatar, Danny Phantom, Invader Zim and Timmy Turner, plus a secret un-lockable character."
The largest gaming magazine of Finland, Pelit, translated the title of the main villain of World Of Warcraft's second expansion pack into "liskokuningas", the Lizard King. Someone tell them the game is about fighting evil, not psychedelic musicians.
- To be fair, it was probably deliberate, seeing as they have a healthily tongue-in-cheek attitude to the whole business and a long-standing tradition of such translation gags.
- Also, the country's largest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, had a little text about the release of Command And Conquer: Red Alert 3. Not only did they call it Command And Conquer 3, but the writer theorised that the game glorifies the war in Iraq. This is a game where USA, the USSR and Japan battle each other in a world war, for freak's sake.
  - A world war involving war bears, whip-wielding mecha angels, and anti-submarine dolphins.
This trope was used for comedic effect in This review of Naruto: Clash of Ninja 2 for the Gamecube. For the record, this was written before Naruto made it to the US and the person was playing an import. So he decided to name the characters himself. Hilarity ensues.
A St. Louis judge reviewed footage from four videogames to determine whether they (and, by extension, all games) were protected under First Amendment rights. Among the games he evaluated: Mortal Combat and, hilariously, The Resident of Evil Creek.
A news report on video game violence in late 2000 pronounced the title Deus Ex as "Deuce Ecks" and said that it was controversial because it allows the player to become the killer. First of all, why choose Deus Ex of all games to epitomize video game violence? Secondly, the report acted like murdering civilians was the whole point and completely ignored the Wide Open Sandbox format of the game, including the moral choices the player can make with varying consequences.
The German report "Frontal 21" is quite famous for this. In "Videogemetzel im Kinderzimmer" (video slaughter in the nursery), "Gewalt ohne Grenzen" (violence without borders) and "Töten am Bildschirm" (killing at the screen), they said, between other things, that you can chop off the arms of grannies in Grand Theft Auto and described World Of Warcraft as a WW 2-type shooter. That games in Germany are heavely censored (for example: no blood and no chopped-off parts in GTA) did not stop them: They simply displayed the uncensored original versions which are not legal in Germany, at least not for anyone below the age of 18. This all gets worse if you realise that this was hosted on a paid-through-taxes publicly owned television station, ZDF, which has a governmental duty to educate. Well, at least on paper.
- Wasn't it them who described GTA:San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod with the words "Like this game: whoever rapes the most women wins", later arguing on a message board that the player's ability to choose positions was where the rape part came in? Either them or a different show, but it definitely happened.
Nintendo Power has been known to misidentify the species of Krystal from Star Fox more than once. In one issue, they called her a cat (using this as a device to say she should've ditched Fox and hooked up with Panther by the end of Assault), and another claimed she was a ferret.
- Bear in mind that the Star Fox Adventures Krystal is a semi-Expy of Krystal from the never released Dinosaur Planet, who was a cat. It's possible they just got their promos mixed up.
  - Considering the article was released quite some time after Dinosaur Planet was canned, that is incredibly unlikely. The mess-up was probably author stupidity.
- The same magazine also erroneously claimed in a Soulcalibur II article that Yoshimitsu is a ghost.
- One of their writers also seems convinced that Sonic The Hedgehog's buddy Tails is a mutant squirrel, even after someone wrote in to tell him that he's a fox. It's mainly just a Running Gag he uses to get a rise out of the fans.
- Despite NP's love for Elite Beat Agents, they referred to the characters as dancing secret agents with afros. Only two of the agents actually have afros, (Morris and Derek, but Morris's afro is covered by his hat) and there are 9 agents, counting the divas and the commander. This can possibly be justified if you consider that the agents only go out in trios.
- Once, they had mislabelled the Pokémon Dialga and Palkia. By the time they realized this, it was too late. They acknowledged the mistake in the next issue.
- In a holiday buyers' guide, they wrote about Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow that "Dracula's back and he's haunting a castle again". Even if you don't know that Soma Cruz is Dracula's reincarnation, it's fairly common knowledge that Dracula was defeated for good in 1999 and that he's not the main antagonist this time.
Practically every "official" strategy review for the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game got Bebop and Rocksteady's names mixed up. To their credit, at least neither was a cowboy seated at his computer.
- In addition, every time they gave a strategy review for the NES port of the TMNT arcade game, Nintendo Power seemed convinced that the two Stone Warrior bosses, Lt. Granitor and General Traag, were the same character, despite their obvious difference in design and color.
According to this Die Zeit article, Grand Theft Auto is a Racing Game. It also contains such shocking revelations as "many computer games are run on personal computers".
Another GTA example: the Quebec newspaper 24 Heures claims that GTA: Chinatown Wars is focused on "the Asian gang" (The Triad) from Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City... Even if they meant Liberty City Stories, CW is part of the Grand Theft Auto IV era, which is as unrelated as possible (plotwise, anyways) to the Grand Theft Auto III era (of which LCS is a part of; and for the record, the Triad did appear briefly in GTAIV.). They also managed to switch around the text caption for the Resident Evil 5 and Final Fantasy XIII screenshots on the same article as said goof.
Another Media Watchdog posted a complaint that the Wii is no longer "family friendly" thanks to the release of the super-violent game MadWorld, saying that they "hope Nintendo does not lose sight of their initial audience, and continues to offer quality, family friendly games," forgetting or not realizing that Nintendo will always continue to do the latter (that's what they primarily do anyways with few exceptions) — and so will the unmentioned Sega, the true publisher of the game. Another thing to mention would be that though Nintendo has always made games that the whole family could enjoy, only with the Wii and DS have they switched their focus away from the hardcore gamer. (However, when Nintendo countered the watchdogs by claiming that the Wii is for everyone, they also include hardcore gamers in said term; notable because no one besides Nintendo associates hardcore gamers with "the entire family" nowadays!) Of course, there are obviously a few more things that could be dissected from this statement, including all the super-violent Wii games before MadWorld.
Animal Crossing players (and just about everyone else), find yourself something big and solid for your head before watching the biggest, most spectaculary epic case of Critical Research Failure.
- For those not familiar with the game, the turtle character that is supposedly a potential child molester is Tortimer, an NPC. Yes, in Animal Crossing, the game itself tries to seduce your children into sending it pictures of themselves.
- In addition, interacting with other players over the internet is only possible by swapping friend codes with that particular player; this is not World Of Warcraft.
- Not that it matters in some jurisdictions — according to a spokesman for the Mid-Missouri Internet Crimes Task Force,, just being an adult and owning Animal Crossing is apparently prima facie evidence of being a pedophile.
Fox News made a news report warning parents to look out for potential pedophilic activity on the Nintendo DS, but of course there's the daunting task of explaining how the DS actually works. Here's a video of the important bits edited into a (misinformative) Nintendo DS commercial.
PC Gamer in his review of the NOLF 2 expansion pack Contract J.A.C.K. mentioned the name of NOLF protagonist as Cate Walker. It later published an apology for the blunder.
- Also in an article about the then doomed to be cancelled Star Trek Online it intentionally mentioned a Rodian blood drawing the ire of Trekkies, but the magazine then sent prizes to the ones who pointed the mistake.
This article probably sums up the major problems pertaining to video games quite well.
The Limbaugh Letter, which would be called a parody of conservative views if it weren't published by conservatives, rails against Burnout Paradise for its hardline stance on global warming. Its what?
Alot of people make the mistake of referring to the blonde-haired, blue-jumpsuited mascot for the Fallout series of games as "Pip-Boy". The Pip-Boy is what you interface with the game through. That character is the in-game mascot of Valt-Tec's line of communal fallout shelters, and is called Vault Boy. The character version of "Pip-Boy" can be seen painted on the Pip-Boy interface. He has red hair, pointy ears, and a yellow and red jumpsuit.
- Worse, some articles and reviews have erroneously called Vault Boy "Fallout Boy." Yeah.
  - Worse still, Fallout Tactics allows you to recruit Vault Boy in a secret encounter. His name caption reads 'Pipboy' [4]
A high school newspaper ran a review of Baldur's Gate II with a photograph of a character portrait of the game that occupies less than a square inch on the screen, and referred to the game in the headline and caption as "Baldur".
A Polish illustrated encyclopedia (ISBN 8374351500, in case you're wondering), published in 2008 or 2009, claims that the most popular consoles today are "Sony Play Station [sic]" and "Nintendo".
In 2002, New York Times claimed that Return to Castle Wolfenstein was a WW 2 shooter with a Nazi protagonist (it's not, the player is an American commando). In 2008, the United States Department of State, who had apparently read the idiotic statement without checking whether it was true, named the game a chief example of anti-semitism in video games.
A TV report on Kwari, an albeit dreadful MMO FPS in which you would actually earn real money for frags (at the cost of paying for ammunition via microtransactions) and other stuff. The said TV report used Crysis footage.
Prima's strategy guide for Donkey Kong Country 2 stated Klubba, the Kremling who guards the Lost World, to be a member of the Kong family.
- While technically incorrect, not as egregious as implied; Klubba is a somewhat-friendly NPC whose "shop" appears on the map, similarly to Funky, Cranky, Wrinkly, and Swanky, so (despite not being a primate) he's like the lesser members of the Kong family, at least gameplay-wise.
Speaking of Prima, the guide for Kirby 64 described Zero-Two, the game's True Final Boss, as a harmless creature that appeared in one level's background. The entire endgame wasn't even in the guide.
This British newspaper article talks about Metal Gear Solid Rising starring Raiden, "the baddie from MGS2". He may have been unpopular with the fanbase but that's surely taking it a little far...
A report made by the Spanish Women's Instutute called The Sims as that game where you can be mayor and when they do refer to being woman complains that is mandatory to marry, calls Link from Legend Of Zelda an elf and mentions a character disguised as Elvis (?!?) and apparently fails to mention that is a series of games mixing up Wind Waker with Ocarina of Time (and perhaps Majora's Mask as well), fails to mention that ever since the second generation of Pokemon games they have gender, among many other things that falls in a twarted view of RL Straw Feminist.
An online article discussing the E3 demo/preview of Golden Sun DS, supposedly by a lifelong fan of the series, described each of the summons in detail: Nereid, Ramses... "and one that must be new, and looked like a cross between Tiamat and Procne." Naturally, the first fifty or so replies were irritated fans calling the writer out on his bullshit, since Eclipse is the easiest multi-element summon to get in the second game.
I can't remember much about it now, but I saw an article in a British newspaper (think it was the Sunday Times) talking about the then new and upcoming game Kingdom Hearts II. Among numerous other errors, it referred to a picture of Kairi as Sora, referred to Sora as "she" in the caption (yet "he" in the article, as I recall) and said that Sora was "of Final Fantasy fame" when Sora is, of course, an original character created especially for the series. The whole article just made me laugh so much reading it.
This Onion video. The list of "today's hot new post-apocalyptic" video games gets only 2/3 right (Fallout 3, Resident Evil 5 and Terminator Redemption). The last one is a few years old and far from "hot and new".
- To be fair, it's The Onion.
Tycho, one of the people you'd most expect to know better, pulled this in one comic, where he said that Mega Man X was the tenth game in the Mega Man series, with the X as the Roman numeral, only to be corrected by fanmail later in the day.
One would expect mainstream journalists to make this sort of mistake, when online gamestores do it the results can be hilarious. Some of them only Warhammer players will spot, but others are rather more blatant. They've listed player characters as enemies and NP Cs, they've got place names wrong, called an Orc a troll and hilariously, called a Dwarf an Elf.
- Online stores selling "Knights of the Old Republic" claim that you play as freedom fighters fighting the "last war" between the Sith and the Jedi.
"Nintendo Wii is a popular game".
A kid's magazine that briefly reviewed video games, in its review of Wii Sports Resort... showed an image for a much different (and far worse) sports game; one with volleyball (a sport not in Wii Sports Resort) at that.
Nintendo Power's preview for Tales Of Symphonia describes Genis's sister, Raine as "Genis' mom." The siblings' mother appears in an optional side quest. Their mentioning Genis and Raine being half-elves seems like a mistake at first, but ends up spoiling a mid-game plot twist.
Count the number of mass medias who claim Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to be a terrorism simulator just from taking the Wham Level "No Russian" out of context.
The OPM review of Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time contains a reference to Suikoden III as a game that's "noticeably worse than its forebears." III actually received critical acclaim; the author was probably thinking of IV, which was pretty much universally panned.
The School Library Journal's review of Suikoden V seems to have been written by someone who only played the game for a few hours, and thinks that the entire story centers around the Lordlake revolt. It also claims that the game takes place in a "mythical kingdom that resembles Japan." Apparently, Japan has towns designed by bad surreal artists. Not to mention the fact that the review previously referred to the setting as the Queendom of Falena.
- The Washington Times' review of Suikoden Tierkreis is worse—the very fist line refers to Citro Village as part Of Salsabil, a nearby kingdom. The cutscenes are referred to as an "anime cartoon of the Naruto variety," and random battles as the hero "finding hidden enemies."
A few years ago a couple of Belgian teachers started a huge campaign in the news to keep Bully from releasing ... when only the title was announced with a few vague screenshots. They thought the game was about a boy named Bully who has to bully as many people as possible in order to get codes for other levels. Anyone who has touched a game in the last 20 years can tell you that's not how video games work.

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in this blog post, baby-name expert Laura Wittenberg explains how distracting names that reveal that authors Did Not Do The Research (i.e. a Work Com with an entire office full of men in their 30s who have names that are popular now but not so much in The Seventies) have become to her.
- The above example pretty much only fits the trope to said expert alone, since people have been giving themselves and their children odd or out of place names for millennia, and fictional media ain't exactly a bastion of reality in the first place.
The humour in Cracked is often an example on this. You may laugh at how silly the, say, Polish movie posters are, unless, of course, you happen to know that some of the pictures are not movie posters but, say, a comic parodying the film. Or, for that matter, how the Voynich Manuscript is described as undecipherable for all the wrong reasons.
The Agony Booth's review of High School Musical made an error by saying that Ashley Tisdale basically played an identical Libby character on that "awful sitcom The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody". If you're not familiar enough with the show to know that Ashley Tisdale plays the exact opposite character type on that show, you obviously haven't even seen a commercial for it, and probably shouldn't be making judgments about it.
When a school shooting rekindled discussions in Germany about video games being responsible for real life violence, the news broadcast Focus TV showed the infamous clip of the "Angry German Kid", claiming that the footage was secretly recorded by Leopold's father while he got mad playing on his computer. (If you didn't know by now, the clip was staged and recorded by the 'kid himself for the lulz.)

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When Boston was gripped by terrorist Lite Brites, the desperation-born sweat from reporters trying to figure out just what the hell Aqua Teen Hunger Force is was enough to smudge the pages. Most of them came up with variations on "show about anthropomorphic food detective superheroes".
- Even TV Guide's description of the show is "food items fight crime". You try explaining it.
- Well, that was the original premise of the show. For about one episode — the whole reason the first episode portrayed them as a crime fighting team was because the creators couldn't think of a way to explain what the show really was in any way that would get it green-lighted.
Small potatoes given some of the other examples here, but Family Guy is sometimes called "The Family Guy".
- Agent Booth called it this on an episode of Bones, which was a little odd since it was the episode that featured a well-publicized Intercontinuity Crossover appearance by Stewie.
  - Even odder — Stewie was a manifestation of his subconscious, indicating that he must be at least a moderate viewer of the show for it to be on his mind. Yet he still gets the title wrong!
  - This, of course, can be explained away if David Boreanez (Agent Booth's actor) doesn't watch it or is unfamiliar with the show as it's not unheard of for him to rearrange lines or slightly improvise. He might have just associated it with The Simpsons.
  - That might explain it, but the tope is invoked nonetheless.
The Polish video game magazine Secret Service, issue April, 1998. In one article, the author claimed that Wacky Races is a crossover show where "Hanna-Barbera characters such as Yogi, Huckleberry and the Addams family" do racing. Either the author didn't see even one episode of the show, or (more likely) he has seen it, but mistook Blubber Bear for Yogi Bear and the Gruesome Twosome for the Addamses. Or maybe he just got it confused with Fender Bender 500.
- Speaking of Wacky Races, Jerry Beck, a renowned animation historian, claims in his book The Hanna Barbera Treasury that The Perils Of Penelope Pitstop "featured the Ant Hill Mob as her chief rival", when everybody knows that they were in fact her protectors on the show.
The Canadian TV provider Bell Express Vu used to describe the Venture Bros as, "Two teens live as though it is the 1960's even though they are 21st century teens!" The only good thing about this description is that the awkwardness of the sentence structure distracts you from the head-scratching description.
Once, Conan O'Brien made a reference to how "Avadar" Aang and his bison Appa (pronounced like Apple with an a on the end) had to break out of an iceberg to save the world. Then he compared it to Sarah Palin breaking out of Alaska.
- It's rare that you have a reviewer who is tasked excluseively with watching a show fail completely. IGN's Avatar reviewer Tory Ireland Mell actually did fail that badly. Her legendarily bad, unprofessionally written, spoiler filled, completely ignorant review of the season 3 episodes was so bad that comments on the reviews lack of skill forced her to watch several episodes before the finale, the review of which still had all of the same issues, only more glaringly magnified, as it covered the 2 hour finale. In highlighting the Critical Research Failure, we find that this reviewer:
1. Didn't watch the first episodes, otherwise she'd know Katara was the only Waterbender in her family.
2. Completely missed the episode covering Blood Bending.
3. Has no idea that the show develops other characters regularly.
4. Is a Zutaran.
5. Has never seen Zuko vulnerable before (so... Has never seen seasons 2 or 3)
- Another reviewer claimed: "He's supposedly the only one skilled in manipulating all of nature's basic elements. But he isn't. A rival shares his powers." ...what?
  - Note to reviewer: review the actual work in question, not the Mary Sue fanfiction of it.
- Newspaper articles on the upcoming movie adaptation of Avatar The Last Airbender, based on the popular "anime." Jesse McCartney says it was "explosively huge in Asia."
  - The movie will star the eeeeeeeevil Prince Zucko, no less. The news anchor in that same video describes the show's plot as involving "the epic battle between the Fire and Air Nations." Air "nation"?
Much of the print material based on Animaniacs (such as the comic books) used the show's name when directly referring to Yakko, Wakko and Dot, who were always called the Warners in the show. Even some Kids' WB! spots (such as the preview special Welcome Home, Animaniacs!) made this mistake.
- It was on Jeopardy!, too. The answer was "They live in the Warner Brothers water tower." The contestant responded "Who are Yakko, Wakko, and Dot?" He lost. They gave it back to him after the commercial, with Alex professing that he hadn't known that; he learns something new every day.
Much of the printed advertising for Histeria! (even its page on Kids' WB!'s official website) gave Loud Kiddington's name as Loud Kid, which he was never actually called on the show.
- Another Kids' WB! thing — in a promo for "Crazy Takes" ("bloopers") a scene from Jackie Chan Adventures showed Ratso wearing a Hsi Wu mask, but an announcer said, "Ratso, that's not your spot! That's the demon sorceror His Wu's spot!"
The original VHS cover of It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown stated that Charlie Brown was trying to buy a present for the little red-haired girl, when in the actual special, it was in fact for a completely different character named Peggy Jean. This was most likely caused by the fact that the special depicted Peggy Jean as a redhead rather than a brunette as she was in the strip.
In an animation encyclopedia's entry on The Raccoons, Cyril Sneer is called a "pink wolf." (A sidenote oddly then mentions that he "looks like an aardvark." Well duh!)
When The Land Before Time IX was first released, there was a very bizarre review on amazon.com, talking about the film's predeccesor, Time of Much Snow. There has never been a Land Before Time film by that name (although the previous movie, while using the title The Big Freeze, did feature a snowstorm as a major plot point, so it is possible that English was not this person's first language). Also, and even more strange, is when the reviewer talks about the reincarnation of Littlefoot's grandmother. Considering his grandmother never died, one must wonder what this person was smoking.
A recent Weekend magazine said that, in The Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror X, Maggie was the daughter of Kang and Kodos rather than Kang and Marge.
The book Disney Dossiers: Files of Characters From the Walt Disney Studios is full of glaring omissions and mistakes. For example, Aladdin's fact sheet says "Parents: None (orphan)", completely neglecting the fact that him finding out his father was alive was the main friggin' plot of Aladdin and the King of Thieves (which the book also claims came out a year earlier than it actually did). Kuzco's profile also seems to negate the existence of Malina by saying that Kuzco has no "significant other" (even though that does sound like something Kuzco would say about himself). Also, for some reason, Donald Duck's filmography highlights includes the Duck Tales movie (which he wasn't even mentioned in), Timon's last name (Berkowitz) and Scar's real name (Taka) are forgotten, and some of the voice actors for the characters are glaringly omitted (i.e. Cam Clarke for Simba, April Winchell for Cruella De Vil).
There's an alternative ending to the first Road Runner cartoon that the Latin American press is raving about, claiming that the ending was funded by a Japanese millionare who was tired of the Coyote always being the Butt Monkey. The actual footage leaves a lot to be desired. The framerate is obviously a drop from the real footage, the animation is basically a cut-and-paste of the Road Runner and Coyote's poses rearranged and assembled, and there's gratuitous use of O Fortuna. But the kicker has to be the Coyote holding up a sign with the name of the new ending's creator on it for absolutely no reason. How the news media have not picked up on these is inexplicable.
Translation of a Swedish TV-guide's blurb about Danny Phantom: "In the past Danny was a shy child who was hardly noticed. But suddenly one afternoon, when Danny unfortunately burned down his parents' lab, he became a super hero." Er, at least they got the name right?
Let's take a trip back to the early-to-mid 1990s, when Moral Guardians were up in arms about Beavis And Butthead. Not only did South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings infamously refer to them as "Buffcoat and Beaver" (later referenced on the show), the three-part documentary about the series ("Taint Of Greatness") revealed some parents thought there was an episode where the boys set a cat on fire. One can only assume one mother caught a glimpse of the episode where they paint Mr. Anderson's cat and set his hedges on fire, completely mis-saw what happened, and told her friends about it.
Sky (uk satellite TV provider) currently claims that Flapjack was 'raised in a bubble'...right.
- This probably had root in an understandable typo: he was raise by a whale named Bubbie. Someone probably just misread "raised by Bubbie" as "bubble" and went from there.
Whoever wrote the official website for An American Tail probably never watched any of the movies. They describe Tanya as "always getting her brother into some kind of trouble" (which he does just fine on his own), and when they describe Tony Toponi they imply that he's in love with Tanya, which of course is never even hinted at in the movies. Now granted, the site was probably created with the idea that the Viewers Are Morons, which is also sadly reflected in Universal's more recent DVD releases of the movies.
An article on depictions of tobacco and alcohol use in movies for children identifies Lampwick as Lampwit.

Close Western Animation

If people who Did Not Do The Research are writing about Dungeons And Dragons, 99 times out of 100 a reference will be made to a "dungeon master" as though it were something that existed in the game world instead of a fancy name for a referee.
- And then there's Jack Chick, and his infamous "Dark Dungeons," which, among other things, shows D&D to be played pretty much entirely by teenage girls (certainly, while D&D-playing girls are out there, the average group is still predominantly male), makes it seem as if when a character dies, the player is kicked out of the game, and that you can learn real magic by playing.
  - Maybe, if they learned real magic, more teenage girls would play.
  - Let's not go there. Charm Person spells. Players who spend a solid hour making "to hit on" rolls for Diplomacy. Doesn't take Int 18 to figure out that wouldn't end well, If You Know What I Mean.
- This was also averted (!) in (of all places) a Alltel commercial. The Alltel salesman is a cool Everydude, the competitors are Nerds. The Alltel Avatar, after giving the competitors a hard time for the whole 30 second spot, asks them sarcastically, "So, what level is your Dungeon Master?" To which they reply, "Dungeon Masters don't have levels."
  - Or alternately summon the wizard painted on their old van, who just happens to be an Alltel customer and turns one or all of the nerds into frogs.

Close Tabletop Games

Parodied in the comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug, in which a news anchor says, "And now that we have reported this story, we plan to research it as thoroughly as possible."
Numerous examples of people apparently thinking the main character of the comic strip Peanuts was named Peanuts, rather than Good Ol' Charlie Brown. This even showed up in a pop psychological text!

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In the 2009 edition of the calendar The 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said, one contributor attributes the phrase YOUR HEAD A SPLODE to "the video game Homestar Runner" (as opposed to being from a game based on the online animated series), not to mention that the silliness of this choice of words was deliberate and that the incident probably doesn't quite fit the calendar anyway.

Close Web Animation

Is Oasis lying to Sluggy? As the article is attributed to the author, it has to be parody.

Close Webcomics

This is a common way to treat the Furry Fandom; see also Acceptable Targets.
- The "infamous" CSI episode did have a member of the fandom as a consultant, though apparently many of his suggestions were thrown out. The CSI fandom calmly responded to this kerfluffle by pointing out that CSI treats everybody like that. Of course, it wasn't just the sexuality part of the fandom that CSI got wrong, but also depictions of "fursuits", animal costumes worn by a small minority of furs. It failed in scope of the phenomenon, depiction of the suits (latex-lined fursuits which would in real life, suffocate you), and Fridge Logic in the episode itself (if a fursuit was built for sex, how does the suit prevent the victim's blood from spilling out?)
- Exception: this Hartford Advocate article had its writer sneak into a real furry convention, see nothing that she expected to see, and reported honestly on what she did see (hint: it wasn't rampant sex).
  - There is, however, an error in the second paragraph where Ms. Abel confuses transvestites and transsexuals... especially since she brought the "trapped in an X's body" bit into it.
  - And they always "claim" to be "a woman trapped in a man's body". No exceptions.
  - In a vaguely, (read: not at all,) similar situation, I was watching the evening news with my grandfather and then pops up a report on furries. I was mortified and wanted him to change the channel, but he wouldn't. The actual report just talked about the fact that people where dressing up as animals and made no mention of the more scandalous part of the fandom.
- On the subject of furries, there was a news article who followed this trope: They reported the name of the convention Anthrocon as "Arthrocon", effectively ruining the name's meaning since "Arthro" refers to joints (as in arthritis, inflammation of the joints).
  - ...there was a meaning in the first place? "Anthrocon" would just mean a convention of humans, after all.
  - Actually the name of the convention would be shortened from Anthrpomorphic Convention, refering to the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, I.E. furries.
- Hmmm. Arthropods, maybe? Spiderfurry, Spiderfurry, does whatever a Spiderfurry does...
  - I won't be able to sleep tonight, thank you.
- Also, just to beat this into everyone's heads (because even internet nerds occasionally get this wrong)... not all furries wear fursuits. I know of a large portion of the fandom that don't even like them at all and think they are creepy. That is all.
  - I don't think I have ever seen the media ever portray the fandom as anything but "people in mascot costumes". It's sad, especially since at Anthrocon '09, barely more than 1/6th of the attendants wore fursuits.
One episode of the Canadian series Being Erica had this wonderful bit of dialogue:
- "Did you know there's a group of people who like to have sex in animal costumes? They're called plushies."
- And to make things worse, they're talking about a mascot suit... shaped like a shark... thump... thump... thump...
There's actually a handbook for people who want to do this, called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. It's surprisingly informative.
- I haven't read it, but it seemed more like a dadaist parody of a self-help book than anything I might take advice from.
- There's also How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Henry Hitchings.
The Something Awful column "Truth Media" is a parody of this, deliberately making error filled reviews hoping to attract flame wars and posting everything on the site.
In the early days of the Internet, many mainstream journalists wrote screeds against websites like Bonsai Kitten and Penguin Warehouse, believing them to be real. Here's a great example.
According to a local russion newspaper, cosplay is a Japanese fashion style defined by padded shoulders and tight sleeves...
There were a number of news stories on Vladimir Putin's first web chat with the general public. Keep in mind that "the general public" includes "the Internet." Seeing the mainstream media have to find ways to describe questions about Humongous Mecha and Cthulhu was quite something.
Whenever the mainstream media report on Mixed Martial Arts, there is a very high possibility of them getting the details completely wrong. For example, the sport is often referred to as "ultimate fighting" based on the original Ultimate Fighting Championship. This is perhaps due to a misunderstanding of the name's connotations, assuming that the UFC is the championship of "ultimate fighting" rather than the ultimate championship of fighting. Mixed martial artists are also sometimes called "ultimate fighters" for similar reasons, even if they don't fight in the UFC. The UFC even puts on a reality show called The Ultimate Fighter. Overall, the UFC probably doesn't want to discourage their brand name being so strongly associated with the sport.
- It's common to refer to MMA as "human cockfighting." When that term was originally coined, it was in reference to MMA's illegitimacy, not its supposed brutality. Since MMA is now a legitimate, sanctioned sport in many areas, the term no longer applies.
It's also commonly referred to as "cage fighting" to associate it with dogfighting, inferring that the athletes are locked inside the arena and cannot escape from the fight. In truth, many MMA promotions take place in modified boxing rings. It doesn't help that some MMA promotions use the term, such as the WEC, to make themselves sound Bad Ass.
- Many reports are apparently ignorant of MMA's ruleset, often claiming that MMA matches are no-holds-barred and generally emphasizing the violence rather than the numerous restrictions and safety measures. In fact, even the first UFC event, which was billed as having "no rules" did in fact have several rules.
- Mainstream media loves to use the term "bloodsport" in reference to MMA to infer a heightened level of violence, in spite of the fact that boxing, kickboxing, and any traditional martial arts competition would also qualify as a bloodsport.
An NPR broadcast a few years back about the history of many Christmas traditions. Riding around in the truck with my father, a Methodist minister, we were both shocked and amazed to hear their description of the Yule log having originated with child sacrifice, and that "Yule Log" developed from a Norse phrase meaning "Child Log." Hearing my father mouthing "Nooooo! No, no, no, no, no! Ooh, they got it so wrong!" is now something I can't help but remember every time someone posits any offensive, ungrounded "fact" about Christian custom or belief.
- This is especially entertaining since the tradition is primarily Celtic in origin, while the word "yule", as demonstrated by 5 minutes with Google and That Other Wiki, comes from a Norse feast (or so we think).
- Come to think of it, The Bible is probably by leagues the single most common victim of this trope.
- Speaking of the Bible, the idea that the Antichrist is "PROVEN TO BE BARACK OBAMA!!!11!1111!1111!1!!!!" is a cross between this and Poison Oak Epileptic Trees.
  - Joseph Stalin, John F. Kennedy, and, far more commonly than even Obama, Mikhail Gorbachev have been the Antichrist. Gorbachev was an especially popular Enemy Of The Faithful because he had a big birthmark on his forehead.
  - The idea that the Antichrist is a character in the Bible is the result of this trope combined with something like Values Dissonance. Centuries of religious scholars struggling to find something new and fresh to say about Scripture, millenia after the stuff was written, is bound to produce some unusual theories.
An Olympic Games commentator referred to London mayor Boris Johnson as dead Russian ex-President Boris Yeltsin a couple of times, without correction. He fixed it pretty quickly the next time he talked about him...
This article◊ in a Swedish newspaper has become a sort of local meme among Swedish computer geeks. The caption can be translated as: "Andread Hedlund has looked over all thinkable software problems. He has now come to the conclusion that the hardware, the Mother Modem, the heart of the hard drive, isn't working."
This article on Yahoo! Tech blog states that only 1.5% of computer users have DVD-ripping software installed, and only 1% of users actually use it, therefore DVD piracy isn't as big a problem as it's made out out be. Thereby revealing a)the blogger has no idea how piracy works, and b)has no idea how many people have computers. The really sad part is the comments agreeing with him.
- Hey, anything to get the DRM bastards out of my hard drive.
Referring to the internet as "the internets" and similar. Recently Ian Hislop mentioned "The You Tube" on Have I Got News For You.
- Parodied in Top Gear, with quotes like: "If you are lucky enough to live near an internet, why not visit our website, which you can find at...a computer, probably."
- Toby Keith's song "American Ride" also refers to "the You Tube".
- George W Bush famously referred to Google as "the Google" when asked whether he used it.
"Something Awful is a cult that supports drug use, rape, racism, illegal use of firearms, harassment, piracy and child pornography. We exist to expose the cult that is Something Awful and the mastermind behind it Richard Kyanka." [5]
- Yeah. Now if they were talking about /b/ on the other hand...
An article that defined "slash fiction" as stories where fans put other authors' characters into new, imagined situations.
- Well, they certainly are new most of the time. And imagined.
Dublin University student Shane Fitzgerald planted a fake quote about death on famous, recently deceased composer Maurice Jarre's Wikipedia page. For over a month, newspapers were using it as fact before he finally came forward and confessed. Let that be a lesson for you, journalists: Stop using Wikipedia.
In the BBC's nostaligia documentary "I Love 1984", one segment focuses on the Transformers, which debuted in that year. A few seconds features various celebrities talking about Soundwave (the Decepticon communications officer who transforms into a cassette player), while cartoon footage illustrates. Unfortunately, all the footage shown during this piece of commentary instead shows his Autobot counterpart, Blaster (who, unlike several characters who transform into the same thing, wasn't just a Palette Swap).
Can happen for important issues, too. The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, ran an article titled "Iran Eyes Badges for Jews" complete with a picture of jews being persecuted in Nazi Germany. This had many unfortunate consequences as the Prime Minister mistook the story as factual. The Other Wiki has the relevant info here.
Media does, indeed, make palaeontologists (and most scientists) cry. If you know Spanish, half the blog El Paleofreak is devoted to debunk wrong media headlines about dinosaurs, Palaeontology, Evolution and Biology in general.
Anyone who tells you that scientists were fooled by Piltdown Man is either deceived or lying. Even worse, some will even tell you that "scientists made an entire skeleton from a pig's tooth!" First, the reason it took so long for Piltdown Man to be uncovered as a fraud were mainly because archaeology and paleontology were very primitive in the teens. Even then, many of the foremost archaeologists were extremely skeptical, because it didn't fit into the known patterns of human migration (most notably, they didn't match up with the Cheddar Man fossil found a few years earlier). With so little to go on, they didn't have definitive proof that it was a hoax until 1953. On the pig's tooth claim, next to no scientists were hoaxed, and the drawing of "Nebraska Man" was done by an independent artist for a non-scientific magazine. Of course, those spreading these falsehoods more than likely knew better; They Just Didnt Care.
Possibly one of the biggest and most history making examples of this trope is when Alfred Nobel's brother died, but not Nobel. Some journalist thought it was Alfred, who at that time was mainly famous for inventing dynamite. and wrote a SCATHING obituary. Seeing the horror of how he would be remembered after his real death, Alfed founded the Nobel Prize.
In real life, there's at least a few preachers out there bebopping at their computers for the Lord to fight the worshippers of Buddha and Hindu, who lie on beds of nails and light themselves on fire for their pagan gods. Seriously.

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