12th Feb: A new policy is being put in place for TRS threads: Make your case that the name/page is broken in the Opening Post, or the thread will be nuked immediately. See Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Names for what "Make your case" means.
5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
Triple H: Sixty six percent, that's almost better than a half chance for a DX victory! Shawn Michaels: Seventy percent of statistics are wrong, eighty percent of the time. — Monday Night Raw
A TV spot for the film Gamer became an Internet hit when it claimed that "the last time Gerard Butler kicked this much ass was 300 years ago." Yeah, we're pretty sure 300 did not take place in the early 18th century.
A car commercial from the 1990s invoked mankind's desire to handle the "awesome power of the eclipse". Eclipses may look impressive, but they aren't powerful. And we already know how to block the light of the sun.
The Trojan condom slogan: "Evolve". Using a condom prevents reproduction, which is the essential process in evolution.
A Denny's commercial from the '90s had a rooster strutting around to the song "Love Machine" by the Miracles while the narrator explained that their breakfast special is so popular that the demand for eggs is up, the implication being that roosters and hens need to get to work having sex to produce more eggs. Very clever, except that the chicken eggs used for human consumption are unfertilized.
A commercial for Oscar Meyer Franks has a father come home sees his three kids on those electronic gizmos kids use these days. Wanting to spend Quality Family Time he trips the circuit breaker of his house knocking the power out and shutting off the older brother's computer, the younger brother's game console, and the sister's cell phone... wait what?
A commercial for an all natural energy drink from Jamba Juice talks about ingredients in other, "artificial" energy drinks. The problem? Every one of the ingredients that they mention are all natural as well.
A Latin American commercial for a Japanese fair tried to reaffirm almost upon redundancy that the event would have all kinds of Japanese stuff, including Japanese food, Japanese music, anime, manga and so on. Regardless of the numerous memes revolving around anime characters dancing to the beat, Caramelldansen is originally Swedish.
Anime & Manga
One scene in Grappler Baki involved a character who blinded people by pulling out their optic nerves... by sticking a finger into the side of his opponent's neck and pulling said nerve out. The optic nerve, which connects the eye and brain, really has no business being there.
Chess metaphors and motifs are all over the place in Code Geass, but it's pretty clear the writers don't really understand the game very well. For example, in the first episode, there's an old man desperately struggling to win a game against a noble. based on the reactions of everyone watching, he was pretty much screwed until Lelouch showed up and saved his ass. However, looking at the chess board with even a rudimentary knowledge of the game reveals that it was actually pretty even. It could have easily gone either way, so either the old man was an absolute noob or the writers really don't get chess.
In the first chapter of D. Gray-Man, there's a character who had a sister named Claire, who was a nun and was married to a priest. The anime managed to avoid this by taking out all mentions that Marc was a priest and Claire was a nun.
Comic Books
The Mexican cartoonist Rius has made several books against the food industry, in one of them he lists as "dangerous food preservatives" Ascorbic acid and Calcium carbonate.
Also: "Jazz is not an American product; it's 100% African. And by extension, the same thing can be said about Rock"
They make claims like: the Catholic Church was A) behind the creation of various groups and religions that are famously anti-Catholic, and B) behind the assassination of the first Catholic President of the United States.
In-Universe, the ordinarily Genre SavvyAmbush Bug once made a huge error. Seeing a young blonde woman in a familiar costume flying by, Ambush Bug immediately realized that some malevolent magic or Red Kryptonite had turned his "pal" Superman into a girl, and that Superman desperately needed the Bug's help. Somehow, Ambush Bug was completely ignorant of the existence of Super GIRL, who was naturally mystified by the encounter. (Supergirl, In-Universe, was publicly known and quite famous in her own right at the time.) The Bug made up for his Critical Research Failure with a Critical Success at the end of the story, though, immediately recognizing Supergirl in her secret identity.*
Supergirl #16 (1984)
A common one to comics is when people get hit by a laser, and fly backwards as if shot with a bullet, despite lasers holding negligible kinetic force. Compounded of course by the fact that bullets themselves don't actually do this.
The Crisis on Infinite Earths maxi-series suffers from this in its basic set-up: due to an alien Mad Scientist messing with Things Man Was Not Meant to Know at the Dawn Of Time, the universe was split into an infinite number of primarily positive matter universes and a single anti-matter universe. Where things go wrong is when, due to villainous machinations, the positive matter universes start to get wiped out of existence by an "anti-matter wave", and this annihilation somehow strengthens the anti-matter universe and its resident Big Bad while weakening the good guys (and reducing their numbers). Except matter/anti-matter reactions were mutual annihilations, so how is it that the anti-matter universe benefits from the destruction of its positive matter counterparts?
There's also the fact that the anti-matter wave manages to destroy all but a handful of the positive matter universes in a rather short time period, which shouldn't even be possible if there is an infinite amount of them.
Magneto's whole plan in Ultimatum appears to revolve around 1) the Earth's magnetic poles and axial poles being one and the same, and 2) Magneto's ability to shift them causing massive tidal waves and climate change in select areas. Just watch Linkara's Ultimatum review for everything wrong with that scenario.
Fan Fiction
Light And Dark The Adventures Of Dark Yagami contains the line "We sent him to a top secret orphanage in Whales (its a town in England)". Later, it gets worse: the "Tames" River is in England, but Dark falls into it from the "Eyfal" Tower. There is a river in Paris - the Seine, which biforcates Paris - but that's still several "Killmeters" away from the tower. Also, apparently Notre Dame Cathedral is "The Mona Lisa Church". Then, they take The Tube from Paris to England to London and then to Whales, where they fall off a cliff into "Loch Nes". Yeah.
The author of Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, claiming to know Japanese history, declares that he knows that Japan had nukes dropped on it in World War One.
In-story example: The lead in The 40-Year-Old Virgin successfully maintains his farce until mentioning that breasts feel like bags of sand. Which was probably a reference to a common stage practice of making fake breasts by attaching bags of sand to an actor's shoulders, which then hang at chest level. The sag of the sand makes the fake breasts look convincingly real under a costume. If Andy had ever done any theatre in college, this was probably the closest he'd ever come to fondling a breast. Either that or he heard about silicone implants and got confused.
The Phantom Planet features a plot point where atmospheric changes cause the protagonist to first shrink in size, then grow back to normal.
There's also a throwaway line in the movie stating that the planet's inhabitants have been shrinking for centuries due to the planet's gravity.
The Amazing Colossal Man features a scientist who claims that "the heart is made up of a single cell."
Reptilicus gives us this little gem: "It's impossible. The skin tissue of the lizard. The cells seem to multiply like bacteria."
The Day After Tomorrow: They outran a wave of cold that shattered glass and avoided freezing to death by closing a door on it and then standing near a wood and paper fire.
In addition, by some miracle, two small rings of fire on a stove-top somehow was enough to survive the chasing frost despite the fact that the frost was in the room and almost on top of the travelers. They need a lot more heat than that.
And this doesn't even begin to describe the scientific wrong of this film. It could be renamed Critical Research Failure: The Movie!
Hurricanes: They don't form in cold, and they don't spin that way. Also "chasing frost?" They kept making it out to be the big bad but defeat it with a few small fires, never mind that it's feasibly impossible, no matter what special hurricane voodoo we have going on(the explanation was that it was pulling supercooled air into the atmosphere from the upper levels near space, which can't happen anyway).
The film also would have us believe that Friedrich Nietzsche was in love with his sister, which apparently made it OK to burn his books for warmth — the man famously hated his proto-Nazi sister.
The Transformers movie gets a pass for a lot of things based on Rule Of Cool, but a few things are still outright mistakes.
While trapped in the room by Frenzy, Glen is told to hack the computer to get the radio working. He proceeds to turn the monitor around and calls for a screwdriver. If he had been cannibalizing some of the parts (accidentally breaking the vacuum tube aside), it may have made some sorta vague sense. But he doesn't.
In the second movie they go to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, just outside of Washington, D.C. which is fine, as it really exists. However, in the movie they open up a large door and walk out into an airplane graveyard with mountains in the background and no trace of the low hills and forests of the Northeast United States anywhere. The scene was actually filmed in Tucson, Arizona.
The tagline of the film Biggles is "Meet Jim Ferguson. He lived a daring double-life with one foot in the 20th century and the other in World War One." Anyone who knows when World War One occurred should see the problem.
In Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd's husband fakes his death and frames her for the murder. After being paroled, Judd sets out to find her husband and murder him for real, but now with legal impunity, since she "can't be tried for the same crime twice" according to the 5th Amendment protection against double jeopardy. The problem is that these would legally be considered as two different crimes that just happen to have the same perpetrator and victim. Of course she could sue and get credit for the first wrongful conviction, but not immunity.
In Resident Evil: Extinction the T-Virus somehow dries up every river and sea in the world. It doesn't evaporate or anything, it's just gone.
In the first movie, the supercomputer Red Queen explains how zombies reanimate, saying that since hair and nails continue to grow after death, there's enough cellular activity in the body to jump-start a corpse. Problem is, hair and nails DON'T keep growing after death. This is not only part of the movie's entire rationale for having zombies at all, but is spoken by a supercomputer supposedly housing vast collections of knowledge and data.
Of course, they completely contradict their own established reasoning for zombies by the second movie, when the dead start to rise from a graveyard... presumably long after the 'cellular activity' would have long since stopped.
Roland Emmerich's latest disaster movie 2012: this trailer for the film refers to the Mayans as "mankind's earliest civilization" within the first ten seconds. The Chinese, Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks, and Egyptians say otherwise.
Not to mention that the Mayans existed in North and Central America, which were naturally one of the last places to be populated on Earth.
And that the entire plot is based in neutrinos magically starting to "mutate" into a completely different type of particle. That interacts with the inside of the planet but does not affect anything on the surface. Yeeeaaaahhh...
In Patch Adams, the title character is ranting at God after love interest Carin dies. At one point, he laments that of all the creatures on Earth, humans are the only ones who kill their own kind. Really, Patch? Ever watch the Discovery Channel? It'd be more accurate to say that humans are the only ones who feel bad about it.
Addressed in Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese:
Mike Nelson:I hate to kick a man when he's down, but you're quite wrong, future doctor Hunter "Patch" Adams. I think the Black Widow Spider Council might have something to say about that.
While much of the "science" in What The BLEEP Do We Know is pretty bad, the movie got a F in the "biology" section with the magnificent statement "the cell is the basic unit of consciousness". Not the brain cell. The cell.
It also states that since the Native Americans that met the first explorers had never seen an ocean-faring vessel before, they could not comprehend it and thus could not see it - only the disturbance it made in the water, until their chieftain figured it out. Facepalm.
In Matilda, Matilda's parents and brother have to run from the cops. In the book, they're British and go to Spain. In the movie, they're American and go to the U.S. territory of Guam. Potentially Fridge Brilliance in that Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood aren't too bright. They may not realize that Guam isn't a foreign country but rather part of the United States. It's heavily implied that they were tricked into going there by an FBI agent. So it's an in-story CRF at least.
In End of Days, a priest explains that the reason that the Revelation of Saint John gives 666 as the Number of the Beast is that in his vision, he saw "1999" (the year of the birth of the Antichrist) upside down. Because a Greek of the 1st century AD would have known Arabic numerals, right? (The Greeks of the time in fact used a numeral system with letters standing for numbers.)
Note also that some ancient sources show the Number of the Beast as 616, not 666.
In Suburban Commando, Hulk Hogan's character is coaching a kid playing a game where he needs to save the universe. Problem is, the game that he's playing isn't about saving the universe, it's AFTERBURNER, a game clearly set on Earth using jet fighters.
The film version of Ray Bradbury's classic A Sound of Thunder has a series of "time waves" mutating all life on Earth, in order, from oldest to most recently evolved. That's bad enough, but a fairly common misconception, and even the baboonosauruses require a certain amount of explanation as to why they're an example of Artistic License - Biology. Then, the scientist tells us that humans will be affected last, being, apparently, the most recently evolved. ACHOO!
The Ben Stiller movie Night at the Museum features exhibits of cowboys, Romans, Confederate soldiers, Christopher Columbus, and other historic figures (including Sacajawea as a major plot point). Too bad its located in the Museum of Natural History in NYC, which only deals with artifacts that are, you know, natural. There are no exhibits in the real museum from any culture more advanced than the Neolithic era, as anyone who even casually walked through the museum once would realize.
Casually walked through may be exactly the problem. On a casual stroll, you see the giant canoe, and it may not be obvious that they were happy to collect Eastern Woodlands artifacts but not generally things from people who were writing their own history.
Hey, FernGully? We've got a few problems here, the main one being that the logging industry is not the biggest threat to the rainforests and the vast majority of the deforestation threat is not concentrated in Australia. Thank you and goodbye.
Mt Warning is pretty much the centre of the Mt. Warning National park (Established in 1967). Not only that, but the park itself is a part of the Gondwana National Parks of Australia, which is a World Heritage Site.
Also, Robin Williams' character Batty Coda is a fruit bat who has been used in cosmetic, biological, and various other animal tests. Fruit bats are a protected species across the entirety of Australia.
Elektra, starring Jennifer Garner. "The sai is an offensive weapon. For killing." No it's not. It's a defensive weapon for disarming and breaking swords. A sai is capable of some pretty horrific damage against someone, but most people treat it like a knife, when it's a blunt instrument. Furthermore, it has a history as a farm and fishing implement. It only became a weapon due to a historical quirk (peasants designing fighting styles based on tools because they were forbidden to own swords by the ruling samurai who used them-hence sword-breaking weapons were made).
Among other insane elements, Jaws: The Revenge has a shark and an airplane leaving one location at roughly the same time, and the shark getting to the destination faster.
Not only that, but the shark is traveling AGAINST the Gulf Stream. And there's that little bit about the shark roaring...
The novel version's novel explanation is that the shark was a Voodoo Shark. Just don't ask about the means or motive for putting a voodoo curse on a shark.
Latter day Return of the Living Dead movies still invoke trioxin as the reanimating chemical, but the zombies go from being unstoppable (a major point of the franchise is that Our Zombies Are Different, and immune to headshots, and even survive dismemberment) to Made of Plasticine. This is especially confusing when we see tricked out, militarized, cyborg zombies who are inexplicably much easier to dispatch than the normal ones from the first movie.
The original film also claimed that rigor mortis starts in the brain. Rigor mortis is a phenomenon that exclusively affects skeletal muscle tissue, of which the brain contains zilch.
Coleman: Let me see, you would be from Austria. Am I right? Ophelia: No, I am Inga from Sweden. Coleman: Sweden? ...But you're wearing Lederhosen.
In the second Die Hard movie, the villains' plan involves shutting down air traffic control at Washington Dulles International Airport so as to prevent interference with his plot. This creates drama via the fact that a lot of planes are unable to be given instructions to land at the airport, so they're all circling the airport with dwindling fuel supplies. There's just one problem: FAA regulations state that all airline flights must carry enough fuel to divert to another major airport close by in case of an emergency, like the one depicted in the film. The film takes place in Washington D.C. There are two major airports in DC (Dulles and Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport), Baltimore is close by, not to mention Andrews Air Force Base, which could work in a pinch. Newark, Philadelphia and New York City aren't a terribly long distance away either. In short, the suspense of the movie never should have happened.
In Flight Of The Living Dead (a.k.a. Plane Dead), the agent responsible for turning people into zombies is a genetically engineered version of the "malaria virus". Yes, that's right, virus. Malaria is probably the most well-known parasitic disease in the world, and has been known to be caused by a parasite since the 1880s...
In Plan 9 from Outer Space, Eros informs the heroes that "a particle of sunlight contains many atoms." Wow. Where to even begin on that?
The writers of the film Cyberbully apparently don't have any idea how the internet works.
Armageddon is so filled with these that NASA regularly challenges its new engineers to view the movie and point out as many physics errors as they can find.
Literature
In Breaking Dawn, Edward and Bella's honeymoon takes place on an island off of the west coast of Brazil. *
Also in Twilight, Carlisle is mentioned finding a colony of vampires living in the sewers of London, despite his youth taking place over 200 years before underground sewers were constructed. This isn't as easy to excuse as the burning witches (not done, but popularly perceived to have been), but about as easy to excuse as the coming of the Commonwealth suddenly causing Catholics to be persecuted, as if the prior 130 years of Catholic oppression had never happened. Stephenie Meyer has infamously bragged about doing as little research as possible, so every book is crammed to the gills with jaw-dropping moments of garbled half-remembrances from high school.
Rosalie Cullen's backstory, also from Eclipse. Rosalie states that her father "had a stable job in a bank" and that "in our home, it was as if the Great Depression was only a troublesome rumor". Problem: BANK JOBS WEREN'T STABLE. 4,000 commercial banks and 1,700 savings & loans failed in 1933 alone, the year that Rosalie died. In fact, by 1933, 11,000 of the United States' 25,000 banks had failed. Toss in the fact that even functioning banks were carrying crushing loads of debt and foreclosures, that bank accounts and savings & loan accounts were not then insured by the federal government, that customers could panic and cause a run on a bank at any time, and that this was the era of notorious bank robbers such as Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and the Barker-Karpis gang, and it's clear that no one in a bank would have a particularly stable job, much less be in a position to ignore the Great Depression.
In Christopher Pike's book The Secret of Ka, the first thirty pages (and maybe more) are full of basic, basic errors. As a simple example, there is no desert outside of Istanbul - Istanbul is right on the water, in fact. (There's no desert outside of Ankara either, in case you were wondering.) It manages to get worse from there.
If that wasn't enough, Istanbul is likewise portrayed as a city of nightly conflicts, much like the Gaza Strip (it's not) and the capital of Turkey (it's really, really not).
Seriously, the opening pages read like a geography-class exercise where you're supposed to circle everything that's wrong. The narrator is scolded for saying "hell" and "Christ" because she's in an Arab country. 1) Turkey isn't an Arab country. 2) Presumably what Pike had in mind was "Islamic country", since he goes on to portray Turkey as a theocracy where the genders are segregated and women wear face-covering veils — too bad "Arab" doesn't mean "Islamic" or "Muslim", and too bad Turkey adheres to a model of secularism that has famously made very deliberate attempts to Westernize, notable among them being a ban on wearing hijab in public buildings, such as universities. 3) Even if none of this were the case, exactly why swearing in English or taking Jesus' name in vain would be an offense in Bizarro Saudi Arabian Turkey remains a mystery.
Digital Fortress: The entire NSA was scrambling around trying to figure out the answer to a simple riddle that anyone who took high school chemistry could easily figure out. Never mind that the answer to said riddle printed in the book is wrong.
The book extensively depicts a country with about the same HDI as the USA as a 3rd world hell hole. (Spain, and the city of Seville.) The descriptions of the country and the city were not merely insulting, they were infuriating. At least other authors admit they never investigated the place they write about, but Brown dares to lie saying he has been in Seville and has done his research of the city. For starters, Spaniards can have normal wounds treated in hospitals, thank you very much.
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville/Ishmael consistently asserts that whales are fish. There's a whole chapter on it. He goes on to warn of those who might lead the reader astray through talk of mammals and the like, which he counters with, "Come on guys, they're totally fish."
Lucy Hawking's The Accidental Marathon has a few of these. A police artist, when she became successful as a contemporary artist, quit her job and "breathed a sigh of relief that she would never have to lift a set of fingerprints...again". That would be part of the job of a fingerprint expert, not a police artist, however.
Jacqueline Rayner's Doctor Who novel, The Last Dodo, features "Mervin, the missing link between fish and mammals", which is just what it sounds like it should be. The thing is, we already know the steps between fish and mammals — they're best known as amphibians and reptiles.
In The Catcher in the Rye, this is used in-universe when Holden Caulfield writes a paper about ancient Egypt, which reads thus: "The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere. The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century." That is the whole paper. Holden also wrote a note blatantly telling the teacher that that was all he knew and that he couldn't pay attention in class.
And of course the title of the book comes from Holden mistaking a line from the song "Comin' Through the Rye"; he thinks it's "If a body catch a body comin' through the rye", but it's really "If a body meet a body comin' through the rye."
There's a Star Trek book in which the author tried to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius merely by subtracting 32, without dividing by 1.8 afterwards. As a result, a supposedly perfect paradise planet is said to have a mean surface temperature of a "pleasant 50 degrees centigrade". That's 122 degrees Fahrenheit. (For comparison purposes, the average July temperature high in Death Valley in 2009 was 47 degrees Celsius.)
In one Farscape tie-in novel, the heroes' escape depends on Rygel's helium farts exploding. But of course, it must have been metastable helium! Though not in itself a Critical Research Failure, the existence of helium farts themselves suggests interesting things about the character's metabolism.
The Song Of Roland is a classic piece of literature. It also claims within the first few pages that Muslims worship "Apollin" (who is either Apollo or Apollyon (or both)), which makes this Older Than Print. Early medieval troubadours didn't have access to Wikipedia, or even tvtropes.org. All they had was garbled traveler's tales, accounts written by classical travelers, and the knowledge of what makes a good story. They worked with what they had, which wasn't extensive. It is also claimed that Charlemagne is 200 years old.
In The Pendragon Adventure we have, in the first book, a description of Mark's wall. Which apparently has a poster of a "colorful Hentai-animation superhero cartoon". Mark's female friend Courtney doesn't seem to have any problem with this. To be fair, however, later books (as well as reprints of the first book) correct this, simply referring to them as "anime posters."
In The BFG, the eponymous Big Friendly Giant goes on a rant about how Humans Are Bastards because they're the only species that kill members of the same species. In reality, intraspecies killing (and cannibalism) has been common in many animals other than humans. But it's justified because the character lives in a magical realm in a cave in the sky, so he knows little about our world. Plus he gets proven wrong when the other giants try to kill him.
While Ring World is a hard sci-fi classic, the author gets the rotation of the Earth wrong in the first chapter, by having the hero teleport eastward around the Earth in order to extend his birthday. Eastward, towards sunrise. This is fixed in later editions.
Niven also made many errors regarding the design of the Ringworld itself. These were pointed out to him at a convention by hardcore fans, and he Retconned their solutions into the next book into the series.
In-universe on the part of the computer team in David Brin's The Postman (remember this is the book, not the movie), the Postman realizes that the supercomputer isn't all it says when he realizes that the lights on a super computer blink the same pattern over and over again.
Angels and Demons, while famed for a sister trope has an example. The book claims that the Catholic Church copied communion (eating God) from the Aztecs. Even a prepubescent child knows: The landmass the Aztecs were from, the landmass Europe is on and that neither Leif Ericson (~1005) nor Columbus (1492) reached the land for over a millennium after Christianity originated, and can conclude Brown is once more typing with his ass (The Aztecs first popped up in the 14th century anyways).
In the Jack Reacher series novel, Running Blind (released in some locales as The Visitor), the killer's method of murdering his victims is to hypnotize them into completely complying with their own murder. Even laymen know that hypnotism just does not work that way.
From Weird Michigan: "Customers looking for a summer ice-cream treat don’t need to worry; there is no hemlock (the drink Aristotle did himself in with) in the soft-serve cones at the Hemlock Whippy Dip." If you don't already know why this is a problem, which I doubt you don't, see Socrates’ Very Own Page.
"What the fuck are these people talking about?" my attorney whispered. "You'd have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!"
In Matthew Reilly's Seven Deadly Wonders, The Victory of Samothrace is apparently the same Nike who sat in the right hand of Zeus, despite it being found on Samothrace (hence the name) and not at Olympia, and being made out of marble and not ivory and bronze. And despite ballet having originated from France and Italy, and it having specific names for every movement and position, a "toe move" is an accepted step, and a ten year-old can learn it (as well as the complicated and injury-fraught art of ballet) with the guidance of nothing but the TV. One of the characters, in fact, mentions that she's way too good for someone who's self taught.
In the '70s horror novel The Sentinel, author Jeffrey Konvitz talks about translating Paradise Lost from the "original Latin".
Used in-universe in Gordon Korman's Son of the Mob 2. Vince is heading off to film school in California with his girlfriend and best friend and decides to chronicle their roadtrip in script form. His girlfriend immediately points out one minor problem: he has them driving west into the rising sun.
In Night of the Wolf by Alice Borchardt (sister of Anne Rice), the claim is made that wolves do not mate for life. This has been proven repeatedly to be false - they do. Meanwhile, one character in the book is repeatedly described as an Amazon, but that same character talk about the men and women of her people living together in harmony...something that never happened among the Amazons, who used men for breeding stock and occasional slave labor, but never lived in harmony with them.
While that's the original depiction of Amazons, they did not actually enslave men as breeding stock. This is because they didn't exist. This is more of a case of Our Amazons Are Different.
In Jurassic Park, the finale of the book has the military of Costa Rica firebomb Isla Nublar to prevent the dinosaurs from escaping. Problem. Because Costa Rica has no military. Not even a little one.
In any Clive Cussler book, one can usually assume the information about diving and marine salvage is reasonably accurate. Beyond that, anyone who knows anything about a subject will shake their heads in complete disbelief. Among others, the novel Atlantis Found if full of such howlers, including having Hudson Bay formed by a comet impact in 7120 BC. For reference, the Chicxulub impact structure, caused by the asteroid that ended the Mesozoic and killed off the non-avian dinosaurs is 180 km across. The largest known impact structure on Earth is Vredefort, at 300km across. Hudson Bay is over 1000 kilometers across. Something that big would easily have wiped out most of the surface life on the planet, including humans.
Invoked in Harry Potter. A Comic Relief book about magical beasts in the Harry Potter universe mentions a Kappa, and states it's Japanese. One of Harry's notes next to it says "Snape hasn't read this book either", since one book has Snape say that Kappa are Mongolian.
Sisterhood series by Fern Michaels: The series has some inaccurate information that reviewers on Amazon.com were more than happy to clear up. The book Vendetta has the Vigilantes punish the hit-and-driver John Chai with caning. Their idea of this is to tie him up, take a whip-like cane made of bamboo, and whip him with it until he's skinned alive! What needs to be pointed out here is that the cane is usually made of rattan, not bamboo, because contrary to myth, bamboo is unsuitable, as it is too brittle and rigid, and easily breaks and cuts the flesh. While it is possible for particularly heavy canes to leave scars that last for years, normal canes, while painful at the time, would leave only reddish welts or bruises lasting a few days.
The book Free Fall has a major instance of this. Japan is depicted as a Third World Country that sells kids to Americans for 100 American dollars, has a village with a description that would not fit in Real Life Japan, as well as old couples who smoke opium, consider cities to be evil, and consider the USA to be "the land of the golden roads". Japan is not a third-world country (Captain Obvious...hopefully). It has not engaged in the practice of selling kids to foreign countries. Japanese people don't smoke opium, because opium is in China. Japan has a lot of cities, so it would make no sense for Japanese people to consider cities evil. Japan would certainly not consider the USA "the land of the golden roads". Also, it seems the book Vendetta has Chinese people wearing the kimono, which is a Japanese garment and not a Chinese garment. Indeed, the author clearly thinks China equals Japan, which would be like saying USA equals Canada if you think about it!
One volume of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader had what was supposed to be a list of funny answers given on Family Feud, but most (if not all) actually came from the British version, Family Fortunes. Somehow, the fact that one of the questions was "a job that requires a torch" (British English for what Yanks call a "flashlight") never tipped off the writers.
Live-Action TV
Boston Legal, to the extent that chronicling them would take its own wiki. Lawyers routinely meet with judges without the presence of opposing counsel, evidence that has nothing to do with the case is introduced, the closing arguments frequently have nothing to do with the case, and the same firm occasionally represents both sides in a case. Or, we could be talking about Ally McBeal here. However, the law firm is shown to be "functionally corrupt" and generally lacks a LOT of morals and standards, which makes their attempts to do this sort of thing fairly unsurprising. Why every single other person in the entire bloody legal system plays by the same rules, on the other hand...
The Weakest Link research team proved itself the weakest link when the question was asked to a contestant "Montreal is the capital city of which Canadian province?" They claimed the answer was Quebec, while in fact the correct answer is none. Quebec City is the capital of Quebec, as Montreal has not been the capital city of the province since its parliament was burned down during a riot in 1849. Anyone who uses Google for more than porn searches could have found that critical detail in under 10 seconds.
The same show also had a episode with the question 'In which century did the First World War take place, the nineteenth or the twentieth' and gave the right answer as 'the nineteenth'. Perfectly excusable if you're rattling off dates and forget momentarily that the 1900s is not the same as the 19th century, but not if you're typing up questions for a game show, which should be double- and triple-checked before they air.
In the recent season of the American Big Brother, Julie Chen says that that's probably the first time Jordan won Head of Household. Actually; she won Head of Household twice the previous time she was on. Even if you don't count the first time (Which Jeff threw for her), she still won the final one by herself.
The "New Earth" episode of Doctor Who: Everything about the New Humans. They each carry "every disease in the universe" (which somehow amounts to a few puny thousand or so). Not only are the diseases somehow able to coexist in the body, they are passed on in full, infection and symptoms and all, by tactile interaction, instantly. Forget about incubation periods or the fact that it takes time for cells in the body to become damaged enough for external symptoms to manifest. And that's not even half as ridiculous as to how they get cured: The Doctor takes the cures ("intravenous solutions") to every single one of those diseases, mixes them together and sprinkles a few of the New Humans with the resulting cocktail, who are cured instantly, all their symptoms disappearing and the boils healing in a second, and then pass the cure on to those still infected, who are likewise cured instantly. Putting aside the ridiculousness of the whole "instantly" thing mentioned earlier, you can't just mix the different cures together and still expect them all to work separately and not disrupt each other, or worse, combine into something that will kill the patient. There's a reason you're supposed to be very careful when taking different kinds of medicine together. For another, the cure (which most likely consists of antibodies or chemicals) isn't something that's infectional by itself and can get "passed on". In short, shame on you, "Doctor".
Doctor Who often plays fast and loose with science in this way - especially in episodes written by Steven Moffat. For example, Amy is once told to close her eyes in order to turn off the vision center of her brain. Obviously Moffat has never dreamt with his eyes shut?
Not as bad as you think. The change in activity in the visual cortex is so pronounced that it's used to calibrate EEG measurements. Opening and closing the eyes rapidly shifts the visual cortex from beta to alpha brain waves. That may have been what the doctor intended.
Actually it was Moffat's predecessor Russel T Davies who couldn't write science to save his life. In addition to the afformentioned episode (yeah, "New Earth" was his), in "The End of Time" he had the Doctor take an alien spacecraft moving fast enough to dogfight with modern missiles, direct it straight up with no apparent loss of speed, turn to give a several second knowing look to his companion of the episode, then jump out of the ship. With no parachute. Yeah. He plunged through a glass ceiling and onto a marble floor about 50-100 feet below... and he's not only not dead, he's just stunned. Even setting aside what a sharp turn at those speeds would involve, or the pinpoint accuracy he manages to achieve... how the hell did he survive that!? Even if the ship did slow down, it was still going considerably faster than terminal velocity and thus— basic physics here— he was moving at terminal velocity when he hit the glass. This is a critical research error on two counts because not only is there no explanation of how he survived, the doctor has died from falling damage before. This is not even the only incomprehensible science failure in the episode, but the rest pales in comparison to forgetting that falling from a great height is lethal.
The Asylum movie Mega Fault. The premise is that a giant earthquake opens a crack in the ground that stretches from the east coast of the US to the Grand Canyon. This one has a lot of cracks following people down roads.
In the first episode of Heroes Volume Four, several of the characters find themselves on board an airplane that undergoes a rapid cabin depressurization at altitude. Anything or anyone that isn't tied down naturally starts flying out the hole, and the plane experiences massive turbulence. The Critical Research Failure bit is where the effects of the depressurization continue for the entire duration of the plane's descent. Even when it's less than 500 feet off the ground.
How about the book of a biology professor claiming that the right combination of genes could do things that blatantly break the laws of physics, much less biology. Or how about the son of said professor seeming to believe natural selection worked by destiny, randomly selecting an individual to be awesome, instead of gradually weeding out unfavorable mutations, allowing better mutations a better chance to survive? Or his statement that individuals with beneficial mutations have to fight harder than other people to survive? In fact, almost any time someone mentions evolution, you can bet it will be entirely wrong.
NCIS plays it pretty loose with science and technology, but one glaring example stands out. During one episode their computer network is being hacked by someone. Abby madly taps at her keyboard to try and counter this but isn't fast enough. So McGee jumps on the other side of the keyboard and they madly tap away at the same time. Unless anti-hacking software somehow involves a mini-game with a two player mode then they aren't going to accomplish anything. Not to mention the simplest solution being a phone call to their IT support with orders to unplug their network.
The episode Kill Screen is full of this and failing to do research. Some of the mistakes are only apparent to people with gaming or software development experience. Others are Hollywood Hacking. However, the final race against time to stop an automated hacking attempt against the Pentagon is not only extremely implausible but completely unnecessary. They could have just have the Pentagon IT people shut down outside Internet access until they found and neutralized the source of the attack. The technophobic Gibbs is the only one doing things in a pragmatic way that would work in reality.
Also anyone who has ever sat though a lengthy software installation knows that progress bars are wildly inaccurate and using one as an accurate countdown clock is just silly.
The team routinely drives up and down Virginia multiple times an episode, which may possible for a state Virginia's size, if pretty much all they did through the entire episode was drive.
And again, on the premiere episode of the ninth season, McGee suggests a fun gaming lounge that the team can go to, saying it has "3D, PS2 and a 60" plasma." Even people with just a passing knowledge in video games knows that a PS2 was old almost half a decade ago and never ran 3D, let alone high-definition.
Another in-character example: when Rick of The Young Ones is trying desperately to recall his history lessons, he finishes the statement "Crop rotation in the 14th century was considerably more widespread after..." with "1172". Which isn't even in the 14th century.
Steel is very impossible to "mine". "West Germany, famously a bunch of cheats" references East Germany's history with performance-enhancing drugs. And "Cricket? 'Ere in Yorkshire?" makes no sense as cricket is really popular in Yorkshire.
The Ashes isn't a tournament with "second rounds" and "semi-finals". It's a revered test cricket match between the national teams of England and Australia. The West Indies, the Dallas Cowboys (an American football team), West Germany (a country that ceased existing for 17 years at the time of airing and in which most people have no idea what cricket actually is) and Pisswiddle Steel Batters are ineligible. Manchester United is an association football team.
The state that 17 years before the airing of the episode was called West Germany at least still existed, if larger in a way that made specifying it as West Germany nonsensical. Yugoslavia, on the other hand...
Michell and Webb have a whole series of skits based on two screenwriters who never, ever, do any research. The medical drama in particular is hilarious.
There's also the archaeologist who makes the incredible find of an ancient Roman...videotape. It appears to show several people having a toga party, but he and other researchers talk about the incredible discoveries they're making, while one stares at them in disbelief, and eventually brings up the obvious. He's then guilt-tripped into going along with it.
Just look up a strategy guide online. Most of them are loaded with spoilers.
On Charmed, references are made to "ancient Wiccan" symbols, rituals, etc. Anyone who Googles Wicca, or even scans the first few pages of a "basics of Wicca" book would known that Wicca was officially founded in 1930 by Gerald Gardner. It does incorporate elements of ancient religions, but Wicca in and of itself is not ancient.
The problem is that a great many Wiccans believe in a highly romantic version of their religion's history, arguing that Wicca goes back to the Stone Age and was in fact humanity's first religion.
In an early episode of Grey's Anatomy there is a patient who needs a porcine valve replacement. Except, she's an Orthodox Jew and she can't have a pig valve in her heart! Except that if anyone had bothered to look it up they'd find out that there is only a prohibition against eating pigs, not on cooking them or deriving benefit from them. And even if there were there is another law that says other than idolatry, murder or perverse sexual acts, Jewish laws can be broken to preserve life.
Also, she's an Orthodox Jew but her rabbi is a woman.
The BBC programme Movie Mistakes somehow mixed up the order of the famous The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, naming Two Towers as the third and Return of the King as the second.
Maybe they looked at Leonard Maltin's famous film guide, where Return... is listed before Two Towers - but that's because they're in alphabetical order.
An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation has a character describe Picard as being "two metres tall". That's over 6ft 6in! Patrick Stewart is no more than 5ft 10in, and even the remarkably tall Jonathan Frakes (Riker) and Michael Dorn (Worf) are significantly shorter than that, even factoring in Worf's Klingon forehead. The writer clearly didn't know the metric system.
Retconned in Picard's last appearance, Star Trek: Nemesis- Picard and his clone both lament not having reached two meters tall.
In the 2000 TV series The Invisible Man, Darien's surface temperature drops below freezing when he turns invisible. The reason given is that no light is hitting him. Clearly, we must all be freezing to death in our sleep every night.
Actually there's a fair bit of heat carried by infra-red radiation, which is emitted measurably by basically any object that's at room temperature. And we would be colder if we weren't absorbing any. It's emitted perfectly well in the dark. Admittedly we also have convection and conduction to consider as well.
Reviews On The Run's 2010 Blu-Ray award special gave the best voice actor to Kevin Conroy for his performance in Batman: Under the Red Hood. While Conroy voiced Batman in the DCAU and for some other projects, a quick IMDB check reveals Bruce Wayne's part to actually be held by Bruce Greenwood.
After being criticized for showing a rabbi singing and dancing along to the eponymous gospel song in the Babylon 5 episode "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place", JMS claimed he hadn't realized it was pretty much a New Testament-exclusive song. One wonders if he ever actually listened to it, since it's a song about sinners trying to avoid the wrath of God on Judgement Day, and name-checks Jesus repeatedly.
One assumes that JMS was trying to make a point about religious unity. The Muslim imam was also pretty enthusiastic—to say nothing of the various aliens, most of whom have their own religious, too.
An odd song choice if so, since it's a gleeful ditty celebrating the misery of heathens and sinners getting their just desserts for not accepting Christ as their savior.
As to that, the lyrics do fit well (in a morbidly humorous way) with the shots of Refa running for his life that are taking place concurrently with the song.
News magazine show Inside Edition ran a story about the "Real-LifeBonnie and Clyde". Apparently, the Inside Edition team didn't know that Bonnie and Clyde were real people and not just from a movie.
The Spinosaurus from Monsters Resurrected; it's shown effortlessly killing every other animal in it's habitat, slashing a Carcharodontosaurus and later a Sarchosuchus in the face with it's claws, killing them (despite the fact it would have taken alot more than that to kill them, and the latter even had bony plates protecting its skin). The narrator says that a Carcharodontosaurus could never kill a Spinosaurus, when in real life it was probably more often the other way around. But the worst example of all is when a Spinosaurus holds a Rugops in its mouth, despite the fact Rugops is 30 feet long, while Spinosaurus is said to be 60 feet long. After this, it's already trivial to mention that the "Rugops" doesn't really look like a Rugops either.
Charles Kuralt's On The Road once showed a young girl who had taught a pig to swim. This was shortly followed by a flurry of letters explaining that all pigs can swim from birth.
A July 26, 1975 telecast of ABC's reboot of the game show You Don't Say! had host Tom Kennedy entreating Atlanta GA viewers to watch for panelist Linda Kay Henning who was appearing in a show in Atlanta at the time. The problem: You Don't Say! didn't clear in Atlanta at the time and wouldn't for a couple of weeks.
The Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers episode "Return of the Green Ranger" features the Rangers going back in time to the late 1700s, where Angel Grove is a colonial town filled with British soldiers. Angel Grove is in California, which was originally ruled by Spain, and wasn't inhabited by Americans until the mid-1800s. Though considering the key demographic of the show, it may be a case of They Just Didn't Care.
The Taiwanese adaptation of The Million Pound Drop is most likely rigged, with the show frequently giving a blatantly false "correct" answer that always happens to be one that the contestants left empty. One particularly obvious incident was when they claimed the correct answer to "Which of these animals is warm-blooded?" was salmon.
On January 18, 2012, the commercials for Entertainment Tonight previewed a story about the Concordia cruise ship capsizing disaster, which they called "The Real LifeTitanic". One would think the real-life Titanic would be, well, the Titanic.
Music
Any song that uses "Romeo and Juliet" to say their love is perfect. It's not as if the source material is that hard to find (and it's required reading in a vast majority of high schools). Romeo and Juliet's love wasn't perfect, it was hasty, shallow, and blind. The whole point of the play is basically that kids make incredibly stupid decisions when it comes to romance. Shakespeare, you sardonic bard you. The idea that the two teenagers were perfect and their parents were stupid probably originates from high-school readers.
Beautifully averted, however (that is, to say, researched perfectly), in Liam Kyle Sullivan's song No Booty Calls as alter-ego Kelly, in an exchange between her ex-boyfriend and herself:
Neil: Baby, all I wanna do is make you sweat. Let me be Romeo to your Juliet. Kelly: Okay, drink some poison and I'll stab myself. You'd know that story if you ever took a book off a shelf!
Also averted by Mindy McCready's "Oh Romeo":
Oh Romeo/Who would lay down her life?/Swallow the poison, pick up the knife/Maybe I cried/Just a teardrop or two/I would not die for you/I would not die for you...
(Don't Fear) The Reaper by Blue Öyster Cult treats the idea of a Romeo and Juliet fantasy pretty accurately. Two people want to be together forever? It's as easy as killing yourselves. You know, all suicide pacty.
Technically, the song is not about a suicide pact, but about the idea love can endure in the afterlife.
The term "star-crossed" (as in "star-crossed lovers") doesn't mean "perfect", or "fated", or anything like that. It means pretty much the opposite; that fate was throwing everything it had at them to make sure this shit didn't happen, and they were going ahead with it anyway, fate be damned.
Neil Young has a song called "Cortez the Killer", in which he praises the pacifist and egalitarian... Aztecs!? Seriously, he comes right out and says "Hate was just a legend, / And war was never known" while he's talking about one of the bloodiest civilizations in human history. He also says they "lifted many stones" and "built up with their bare hands / What we still can't do today." So, which early 16th century Aztec stone buildings were unmatchable by 1970s technology exactly?
On top of that, Cortez was actually one of the more humane of the conquistadores (insofar as the conquistadores were humane at all). Once the Aztecs were conquered, he actually wasn't a bad ruler. Of course we should keep in mind that we are talking about 16th century Spanish standards. He petitioned for the Aztec titles of nobility to be recognized by the Spanish crown and in his will insisted that his Indian, mestizo, and Spanish heirs be treated equally (including inheritance of his lands and titles). Yes, you read that right; he actually wanted to maintain the social structure of the empire, essentially treating it as an overseas province of Spain.
There is a Dutch DJ who, as of October 2011, claims to get phone calls from Madonna and Frank Sinatra on a regular basis. His phone bill must be through the roof, because Sinatra died in May 1998. Two seconds on Wikipedia would have prevented this; it's right there in the very first sentence of their article on Sinatra.
There was a period in the 2000s when the media believed "emo" to be a "cult" and that the "Black Parade" was a Valhalla type place where emos go after they die. [1] Critical Research Failure indeed.
Tabletop Games
The 3rd Edition D&D sourcebook, Deities & Demigods, brought us such notables as Odin being good-aligned, when the myths show his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder helped cause Ragnarok due to the number of people he callously and willfully abused in his dealings; and Hephaestus having double human base speed, despite being a cripple who couldn't walk on his own. What makes this especially bad, however, is that the only plausible excuse is that They Just Didn't Care: the writer of the book was a mythologist previous to writing RPGs, and all of the above is relatively common knowledge for anyone studying those mythologies.
Zeus being Good-aligned goes all the way back to the 1st Edition Deities and Demigods Cyclopedia.
Also Hephaestus having double human base speed is because of the quasi-deity template. Having improved land speed comes with the whole "god" thing in D&D.
Set, the Egyptian god of Chaos and general dickery, is represented as Chaotic Evil. Ok, that makes sense. But he's also shown as a great ally of Apep. You know, the evil serpent of Darkness that Set is hired by Re to fight every night? The serpent that Set fights that is the only thing that redeems him just enough for everyone else to tolerate him? Yeah, best buds now.
The Spanish translator of one Dungeons And Dragons book made several sarcastic comments about research errors. One of them talks about the edgeless estoc having the picture of a sabre. Another one points out the author using concepts from the Far West in a Medieval Europe setting. There is another section where the author talks about the law frowning upon those who take it into one's own hands, and the translator points out that is "politically correct"... for the 21st century, but back in that time the author would have not been even close. Oh, and the translator usually remarks that the author is a dumb American.
Old World Of Darkness books have a few, but a special shout out goes to "Berlin By Night". Aside from having it somehow being a secret that West Berlin's Jekyll and East Berlin's Hyde are the same person, it was written and edited at the same time as another sourcebook about the Ax Crazy Malkavians, and White Wolf didn't notice that both books included Rasputin the Mad Monk... while giving him entirely different backgrounds and clans. Subsequent books Lampshaded this, with him being a mage, werewolf, ANOTHER mage, and ultimately implied to be a ghost, possessing all of the above at varying times.
FATAL takes this to new levels by not just not doing any research, but actually doing minimal amounts of research, and then getting the things it researched wrong anyway. For example, "authenticity" is apparently when you take things people used to think were true (like the body's four humors, or men having more teeth than women) and treating them as if they were actually true.
Theatre
Shakespeare committed one pointed out by Ben Jonson, when in The Winter's Tale he had his characters shipwrecked on the coast of Bohemia (i.e., Czechia) "where there is no sea near by one hundred miles."
The kingdom of Bohemia has had a coastline twice in its history. King Ottokar II (1233-1278), king of Bohemia, conquered Hungary (which at the time extended to the Adriatic Sea) in 1260, adding it to the Bohemian kingdom until his death in 1278. The story of King Polixenes of "The Winter's Tale" closely parallels the life of King Ottokar II.
King Rudolf II (1552-1611) accomplished the same thing in reverse by becoming king of Hungary and Croatia in 1572, then becoming king of Bohemia in 1575, giving his new kingdom both Bohemia and a Croatian Adriatic Sea coastline (though admittedly not an actual Bohemian coastline as King Ottokar II accomplished in 1260).
Also worth pointing out that this results from a reversal of the setting of Shakespeare's main source for the play, switching the use of Sicily and Bohemia (Sicily, of course, has a coast).
A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in Athens in the time of Theseus, placing it around 1200 BC at the very latest. Yet there is a reference to a clock striking twelve. The same occurs in Julius Caesar, wherein a clock strikes three.
Arguably, there were clocks as far back as ancient greece, just not the kind we usually think of when mentioning a "clock striking twelve". They were also horribly expensive, complicated, prone to breaking down, and not all that accurate unless maintained very thoroughly.
In Antony And Cleopatra, Cleopatra suggests playing a game of billiards, a game which wouldn't exist until about 1000 years later.
To be fair to Shakespeare, his audience would have been supremely uninterested in the actual games played by Egyptians at the time, such as Senet, a board game resembling checkers.
The Two Gentlemen Of VeronaAverted: while the gentlemen and their servants take a ship to get from Verona to Padua (or Milan, the script says both at different times), and all three cities do not have access to the sea, the three cities did have access to an extensive network of canals linking Verona to Padua and Milan, as well as to various points within each city. Some of these canals are still around today, though their transportation uses have been replaced by modern transportation methods.
The Tempest, Averted. Act I Scene 2 tells us that Prospero and Miranda were taken from Milan by "bark" (boat) "some leagues to the sea" where they were put aboard "a rotten carcass of a boat". While Milan does not have direct access to the ocean, Milan does have access to an extensive network of canals, one of which connects Milan to the Mediterranean Sea via the Ticino river. The Grand Canal (Naviglio Grande) is still around today.
Video Games
Imageepoch listed Black Rock Shooter: The Game as an RPG. Everyone who played the game or actually watched the trailer knew at once that it's anything but an RPG.
In Koudelka, the first part of the Shadow Hearts series, the action takes place in an old abbey in Wales. Which, the manual cheerfully tells everyone, including people living there, is a "small country in the north of England".
In the PSP game Def Jam: Fight for NY: Takeover, there is plenty of cringe-inducing trash-talk that gets tossed back and forth before almost every fight in the main storyline. One of the opponents you can fight for money in the Dragon House is named Prodigy. All trash talk pertaining to this opponent makes reference to him claiming to be a prophet. Prodigy, prophecy, what's the difference?
Most of the reviews on most rhythm games thataren't Guitar Hero ever released and reviewed in America. While most people don't know (or care) about rhythm games, this is still a CRF because it's exactly the kind of thing that professional review sites are expected to clear up; heck, it's arguably their primary purpose. (Also, most people visiting a rhythm game review would know if one game was released more than 5 years before another). So let's clear this up: the first popular series was by Bemani (owned by Komani), who made Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, Drummania, and Dance Dance Revolution (among others). Guitar Hero is based on (but more advanced than) Guitar Freaks, and the first two GH games were from Harmonix, before the name was bought by Activision. So with Rock Band, Harmonix only ripped-off themselves.
Soldier of Fortune II. "A virus that infects people, but not plants or animals? That's bizarre. Can they explain that?" There are numerous viruses that are only able to infect a single species, such as smallpox. Humanity was able to eliminate smallpox because it had nowhere to go once humanity was immunized. There are many which can jump species, such as influenza, which is really a bird intestinal disease that found new hosts. A surprising number of people do not know this.
Even more glaring is that humans ARE animals. It'd be like saying a virus infects trees, but not plants.
Soviet Strike has Crimea located "somewhere in Southern Russia", but even a simple political map of it will tell you this territory does in fact belong to Ukraine.
On top of that, despite the game has the word "Soviet" in its' name, the latter events point that it actually takes place when Russia became a separate federation, with countries like Belarus and Ukraine proclaiming their independance at this time. Simply said,after the collapse of USSR.
While Pokémon's Pokédex has a good number of instances in which it seems to contradict itself and make strange claims, Whismur's entry state's its cry is louder than a jet plane. The strange part is that the player character can hear it multiple times (while having no indication of ear protection) with the source being right in front of them. It's very possible that Pokémon can control the volume of the sounds they make. That doesn't explain how an ill-ordered Hyper Voice has no effect on the trainers or surrounding bystanders, though.
Another one that would count would be the 90% of Electric attacks. Every one that has "Thunder" in its name is misnamed because the thunder is the sound made by the lighting, and has nothing to do with the electric power directly.
Thunderbolt is interchangeable with lightning; Thunder is a direct translation of "kaminari", which is the move's name; Thundershock is the maximum characters allowed, and would still make sense since the literal translation of the attack is Electric Shock; Thunder Wave is the only one that doesn't make sense.
The issue is really more of a cultural one. Japanese uses the same character to refer to both thunder and lightning (雷; rai). While "shuurai" does specifically mean "lightning bolt" or "strike of lightning", it seems to be a rarely-used phrase.
Those are just the names of the attacks, and as in every RPG, they should be taken with a pinch of salt. Those names are made up to sound fancy (both in and out of universe), not to be 100% accurate.
The strange claims, Fridge Logic, and contradictions have given rise to the fan theory that the Pokedex entries are actually written by the protagonists, who are generally children of approximately ten years old, fudging numbers and making vague estimates that seem right as long as you don't actually know better; in other words, they actually are the result of a complete lack of research. One example often cited is Magcargo, whose temperature is cited to be something to the tune of 18000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 7000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun); since this is so hot that it ought to be incinerating organic matter at quite a lot of paces indeed, the theory goes that the kid writing the entry just made up a number that sounded like "really fucking hot" and called it a day.
There's also Alakazam and its alleged 5000 I.Q. Since genius-status I.Q in Real Life is around 140 to 160 depending on the scale you're reading (e.g. Albert Einstein) and "supergenius" is 200, this particular claim is a bit on the outragous side., and stumbling across someone of either status is extremely rare. *
On top of that, IQ is a relative measure; the statistical average is always given a value of 100, so one's IQ score will change along with the statistics. To say nothing of the fact that, if we're going to assume there's more than one Alakazam (which we are), the fact that they're all so prodigiously intelligent would skew the results somewhat.
How about the fact that Flying-types are weak to Electric attacks, while Ground-types are immune to them? If anything, this is backwards: electricity will eagerly flow through grounded things and into the earth, causing severe burns to the grounded thing; but something not touching the ground isn't in danger from electricity unless two differently charged objects form a pathway across it (like a lightning bolt). Birds can sit on high-voltage power lines without getting zapped, but touching a low-voltage electric fence and the ground at the same time is extremely painful. Surely Japan has enough power lines and birds to give the designers some research assistance...
Demyx of the Kingdom Hearts series wields a weapon that the official literature describes as a "sitar"—shaped like the Indian instrument of lore, but played... like a Japanese koto. Sometime during the development cycle, someone failed to alert the art director, Tetsuya Nomura, that the two instruments are not actually interchangeable. Unfortunately for the localization team, this cascading error also means a "koto" is not a "sitar." It also has the timbre of a wind instrument somehow.
This was actually addressed by the show's creator who said that they were well aware male cows didn't have udders. However, they wanted to use the udders for the scene in the movie where he sticks them out the window of the car.
In Rise Of The Dragon, we're explicitly told that the shapeshifting drugs work by changing the DNA of your red blood cells. The fact that red blood cells don't have DNA is a standard piece of trivia in pretty much every high school biology course on the planet.
Batman: Arkham City features the Penguin bragging about how the machine guns he makes available to mooks can fire over 100 rounds per minute. This is technically true the same way as a sports car can do over 10 miles an hour. There's also a good bit of Artistic License - Gun Safety on the part of the mooks, but as they are scum a member of Batman's Rogues Gallery has given an assault rifle, it's a Justified Trope.
Weirdly enough, this gets Played for Drama thanks to an in-universe example in Tales of the Abyss. Dist spends much of the game trying ("try" being the key word) to manipulate the real Big Bads into gaining the knowledge and resources to resurrect Professor Nebilim: his and Jade's Hot Teacher through cloning. A noble goal, but clones are separate existences so it would never work. It stands out as being egregious because, while Dist may be Always Second Best to Jade, he is (oddly enough) way more of an Omnidisciplinary Scientist than his rival and was there when the first cloning attempt failed and produced an Ax Crazy replica. Jade regards the whole thing as a tragic dream that can never be.
In regards to a CRF about games, Gamespot attracted a lot of ridicule when they claimed BlazBlue's Arakune was "a colony of bacteria that really wanted into the tournament so it put on a mask and got in and started fighting". The split second the reviewer said this, Arakune's Arcade Mode profile showed up and revealedhisstoryinfull. Blazen! had a barrel of fun with that one.
Webcomics
This episode of Closet Gamers contains an in-universe example.
On one page of The First Daughter, an alien takes Tash to the top of the Washington Monument, with a top-down view, and the tip is solid stone. A quick look on a sunny day will show you the problem with that.
This episode of Neko the Kitty is set in a museum, near the Giant Slug exhibit. The author admits to doing no research for the museum sequence.
The Irate Gamer is guilty of this in almost every video he makes. There used to be an entire page at TV Tropes dedicated to them.
The Angry Video Game Nerd is normally better than The Irate Gamer; but in his Castlevania series, he comes across a few. Among these, he never seems to realize that you had to actually hit the "interact" button to drop the Nitro or the Mandragora by the cracked wall in Castlevania 64, and had repeatedly tried to use it from the item screen for items you use on yourself. One can easily assume he didn't have the manual, but even if he was recounting his experiences as a kid, it's pretty impressive that he didn't know that. He then proceeds to mix up Dawn of Sorrow and Aria Of Sorrow's plots and says that Dawn of Sorrow is an example of how every game has to take place in Dracula's Castle. Wrong, Dawn of Sorrow is so far the only Castlevania game to not include Dracula's castle itself; only a simulation. Given that he's shown himself playing it, it shows he's not really been paying attention to it.
Gaia Online made a terrible mistake whilst describing a new item called Lala the Koala Plushie.
"Lala the Koala Plushie pays tribute to the noble koala bear, which is now just returning from hibernation to resume it's [sic] voracious consumption of eucalyptus".
While regular bears hibernate, koalas (which are not bears, or even placentals) live in Australia, which even in its temperate zones doesn't get cold enough to necessitate hibernation.
Darwin's Soldiers is normally good about research but there is one obvious Critical Research Failure in the first RP. Lockdown turns a wardrobe into antimatter... and it disintegrates into nothing without the massive explosion and accompanying blast of gamma rays that typically results from matter-antimatter annihilation.
This becomes a Voodoo Shark when the writers try to Hand Wave it by saying it was actually turned into antienergy, not antimatter. And thus completely ignoring what the problem was.
No wait, that almost makes sense, from a bad-logic standpoint. If antimatter+matter=a metric shitton of energy, then antienergy+energy= a metric shitton of matter, right? It's like physics took a vacation!
The now-memetic "Jimmy McPerson" essay includes, among others:
Having Jimmy grow up in Illinois while living in Harlem.
Having the Japanese attack Jimmy's town, when neither NY nor Chicago was attacked.
Alleging blacks couldn't join the military in World War II because Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't born yet. Yes, they could, and MLK was born in 1929.
The most glaring issue: If, as the essay says, Jimmy was forgotten by history, how does the author know him?
Western Animation
In the X-Men animated episode "Days of Future Past, Part 2", Gambit travels to Washington, DC. But the monitor shows the state of Washington (with Washington, D.C. captioned right below).
In a likely nod to the Animal House example above, TJ from Recess once made a speech to convince Gretchen to not give up on the "space travel training" the gang was putting her through:
"Did Albert Edison give up when they stole his Theory of Regularity? Did Ben Franklin give up when the Germans shot down his kite?"
He even stated Benjamin Frankmin.
A terrible offender is The Mummy: The Animated Series in the episode "The Cloud People" Lake Titicaca is described as both puma-head shaped and as being found below the ruins of Macchu Picchu.
On King of the Hill, Hank attempts to invoke this on a number of archaeology students who are digging up his lawn because Peggy told their professor that she found a Native American artifact there. His efforts (chicken bones strung on a piece of fishing line like a necklace) fail miserably: the haughty professor asks Peggy to identify the 'artifact', and after she declares that it's a warrior's trophy made from the "finger bones of his enemies", he hands it to his students who immediately state what it really is.
"It was baling twine, ha!"
In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Jimmy does a report on Thomas Edison. Why? Because Edison invented electricity. Besides everything else (including the work of Edison's rival Nikola Tesla), electricity is a physical natural property that exists in lightning bolts.
Perhaps Jimmy isn't such a genius? He even thinks Cindy is wrong when she does her report on Marconi (he 'invented' the radio) because she says he made the radio prior to Edison's work.
"What was it, mud powered?"
It should be noted that Marconi actually didn't invent the radio - he was merely the first to really monetize it. The actual credit for the invention of radio (telegraphy) is shared between several scientists and inventors: Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, etc.
This actually happens all the time. For example, he refers to the Cretaceous Period as the Cretaceous 'Era' and, for most of an episode, insists that people can't change because their personality is somehow imprinted on their brain before birth, etc.
In a later episode, Courtney— who actually corrected the intern— tried correcting Chis again when the contestants were in China, and he told them the Great Wall was built eight million years ago. The kicker? Even though Courtney realized the Great Wall couldn't have been built until much more recently, she explained there were dinosaurs in 8,000,000 B.C.
An episode of House of Mouse starring Professor Ludwig von Drake was actually all about this. Throughout the whole episode, Mickey Mouse and the gang are constantly trying to find ways to outsmart von Drake. At the end of the episode, they make von Drake sing a song about every single animated Disney characteras of June 15, 2001. When the song is over, von Drake tells Mickey that he names all the characters, and Mickey's response? "Actually, you left out only one person in your song: yourself!" Apparantly, Mickey and the gang thinks that von Drake is actually stupid, but to the viewers, he's actually even more so: Aside from leaving out himself from his song, von Drake actually also left out a huge number of animated Disney characters as well, such as Megara, Mulan's family, and even Kuzco of all characters! He even referred the prince from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as "Prince Charming" (the real Prince Charming is from Cinderella) as well.
Of course, said characters were probably left out as Ludwig was naming everyone who was inside the House at the time
Zula Patrol: On average, for every one thing they get right, there is one thing they got wrong.
In an episode of American Dad, Roger claims to have discovered the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden, claiming that he's "right here in D.C.", because the CIA headquarters is apparently located there as opposed to Langley Falls, Virginia, where they constantly reference the series as taking place in. It's one thing that one of the writers wrote this into the script without thinking; it's another thing entirely when it made it all the way to the final episode being spoken by a character who's voiced by the creator of the series.
Southern Maryland/Northern Virginia are informally considered "Washington DC".
Maybe if you live outside the area, but residents don't call Northern Virginia DC.
One of the three resident Spoiled Brats of Willa's Wild Life mentions that dogs are the smartest animals. Other than implying that Humans Are Morons, dogs are not necessarily the brightest species on this earth. (They are, however, smart compared to many other animals, as noted in the Dogs Are Dumb article.)
In The Powerpuff Girls, when confronted with two Ms. Keanes and asked to pick the one that only tells the truth, Blossom picks the wrong Ms. Keane. Perhaps if Blossom hadn't asked such a convoluted question and just asked one whose answer is obvious such as "What is my name?", this gaffe would've never happened.
