"Windmills do not work that way! Good night!"
"You see, Dinosaur is a two-part word... "dina" is where we get explosive, or "dynamite", and "saurus" is lizard, so we have "explosive lizard"... - "Joe",
The Internet
Writers in film, television and other media
can sometimes be lazy people who cannot be bothered to do proper research on subjects relevant to the plot of their work of fiction. At other times (especially in TV), they just
cannot squeeze research into the 10 days or so they get to write a script. In other cases, putting in too much detail would be distracting and annoying. Either way, the research did not get done.
The result is that depictions of events and concepts taken from history, foreign cultures, or the sciences will often be
heavily distorted, caricatured or inaccurately depicted as being analogous to something more familiar to the audience.
For the situations where the research
is obviously done, see
Shown Their Work.
Tropes that fall into this category:
