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"103 years have passed since I have been specially summoned. It would have been wonderful if this happened 3 years earlier, but ...ah, never mind."
And this movie is set in the futuristic year of...2007? Oh, yeah. Remember that year? When the polar ice-caps all melted, raising sea-levels; all the nuclear missiles launched, destroying every major city; and in one year, we cleaned it all up. Funny couple of months.
In most series set more than Twenty Minutes Into The Future, the date will be an exact round number of years after the year the series was made. Something made in 1965 and set in the twenty-first century will be set in 2065. Something made in 1989 and set in the thirtieth century will be set in 2989.
This also applies to Time Travel, either forward or backward; from 1972, you can jump forward to 2072 or back to 1872.
There are two big exceptions to this. One is when they just use a nice round number by itself for the year; thus, all the TV shows and movies set in the year 2000 (or 1999, or 2001). The other is sequels to something that was set in Exty Years; for example, Star Trek The Original Series came out from 1966 to 1969 and was set from 2266 to 2269, but Star Trek The Motion Picture came out in 1979 and was set in 2272, because it needed to be only a few years after the end of the series. Likewise for Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs, which took place an exact century after the beginning of the original series (2366 in TNG's Season 1) and continued in real-time thereafter, but originally premiered in 1987. Thus, when the titular ship of Star Trek: Voyager ended its, well, voyage in the late 2370s, its last episode aired in 2001.
The trope's name comes from Homestar Runner's pronounciation of an X in "futuristic" dates, such as the setting of Mega Man in 200X and Metroid in 20X5. The series parodies this directly by setting their mock-anime mock-spinoff series in the year 20X6 (pronounced "Twenty Exty-Six").
The Human Popsicle, Sealed Evil In A Can, and Sealed Good In A Can have often been that way for Exty Years too.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- The first Mobile Suit Gundam series is set in the year 0079 of the fictional Universal Century. The time it was released? 1979, of course. Several other Gundam series do this as well, for example, Gundam Wing (1995) is set in After Colony 195.
- And Universal Century 0079 was really 2079, though that go retconned away.
- Wangan Midnight, first published in 1992, is set in the year 20XX to allow for the introduction of newer cars that at the time of the first publishing did not exist.
- Fist of the North Star is set a few years after a nuclear war destroyed the world in "199X".
- The plotline of Tenchi Muyo has copious amounts of backstory going back for millenia; however, ALL the big important events seem to have happened a round number of years ago. To name just a few: Ryoko was imprisoned for 700 years, Ayeka and Sasami have been in cold sleep for just as long. Washu is 20,000 years old, and Kagato betrayed her 5,000 years ago.
- Feel free to delete this edit if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that those figures were rounded off for simplicity. After all, once your age becomes five digits long, how relevant do a few years either way really seem?
Comics
- The Legion Of Super Heroes combines this and Comic Book Time by always being set a thousand years after the current date.
- The Crisis Crossover DC One Million has an interesting variation on this; the future here is the 853rd century, exactly one million months after Action Comics #1.
- This could be a play on the reality of monthly issues to periodicals, of which comic books would be one.
- Whaddya mean, "could be"? The whole gimmick here was explicitly stated as such, with the special crossover editions of each participating comic being written as Such-and-so Issue #1,000,000.
- Although not a "round" number, Judge Dredd is always set 122 years ahead of the present.
- This is a round number from a different direction — the first issue came out in 1977, so 122 years after that was 2099, so as to set it just before the turn of the century.
- The Sandman issue Men of Good Fortune used this across 6 centuries, beginning in 1389 and ending in 1989, the year it was written and published.
- Camelot 3000.
Films
- The Back To The Future movies start in 1985, go back thirty years to 1955, jump forward thirty years to 2015, and go all the way back a hundred years to 1885.
- The original jump was at least justified in that Doc Brown selects 1955 as the date he invented time travel. Going forward to 2015, at the end of the movie, was given as a nice round number, after originally intending to go 25 years instead.
- Though one could say that Doc Brown only selected these dates because the writers decided it would be Exty Years From Now.
- And 1885 was a glitch in the already programmed 1985, although why the time circuits ran on decimal instead of binary is anyone's guess.
- In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Austin and Dr. Evil are frozen in 1967 and unfrozen in 1997, the year the movie was released. Similarly, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me was released in 1999, but most of it takes place in 1969, after Austin and Dr. Evil travel back in time. Interestingly, the third movie, Austin Powers in Goldmember, does not use this "30 years" convention, although it does briefly involve time travel from 2002 to 1975 and back.
- Escape From New York, made in 1981, was set in 1997, sixteen years after it was made. In 1996, the sequel Escape From L.A. was released; it was set in 2013, seventeen years after the first movie.
- Event Horizon was made in 1997 and set in 2047.
- Star Trek IV The Voyage Home is set in 2286 according to the official timeline. They travel back in time to 1986, the year the film was made, so they apparently went back exactly three hundred years. You'd think this would've at least been mentioned at some point in the actual film.
- In Citizen Kane, the present year is 1941, young Kane was taken from his parents in 1871 (70 years ago) and he ran for governor in 1916 (25 years ago).
- 2057, a "future of science" film from the Discovery Channel, was released in 2007.
Literature
- Nineteen Eighty Four is a sort-of aversion; it's not a round number of years, but Orwell flipped the year he was writing in to get a "distant but chillingly near future" effect.
- He wanted to entitle it Nineteen Forty Eight.
- The movie version was not only shot in the real 1984, but every scene referencing a date was shot on the right date.
- The Science Fiction book Frek and The Elixir takes place in 3003 (it was written in 2003).
- Weirdly averted in the Lord Darcy mysteries: set in an Alternate History Europe, each story takes place in the same year when it was published in reality. This makes for some amusing dissonance, as Victorian-level technology and archaic royalist politics appear side by side with dates in the 1950s.
- The futurist book 2081 was, of course, published in 1981.
Live Action TV
- Things in Babylon 5 often seemed to take place in nice round increments of years: Valen revolutionized Minbari society precisely a thousand years before the events of the series; the Drakh plague that spurred the action of the spinoff series Crusade would activate in exactly five Earth years; Sheridan got to live for twenty years after he "died" on Z'ha'dum.
- Not exactly though. This troper has been rewatching B5 lately and when you take into account that the series itself spans four in-universe years, but regardless of whether it's later or early in the series, it's still referred to as 'a thousand years ago', you can assume they don't mean EXACTLY 1000 years.
- It averts the trope in another way by not being set a round number of years from when it was produced.
- Time Trax featured a time machine which only could create a time jump or "arc" of 200 years, so they traveled from 2193 to (then present) 1993. As the time passed, so did the possible destination in the past, and we see the related actions of other future cops, so this is also an example of Meanwhile In The Future.
- Averted in the episode of The Twilight Zone titled "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim", in which a settler from 1847 is transported to the year 1961, 114 years in the future.
- Lost In Space, particularly the original series, was set in 1997. When this troper was young, he got a kick out of watching the original episode in 1997.
- Amusingly, this didn't stop one or two set-on-Earth scenes from featuring horse-drawn carts and the like.
- Doctor Who seems to exist for this trope. The number of times a story has been set exactly a whole number of decades (or centuries) in the past or future are too numerous to count. However, there are exceptions.
- The vast majority of these exceptions are when the story in question was a historical piece; for instance, the Crusades, the French Revolution, the fall of Rome, the Battle of Hastings, etc;.
- Some were just when the year was a round number in itself, though these are even fewer and further between. The Ark (original airdate: 1965) was set in the year 10 Million AD. However after the Doctor and companions left, they rematerialised in the same place on The Ark EXACTLY 700 years later, so that's only a partial subversion.
- One definite subversion was in the serial "Trial of a Timelord" (original airdate: 1986) - in the first segment, no exact date was given; the second segment was explicitly stated as being set in 2379, however (the third segment was set in 2986, which plays the trope straight).
- "The Waters of Mars" was meant to take place fifty years to the day after the airdate. It was out by six days.
Tabletop Games
Video Games
- Mega Man is a strong example of this trope, starting in 200X and later moving into 20XX. The spinoffs are all set relative to this ambiguous date; the X series takes place in 21XX, and drags on into 22XX, while Battle Network is an alternate 200X. The later games in the main timeline starting with Mega Man Zero (which was assumed to take place in 22XX before MMX Command Mission came out) have abandoned this & don't specify any dates, possibly because the world has suffered so many successive apocalypses by this point that people don't even remember what year it's supposed to be. According to the ''Perfect Memories'' sourcebook, the Legends series takes place around 6000 years after the end of the X series, but that's about all we know.
- In Day Of The Tentacle, two of the game's three protagonists are projected two centuries into the past and future respectively, while one remains in the present day — 1987, the year the previous game, Maniac Mansion, was released. The setting in the past is 1787, the year the US Constitution was written.
- Earthbound is set in 199X. If you borrow a map from the library and then talk to the librarian again, you are told you don't have to return the map until the year 2000, much to the amusement of modern-day fans.
- As mentioned above, the Metroid series used this. Like Mega Man, the other games in the series all take place relative to the ambiguous date of 20X5 in the original.
- The Streets of Rage games are set in that one (or several) heady year(s), 199X.
- Although it's not quite the same thing, all the dates of the Entity's memories that can be traveled to in Chrono Trigger just so happen to be nice round numbers, at least for the centuries (600, 1000, and 2300 AD; 12,000 and — wait for it — 65,000,000 BC). The "Apocalypse", though, happens in the year 1999.
- Double Dragon II: The Revenge is set at the aftermath of a Nuclear War that occurred sometime before the year "19XX". Oddly, the Japanese manuals for the first game sets the plot in the slightly more specific year of "199X".
- Can be attributed to Battlefield series with Battlefield 1942, later having a sequel set in the future entitled Battlefield 2142.
Western Animation
- Futurama combined this and the "round numbered year" exception by coming out in 2000 and being set in both 2000 and 3000, although here it was justified since the millennial celebrations (both of them) were part of the story.
- An episode in a later season Lampshades the round number phenomenon with Fry commenting "here it is, the year 3000 or so..."
- One of the big things for Futurama was that it wasn't meant to be time locked like The Simpsons: characters would age, etc.
- In Bender's Big Score, midway through, it's revealed to be Xmas 3007, and a near-final scene takes place on New Year's Day 3008.
- The Opening Narration of Adventures Of The Galaxy Rangers begins: "In 2086, two peaceful aliens journeyed to Earth, seeking our help..." The series premiered in 1986.
- The animated series Spiral Zone, which was produced in 1987, was set in the (then) near future of 2007.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, Aang was frozen in an iceberg for an even 100 years. Avatar Kyoshi was born on Kyoshi Island "400 years ago".
- Gargoyles: The titular gargoyles were turned to stone in 994 AD, and reawakened in 1994 (the year the show started).
- Inverted in Ducktales in which an episode takes the cast BACK in time to 1687, exactly 300 years from the show's 1987 airdate.
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