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Year 33 — The Malkavians claim that their greatest practical joke happen during this year, when they perform a bit of graverobbing in Jerusalem.
Happens when a show references a historical event, and provides additional information about the event, relating it to the show. This either changes the meaning of the event, or shows what really caused it, as opposed to what everyone thinks really happened.
Don Bellisario, the producer/creator of Quantum Leap, called these "kisses with history".
Given the painstaking lack of research that most writers perform before writing, it should come as no surprise that many Historical In Jokes are painfully inaccurate anachronisms. Or they may be taken for being fiction by the audience.
The most common variation is that the characters are responsible for some famous bit of damage: Venus de Milo's arms, the Sphinx's nose, etc. Usually these are shown to occur when the artifacts are new, even if the real damage occurred much later.
Naturally will involve a Historical Domain Character or two.
When this occurs in an Alternate History setting it's a case of Allohistorical Allusion.
Compare It Will Never Catch On. A character who does a lot of these becomes The Gump. If the protagonists blunder into a famous event instead of interfering deliberately, this can also be evidence that In The Past Everyone Will Be Famous. Naturally, this is a form of In Joke.
Subtropes include:
Compare with Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act, which frequently inverts this.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In the InuYasha movie, we find out that the storm that thwarted the 1281 Mongol invasion of Japan was caused by a battle between InuYasha's father and a Chinese demon lord.
- In Rurouni Kenshin, the murder of Japanese minister of the interior Okubo Toshimichi in 1878 is retconned to have been executed by fictional character Seta Sojiro, rather than a group of sympathizers of Takamori Saigo. They just show up and take credit for it.
- All of Le Chevalier d'Eon is an elaborately staged Historical In-Joke told in the context of an 18th Century spy adventure. It covers the rise of Catherine the Great and Robespierre, among others....
- An omake in Zettai Karen Children reveals that it was BABEL's Tsundere director who proposed a day where "girls give presents".
- In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, the original visual novel version has soldiers from Hinamizawa being responsible for the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. It was the first outbreak of the Hate Plague Hinamizawa Syndrome.
- Half the point of Axis Powers Hetalia.
- In the Fullmetal Alchemist movie we find out that the Beer Hall Putsch failed because of our protagonists' activities.
- In Brotherhood, among mentions of violent insurrections in Amestris across the centuries include the Wellesley Incident of 1811. No hint of what it is, but depending on how alternate the show's world is, Arthur Wellesley may have been involved.
Comics
Films
- Back to the Future and Back to the Future III show the "real" origin of rock-and-roll music, skateboarding, and Frisbee discs.
- To be fair, the pie tin from the Frisbee Pie Company was the origin of the Frisbee... just ya know, on the other end of the country. Marty just happened to use it in that way.
- Dick explains the identity of the mysterious "Deep Throat" (the movie was made years before it was revealed in Real Life to be someone else), and the 18-minute gap in Richard Nixon's private tapes.
- The Godfather Part III RetCons the death of Pope John Paul I and the murder of the Vatican's chief banker into part of a Mafia vs. Vatican conspiracy. Assuming they weren't in the first place.
- Recurring joke in Forrest Gump (as Forrest inadvertently invents jogging and the smiley face, teaches Elvis to dance, etc.).
- This is even more rampant in the novel, which includes Forrest playing fetch with those nice police doggies playing with Mr. King and his sign-carrying friends (included as a deleted scene on the special edition DVD.)
- In The Hudsucker Proxy, Tim Robbins supposedly invents the Hula Hoop and Frisbee.
- And presumably, the elevator boy eventually made good with his bendy-straw idea.
- Men in Black revealed that the depletion of the ozone layer was caused by aliens siphoning it off for the galactic black market. The well-propagated vicious rumors that fluorocarbons dissolve the ozone layer are just Plausible Deniability.
- Agent K explained early in the first movie that the 1977 New York Blackout was the result of a practical joke by an alien ambassador known as "the Great Attractor" when he released an extremely bouncy ball. He thought it was funny as hell.
- MIB also shows that many of the famous celebrities and historical figures are/were aliens. Late in the movie, Agent K outright states that Elvis Presley's mysterious death was really him just returning to his own world. There's also a screen showing numerous celebrities that are really aliens, like Sylvester Stallone, Danny De Vito and Dennis Rodman, although that wasn't much of a disguise. (two are self-deprecation: producer Steven Spielberg and director Barry Sonnenfeld).
- Shakespeare in Love is another movie that lives and breathes this trope.
- Parodied brilliantly in the short film George Lucas in Love.
- Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights both had this. The end of the first movie revealed that Roy O'Bannon's real name was Wyatt Earp (a famous Western lawman from the 19th century). The second film was loaded with the things, from Roy's defense of losing Chon's money investing in dead-end airship research ("Chon, you're lucky I didn't invest in that ridiculous 'auto-mobile' idea.") to the appearance of a (very) young Charlie Chaplin. Not to mention explaining why Jack the Ripper stopped.
- From Walk the Line: When Johnny Cash wakes up on the tour bus, he walks past a passed out Luther Perkins (his guitarist) with a lit cigarette in his mouth and he casually put it out. Luther Perkins died months after the "At Folsom Prison" recording/performance when he fell asleep in his Tennessee home with a lit cigarette in his mouth, and died from injuries sustained in the resulting fire.
- Young Einstein starring Yahoo Serious is basically a 91-minute long collection of historical in-jokes, although the end result is not quite an elaborated version of history as we know it. Albert Einstein is from Tasmania, invents foamy beer by splitting the beer atom and ends up romantically with Marie Curie... oh, and he also comes up with Rock & Roll.
- In Oscar, mob boss Angelo Provolone asks his accountant Little Anthony why he doesn't remember something, to which Anthony replies, "You were in Chicago. It was St. Valentines Day?"
- A scene from Walk Hard implies that Dewey invented Punk music.
- In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Wolverine and Sabretooth fight Weapon XI atop the cooling tower at Three Mile Island, destroying it in the process.
- Some Like It Hot starts with the protagonists witnessing the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and being forced to run/hide from the mobsters.
- Rose, in Titanic, is fascinated by the paintings of Picasso and purchases several while in Europe, despite her fiance Cal's assertion that they'll never be worth anything.
- In The Rocketeer, the Hollywoodland sign was shortened to Hollywood after the primary antagonist Neville Sinclair crashes into the 'LAND' portion of the famous sign.
- The trailer for Transformers: Dark of the Moon implies that the real purpose of the Apollo 11 moon landings was to investigate Decepticon wreckage on the Moon.
- The Mask: In a deleted scene, Leif Erikson sailed to America not out of any desire to find new lands, but just to get rid of the mask. When pressed by his colleagues to name the new world, he said, "Leave that to the Italians. This land is now cursed."
- No direct changes, but in Time Bandits, the Mona Lisa is unintentionally transferred from Napoleon to Robin Hood (and possibly to before it was painted).
Literature
Live Action TV
- Spike inspired Billy Idol.
- He also lampshades the trope in his first line, mocking a low-ranking vampire claiming to have been at the crucifixion of Jesus.
Spike: If every vampire who said he was at the Crucifixion was actually there it would've been like Woodstock. I was actually at Woodstock... that was a weird gig. I fed off a flower person and I spent six hours watching my hand move.
- Quantum Leap had at least one every episode, including (among other things) Sam teaching a five-year-old Michael Jackson to moonwalk.
- Other notable figures Sam meets (or Leaps into!) include: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Stephen King, and Lee Harvey Oswald.
- Sam also suggests that a young would-be boxer who worked in a meatpacking factory train by sparring with the frozen beef carcasses hanging around his workplace, mentioning that it was "something I saw in a movie." The grateful young boxer thanks Sam and closes his locker, upon which is his name: "S. Stallone".
- In the episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", Star Trek: Deep Space Nine actually did this to a bit of Star Trek's own history — in something much more than a simple Continuity Nod, the episode revealed that there was much more going on in the background of the original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" than was initially seen by viewers in the 1960s.
- Also, the scene of Tribbles continuing to fall down on Kirk's head, one every ten seconds or so, long after the storage compartment had been opened and most of the tribbles had fallen out proves to be the DS9 team's tossing Tribbles aside once scanned.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus got some nice examples. Like in e.g. 'The Funniest Joke In The World': "It was a fantastic success, over 60.000 times as powerful as Britain's great pre-war joke (cue PM Neville Chamberlain waving around a certain piece of paper in public *
The Munich Agreement. )!".
- Same with the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Flashback", where Tuvok flashes back to his service aboard the Excelsior... during the time of Star Trek VI. He's even the one who gave Sulu the tea that we see knocked over at the beginning of the movie. Interestingly, since the original Trek actors had aged a good bit, many scenes that happened exactly as seen in Star Trek VI had to be redone (or else, Sulu ages ten years once original footage kicks in.) Watch 'em back to back and you'll notice the tiniest differences, like the way Valtane's hand moves when he puts it on the railing, or Sulu saying "Shields! Shields!" a bit more loudly, or a few camera angles being different. Also, the Excelsior's warp engines only glow in original (i.e., "shot for the show") footage, as a new model's being used — although the nacelles of the movie model were wired to glow, they didn't.
- An incident occurred during the filming of this episode that is either the greatest Historical In-Joke, or the luckiest accident, of Star Trek history. During the flashback sequences, we see Dimitri Valtane die, despite his chronologically later appearance at the end of Star Trek VI. Word Of God jokingly suggested he had a twin brother serving on the same ship, but the general fanon response was that he had been successfully resuscitated off screen. The former is now accepted as correct, however, because in the opening scenes of Star Trek VI, because of a poor editing job, Valtane is seen to be manning two separate consoles on opposite sides of the bridge. Only one of him appears at the end, so the twin theory is actually the best solution.
- In the two-parter "Future's End" the Digital Revolution only happens because of a crashed timeship.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine did this with the episode "Little Green Men", where the Roswell aliens turn out to be Ferengi.
- Star Trek: Enterprise pulled a cute one in the episode Carbon Creek. Star Trek canon states that humanity met the Vulcans in the late 21st century after Cochrane's warp flight. Apparently, a little-known fact is that a Vulcan survey ship crashed in Pennsylvania in the '50s. A Vulcan woman raises money for a boy to go to college by introducing the bank owner to a strangely adhesive fabric, better known as Velcro, invented in the real world by "George" de Mestral.
- The name of one of the Vulcans? Mestral.
- The two-part episode Time's Arrow in Star Trek: The Next Generation has Data accidentaly sent back to 1893 San Francisco where he meets the author Mark Twain and a young bellhop named Jack London, who has an inexplicable desire to visit Alaska.
- Red Dwarf did a double in-joke by having an alternate dimension President John F. Kennedy assassinate himself — from behind the grassy knoll.
- Timeslides has a few for World War 2. Using the titular 'timeslides', Lister travels back to a Hitler-led rally and attempts to persuade the crowd not to believe him because he's 'a complete nutter - and he's only got one testicle.' Lister returns from the past with a suitcase from Claus von Stauffenberg, which triggers a predictable panic if you know who he was.
- The X-Files, "Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man", shows the CSM writing a fictionalized account of a mysterious government operative (himself) assassinating JFK and MLK. However, it is strongly implied that much of the story is made up to make him seem more important.
- He also gives a standing order for the Bills to never win a Super Bowl, which explains a lot.*
CSM's operatives have been following his order a little too zealously. Since the episode aired in 1996, the Bills haven't even won a playoff game.
- He also apparently drugged the Russian goalie during the 1980 Miracle on Ice when the US men's hockey team beat the far superior Russian squad.
- Both Star Trek: The Original Series and Babylon 5 revealed the secret truth behind Jack the Ripper.
- Hilda's and Zelda's exploits in Sabrina the Teenage Witch are liberally sprinkled with historical in-jokes. "And that was how Aunt Hilda started something called the American Revolution."
- "Oh, so that's why [the Parthenon is] in ruins!" "Yes! Luckily, History blamed the Turks."
- The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. has historical in-jokes in virtually every episode, as Brisco encounters some gizmo which is sure to be the next "coming thing".
- Naturally, Doctor Who, being a show centered around time travel, had plenty of these. The Doctor himself, for instance, wrote Hamlet down for Shakespeare after the latter had sprained his wrist writing sonnets, and the Great Fire of London was started by a dying alien.
- In the new series episode "The Shakespeare Code", the Tenth Doctor accidentally suggested a good many of his most famous lines to the Bard, including "to be or not to be". The Doctor even gives him Dylan Thomas's "Rage, rage against the dying of the light", but tells Shakespeare that "it's been used." Also, Shakespeare wrote the sonnet beginning with "Shall I compare thee...?" to the Doctor's companion, who also happened to be the Dark Lady mentioned in some of his other poems. (Although that particular sonnet is not believed to be about the Dark Lady.)
- In the episode "Father's Day", the whole of time itself begins screwing up due to interference with someone's death, causing such stuff as a phone ringing which when picked up treats the listener to "Watson, come quickly, I need you...", the first words ever spoken through a phone, by Alexander Graham Bell.
- Similar to the way the Doctor name drops the famous historical figures he's met, Jack Harkness has a tendency to drop the names of famous historical figures he's dated in Torchwood.
- The Doctor does the same at least once, when Ten informs Ood Sigma (who seems completely unimpressed, and probably has no idea what he's talking about anyway) that he married Queen Elizabeth I and that one of her nicknames is no longer accurate.
- And in the 2008 series it is also revealed that the Doctor and his companion were responsible for the eruption of Vesuvius. Earlier in the same episode, we get both a Historical In-Joke and a Continuity Nod, as the Tenth Doctor very quickly tells Donna that "Before you ask, that fire had nothing to do with me. Well, a little bit..." referring to the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64, which in a VERRRRRRRRRY early episode was shown to have been inadvertently inspired by the First Doctor accidentally setting a map on fire with the light through his spectacles...
- Donna, being unaware of the exact point of Agatha Christie's career at the point where she meets her, tries to sell the author several of her own ideas, like Miss Marple, or Murder on the Orient Express.
- In series five, The Doctor and Amy go to visit Van Gogh; Amy greets the artists with lots and lots of sunflowers. Very subtle. (The Doctor also reveals in the same episode that apparently Michelangelo had a fear of heights.)
- Seriously, when you start watching a lot of Doctor Who, this trope starts to look like the summary of the show.
- The Eleventh Doctor gave Richard Nixon the idea of taping everything in his office...so he'd know if he had his mind wiped by aliens.
- All of Blackadder.
- The single-season Sci Fi series Dark Skies centered around this trope, "revealing" that aliens or the Government Conspiracy to fight them have been involved in almost every major event over the course of the mid-60s, from the Kennedy assassination on down.
- The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles sees Indy meeting virtually every major historical figure of the early 20th century before his 21st birthday.
- I, Claudius has Nero proclaim, "Such a pretty thing, a fire..." Uh-oh.
- Mr. Jimmy James on NewsRadio has claimed to be the informant Deep Throat on more than one occasion.
- It's also strongly implied that he is D.B. Cooper (explaining how he came to be rich)
- Vorenus and Pullo from Rome have been called the Forrest Gumps of Ancient Rome. During the course of the show they witness, cause or partake in pretty much every single important event during the end of the Roman republic. Caesar finally lampshades this in a later episode.
- One good example is the second episode, where the attack on Marc Antony by Pompey's men when he's heading for the senate is actually an attack on Pullo by a random thug Pullo gambled and argued with (and killed his friend). This attack on Antony is believed to be Pompeius's thugs trying to prevent Antony from wielding his lawful power of veto, and becoming the key incident that led to Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The episode is even titled "How Titus Pullo Brought Down The Republic".
- Pullo is the real father of Caesarion, the historical son of Caesar and Cleopatra.
- Vorenus believing himself responsible for Caesar's death, as he was to accompany Caesar the day of his assassination, but was stopped by a woman who told him that his daughter's child was actually his wife's child by another man, causing him to leave and confront Niobe, while Caesar goes and gets killed on his own.
- Pullo uncovering the stash of gold and silver from the treasury looted by the Optimates, stealing it all for himself before handing it back over to Caesar when he's caught. Historically, it's said that none of Pompey's supporters, nor Pompey himself, managed to empty out the treasury, allowing Caesar to claim it for his war effort, seriously hampering the optimates' finances for the civil war, causing them to heavily tax the provinces of the east, drawing heavy resentment from them.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 had a story arc where Pearl, Observer, and Bobo travel back to ancient Rome. As they leave for their own time, Bobo steals a wheel of cheese, knocking down a candle in the hay-filled room and starting a fire that can be heard throughout the end credits. It's implied that this is the great fire that burned down the city.
- Sanctuary does this with explaining several historical figures as being abnormals. Several of them are important characters.
- Ashes to Ashes had a scene in season 3 which made Gene Hunt responsible for the vandalism to the Blue Peter garden in the 80's.
- A season 3 episode of Murdoch Mysteries has H. G. Wells in Toronto to speak at a meeting of the "Eugenics Society", a group dedicated to the improvement of humanity by scientific means. The event and the discovery that a local scientist is experimenting on animals give Wells an idea for a story about human experimentation, "...perhaps on a remote island."
- A different episode had Arthur Conan Doyle visiting the police station, where he finds Inspector Brackenreid is a great fan of his work. All through the episode, Brackenreid keeps telling him about an idea for a new Sherlock Holmes book he had, and had thought of calling it "The Hound Of The Baskervilles". Doyle walks away at the end of the episode repeating the title to himself.
- A character from Charmed called "The Angel Of Destiny" was the reason Britney Spears got famous.
- In Merlin, the court historian is none other than Geoffrey of Monmouth, the man who wrote the King Arthur legends. Of course, that's a bit of Artistic License (at best) and Critical Research Failure (at worst); the historical Geoffrey of Monmouth lived about 500 years after when King Arthur would have been alive (were he real).
- Given that the Kingdom of Camelot does not appear to even be on an island, that caveat is somewhat beside the point. No one is pretending these people are English or anywhere in actual history. Speaking as someone who got the reference, though, it was still funny.
- Warehouse13 loves these. Expect to hear at least two per episode.
- Usually in a one-line throw away gag, or even just items sitting innocently on shelves in the background.
- In Lost Girl, the Sudanese genocide is thought to be partially attributable to the Djieiene, a mystical spider whose bite causes Hate Plagues.
- From the Glee episode "The Rhodes Not Taken":
Emma: A couple of years ago I started an online flirtation with an old high school flame, Andy. Things got weird and I called it off. And two months later ( Dramatic Pause) Versace was dead. ( Dramatic Pause) Dead.
- The Roaring Twenties set Boardwalk Empire has a few. The pilot features Arnold Rothstein cheating at poker, when eight years later he would be killed thanks to welching on a lost poker hand.
- One of Nucky's friends brags about finding a great new investor in New York. A few episodes later he's broke, and we learn that the investor's name was Charles Ponzi.
- In a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Kevin Spacey played the "inventor" of sarcasm and no one understood he meant the opposite of what he said:
Lord Sarc: If it's not too much trouble, do you think we could make this roof leak a little more?
Vassal: Why, yes. Yes, we could.
Lord Sarc: That's wonderful! Here's an idea: maybe in the next house I have, maybe you can all go out and you can just throw together a collection of random stone blocks in the middle of nowhere and I'll live there! You think you can handle that?!
Vassal: At once, my Lord.
Narrator: And so Stonehenge was built.
- A quote attributed to the historical Louis XIV is, "I am the State." In fact, he said the opposite: "I depart, but the State shall always remain." In the Young Blades episode "The Girl from Upper Gaborski," Louis utters a similar quote — "I am the mighty state of France!" — while flexing shirtless in the mirror and fantasizing about how to impress women. Putting the quote in the mouth of a 15-year-old Spoiled Brat / Cloud Cuckoolander — someone who's just discovered women and the fact that he has royal power — explains how the same person could say both quotes.
- Pan Am is prone to a few of these, as it is set in the 1960's. Examples include:
- "It's Castro's country. He'll never keep it."
- "That Bob Dylan will be famous, mark my words."
Tabletop Games
- The old World Of Darkness had a number of these; for example, the Malkavian clan claim to have done a bit of grave-robbery in Palestine in the first century AD. If you're wondering, think The Joker as a vampire, and then make them thousands strong (though, as might be imagined, rarely united). Another, borderline example is Dark Ages: Werewolf, which linked the fairy tale of Red Riding Hood to a young werewolf's First Change — Red is the werewolf, and in the throes of her First Change, kills her grandmother and is found (and implied to be killed, or at least grievously wounded) by a lumberjack who finds her grieving.
- In fact, in the old World of Darkness, the one thing the supernaturals never had an active hand in was the Third Reich and the Holocaust. This itself proved to be a pretty funny, if unintentional, historical joke in the context of the game. The intent was to avoid cheapening the full inhumanity of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany by ascribing it to supernatural influence; the effect was to make readers scratch their heads wondering how, in a game overflowing with Beethoven Was an Alien Spy, none of the countless supernatural groups had anything to do with the largest war and most notorious genocide in history.
- Then again, none of the supernatural factions had a great deal of interest in the Third Reich. Even the most callous vampires aren't messed up enough to waste that much food (and even the freaks following the Path of Night want mortals to fear them, not some twat with a silly mustache), for the Werewolves it's just another sign that the Wyrm is winning, the fairies are the ray of hope that wants nothing to do with this mess, the war seriously fucks with the Shadowlands and leaves the Wraiths in a sad state, and the last thing the Technocracy wants is to display the wonders of technology as soulless forces of destruction. The Traditions are the only ones who might benefit, and they're on the run. Well, and maybe the Antediluvians, but their machinations are so subtle and far reaching that the war is a footnote to them at best. The real question becomes why none of these groups stopped Hitler before things got out of hand.
- Due to heavy cross-marketing between the Shadowrun and Earthdawn games, a number of early Shadowrun products indulged in this trope with immortal-elf references. If the spinoff novels are to be credited, Queen Elizabeth I was a usurping immortal elf in disguise, as was Leonardo da Vinci and (implied) the Apostle Thomas.
- In one of the Sourcebooks for Mage The Awakening, it states that the Halifax explosion was actually caused by a battle between Pentacle mages and Church Militant members of the Seers of the Throne. Mages are said to refer to the explosion as the "Battle of the Maritime".
- Promethean: The Created claims that The Tunguska Event was the result of an attempt to summon a arch-qashmallim. The Knights of St. George failed to stop it in time.
- Also, a qashmallim inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write Kubla Khan. A Promethean, in turn, was the "Person from Porlock" who interrupted him and caused him to forget the ending.
Video Games
- Many of the major characters that Altair is sent to assassinate in Assassin's Creed were real historical figures who died during 1193, the year in which the game is set.
- The sequel takes this up to 11, with database entries on all the assassination targets that tie them all in to the Templars or their allies, while still staying faithful to their real-life history.
- And the disclaimer at the beginning of the game actually states that it was "Inspired by historical events," which pretty much means that it was made for this express purpose.
- Brotherhood has Machiavelli at one point say that he intends to write a book about Ezio. Given that Cesare's on the other side, it seems obvious who The Prince was really based on.
- Then again, considering The Prince is widely accepted as being a snarky Take That of the "this is what this asshole does and believes, people. Ain't it GREAT ?!" variety, the Shout Out kinda backfires. Not that Ezio is the nicest carebear on the rainbow cloud but...
- Revelations had more Historical In-Jokes compared to the first few games.
- Set in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Constantinople. Constantinople/Istanbul Jokes fly around.
Ezio: "Istanbul? No doubt one of the many names for this city?" Yusuf: "Yes! It's quickly becoming the local favourite!" *** On mention of The New World's name (Continent of Amerigo), Ezio smiles and remarks "poor Colombo..."
- Piri Reis, a legendary Ottoman Admiral, was not an admiral by the time of the game, but the Assassins of Constantinople do jokingly call him "Piri" (Ottoman for "Admiral").
- Prince-Governor Suleiman keeps on talking to Ezio about tolerance between the Ottoman Empire's subject peoples and a standard and written state law, things he will work on and accomplish as Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
- Upon Sofia mentioning that she posed for a certain Albrecht Durer, Ezio asks if he's an artist of some renown.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3, the Cuban missile crisis was actually resolved by handing over a Soviet scientist who'd defected to the West, and the Turkish nukes were outdated and going to be removed anyway.
- Later, Snake makes a joke that the prototypical Russian helicopter which is smaller than the Hip should be called a Hind. His support team agree to use Hind as the code for the kind of helicopter from now on. Also a Continuity Nod, since a Hind helicopter was a boss fight in Metal Gear Solid.
- In fact, MGS3 is rife with instances of this, including Snake being the first to perform a HALO jump (which was actually first performed in 1964), as well as Snake finding an XM16E1 and making suggestions for how it would be a better rifle, echoing complaints from soldiers in Vietnam who made the same suggestions that were ultimately incorporated into the rifle's design.
- Red Alert 2 plays the Cuban missile crisis too, in an alternate history: to achieve the best results, the Chronosphere had to be built in a specific place in the Earth's magnetosphere or the Allies can't use it to invade Moscow from across the globe. Problem is, said place is in the Florida Keys, well inside the range of the Soviet nukes in Cuba. Since the US and the USSR are already at war and Romanov won't negotiate as Khrushchev did in real life, the Allies say "screw negotiations" and instead chronoshift some troops into Cuba to blow the missiles sky-high before they could be launched. Cue Villainous Breakdown from Romanov.
- And the invasion of Pearl Harbor too, this time with Soviets as aggressors and the US anticipating the attack via U-2 spy planes. It can be played from both sides, interestingly; though the Soviet version has a South Korean fleet moving in to assist the defenders.
- Then came Yuri's Revenge, taking this trope to the logical extreme by making an in-joke on it's own history: one Soviet mission had the player re-doing - via time travel - one of the vanilla game's Allied missions... from the other side. Bonus points because said mission enabled the Allies to win the war with the aforementioned re-take of the Cuban missile crisis... which this re-take mission, appropriately named "Operation Deja Vu", retcons into the Chronosphere prototype being destroyed and the Allies surrendering.
- Red Alert 3 also has a defense of Pearl Harbor, this time Allies versus the Empire of the Rising Sun. With the latter defending.
- Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is canon in Castlevania chronology. John Morris and Johnathan Morris, protagonists from Bloodlines and Portrait of Ruin respectively, are descendants of Quincey Morris.
- So, not terribly canon- Quincey Morris dies without children in Dracula.
- Evil Genius has you perform several Acts of Infamy based on real-life Cold War events, most notably staging the Cuban missile crisis.
- Fallout 2 has a special encounter in which the player can return to Vault 13 in the past. The player cannot leave until they break the water chip, thus setting up the basis of Fallout. It's not canon, though.
- Touhou's Eirin Yagokoro caused the malfunctions that occurred during the Apollo 13 mission. It's never explained why.
- Also, Neil Armstrong's flag renewed a war between Earth and the Moon.
- Utsuho Reiuji was responsible for the Chernobyl disaster in some way. She's implied to have been the Black Bird.
- The Shadow Hearts series. Many of the catastrophes that occurred around World War I was all because of Lovecraftian hellspawn.
Web Comics
- Questionable Content suggests that World War One was started due to a badly worded sexual innuendo about someone wanting to "invade her Alsace", and things spiraling out of control from there. Whether they were joking or not seems to be unknown.
- Irregular Webcomic! provides a different explanation for the start of World War One.
- This is more or less the raison d'être of Hark! A Vagrant.
- Homestuck: The universe of Earth was created by the trolls, and so they had some influence on some things that eventually happened, like possibly the existence of the Insane Clown Posse. A particularly amusing example comes from a trans-timeline bulletin board conversation involving a future instance of Vriska, aka arachnidsGrip (AG)...
CCG: TOO BAD THE ACRONYM WASN'T "HAG" INSTEAD, IT WOULD HAVE SUITED YOU MUCH BETTER.
CCG: INSTEAD OF THAT NONSENSE WORD
Web Original
Western Animation
- Pretty much the entire premise of "Peabody's Improbable History" segment on "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle."
- Family Guy is fond of this, in flashbacks which sometimes don't even relate to the show in any way. For example, when Peter was arguing that Stewie might be too young for potty-training, a flashback suggested that the Lindbergh baby was accidentally flushed down a toilet. And that Amelia Earhart was done away with for witnessing it.
- John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln for talking on his cellphone.
- Peter killed Nicole and Ronald. OJ was just at the wrong place at the wrong time. Another incident showed a drunken Stewie told OJ to kill his wife.
- American Dad had the main character shooting Ronald Reagan, because, well: He originally wanted to kill Jane Fonda because he blamed her for the war on Christmas, then he found out that she was influenced by Donald Sutherland, who was in turn influenced by Martin Scorsese. Stan convinces Scorsese to give up drugs, which in turn causes him to lose his edge. As a result, Taxi Driver is never made, so there's no star vehicle for Jodie Foster, and no one for John Hinckley to become obsessed with. As a result of that, Reagan is never shot, which means there was no incident to bolster public support; so Mondale won, and practically "handed over the country to the Commies". Thus, Stan Smith shoots Reagan. Also, in the same episode, Roger "invents" the genre of disco. Whew.
- Clone High being what it is, it's rife with these. In it, Marie Curie is a giant, misshapen mutant of a girl because of her irradiated DNA. People such as the clones of Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and half of Lynyrd Skynyrd go up in a plane made of junk.
- Time Squad did this almost every episode, as the entire premise of the show was that they went back in time to make sure that history happens correctly. The main characters are singlehandedly responsible for such things as The Boston Tea Party, the Battle at the Alamo, and the invention of peanut butter.
- Also, in the episode where the team has to make Betsy Ross design the American flag, one of the colonial hippies blends his own brand of coffee to energize the others. His name as a hippie? Starbuck.
- After a whole episode dealing with putting Abraham Lincoln's presidency back on track, the time travelers return to the future just as Abraham suggests to his wife that he feels like visiting Ford's Theater...
- In Futurama: Bender's Big Score, the titular robot travels back to the year 2000, where his virus-induced homicidal rampage accidentally destroys a large number of ballots in Florida. This virus was used by a group of greedy, nudist, and narcissistic alien scammers to make Bender to go back in time and steal treasures, and as a result, he is seen with several artifacts that have gone missing, like the Sphinx's nose and the Holy Grail.
- His time-traveling also causes several in-show historical in-jokes as well. For example, one episode revolved around Fry finding his pet dog Seymour as a fossil in a museum and his attempts to resurrect it. In the movie, while the scammers are forcing Bender to assassinate Fry in 2012, the year Seymour died at a "healthy old age", one of Bender's futuristic weapons misses him and encases the poor dog in stone. This quickly goes from a joke to a happy when one recalls that Fry decided not to bring Seymour back because he thought he died of old age, but now we find out he died of old age after spending an entire life with Fry's time-clone.
- Time-travel is also how Zoidberg became the Roswell alien.
- A blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to an alternate past comes near the end of the Fairly Oddparents special "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker". Right after '70s-Jorgen shows up to erase everyone's memories of the fairies being revealed, present-Jorgen shows up to take Timmy back to his own era and says that Timmy is forbidden from returning to March of 1972, but can still travel to any of the other months "so long as you don't interfere with the election of President McGovern". This implies that either The Fairly OddParents takes place in an alternate continuity where Nixon was never re-elected, or Timmy didn't listen and is somehow responsible for Nixon's re-election.
- There was the one where Timmy released the kids from the Cosmo & Wanda's "Wall of Shame". One of them "took out" Archduke Franz Ferdinand, triggering World War One.
- In an earlier episode, they inspire a young boy to "Connect all the computers in the world together, and call it the internet," Wanda's response? "That Billy Gates and his CRAZY ideas," Of course, he gets the name wrong...
Billy Gates: And I'll call it the Internet.
Cosmo: That's a stupid name, you should call it The Timmy!
- And at the episode's end we find out that "The Timmy" apparently stuck, because his mother calls out "Internet, come to dinner"
- Although, thanks to the reset button, that doesn't catch on...
- In the Disney film Hercules, it's indicated that the reason the Venus de Milo has no arms is because Hercules accidentally broke them off.
- In Aladdin, the crack in the Sphinx's nose happens during the flyby in "A Whole New World".
- Whereas The Prince of Egypt posits that it's Moses' fault, when he crashes his chariot, setting in motion Disaster Dominoes.
- A Halloween episode of The Simpsons suggests that Wiggum's ancestor's insult to Orson Welles inspired Citizen Kane.
- At the end of the Paul Bunyan tall tale segment, Paul saves the town from a meteor. He throws the meteor towards Chicago, starting the Great Chicago Fire.
- In Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Ickis' father was the one responsible of causing the crack on the Liberty Bell when the humans he scared dropped it.
- And when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show, the reason why everyone in the audience was screaming was because of a monster scaring them, not because of hysteria over The Beatles' music.
- A monster inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt to include "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" in his inaugural address. A monster was also the reason Christopher Columbus discovered America.
- An old monster the trio had to escort home told stories of himself of scaring George Washington (which motivates him in crossing the Delaware River) and Albert Einstein (which is why his hair is what he's known for).
- An episode of Justice League revealed that ancient hawkmen were responsible for the rise of Egypt as a civilization.
- Rocko's Modern Life showed that Heffer's past lives were responsible for why the Leaning Tower of Pisa leans and the Hindenburg disaster.
- South Park. Chef gave Meat Loaf his nickname and he introduced Elton John to the songwriter which gave him his first hit.
- In Robin Hood, one scene had Prince John crying and sucking his thumb, lamenting how his mother always liked his brother over him. In real life, Prince John's mother was Eleanor of Aquitaine, who really did favour her oldest son King Richard over John.
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