Historical In Joke - Television Tropes & Idioms

In the Inu Yasha movie, we find out that the storm that thwarted the 1281 Mongol invasion of Japan was caused by a battle between Inu Yasha'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....
In an episode of Strike Witches (which is set in an alternate 1944 in which aliens invaded and conquered most of continental Europe in 1939), Minna comments how if the aliens hadn't invaded, their superiors (Europe's political and military leaders) would likely be fighting among themselves.
An omake in Zettai Karen Children reveals that it was BABEL's Tsundere director who proposed a day where "girls give presents".

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Done a lot in the French comic Asterix. To name just a few examples:
- In Asterix Meets Cleopatra, Obelix is revealed to be responsible for the Sphinx's missing nose.
- In Asterix in Britain, Asterix introduces tea to the British and Obelix suggests introducing rugby to the folks back in Gaul (professional rugby is quite popular in several European countries, including both France and Great Britain).
- In Asterix in Spain, when Asterix and Obelix ask if Unhygienix the fishmonger will rent his fishing boat to them, he mentions in passing that he'll take his payment in menhirs (stone monoliths), as he's looking to develop some land he owns in Britain (which a footnote explains is on Salisbury Plain, i.e. the location of Stonehenge). The original French version of this same book used Carnac instead of Stonehenge, a French town in the southern coast of Brittany, home to another big megalithic site.
  - Later in the book, Asterix accidentally invents bullfighting when he gets captured by the Romans and, instead of being thrown to the lions, is forced to fight a wild aurochs (a sort of now-extinct bull). Which might not sound very terrible, unless you know aurochs were twice the size of modern bovines. Kind of like having to fight a tank made of meat.
Don Rosa's The Life And Times Of Scrooge Mc Duck features quite a few historical in-jokes. Apparently, during his rise to fame and fortune, Scrooge has met such personalities as Wyatt Earp, Theodore Roosevelt, and P.T. Barnum. (And, as Rosa explains in the collected edition, all of the scenarios are somewhat plausible, as the people in question were, more or less, where Rosa has them. He prides himself on his research.)
The Sandman has several, though "jokes" may not be the correct description. For a prominent example, Shakespeare's talent comes as a results of a proto-Deal With The Devil with Morpheus (he gets his talent, but Morpheus essentially becomes his patron in return).
- There's also a very meta-example. Wesley Dodds (the original Sandman in comics) was inspired by Morpheus through his dreams.
Hellblazer does this with John Constantine's ancestors, usually Johanna Constantine. One ancestor disrupted the dream that became "Kublai Khan" because Angels are describing how awesome Heaven is, which isn't kosher.
Watchmen involves the introduction of masked avengers into a "normal" earth, and quite a lot of these result — amongst them, JFK's assassination is heavily implied (and downright stated in the movie) to be performed by The Comedian.
- More obscurely, the movie also shows Neil Armstrong saying, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!".
This trope is also featured in the Predator comics, after it was already implied in the movies that these Sufficiently Advanced Aliens had been visiting Earth for a veeeery long time.
- In Predator: Concrete Jungle, Major Phillips (the one that sent Dutch's team to the jungle in the first movie) claims the Predators exterminated the dinosaurs and gave birth to Ancient religions. Both claims were ignored in later comics and even denied by some fans till they were (partially) confirmed in the Alien vs Predator movies.
- In Predator: The Bloody Sands of Time, the main character discovers that Predators were responsible for the fall of Fort Douamont to the Germans in February 1916, thus triggering the Battle of Verdun as the French attempted to recover the position.
League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen has quite a few of these, although most connect events in several other works of fiction — several of those are analogues for real-world events, like WW 2 and Jack the Ripper murders. One of the funniest examples might be Orlando having posed for Leonardo Da Vinci — while changing hir sex.
Transformers: Hearts of Steel has Tobias Muldoon, a young engineer, demonstrate his new invention, a 'sub-marine', to an audience that includes Jules Verne. In-story, this happens a couple of years before Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.
The Ultimates had a whole storyline about a race of aliens called the Chitauri who, as Nick Fury revealed, were the real Nazis trying to take over the world to subvert the people of Earth to their will if not for the actions of Captain America. They end up coming back to try again in the present day by infiltrating SHIELD, led by the very same Herr Kleiser who tormented the Allies in the past, which eventually leads to the resurrected Cap yelling the now infamous quote, "You think this letter on my head stands for FRANCE?"

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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.
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.
Men In Black had aliens blasting the ozone layer hole over the arctic. 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 a practical joke by a group of aliens using a ball with extreme (to say the least) bouncing capabilities.
- 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 and Danny Devito.
Shakespeare In Love is another movie that lives and breathes this trope.
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.
In Star Trek First Contact we learn that Riker and La Forge helped Zefram Cochrane pilot the famous Phoenix spacecraft, about two hundred and fifty years before they were born.
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. 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?"

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Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams ties together the origins of life on earth, Coleridge's epic poem Kublai Khan, the extinction of the dodo and dozens of other epochal or trivial events into an excellent approximation of a coherent plot.
In Isaac Asimov's short story "The Message" (1955), a time traveler goes back to observe the Second World War, ancient history to him. Desperate to leave some kind of mark that signified his presence and yet wouldn't change the outcome of any major events, he carves a message on a wooden fence somewhere on a North African beach. The traveler is named Dr. George Kilroy, and the message he leaves is the first-ever KILROY WAS HERE graffito.
Dave Barry Slept Here makes excellent use of this.
In Avram Davidson's Full Chicken Richness, a time travelling cook kills off the dodo to use in his soup. (In Real Life, according to the sailors who discovered them, dodos tasted terrible.)
Lampshaded in The Three Musketeers. John Felton is so seduced by a captive Milady De Winter that not only does he set her free but also goes as far as assassinate her captor, George Villiers, the First Duke of Buckingham. Alexandre Dumas's work was written in 1844, making this Older Than Radio. Felton did, indeed, assassinate the Duke, but more likely for political reasons, probably due to discontent regarding the state of the English navy. Rash behavior due to a romantic crush would have been uncharacteristic of the fellow.
Umberto Eco's Baudolino, being a historical novel about an influential liar, is full of these. Among other things, it gives an alternate explanation for the death of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, and reveals the "true" origin of the works of the Archpoet and the letter of Prester John.
This the entire premise of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, extended to all fictional events from written literature as well.
- In The Eyre Affair, for example, it is established early on that Nextiverse!Jane Eyre ends differently from how it does in real life. Toward the end of the book, however, Thursday goes into the novel in order to put things back to normal... but, in her effort to catch Jane Eyre's attention without becoming mentioned in the first-person narrative, she ends up becoming the mysterious disembodied voice that is an integral part of real world!Jane Eyre.
In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Croup and Vandemar were responsible for burning Troy and spreading the Black Death. It is also hinted that they were the men who crucified Jesus.
- "It had been a very long time since they had crucified anybody."
Erek in Animorphs is more than five thousand years old, was Franklin Roosevelt's butler, and apparently coined the phrase "New Deal" during a card game. His race of androids in general is also responsible for the creation of the domestic dog, who fused the DNA of their fun-loving canine/humanoid creators with wolves, in order to preserve their essence in some way.
- Another Animorphs explains that broccoli tastes bad to humans because it was brought to Earth by alien colonizers during the time of the dinosaurs. These aliens were also ground zero for the impact that killed off the dinosaurs which was brought down by refugees of another race that had lost a war to the first mentioned race. A handful of survivors from one of those alien races apparently evolved into ants.
- Yet another mentions that Elfangor was once friends with two guys named Bill and Steve, whom he helped explain computers to. He had to explain it to Bill with the term "Windows."
In Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock, a man goes back in time in an attempt to meet Jesus. However, he finds that Jesus' life is a total myth. He then takes it upon himself to become Jesus, preaching the teachings he learned in the future, until he is finally crucified by the Romans.
Grim Tuesday, the second book of Garth Nix's Keys To The Kingdom series, reveals that The Great Depression was caused by Grim Tuesday's greedy meddling. This also counts as Parental Bonus as it's not outright stated and most of the 9-12 year old kids that the books are marketed towards probably wouldn't know enough to make the connection.
The Areas of My Expertise, by John Hodgman, is filled to the brim with them. Its sequel, More Information Than You Require, has one on every page.
The novel series about Erast Fandorin revels in Historical In Jokes. What caused the rapid scientific advancement of late 19th century? Why did the Siege of Pleven take place? Who murdered General Skobelev? Who was Jack The Ripper really? Who was behind the Khodynka Tragedy?..
The two-part Star Trek novel The Eugenics Wars: The Rise and Fall of Khan Noonien Singh is an attempt to reconcile real world history with the fact that, in the Star Trek timeline, the Eugenics Wars occurred in the 1990s.
All of Animal Farm. Seriously, the whole thing is an analogue to the 1917 Revolution in Russia, the civil war the followed, and World War II.
Jonathan Stroud's The Bartimaeus Trilogy is filled with this, mostly in footnotes, where the titular demon often refers to his previous masters, most of them being real famous (along with a few more obscure) historical figures.

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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.
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.
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 succesfully 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.
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.
Red Dwarf did a double in-joke by having an alternate dimension President Kennedy assassinate himself — from behind the grassy knoll.
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.
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 they messed up a bit there, as that 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 the death of a person, causing such stuff as a phone ringing which when picked up treats the listener to "Watson, come here quick, 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.
- And in the latest 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 Doctor very quickly tells Donna he "Before you ask, that fire had nothing to do with me. Well, a little bit..." referring to the Great Fire of Rome in AD 63, which in a VERRRRRRRRRY early episode was shown to have been inadvertently inspired by the Doctor holding a magnifying glass too long at a map...
- Not to mention that various alien species were responsible for the creation of the universe (Terminus), the Earth (The Runaway Bride), the creation of life on Earth (City of Death), wiped out the dinosaurs (Earthshock), and the directed the development of human sentience (Image of the Fendahl).
- 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.
  - Seriously, when you start watching a lot of Doctor Who, this trope starts to look like the summary of the show.
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.
In the abysmal The Lost World TV series, the protagonists find themselves transported to WWI era Fulham and meet Winston Churchill himself. During the episode, he responds to the outrageous claims of the protagonists saying "That's about as likely as I becoming Prime Minister!"
- This may be a double joke with Margaret Thatcher, who did say "No woman in my time will be Prime Minister."
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 News Radio 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.
- 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 being heavily implied as the real father of Caesarion, the historical son of Caesar and Cleopatra.
  - It's not heavily implied if two characters state it outright, as well as it being the only chronological explanation that makes sense, and the original motive behind the conception of Caesarion.
- 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.

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The old World Of Darkness had a number of these; the one mentioned at the top of the page relates to the Malkavian clan. 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.
  - Wasn't the Holocaust at least indirectly caused by the Nephandi?
  - In an early edition, yeah; they undid that, and made it policy not to "explain" Nazism in fantastic terms, because they decided it was irresponsible/in bad taste.
  - And they didn't consider "explaining" Christinaity as bad taste? I mean 33% of the world's population believes in it for pete's sake!
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".

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Many of the major characters that Altair is sent to assassinate in Assassins Creed were real historical figures who died during 1193, the year in which the game is set.
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.
  - 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 XM 16 E 1 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.
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.
In Scribblenauts Albert Einstein is afraid of God.
- Ironically, I'm pretty sure Einstein believed in God in some way
  - Spinoza's god, to be exact.

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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 spiralling out of control from there. Whether they were joking or not seems to be unknown.

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The Unified Field Crossover History of the Universe (http://crossover.bureau42.com/timeshredder1.html ) is a website pratically dedicated to this trope.
The SCP Foundation does this rather creepily in this story. The SCP Foundation was responsible for the JFK Assassination. Apparently, he tried to oppose the Foundation.

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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 & Ronald. OJ was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
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, one of the main characters "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 narcissitic 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.
- Ret Con of some of the earliest episodes, where Al Gore was implied to have become President of the United States.
  - Is that really a retcon? Usually retcon is something that "happened this way all along", while this is a chance, that takes place in the show's history?
- His time-travelling also causes several in-show historical in-jokes as well. For example, one episode revolved around Fry finding his pet dog Seymoure as a fossil in a museum and his attempts to resurrect it. In the movie, while the scammers are forcing Bender to assinate Fry in 2010, the year Seymoure 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 sad moment when one recalls that Fry decided not to bring Seymoure back because he thought he died of old age.
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 Bill Gates and his CRAZY ideas," Of course, he gets the name wrong...
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". (Nevermind that it was just fine until Turkish troops shot a cannonball at it.)
- The cannon isn't canon
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 had Wiggum's ancestor beratting Orson Welles which ended with the phrase "nose, bud". Welles says Nosebud...

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