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The practice of giving inappropriate firearms to characters or factions in a TV show or movie. They're inappropriate either because this group wouldn't have access to it (like Soviet soldiers wielding Uzis), or because the producers can't be arsed to make special props for their Sci Fi setting and just used a real gun. If they show up often enough, dialogue might point out it's an entirely different gun, since it has some Techno Babble name. Sometimes, it'll be something completely silly like a repainted glue gun.
Needless to say, it isn't restricted to guns, but they are always the first and most notable victim. Which is strange, as it's generally a lot easier to get a few MP-40's than to arrange for a Tiger tank to show up in your production.
Named for what someone will exclaim when spotting the Sci Fi version, since it will almost always be a Rare Gun. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since gun design is practical and the ergonomics are unlikely to change in the future; the production crew making its own design might end up giving you something like the horrible phasers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which looked like electric shavers miniaturized dustbusters, lacked sights, and were so unergonomic that, for the war arc of Deep Space Nine, which involved many gun battles, the production team were forced to make more practical designs; the SFX team had problems adding in energy beam effects in post-production because the actor couldn't aim them properly at targets ten feet away (in fairness, this was because the phaser models had been subject to Executive Meddling by Gene Roddenberry at the start of Next Gen`s run, emphasising the pacifistic nature of early Next Gen by making the weapons look as un-weapon-like as possible; early production notes published recently include plans for much more sensible pistol-shaped phasers).
Another reason this can happen (especially for things more expensive than guns) is that the "right" weapon may not be available, and an incorrect version easier to come by than it would be to make a replica. For example, Chinese AK clones commonly stand in for the real thing in American movies made during the Cold War. An extreme case would be armoured vehicles; there is only one WW 2-vintage Tiger tank that still runs in the entire world and leasing a running mock-up from a private collection would be far more expensive than simply using some other tank and hoping the audience doesn't figure it out. This goes even more for ships; before modern CGI, movies were often forced to either use contemporary warships (even with a stratospheric budget, Pearl Harbor's Japanese carrier set was built on the deck of a modern carrier, made obvious by the visible steam catapult runs) or unconvincing models.
While guns are a fairly mature technology with most new designs being more ergonomic then mechanically different, some shows will push this and it gets unrealistic when a gun is still in use in an entirely different universe, 1,000,000,000 years from now, or 100 years before it was designed.
See also A.K.A.-47, Just Plane Wrong and Artistic License - Ships.
Examples:
- The king of this trope would have to be the M1911 service pistol (usually the M1911A1 variant specifically), which regularly gets star billing playing itself. In series as diverse as the Honor Harrington novels (set in the year four thousand or so) and John Barnes' Timeline Wars, protagonists routinely carry this gun as their personal signature. Nevermind that Honor's pulser can rip apart a tank, and Mark Strang's SHAKK can do so at six miles, with two thousand homing rounds it can synthesize from scrap metal.
- To be fair, Dame Harrington is in the SCA, and thus practices the use of such an antique weapon.
- Honor Harrington's M1911, a replica built from the original design, was a gift. Three factors: her uncle was in the SCA so she'd learned to fire "chem burner" guns at a young age; dueling pistols on Manticore are 10mm "chem burner" automatics (because a hit from one can be survivable and the preferred dueling protocol is a single shot each), and the gift was from the Protector of Grayson (a planet whose tech base had become low enough before their alliance with Manticore they couldn't produce small enough grav-drivers to make pulser and so had to use "chem burners"). She did kill a mass murderer with her M1911 because as it uses chemical propellant it could be concealed without a scan for energy sources picking it up, but her signature weapon is probably either David Weber's latest "uber tech" for slaughtering Havenite ships or the pulser built into her artificial arm.
- Also justified for Strang: he starts as a historian and bodyguard in our present (subjectively before being drafted by the Time Police), where he uses the M1911 because of its durability and intimidation value. And if you lose your BFG in the past, it helps to have a backup you can find bullets for.
- Here's the IMDFB page for the M1911 series.
- The 1911 style pistol's continuing existence is more likely than you think. As the name implies, the design is already 100 years old and it is STILL one of, if not THE, most popular pistols in the world. Aside from being the basis for almost every automatic handgun on the market today, everyone and their mother makes a copy of it and it's probably second only to the AK-47 and variants in terms of number built. Also, let's not forget that there are still black powder shooters who own and shoot cap & ball revolvers, the designs of which are over 150 years old. It's not two thousand years, but it's a start.
- A very common one is use of the wrong AK variant. Sometimes you see Soviet/ex-Soviet soldiers in a reasonably modern setting wielding AK-47s. In reality, they'd been mostly replaced in Soviet service by the AK-74 (which can be identified by a smaller, less-curved, orange-coloured magazine, as well as a large muzzle brake on the end of the barrel). Lord of War is an example. Recently, however, 7.62-mm AKs, either former mainstays of the AKM line, or more modern AK-10x series, made a resurgence, after combat experience in Afghanistan and Chechnya demonstrated that the lighter bullet of the AK-74 tends to ricochet at the slightest prodding, and is thus unsuitable in forested areas. Thus there can be some unexpected aversion, when a bumbling producer who just doesn't care accidentally gets things straight.
- In reality, the AK-74 was just starting to make its way to the export market before The Great Politics Mess-Up. The vast majority of AK variants in the world are of the AKM variety or the Chinese Type 56 clone, both firing the original 7.62x39mm cartridge.
- With the AK family and its close relatives this can get really screwy. To date there have been various AK-type weapons firing a truly massive list of different calibers, including 7.62x39mm, 5.45x39mm, 9x39mm, 5.56x45mm, 7.62x54mmR, 7.62x51mm, 9x18mm, 9x19mm, 7.62x25mm and even 12-gauge, 20-gauge, and .410 shotgun shells.
- Misidentification of pistol caliber in live action TV/movies. Hollywood pretty much standardizes around the 9mm blank, so many firearms identified as .40S&W or .45ACP will often have a 9mm "stand in." With something like a Glock, which comes in several different calibres and variants, it's barely even noticeable.
- Substitution of a common firearm variant for a rare one. Machine pistols such as the Beretta 93R or the Glock 18 generally aren't sold outside of government agencies even if the armsmaster has a Class III permit; the usual solution is to drop a full-auto sear into the semiauto variant (The Joker's Glock in The Dark Knight is one notable example).
- An interesting case occurs on the cover of Paratime by H. Beam Piper. The main character is shown holding a Steyr AUG assault rifle. This supposedly represents a bolt-action rifle which U.S. law-enforcement types in 1948 thought looked unusual and advanced ... but not extraordinary or science-fictional.
Anime and Manga
- Cowboy Bebop is set in a future with space gates, large spaceships and advanced almost-sentient computers, yet every personal weapon seen is either very similar or exactly identical to present-day ones. Spike himself uses a Jericho 941. The anime tries to convey the idea that it's set in a somewhat realistic and retro future, so it makes sense that there are no blasters and that energy weapons are few and far between (though it's never explained how Spike got a plasma cannon on his Swordfish when even police fighters are restricted to machine guns). You'd think personal firearms would have evolved at least a little. Plenty of the main cast's weapons are out of date now, but then everything in Cowboy Bebop is retro!
- It's worth noting that Spike's dated Jericho can fire in the vacuum of space. The pistol might be mundane, but the bullets are better than what you can buy today.*
Bullet propellants usually contain all that's needed for combustion, meaning that normal guns should be able to fire in the airless environment of space. However, there's also nothing to radiate the heat away from the gun. So, while the gun can probably get off a few shots it would quickly overheat, causing the barrel and other parts of the gun to expand, rendering the moving parts unable to move. Also, exposure to hard vacuum can cause many types of non-specialized lubrication to flash-evaporate, meaning the gun might not even fire in the first place. Space is not a good place to use most regular firearms.
- In Gankutsuou, which takes place in the 50th century, Danglars uses a gold-plated PPK/S, and Morcerf a gold-plated P08.
- A lot of the guns shown in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga are visual expies of real life weapons. One of the most apparent is the submachinegun design of the Amestrian military, which is pretty much the German MP-40 from WW2. I guess if you're Putting on the Reich, it'd only make sense to use their guns.
- The first anime series, on the other hand, goes in a different direction, arming the State Military with mostly Vietnam-era American weapons; the standard rifle is the M14, and both the M21 sniper variant and the M60 machine gun show up at one point or another. Hawkeye's signature Browning M1910 is unchanged, though, and the MP-40s are replaced with Walther MPLs rather than any kind of American weapon.
- Brotherhood keeps the first series' MPLs and M14s, while leaving Riza's various guns and most non-Amestrian weapons as they were in the manga.
- Code Geass is rather strange in this regard. Taking place in an alternate timeline, most of the firearms seen are fictional, but the few identifiable ones seem like very odd choices in the context of the series. The standard Britannian pistol appears to be a slightly modified Heckler & Koch USP .45 or Mark 23 pistol, while the service rifle looks like some kind of cross between a FAMAS and an FN P90. Considering that, in-universe, the EU and Britannia are mortal enemies, it makes very little sense for Britannian troops to be using German, French, and Belgian arms.
- Of course, firearm design in general is said to be totally different in the series' timeline (all firearms are apparently coilguns of some sort, for one thing), so it may be a moot point.
- The Pallet Gun from Neon Genesis Evangelion is almost identical to the Steyr ACR, albeit with a different stock shape to account for the lack of a magazine.
- The ECOAS spec ops troops in Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn use FN P90s, despite the series taking place several centuries into the future.
- Most of the guns in the Ghost in the Shell franchise are based on real-world weapons, some of which are outdated today (even though the series takes place circa 2030 A.D.) and are frequently Rare Guns as well. The FN-P90 seems to be particularly popular with the creators.
- Noir both subverts this and plays it straight. Of the main characters, Mirielle uses a modern Walther P99, which subverts this. This trope is played straight with Kirika's Beretta Md. 1934. Instead of giving her the more widely available Walther PPK (which uses the same cartridge and is almost exactly the same size), the production staff deliberately gave her an out-of-production World War 2 vintage pistol because they didn't want to give her "the James Bond gun".
Film
- In the film Aliens:
- The M41A pulse-rifle is made from a Thompson SMG, its grenade launcher made from a Remington 870 shotgun inside the shell of a Franchi SPAS-12.
- The smartguns are each made from an MG-42 machine gun mated with a Steadicam camera harness and some pieces of a bicycle.
- The flamethrower built on a cut-up M16 receiver with an M203 handguard.
- The sentry guns are built around WW 1 Maxim LMG 08/15 machine guns.
- Hicks carries as a backup an Ithaca 'Stakeout' shotgun, and the Marines' sidearm, called the VP 70, is a real, unaltered weapon. The Sulaco's weapon racks are also filled with unaltered modern weapons; M16s, Colt Commando rifles, and Enfield L85s. Vasquez also uses a Smith & Wesson Model 39 pistol at one point.
- Alan Dean Foster hangs a lampshade on the first of these in his novelization of Aliens, when one of the Marines asks Hicks if he got his pump-action shotgun from a museum.
- Bear in mind that the gun props in Aliens look suitably futuristic enough that they actually avert this trope for anyone who's not a firearms expert. The M41A has become iconic in its own right.
- The Stormtrooper rifles in Star Wars were made from the British Sterling L2A3 SMGs with added scopes and radiator fins made from windshield wiper blades.
- The Rebel troopers' blaster pistols seen during the boarding of the Tantive IV and in the Battle of Hoth are also modified Sterling SMGs.
- Han Solo's gun, the Blastech DL-44, is a German Broomhandle Mauser with a scope and a fire extinguisher dispersion nozzle on the barrel.
- Elite Stormtrooper's DLT-19 heavy blasters are MG 34s and their T-21 light repeating blasters are Lewis guns, both with little to no modifications.
- In the Battle of Hoth, modified MG 42 show up on the Imperial side, while a few Rebel troops field modified Sturmgewehr 44s. They reappear on Endor, alongside modified AR-15 rifles.
- In the same sequence, the electrobinoculars used by Luke are a Simrad Optronics LP-7 laser rangefinder as used by the Norwegian Army. There's a reason for this; the Rebel soldiers were played by the Norwegian Army. The movie prop has a few parts of a Revell model kit of a V-8 engine added to it.
- The Jawas' blasters are modified Lee-Enfield rifles.
- In the book The Making of Star Wars George Lucas says he used modified firearms for rayguns because he wanted them to look real (e.g. scratched and battered) rather than like plastic toys or props. In addition, using actual firearms firing blanks allowed ILM to accurately time where to insert the blaster bolts; also, the sound of the blank round firing was integrated into the sound of the blaster (the "peew" effect being achieved by smacking a taut steel cable with a hammer). Freeze-framing scenes will often show the blasters ejecting spent casings in scenes where they're actually being fired.
- Boba Fett's EE-3 carbine rifle is a Webley & Scott No.1 Mark 1 Flare Gun used by British paratroopers in WWII. That's right, Boba Fett uses a flare gun!
- The vehicles are all decorated with model kit parts for detail. The Jawa Sandcrawler has the running gear of a Sherman hidden under plastic covers, and various jet engines, truck engine blocks, battleship components, bits of tanks and so on decorate the spaceships.
- The movie Pitch Black featured a shortened SPAS-12. It either shot slugs or was an energy weapon in the movie.
- In Escape from New York the United States Police are armed with M16s with the handguards removed (which would burn the hands of the people using them).
- The Asylum movie Mega Piranha has a group of frogmen using a special type of underwater assault rifle... which is clearly a NERF gun painted black
- In Rambo movies, you will notice many.
- Russian helicopters fitted with western weapons (such as the FN MAG machine guns). The helicopter in the second movie was also a fake; a prop nose built onto a Western helicopter which apparently made it extremely difficult to fly.
- ZSU-23 Shilka replica made using M113 chassis in Rambo 3.
- 'AK-74' and 'AKS-74' assault rifles that uses magazines for 7.62x39mm. To be exact,those guns are AKM, AKMSU, or some Chinese AK replica modified (such as adding the muzzle brake) to look like AK-74 and AKS-74 since Hollywood did not have access to those weapons at those times.
- A fake SVD made from a Valmet with an SVD-style stock in the second movie.
- M2 Browning heavy machine guns fitted with prop parts to look like Soviet heavy machine guns, with the exception of the parts of Rambo 3 filmed in Israel.
- In the 1988 cop movie Red Heat Arnold Schwarzenegger (playing a Russian 'Dirty Harry' type) totes the fictional 'Podbyrin 9.2 mm' pistol (actually a modified Desert Eagle). The weapon certainly looks different during the one scene we see it resting on a table with its P-38 style grips; unfortunately the rest of the time they're wrapped in Arnie's huge fist and so the Podbyrin just looks like a Desert Eagle with a slightly longer barrel.
- In the sci-fi movie Enemy Mine the human pilot is armed with a stainless steel Walther PPK.
- In Raiders of the Lost Ark the main weapon of the Nazi soldiers is the MP-40, despite the movie taking place in 1936. More jarring is the fact that at the end of the movie, Indiana Jones threatens the bad guys with an RPG-2, a Soviet rocket launcher, which wasn't even designed until a few years after World War II.
- The MP-40 was the MP-38 slightly redesigned to be cheaper to manufacture, and the two are visually nearly identical, but still falls 2 years too short. Of course, as the Germans were collecting para-normal technology, they obviously must have gotten a hold of a short duration time-machine.
- There was an earlier version of the MP-38/-40, the MP-36, which was superficially very similar although the magazine housing was slanted slightly forward. It's uncertain how many were actually made but there are only two believed to still exist, numbered 01 and 014.
- Justified in Lifepod (the sci-fi remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat) where one character is carrying a 20th century revolver because it will get through spaceport detectors that will pick up contemporary energy weapons.
- A case of being a bit too accurate is in the movie adaptation of The Fourth Protocol, where the KGB agent played by Pierce Brosnan uses a Soviet Makarov pistol — as an 'illegal' carrying out an operation that must not be linked to his own country (setting off a nuke outside a US Air Force base to fake an accident) it's the last weapon he'd use.
- It's possible that the Makarov was supposed to represent the (rather more expensive) Walther PPK on which the Soviet design is loosely based.
- Remo Williams had the hero being tracked as he ran through the woods by what was actually the High Power Illuminator Radar. It is the distinctive 'Mickey Mouse ears' system. This is a radar meant to 'spotlight' a target for the missile and would be useless in that role (and quite hazardous to anybody within 75 meters of the front of it).
- Some of the 'laser guns' in the first (low budget) Terminator movie are clearly contemporary auto weapons, such as the fifty-calibre machine gun in the car sequence.
- In District 9, at least one MNU Elite Mook can be very briefly seen wielding a rifle that looks a bit like an AK-47 with a straight, slightly shorter magazine. It was probably a 7.62mm NATO-calibre IMI Galil, which is slightly odd given that South Africa did make a copy of the Galil, but of the 5.56mm version that uses an AK-style magazine.
- Given that they're mercenaries working for a multinational corporation it's hardly unusual they'd have access to weapons from all over the world.
- Still mildly noteworthy in that it's the only weapon the mercenaries are seen to carry that isn't standard issue to the South African army or police, with the possible exception of that sniper rifle in the shots from the helicopter.
- The CR-21, the weird-shaped bullpup combat rifle which the MNU guys are seen to be issued by their armorer near the beginning of the movie, isn't standard-issue either, but at least they are indeed made in South Africa.
- The sniper rifle used by the MNU mercenary to disable Wikus' mini-mech is a Denel NTW-20, which lot of people will recognize is as "the sniper rifle from Halo". Indeed, Halo's sniper rifle was based heavily on the NTW-20 with bits from a Barret M82.
- The film Zulu had a few examples:
- While the production crew acquired plenty of period accurate Martini-Henry rifles, the production used up all of the available blank cartridges for the Martini-Henry's obsolete caliber. Thus, some extras wound up with anachronistic Lee-Enfield Mk I bolt-action rifles instead.
- Also, officers used Webley Mk VI revolvers in lieu of period-accurate (but difficult to procure) Beaumont-Adams revolvers.
- The film Demolition Man features an energy weapon that is actually the futuristic-looking Heckler & Koch G-11 rifle.
- That specific type of assault rifle actually shows up quite often in movies or TV shows set Twenty Minutes into the Future that need a "futuristic-looking" firearm. It's (unsurprisingly) mostly portrayed as some kind of energy weapon. Another 90s production that used it several times was SeaQuest DSV.
- The movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen used several anachronistic guns with cosmetic changes. Dorian Gray used a gilded Luger P08, Captain Nemo used a Tokarev TT-33 pistol with ornate external decorations, his men have equally ornately-decorated Sten Mk II submachine guns, and the antagonist's mooks used Uzis, Thompsons, and AK-47s essentially encased in rectangular metal boxes.
- They also used Mark V Tanks which was developed at the very end of WW 1- in 1899!
- In the film A Bridge Too Far, most of the American paratroopers (including their Colonel, played by Elliot Gould) are seen carrying the M1 carbine, rather than the modified M1A1 carbine (a smaller, easier to carry weapon with a folding wire-stock) that was specifically designed for and issued to American paratroopers.
- Hilariously in the film version of Bulletproof Monk, the Nazi villain's Mooks use Uzis.
- For those of you who don't get the joke, the Uzi was created by an Israeli.
- The James Bond movie Octopussy had a scene with Soviet border guards armed with Steyr AUGs.
- In A Few Good Men, Kaffee notes that Lt. Colonel Markinson committed suicide with a .45, yet the scene depicting his death clearly shows him shooting himself with a Beretta.
- Averted in Buffalo Soldiers in a nicely self-referential way. The plot revolves around how relatively easy it was to sell off large amounts of weapons stolen from US army bases in Germany. After the Cold War ended and US troops returned home, vast amounts of materiel were left behind. One member of the film crew owned 100 of the appropriate guns to lend the production. Where one character is given a particularly heavy gun to carry on exercises as a punishment, there was some difficulty in sourcing this gun.
Literature
- A rare literary example can be found in Brian Daley's Hobart Floyt/Alarcrity Fitzhugh adventures: Despite the far-far future setting, Hobart's personal weapon is a Webley Mark IV revolver. It's specifically stated to be a modern reproduction from a frontier planet which needed a sturdy and reliable last-ditch survival weapon.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: Voyager once featured the smallest of the Calico SMG variants as pistols (guess the 50-round magazine was just convenient).
- There is a pistol version of the Calico actually: the 9mm M950 which can take a 50 or a 100 magazine. Due to their unique appearance Calico firearms have appeared in several sci-fi movies, including "I Come In Peace" (aka Dark Angel) and the parody Spaceballs.
- The terrorists in that particular Voyager episode ("Time and Again") also used the Detonics Pocket 9. At least the producers went to the trouble of selecting weapons that looked different from regular firearms.
- The Doctor Who story The Impossible Planet features the people on the base wielding P90s, a gun which would be several thousand years old at that point.*
All in all, P90s shows up in all sorts of strange places in Doctor Who, the BBC must have ordered a surplus.
- Utopia then takes it to a completely ridiculous extent. Guards are shown using Dragunov sniper rifles (a gun designed in the late '50s) in the year 100 trillion. For reference, the universe right now (in the real world) is allegedly 13.7 billion years old. This episode takes place over seven thousand times the age of the universe into the future (95.9 trillion), and they're still using a gun that is almost obsolete now!
- The Doctor's Daughter features a Webley revolver in a futuristic clone-war. Yes, the favoured weapon of the original Brigadier. It also featured P90 gas-jet mock-ups, oddly enough. Couldn't they have just reused the G36s they had on hand?
- The soldiers in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone also use P90s, although these have phony suppressors dummied on to increase their length. Interestingly, the suppressors resemble Dalek extermination beam projectors.
- River Song has used the futuristic-looking COP derringer also seen in Battlestar Galactica - although River's has an integral blowtorch.
- In The Twin Dilemma, Jacondan weapons seem to be repainted glue guns.
- The 1960s-era series Combat! (set in World War II) sometimes used what appeared to be M3 submachine guns (which were actually issued to US troops at the time) with some modifications in external appearance in place of Nazi MP-38s or MP-40s.
- Similarly disguised Reising submachine guns were also used in some episodes. Like the M3, the Reising was also distributed to US troops in WW 2, though in more limited numbers.
- Averted in Firefly just for Mal's revolver was carefully built to mask the underlying Taurus model 85 while remaining operable. Zoe's short rifle is simply a Winchester Model 1892 — in fact, the prop was previously used in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. The Alliance are seen to be wielding G36s, MP5SDs and L85s. And River gets her hands on a Desert Eagle at one point in "Objects in Space."
- Zoe's short rifle traces its lineage back to the Mare's Leg of the old TV series "Wanted, Dead or alive" (1958-61)
- The Desert Eagle stand-in was Jayne's, and given his love affair with guns it's vaguely possible he had a Desert Eagle—or, given the price of artifacts from Earth-That-Was, a reproduction of one. But still.
- In the movie Serenity, the titular spaceship mounts a 20mm FlaK 38, a World War II German anti-air cannon.
- Serenity also features an MP5K SMG in the robbery scene, as well as a modified Winchester 1897 at the end. Both guns use fake sounds. Almost all the guns have different sounds, suggesting Rule Of Cool for gun design and Abnormal Ammo for functionality.
- Jayne's giant gun "Vera" was a modified Izhmash Saiga-12 shotgun that had previously appeared in the movie Showtime.
- In a case of "I Know That Gunship", the aerial ambulance in Ariel is quite obviously modeled off the Soviet Mi-24 Hind, with its distinctive double canopy. The Alliance patrol/fighter craft appear to be based on F/A-18E/F Super Hornets.
- At first averted in the new Battlestar Galactica's first season, when most guns were either masked or obscure guns. However, in the following seasons, more recognizable guns were used, much to the ire of fans.
- In the first season, especially the humans on Kobol use H&K G36s and the futuristic-looking Beretta Cx4 Storm.
- At Zac Adama's funeral, the salute is performed with what appear to be British-made L85 automatic rifles, better known as the SA80.
- There's also the COP .357 derringer, used by Zarek's men and other unofficial types. The same weapon was used in Bladerunner in the opening scene, so it's also a sci-fi Shout Out.
- At one point Admiral Adama is going to an execution; the pistol he carries is clearly an H&K USP, complete with a SureFire laser sight attached under the barrel.
- From season 3 on the masked pistols were dropped and the Colonial Forces received FN Five-Sevens as standard sidearms. They have an underslung "Grenade Launcher" for the high praised explosive ammunition, but are basically just Five-Sevens.
- The Airwolf episode "Mad over Miami" features a bad guy holding something he claims is a new American heat-seeking missile launcher, which he uses (unsuccessfully) on Airwolf. It's very clearly an RPG - a Soviet rocket launcher with no heat-seeking capability.
- In the Airwolf pilot movie, a HAWK missile is seen launching, to be identified by the heroes as a 'heat seeking missile' (the HAWK is a semi-active radar guided missile).
- In an episode of The Seventies TV series The Professionals, where the Bulgarian secret service mooks at a prisoner exchange are holding StG-44's instead of AK-47's.
- This is something of a near miss research-wise, as a few StG-44s persisted in service with the East German Border Guards and possibly a few other Soviet security forces as a stopgap whilst the AK-47 was being rolled out, but they were almost certainly long gone by the end of the 1950s.
- StargateSG-1 both commits and averts this trope, often even in the same scene. From season 4 onwards, the team's MP5 submachine guns (which ARE issued in the U.S. military) were replaced by the Belgian FN P90 personal defense weapon. The only American users of the P90 are the Secret Service and some U.S. law enforcement agencies. However, actual U.S. military weapons also appear in the show quite often: the Beretta M9 pistol, the M4A1 carbine, the M16 assault rifle, and the M249 SAW to name a few. Another straight play of the trope occurs much later in the series; when Cameron Mitchell joins the team, the SGC starts using the H&K G36 and MP7 PDW.
- The Word Of God is the 9mm round fired by the MP5 was simply not powerful enough to penetrate Jaffa armor reliably, resulting in a lot of ammunition expended for little purpose. SGC switched to the P90, along with assault rifles, specifically because the 5.7mm round has extremely good penetration against a variety of materials, making it more effective against Jaffa than the MP5.
- Also, in addition to their specially designed weapons the Genii use Striker shotguns.
- During the opening phases of the second Gulf War, it was necessary for the Stargate production crew to cut down on their use of the P90, with it only being carried by O'Neill, whilst Carter carried the 'Carter Special'. This was due to the fact that factories that would otherwise have produced the 5.7mm blanks were busy producing live rounds.
- This trope is played glaringly straight almost any time the SGC runs into an offworld civilization that's using firearms. There is one episode where the other civilization was clearly using M1 Garands and AKs.
- The use of (for example) the P90 by Stargate Command has some real-world plausibility, even though it's not standard U.S. military equipment. In real life, Special Operations Command can make use of RFI (Rapid Fielding Initiative) to bypass the usual slow-moving procurement system and buy whatever they need directly. SGC would be in a somewhat analogous position to SOCOM (i.e., a relatively small but well-financed and highly important element of the military), quite possibly with even more RFI freedom.
- There was an episode of Hogan's Heroes where an American M7 Priest (a self-propelled artillery piece from WW 2), painted grey and given iron cross decals, stood in for a German AFV. They even use the Priest's gun to set off some dynamite they've wired to a bridge at one point.
- In Red Dwarf's eighth series, the resurrected crew of the titular ship appear to use Steyr AUGs as their standard service rifle. Canaries appear to be armed with modified MP5s.
- The canaries actually seem to be wielding some form of modified G3s, or variant thereof. The "magazines" are straight and more in line with a rifle caliber than a pistol one. Not to mention the amount of barrel forward of the foregrip.
- Nope. They were MP5s.
- The Peacekeeper Pulse Rifle from the show Farscape bears a remarkable similarity to the Steyr ACR, sans magazine and wrapped in tin foil.
- In the Castle episode "The Fifth Bullet", Beckett discovers a “9mm pistol” in an amnesiac's apartment — which is very obviously a .45 caliber Colt M1911.
Video Games
- Although Serious Sam, with a 22nd century protagonist, has a fully-automatic rocket launcher (still a dream) and a laser weapon (ditto), but it also features archaic weaponry, including unlimited-reload Schofield revolvers, a manual-loading snap-open double-barreled shotgun, an unashamedly labeled Tommygun and a man-portable ''cannon'' (of the cannonball variety). All of which are hilariously out-of-place in ancient Egypt.
- In Hidden & Dangerous 2 and its expansion pack you face Italian soldiers that wield German firearms and tanks. The Japanese feature about the same amount, but in their case the developers took the time to model appropriate weapons. There are also some Italian-model aircraft on the field, yet the pilots seen wear Luftwaffe uniforms.
- The box art for Wolfenstein 3D depicts Nazis using M16s, that fire while falling through air no less.
- The box art for its Spear of Destiny expansion features the hero smashing open the glass case of the titular spear with a Kalashnikov.
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein has the female Nazi Elite Mooks all wielding British Sten guns. Whether this is acceptable is up for debate, since the Germans did make their own copies near the end of the war.
- A similar example: In the demo version of Medal of Honor: Airborne Assault the player faces Italian blackshirts armed with German weapons like the Kar-98 and MP-40 in a small village in Sicilia.
- This continued in the Breakthrough expansion pack's Italian missions, in spite of the expansion adding authentic Italian weapons and NPC models for use in multiplayer.
- During the introductory assault course in Modern Warfare 2, the range master is seen brandishing a chrome-plated Desert Eagle and gives another one to the player character. Keep in mind these are US Army Rangers in Afghanistan: Desert Eagles are definitely not standard issue, and getting caught using an unapproved firearm can land you into serious trouble. Then again, the weapon boxes he opens before you run the Pit also contain a number of weapons that aren't standard-issue, and nobody ever complains if you drop one of your starting guns for one that someone had just been trying to kill you with (hell, Soap at one point in the second game directly asks if you "see anything you like" in the Gulag's armory), so the concept of unapproved firearms may not be even exist in the game's universe.
- What's funny to note about Modern Warfare 2 is that only 2 of the weapons the Russians use make any sense. These are the RPG-7 and the Dragunov SVD- most of the others they use aren't even Russian, for example the Israeli TAR-21. The other ones that ARE Russian, such as the RPD and AK-47, have been replaced for military use already.
- There's also the “G18,” which is a modified Glock 17 standing in for the full-auto Glock 18. As mentioned at the top of the page, this is a common occurrence in films; why they would do that in a video game where they can model whatever gun they want (such as dual sawed-down Model 1887 shotguns being flip-cocked after every shot), is anybody's guess.
- Well they do need a physical copy which they could make a model from. Many guns in-game are actually modeled off of airsoft guns - where else could you find an AK-47 with a polymer handguard, Picatinny rail, and Magpul stock? Other weapons which may not have an airsoft equivalent may have been sourced differently, whether from police stations, museums, or the actual steel. In any case, Modern Warfare 3's version of the G18 does include a selector switch (which isn't usable anyway).
- Taken to an extreme in Call of Duty: Black Ops which features several anachronistic faults in regards to firearms shown in the game. The FN FAL in particular - commonly known as the "Right Arm of the Free World" for its use by many Western-aligned nations - is only used by Vietcong and Cubans in single player.
- DOOM gives the hero a pistol that looks very much like a Beretta 92. And the shotgun? It's a digitized Tootsie Toy "Dakota" capgun.◊
- The Russian army in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 uses two Russian assault rifles and a handgun alongside Chinese machine guns and sniper rifles and a Swedish RPG. What's even weirder is that the game features a wide assortment of much more sensible modern Russian firearms, but the majority of them are only usable in multiplayer.
- While all the other guns in the original Unreal Tournament are futuristic enough, the game's sniper rifle is merely a long-barreled M16 with a scope attached to the carry handle. Lampshaded in the official site's timeline of the series, where the in-universe explanation for replacing it with the Lightning Gun in UT2003 was that it was "a relic of centuries past".
Western Animation
- Seth MacFarlane shows technically fall into this with pistols: all are drawn as the exact same model, but are identified as what the character in question would logically be using. For example, in Family Guy, all pistols appear as M1911's, but in one episode Stewie identifies one held by an Army recruiter as an M9.
Real Life
- Andy Rooney (who was a correspondent during WWII) once told the story of a platoon of American soldiers who came across a German weapons cache. Either out of curiosity or necessity, they equipped themselves with the best guns the Third Reich had to offer. To paraphrase: "A U.S. mortar team, hearing the familiar sound of German firearms to their flank, dropped round after round on that position until the firing stopped..."
- In Generation Kill, Captain America is chewed out by his very annoyed Sergeant for this very reason.
- This was why the US discouraged its soldiers from taking AK-47s in Vietnam. They are the preferred weapon of the enemy, which make a distinctive sound when fired. However, at the time US riflemen were equipped with an early model of the M16 which was notorious for design faults and a tendency to jam at inappropriate moments, no matter how well looked after. The AK-47, by contrast, was and in some circles still is famed for its durability and reliability, so it boiled down to a choice between being unable to shoot anyone or being shot at by everyone.
- The issue there was as much a combination of advertising the weapon as low maintenance, combined with a change (between prototype and production) in the propellant powder used which made it anything but. There is also the issue with the rifle's direct impingement operation that tends to foul up the innards really quickly.
- For the same distinctive sound, Special Forces teams used them instead of the M16. Any enemy hearing a shot simply heard a fellow soldier shooting enemies.
- Similarly, there was at least one American unit in World War 2 that got itself trapped behind German lines and ran low on supplies. They ended up having to hunt venison using captured German rifles to avoid alerting enemies to their presence.
- With genuine enemy equipment often hard to come by, training units that simulate enemy forces often use friendly vehicles and aircraft painted - and sometimes structurally modified - to look like those of enemy forces.
- During WWII the Russians trained dogs to run under tanks, the plan being to strap them with bombs and unleash them on the advancing Nazis. They lacked actual Nazi tanks to train with, however. When released in the field, the dogs performed exactly as trained and went under their own tanks.
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