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Unintentional Period Piece
With dated 60s references like these, we won't have much of a life in reruns!
—Babs Bunny imitating Rocky Squirrel, Tiny Toon Adventures

A work set in the present day at the time of its creation, but is so full of the culture of the time it resembles a deliberate exaggeration of the era in a work made later.

To provide a concrete example, let's say you're changing channels, and come upon an episode of Barney Miller. You see two gay men go to the police station to talk to Barney about what a recent California court decision would mean for them if they moved there*. Even if you don't look up the decision or when the episode aired from outside sources, you can tell it places the episode at least a few years post-Stonewall (in other words, after 1969); then, they get stuck there because the station is under quarantine because a prisoner who was being held there might have had smallpox, which also places the episode quite firmly in time (the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in 1978).

Thus, even without knowing anything about the show, you can immediately say "filmed in the mid-1970s" without question.

And that's an Unintentional Period Piece; by being current at the time of production, it winds up feeling like a period piece when viewed later.

Narrow Parody is a subset of this trope. Zeerust is when a work's depiction of the future becomes dated, so all works with a far-future setting belong there, not here.

When this is caused by clothing and hairstyles alone, it's Fashion Dissonance. Look for examples of Technology Marching On and Aluminum Christmas Trees. Compare with Two Decades Behind and Society Marches On. Sometimes, especially when the viewer has spent too long on This Very Wiki, the very tropes in use may be recognisably of an era - such as the Nineties Anti-Hero.

Note that a work being a product of its time doesn't necessarily mean it isn't relevant or entertaining to modern audiences, even notwithstanding the kitsch or nostalgia factor (as many of the examples below will demonstrate). If the work's severe datedness also makes it inaccessible to modern audiences, then you have Values Dissonance. When a work's popularity can be specifically dated to a certain era, that makes it Deader than Disco. Obviously films done in black and white, as well as video games, will automatically be dated for technology reasons, but if we listed them all we'd be here all day. So it would be best to judge them more by content and plot.

Examples, organized by both decade and media:

    open/close all folders 

1930s

    1930s Film 

    1930s Literature 

    1930s Theatre 

    1930s Western Animation 

1940s

    1940s Film 
  • Anchors Aweigh
  • The Great Dictator actually could be considered a couple of years ahead of its time, since back when America was neutral, the Nazis were rarely badmouthed in the media. But it is cemented as an early Forties film that could not have been made after World War II because Charlie Chaplin couldn't have known the full scale of the Holocaust at the time the film was made (the Nazis are shown bullying and harassing the Jews, but nothing much worse than that). Chaplin later said if he'd known about the full scale of it at the time, he wouldn't have made the film.

    1940s Western Animation 
  • Any Wartime Cartoon.
  • Looney Tunes shorts tend to be full of the pop culture of the decade they were made, particularly those made in the 1930s and '40s. This could also be said of episodes of Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker or any number of cartoon shorts.
    • Any short directed by Tex Avery is especially full of dated and forgotten Memetic Mutations of the day.
    • The Tom and Jerry short "The Zoot Cat" deserves special mention, not only for its 1940s Fashion Dissonance but because the slang and the dances featured in it place it firmly in the 1940s.
  • The 1946 Disney short "All the Cats Join In", with its jazz soundtrack produced by Benny Goodman, features teens partying in a malt shop, doing swing dancing as a jukebox plays.

1950s

    1950s Film 
  • Guys and Dolls.
  • Averted with The Movie of West Side Story, which was made (very early) in The Sixties but is presumably set in 1957, which is when the play debuted. Admittedly, the Jets look and talk like a product of their time, but the much grittier Sharks look like they could be from two or three decades into the future!
    • The dialogue, however, was fairly authentic teenage slang from the 50s—which of course makes it sound incredibly dated to modern viewers.

    1950s Literature 
  • A couple of Ian Fleming's James Bond stories from ca. 1959 reference the anti-Batista forces in revolutionary Cuba with some sympathy, which wouldn't be the case a year or so later.

    1950s Live Action TV 

1960s

    1960s Film 

    1960s Literature 
  • The White Album by Joan Didion, which is an intentional reflection on the period (that goes into the early 70's as well).

    1960s Live Action TV 
  • The Brady Bunch bleeds its late 1960s/early 1970s origin, due to Fashion Dissonance and being a touch too conservative for the 70s proper. This is lampshaded in the Brady Bunch movies, where they have this attitude in the 1990s.
  • Rowan And Martin's Laugh-In.
  • The Batman live-action series, arguably intentionally. The creators of the series deliberately went for an over-the-top "pop" palette reminiscent of 1960s artists like Warhol and Liechtenstein, and much of the humor derived from Batman and Robin's "old-fashioned" values becoming outdated in a more permissive era. By the time the show ended, the counterculture and hippies had started to creep in.
  • The Monkees.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus to an extent. While the majority of the Pythons' humour is pretty damn ageless, some of the jokes will fly over your head if you aren't familiar with British television presenters, celebrities and politicians who were around at the time. You might get a joke about a "Mrs. Thatcher", but unless you're well-versed in British culture, you probably won't know who Robin Day was (except that he owned a hedgehog called Frank).
  • The Banana Splits, especially during the song segments. For example, in the "San Francisco" version of Wait 'Till Tomorrow, as well as the "Pop Cop" segment (which doesn't feature the Splits), you can see various, then-current styles of cars from the time.
  • Mission: Impossible clearly dates itself by a combination of two factors: on the one hand, while the conflict with the Soviet Bloc could carry the stories into the 1980s, several episodes dealing with Nazis keep it from going later into the 1970s as concerns about Nazis plotting a fourth Reich faded from popular culture.

    1960s Music 
  • "Happy Together" by the Turtles includes the line "If I should call you up, invest a dime..." Telephone booths use quarters nowadays, and even they are becoming obsolete as cell phones are becoming more commonplace.
  • "Mutang Sally" sung by Wilson Pickett: "I bought you a brand new Mustang, 1965..."
  • "Magic Bus" by the Who manages to still sound edgy until the unbelievably quaint-sounding, "Thruppence and sixpence every day just to drive to my baby".

    1960s Theatre 
  • Hair focused heavily on The Sixties while while they were still going on, but did so intentionally.
  • The Boys in the Band is very much a look at the self-loathing, dread and neurosis in a pre-Stonewall gay culture - especially since it hit the stage in 1968, one year before the Stonewall Rebellion. In fact, when Willaim Friedkin adapted the play for the screen in 1970, right when gay liberation and pride were on the rise, he was excoriated for putting together a "throwback" to the days of gay shame.

    1960s Western Animation 
  • Scooby-Doo, thanks in no small part to the bubblegum pop background music during some chase scenes (starting with the second season in 1970— which makes this show a good candidate for the 1970s entries as well!).
  • As noted in the page quote, Rocky and Bullwinkle.
    • Ironically, Rocky and Bullwinkle has had a much longer life in reruns (appearing in syndication through the 1960s, '70s and '80s, on Nickelodeon in the early 1990s, plus very occasionally since then) than the show poking fun at it in the page quote (Tiny Toon Adventures hasn't been seen much on TV since the late 1990s or so).
  • The Flintstones and The Jetsons, despite taking place in the past and the future respectively, have enough 1960s pop culture references that they come off as "The 1960s With Cavemen" or "The 1960s With Flying Cars".

1970s

    1970s Anime/Manga 
  • The second series of Lupin III, in addition to its 1970s styles galore, featured an episode where the heroes make an airborne escape over the Berlin Wall. Another episode had a frustrated Zenigata in Israel getting arrested for demanding a flight to Egypt. The English dub by Pioneer (later, Geneon) Entertainment "updated" many of the pop culture references for the early 2000s, when it was first licensed in the US, which resulted in making the show look as though it took place in the (then-)present day. For instance, a reference to Roger Moore - who played James Bond at the time - in the Japanese original, was changed to Pierce Brosnan in the English dub (That reference itself was later played straight as an Unintentional Period Piece of the early 2000s, as Brosnan was replaced by Daniel Craig).
  • The manga From Eroica with Love is, at its outset, clearly a seventies piece. From its art style, to its neo-nazi hunting West German NATO officer, to its Affably Evil Husky Russkies. As the decades rolled on and the manga continued, it first became a Period Piece, and then eventually moved forward in time a little, the Berlin Wall falling, and Klaus having to make nice with the Russians.
  • The Jack And The Beanstalk anime Jack to Mame no Ki is very much a product of its time you can tell in the music, like the music the vendor who sells Jack the beans plays a song on his piano which sounds a lot like the rock music of the time, the melody of Princess Margret's song "No One's Happier Than I" sounds like the song "Top of the World", and in the original Japanese version of Jack's The Villain Sucks Song about Tulip, Tulip does an Elvis Presley impression.

    1970s Film 
  • The Warriors for 1979 New York City. Interestingly enough, the film is supposed to take place in the future, but was based on a novel from the mid-1960s.
  • Saturday Night Fever.
  • The Muppet Movie.
  • Koyaanisqatsi. Released in 1983, but largely filmed in The Seventies. It starts becoming a period piece when they begin showing people in dated clothing, and really dates itself when it shows the inside of an arcade (bridging those years in which the 1970s transitioned into the '80s culturally).
  • Zardoz. Even though the movie's set in a Post Apocalyptic future, its '70s influence shows everywhere.
  • Most disaster movies, such as Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno.
  • The Man Who Fell to Earth supposedly takes place over several decades, but the fashions, technology and virtually everything else remain pure 1970s. This isn't helped by the fact that We Are As Mayflies to an Alien Among Us hero who isn't physically aging, meaning that only the appearances of the supporting characters clue us in to the passage of time.
  • Plenty of rock musicals of the time scream 1970s, such as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Tommy, Jesus Christ Superstar. Godspell, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Xanadu (1980). Part of the Narm Charm in those movies comes from that fact.
    • Popeye and Flash Gordon, both early 1980s HBO staples, could only have been made in 1980, at the end of the "maverick" era of filmmaking and 1970s excess.
  • Godzilla Vs Hedorah. So grounded in the very early '70s it hurts, with hippies all throughout the film, a very groovy score, and bar scenes that are said by Word Of God to be inspired by Woodstock.
  • Many blaxploitation films characterized the defining characteristics of the '70s. Black Caesar and Hell Up In Harlem, for instance, featured a pre-overhaul Times Square (back when it was known for its sleazy theatres as opposed to the LCD mecca of the late 1990s and 21st century), mink coats, kids shining shoes on the streets, afros, accounting ledgers written in multiple books, and much more.
  • The Bad News Bears: so very mid-'70s, and a fine example of what a PG-rated film could get away with before the PG-13 rating came along. Just listen to 7-year-olds toss out four-letter words, racial epithets and ethnic slurs like there's no tomorrow and try to keep your head from exploding. Also watch as the kids douse each other in beer and see a then 14-year-old Jackie Earle Haley smoke like a chimney.
  • Race with the Devil shows off its '70s-ness in the first ten minutes, where Frank is showing his friend Roger all the features on his $36,000 RV (money that, today, would buy a bare-bones BMW 3-Series). Said features include a color television with stereo sound, a microwave oven, and tons of faux-wood paneling.

    1970s Live Action TV 
  • Starsky & Hutch, which was trying so hard to be urban and au courant in 1975, it's now firmly in I Can't Believe It's Not Parody territory.
  • Barney Miller.
  • All in the Family, along with its many spin-offs.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special is a very 1970s Variety Show with very vague Space Opera trappings. This is very sad, especially since the theatrical films do a pretty fair job of averting the trope.
  • The Muppet Show. People can learn a lot about the celebrities and pop culture of the '70s by watching this show today.
  • The original Hawaii Five 0 suffers this in the early seasons, beginning with the 1968 season, when episodes regularly revolved around issues arising from the Vietnam War such as drug smuggling by military personnel, incidents involving soldiers on leave in Hawai'i, and vets with psychological issues. In later, post-Vietnam, seasons the military aspect (including McGarrett's status as a Naval Reserve officer) was essentially eliminated.
  • Match Game, in the CBS era.

    1970s Theatre 
  • Vanities sets its three scenes in the early 1960s, late '60s, and mid-'70s, respectively. By the time of its musical adaptation, it was three decades past its prime. The addition of a fourth scene set in the mid-1980s-early '90s didn't help.

    1970s Western Animation 

1980s

  • Any of the vast number of movies, songs and TV shows that reference the Cold War and fear of World War III, thanks to The Great Politics Mess-Up. (This mistake applies to most other postwar decades, too, particularly The Fifties).
  • Any use of a cell phone as a status symbol. Especially the huge brick-style ones.

    1980s Anime 
  • Akira. It takes place after a nuclear bomb starts off World War III, and while society does rebuild; clothes, hairstyles, and technology show progress didn't really get past the 80s.
  • Furthermore, Robotech. It took place in the then-far off world of 2009; but 1980s influence is everywhere.

    1980s Comic Books 
  • The Dark Knight Returns, which was written in 1986, strongly features an exaggerated satire of the then-contemporary political and social climate. Back then it was a deliberate contrast to the typical world of young Batman. Now it reads like a deliberate period piece. The sequel, written 15 years later, was written based on the political and social climate of the early 2000s and is already showing shades of this as well, and will undoubtedly read like a period piece in ten years.
  • Bloom County, for all its surrealism, got hit with this hard due to its very prominent political element and a cornucopia of pop-culture gags. It was for this reason that a complete series collection was put off for years—Breathed was positive no one would get most of the jokes. The Complete Library was eventually released with historical commentary next to relevant strips and two-page spreads featuring then-recent newspaper headlines.

    1980s Film 
  • Most of the teen films from the heyday of that genre:
  • The Wizard.
    • Every movie with a scene in an arcade is usually dated to the mid-to-late '80s. The Karate Kid is a notable example.
    • For that matter, TRON.
  • Back to the Future is very strongly '80s, to the point where the sequence introducing the "present day" of 1985 is now counted as an unintentional Mister Sandman Sequence like the introductions to 1885, 1955 and 2015.
    • The scene at the retro-themed restaurant Café 80's in Part II is remarkably prescient. Nearly all the '80s elements in there — Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, arcade games — are things that are strongly associated with the '80s today. (Compare it to the '80s Mister Sandman Sequence in Hot Tub Time Machine, a film made twenty years later.) This is despite the fact that the film was made in the '80s, and almost all those elements were still current (Doc Brown even remarks that the restaurant isn't done very well).
    • Averted with the "alternate 1985" scenes in the second movie, which, except for the Sammy Hagar music in the background, does not evoke the eighties at all. Biff Tannen's muttonchop sideburns and leisure suit, along with the way his goons at the casino are dressed, actually evoke The Seventies. Lampshaded by Marty, who responds to the urban decay around him by remarking that "This has got to be the wrong year!"
  • To Live and Die in L.A..
  • The Al Pacino version of Scarface.
  • Wall Street.
  • Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
  • Road House. The Agony Booth's recap called it "a tone poem of late '80s cheese.".
  • Night of the Comet.
  • WarGames. Acoustic couplers were a particularly short-lived part of early modem use, but it also captures the tone of the end of the Cold War flawlessly.
  • Real Genius could only have existed when the SDI was a pressing concern.
  • Do the Right Thing features a character who seems to do nothing but walk around carrying a boombox blaring Public Enemy's "Fight the Power", and makes reference to several contemporary well-publicized hate crimes.
  • Red Dawn.
  • The Running Man, almost certainly intentionally. (Among other things, the movie is clearly a satire.)
  • Zeerust sets in on Escape from New York and manages to make Twenty Minutes into the Future look like an Unintentional Period Piece. The vehicles, the weapons, Snake's immense walkie talkie, the styles of dress, the Cold War undertones and the soundtrack are so evocative of the 1980s that it is impossible for a contemporary viewer not to see it as a Reagan-era piece (which is slightly ironic, since it was filmed while Jimmy Carter was still president). Our Graphics Will Suck In The Future is also in play. Despite being labeled under different decades, the two movies were released only two years apart (1979 and 1981).
  • In his commentary for Star Trek II, director Nicholas Meyer mentions that all works are inevitably the product of their time period, when it's pointed out how Khan's followers look like the entourage of a hair metal band.
  • Teen Witch.
  • The Terminator has a memorable scene in a horrifically '80s nightclub, and also features Sarah and her friend dressing in everything you think of as '80s women's fashion and declare themselves "Better than mortal man deserves."
  • Trading Places.
  • Big.
  • Flight of the Navigator is definitely something. 80s music, 80s hair, 80s clothing, it's all here.
  • The Goonies.
  • Rad.
  • Streets of Fire took place in a Retro Universe that looks like a mix between the 50s and 80s, but the 80s influence is so much more obvious.
  • Transformers: The Movie.

    1980s Live Action TV 
  • Miami Vice.
  • The Facts of Life (started in 1979; but is very much associated with the 1980s).
  • Full House, which is also an Unintentional Period Piece for the early 1990s, even beyond the typical Two Decades Behind phenomenon - perhaps inevitable with three trendy teenage girls in the cast. For example, the episode where Stephanie's band sings "The Sign" by Ace of Base could only have been made in 1994-95.
  • Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High.
  • The Golden Girls did this, both with the ladies' fashion choices and with a lot of their pop culture references (which they wisely kept to easily ignored asides, as much of today's Periphery Demographic is far too young to appreciate the endless stream of jokes about Donna Rice or Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker).
  • Family Ties.
  • Small Wonder.
  • MTV, when they played music videos on a regular basis.
  • The Beiderbecke Affair is like a time capsule of Leeds in the early 80s, and in particular of the British education system before the National Curriculum.
  • The Young Ones, being set explicitly during Thatcher's Britain.
  • Cheers. Many artifacts of the 1980's occur, such as the bar being amazed by a car phone.
  • Rockschool, a BBC miniseries later broadcast by PBS, was a show (in fact, two separate miniseries), the first (concerning a guitar-bass-drums Power Trio) of which lasted in 1984, and the second one (which added a keyboardist to the trio) in 1987, attempting to teach kids the basics of playing and singing in a rock band. Not only were the computer graphics used in the show, along with the hair and fashion styles of the four teenage presenters/musicians dated to the '80's, but naturally the special guests the show interviewed in segments, as well as the music technology the show demonstrated. Along with the stiil very useful information the show presents, the use of what would now be considered very crude and outdated (current vintage) synthesizer, sampler, guitar-synthesizer, sequencer, MIDI and drum machine technology in particular scream 1987 in the second series. (E-mu Emulator II! Moog Memorymoog!! Fairlight CMI!! Yamaha DX-7!!).
  • The first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, before it grew the beard.

    1980s Literature 

    1980s Theatre 
  • Edmond.
  • Despite the numerous (and, by most accounts, unsuccessful) attempts to modernize Starlight Express, the show remains firmly grounded within the 1980s. The disco-tinted score, neon-colored costumes, and references to DOS programming as if it were futuristic have been toned down or removed since the musical's inception, but the musical's premise and choreography require that the performers wear old-fashioned roller skates, so it can't avoid representing its decade. Some fans argue that if the show had declared itself an intentional period piece at the beginning of the 1990s, it would be more popular today.

    1980s Video Games 
Video games from this era are obvious examples, due to 8-bit technology (and later in the decade, early 16-bit technology). Games from this era are also Unintentional Period Pieces for other non-technology reasons:
  • The Great Politics Mess-Up:
    • Raid Over Moscow.
    • The When Superpowers Collide strategy game series: Germany 1985, RDF 1985, Baltic 1985: Corridor to Berlin and Norway 1985.
  • The NES version of Punch-Out!! is definitely set in the 1980s, due to Mac's pink jogging suit, Mike Tyson being champ, and referfences to Bombay (now "Mumbai"), India and the USSR.
  • NARC, set in the War on Drugs.

    1980s Western Animation 

1990s

    1990s Anime 
  • Early episodes of Pokémon and the original series in general; they show how 1990s culture spilled over into the early 2000s.
    • The same could be said for the games, with the technology and clothing style.
  • Digimon Adventure. Izzy's Apple Power Book-like computer gives one an idea of the time; and the dial-up based methods both later in the season and the movie would become very quaint as broadband caught on very quickly in the early 2000s. The "You've Got Mail!" line from said movie also doesn't have the same impact in the age of Face Book, YouTube, and Twitter.
  • Genki is clearly shown playing a Monster Rancher game on a Playstation lookalike.

    1990s Film 

    1990s Live Action TV 

    1990s Literature 
  • Several Animorphs books come across like this, due to the author's fondness for real contemporary pop culture references, as well as some situations that would be greatly changed by advancing technology (especially cell-phones). Probably the most blatant example was "The Warning," with a plot that heavily involves the internet, as it existed during the mid-nineties.
    • The Animorphs series is being rewritten, apparently replacing jokes and references from the 1990s with more modern ones. Most of the storylines should stay intact, but the 16th book, centered entirely on the Internet, will have to be rewritten very heavily, if not completely removed from the series.
  • Almost anything by David Foster Wallace.
  • Connie Willis's Bellwether - written in the mid-90s, its narrator is a sociologist researching fads, so the book is a perfect time capsule of fashions in everything. Remember hair wraps? Sunflowers on everything? The spread of Seattle-style coffee houses? Notably, e-mail is treated more as a gimmick than anything, and the narrator speculates about the way that attitudes to smoking will change in future... and gets it wrong (so far!)

    1990s Theatre 
  • Eric Bogosian's subUrbia.
  • RENT. The movie, at least, starts on Christmas Eve 1989, but the show has always been synonymous with The Nineties. The repeated references to Virtual Reality as an evil takeover plot by The Man are downright Hilarious in Hindsight. AIDS spreading like wildfire to several of the characters (and being a short-term death sentence) is less hilarious, but pegs the action just as firmly in the early 1990s. Benny's desire to sleep with Mimi, who he knows to be infected, is arguably the worst case. It's also important to note that a large part of the reason so many people contracted AIDS in the 1990s was because it took a while for accurate information about how HIV spreads to become common knowledge, and even longer for preventatives to become easy to get. Also, plenty of HIV negative people are in sexual relationships with HIV positive people, although it was much more dangerous back then, since so little was known.

    1990s Video Games 

    1990s Western Animation 
  • Tiny Toon Adventures is laden with contemporary pop culture references, very much in keeping with the tradition set by Looney Tunes. The other Warner Bros. cartoons of the period (such as Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain) were much better at avoiding this trope, because many of their pop culture references were to figures and events of the past.
  • Daria, for the mid-late '90s, to the point of having a page on the fandom's wiki about it.
  • A Goofy Movie, thanks to a combination of Fashion Dissonance and the very '90s-sounding Fake Band "Powerline" that features heavily in the story.
  • KaBlam!, which probably contributes to it's lack of life in reruns.
  • Hey Arnold! shows cassette-tape systems and boomboxes whenever there's in-universe music. Famously, Helga's father runs Big Bob's Beeper Emporium, having built his successful business on technology that couldn't be more nineties. Additionally, one episode has Gerald telling Arnold that he'll call him later, saying that he'll ring twice* to let Arnold know it's Gerald calling. Caller IDs are standard for phones nowadays.
  • A lot of the early Rugrats episodes feature 90s references.
  • Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? is undeniably 90s. From the style, to the references, and everything inbetween.
  • The Critic is nothing but 1990's pop culture and celebrity jokes.
  • Doug, especially the Nickelodeon version. Most of the clothing and technology are very `90s.
  • Early episodes of Recess, though this was downplayed after the first season.

2000s

    2000s Fan Fiction 

    2000s Film 
  • Each of the works in the collective oeuvre of Seltzer and Friedberg (except for Vampires Suck, which was released in 2010 and focused on one work in particular) is one of these not only to the Turn of the Millennium, but to the specific year in which it was released. One of the main criticisms of their work is that the pop culture jokes that they rely on become outdated within just a few months, with the things that they're parodying having fallen out of the collective consciousness. Their tendency to base brief parodies on the trailers to movies that wouldn't be released until well into their own production probably has something to do with it.
    I think the greatest redeeming quality [of Scary Movie 4] is that it works as something of a comedic time capsule from 2006, with so many jokes and cultural references that I had honestly forgotten completely about cheaply exploited for this movie. Like Tom Cruise going crazy on Oprah (the only part of the movie that had me near to tears in laughter), it almost makes you feel nostalgic...
  • Post Nine Eleven Terrorism Movies are already beginning to look dated.
    • The scene in the first Spider-Man film where a bunch of New Yorkers come to Spider-Man's aid and one shouts "You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!" seems a bit awkward now. Especially given that that particular scene was added in post-production, after the attacks had occurred.

    2000s Literature 
  • World War Z. The Jamie Lynn Spears reference alone dates the book to before 2007, when Spears' teen pregnancy scandal destroyed her career. Couple that with references to the Nintendo GameCube and AOL, as well as thinly-veiled expies of Howard Dean, Karl Rove, Colin Powell, Ruben Studdard, Bill Maher and Paris Hilton (all of whom enjoyed their greatest cultural prominence in the early-mid '00s), and you have a book that wears its "Bush-era America" origin on its sleeve.
    • Oddly enough, the No Celebrities Were Harmed may actually help the book seem current; with a little work, readers can put any celebrity they're familiar with into many of those slots. Replace Paris with Jersey Shore's Snooki and the scene featuring the unnamed airhead still works, aside from her being blonde.

    2000s Live Action TV 
  • 24 was arguably an example of this before it finished airing.
  • VH-1's I Love the New Millennium. It was made in 2008, before the decade it was supposed to be nostalgically looking back on was even over. This, of course, presented some problems in hindsight. The show is fascinating now as a time capsule for what people thought would be memorable and lasting about, say, 2007; some things apply, but some look laughably dated, even just a year or two down the road. And yet, it's almost more apt for the sort of nostalgia the show was made for.
  • A lot of 2000s shows on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel are becoming this, especially ones from the early 2000s. Technology in the 2000s changed rapidly, so you can tell when a show was made by what they're showing.
  • The Wire was an interesting case as the first season was based upon a real life criminal investigation involving coded beeper transmissions from the 90s; this was handwaved when the show aired in 2002 by way of having it being stated that the Barksdale crime syndicate was too cheap to pay for cell phones for its low level underlings.
    • Later season episodes were way more topical: Season four made heavy reference to the "No Child Left Behind Act" and it's effects upon modern high school educations, "Troop Surge" was used by the street level dealers as code for drugs when they worked the corner, as well as other references to the war on terror and the Iraq War.
  • FX Network has this problem too: while The Shield only made occassional references to current events (one of the characters nearly loses her job after she makes racist remarks to an Arab woman who's husband was killed by a racist after 9-11, references are made regarding Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California, and referencing to the Housing Crisis in the last couple of episodes of the series), Rescue Me was definitively based around the aftermath of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. Nip/Tuck made references as well (Hearts & Scalpels was a Gray's Anatomy rip-off and the final season began with an episode that outright references the 2008 Recession).

    2000s Western Animation 
  • The Proud Family. It has a not-so-subtle reference to Napster in one episode, when Napster as it once was went down in the early 2000s (around 2002).
  • Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Gamecubes (and a Wii in a 2007 episode), Game Boy Advances (which would become a Nintendo DS later), and a lot of other technology refrences make it an obvious product of the mid 2000s.

    2000s Video Games 
  • The Emogame series. Playing these games is like stepping back in time to 2002-03, what with all the pop culture references, '80s kid show nostalgia, emo treading the line between "underground" and "mainstream", and MTV still, at the very least, basing its reputation around music videos.
    • This trope wound up killing the planned third game in the series. It had become one of these to 2005-06, yet it had been languishing as vaporware well into 2007 and would've taken another couple of years to finish, meaning that, by the time of its eventual release, most of its humor and references would've been very outdated. Any attempts to update the humor would've delayed production for even longer. Realizing this, Jason Oda pulled the plug on it.
  • Same as above for the Final Fantasy VI hack Awful Fantasy, made in 2003. It shows.

2010s

    2010s Film 

    Live Action TV 
  • A funny one occurred on NCIS Los Angeles when the subject of one episode was Libyan government agents sent by Qaddaffi killing a rebel propagandist and trying to use his identity to get the rebel leadership into an ambush. Obviously written and filmed when the Libyan Civil War seemed (from the outside) to be deadlocked, by the time the episode aired (October 2011) the rebels would be more properly called "The Libyan Government", having been recognized as such internationally in September 2011 with Qaddaffi the one on the run who should be wary of ambushes. The "Arab Spring" references also clearly date the show.

Special Cases (either multiple decades, or Older Than Radio)

    Comic Books 
  • Look at any issue of Archie Comics. Even back in the early '90s, they acknowledged this with their Americana Collections, showcasing the iconic strips of each individual decade. Usually they will feature one "Love Triangle"-themed story, then dozens of others about then-current fads, or parodies of then-popular movies. The fashions of most strips shown in the Digest format issues years later also date certain stories greatly.

    Film 

    Literature 

    Live Action TV 
  • Quite unavoidable with a Long Runner such as Doctor Who — the special effects and fashions (and production styles) give the production decades (sometimes the very years) away within minutes (unless this is the Eighties we're talking about, where the... Eightiesness gives away the decade within milliseconds). When the stories have been restored to DVD with new special effects, the Restoration Team have very deliberately shot many of the new effects in appropriate styles so they wouldn't clash with the source material. So the Five Doctors Special Edition has new and improved CGI effects that actually look like Eighties effects.
  • Soul Train: Mainly for The Seventies, but also for The Eighties and The Nineties.
  • Thanks to the Ripped from the Headlines formula, Law & Order, depending on the season, can seem quite dated. On the other hand, the fact that they just switch the names makes it so that the older episodes can still be enjoyed on their own merit.
  • Episodes of Saturday Night Live, thanks to its musical guests and its use of topical, current events humor (from "Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead" to "I can see Russia from my house!"), can be dated almost to the year.*
  • Pretty much every Game Show is dated to the year that it's produced, whether because of the products (four-figure Datsuns, anyone?) or the questions (which can fall prey to future updates).

    Music 
  • Music videos tend to date themselves very quickly, especially videos by female artists, since women's fashions change more quickly than men's. Go look at a video like En Vogue's "Free Your Mind" and see whether it doesn't scream 1992.
  • Many, but not all, political songs fall into this category. To name a few:
    • Songs about apartheid rule such as Free Nelson Mandela by Special A.K.A. Just 6 years after the song was released, Mandela was released from prison.
    • Elvis Costello's Oliver's Army, which name-checked various places that were geo-political hot spots in the late 1970s.
    • Just about any song about the Vietnam War.
    • Heaven 17's Fascist Groove Thang is firmly planted in the 1980s, due to mention of Ronald Reagan as 'President Elect'.
  • Each of "Weird Al" Yankovic's albums is largely a product of the year it was recorded, as Al fills the albums with parodies of popular music at the time or older songs parodied in a way that references current pop culture. The polka medleys, in particular, contain snippets of pretty much every song topping the charts at the time.
    • Al is an odd case - he tends to parody songs that were popular two or three years before his album came out, which means they're usually forgotten by the time his parodies are released. This is the inevitable result of recording times.
  • Most of those CD compilation albums that are released every year, such as Kidz Bop or Now That's What I Call Music! become this within a few years of being released, because they are just compilations of the top hits of the year.

    Theatre 
  • Many plays by William Shakespeare were set in a time period that the original viewers during the Elizabethan era would find familiar. Nowadays, times have changed to the point where the dialect of Shakespeare's characters is frequently mistaken for Old English (which actually has more in common with German than modern English).

    Video Games 
  • Due to Development Hell causing the game to be delayed continually since its inception 13 years prior to its release, Duke Nukem Forever (released in 2011) has the unintended disadvantage of playing like a game from the early 2000's, right down to its gameplay mechanics and humor. The game plays as though certain parts were only added in a certain decade, the humor is outdated by several years, the references to previous installments are years (and even decades) out of date and the gameplay (as a whole) is much slower than 2010-era FPS's. In additions, several of the "topical references" include an out-of-date reference to Halo ("Power armor is for pussies!") and a near-exact replication of the infamous Christian Bale rant from the set of Terminator Salvation (which had already been out for several years by the time the game was released).

    Web Comics 

    Western Animation 

    Other 
  • Mad Magazine does this so well that compilation books from each decade since it began in The Fifties have been made. What seemed popular enough to be spoofed on their cover at one time might even two or three years later be forgotten. Sometimes due to a delay in publishing what it parodies may already be old news by the time the issue comes out.
  • Any map, due to changing political borders, countries or cities changing their names, things like The Great Politics Mess-Up, etc.
  • According to Orson Scott Card, all fiction is this way to one degree or another, bearing identifying characteristics of its writer(s)'s time and culture. He uses this argument as the thesis for an article explaining that The Book of Mormon has to be genuine because the tropes it uses do not correspond at all to the time and place Joseph Smith lived in.
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