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Author: pinkdalek

May 30th 2012 at 9:37:58 AM

@Duncan No, that's still not an aversion (at least not an interesting aversion). This trope states that 20 years is about the minimum distance for fictional time travel into the past and anything less than that is very rare. 2055 to Dinosaurs is not this trope as that is significantly greater than 20 years (~65 million years). If the time travel story started in 2012 and the characters went back to 2004, or if they started in 2012 and went forward in time to 2020, that would be an aversion.

I think we need an exception. There are really two kinds of time travel stories - the Time Travel As Tourism kind where the past is portrayed as basically a big, mysterious place for the protagonist(s) to explore and have adventures in (where this is a rule), like ''DoctorWho'', ''BackToTheFuture'', etc., and the Time Travel As Convolution kind where the characters go back in time minute amounts (one hour, one week) to make complicated TimeParadox stories or alter past events (where this isn't a rule), like ''{{Primer}}'', the gag in ''BillAndTedsExcellentAdventure'' with the keys (the movie is otherwise a Time Travel As Tourism movie), the ''MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagic'' episode about time travel, etc.

Curiously the only example I can think of this trope is a parody blog post pointing out how lame an idea it would be:

* [[http://lucienyoung.wordpress.com/2011/02/23/trailer-for-new-tv-show/ This]] fake pitch for a ''LifeOnMars''-like TV show, in which a cop from 2010 gets hit by a bus and time travels back to 2009, where "[[AnachronismStew everyone now has sideburns, flared trousers, and is smoking]]" and where "''TheDarkKnight'''s just come out on Blu-Ray, LaRoux's firmly in the charts, and [[YouFailHistoryForever dinosaurs remain a problem]]".