History Main / FakedRipVanWinkle

** A variation in ''The Emissary'': a Klingon crew ''really have'' been asleep for 75 years and awake to attack the Federation. The crew manage to talk them into surrender by fooling them into thinking that the Klingons won the last war. The Klingons are skeptical, but the Enterprise's superior firepower swings the argument.

* ''Franchise/StarTrek''
** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': "Future Imperfect" has Riker wake up to be told that he was recovering from an amnesia-inducing sickness some sixteen years in his own future. The twist here was that the conspiracy was not, as it first seemed, an evil Romulan plot to find strategic information, but rather a lonely alien child who wanted someone to play with.

** Inverted in the ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' episode "Stratagem". Captain Archer tries to get information out of an alien by convincing him that they are now friends and that years have gone by. The alien ship they have supposedly stolen is [[FauxtasticVoyage actually set up inside a small shuttle in the ''Enterprise'' landing bay]]. The small touches making the simulation seem real include [[ScannableMan tattooing both their arms with prison barcodes]].

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* The 1965 film ''[[Film/ThirtySixHours1965 36 Hours]]'', in which German agents use a FakedRipVanWinkle on an American officer in an attempt to learn the details of the upcoming D-Day operation. It invented or popularised several common features including the "memory therapy" which is really a disguised intelligence debriefing, and the hero's realisation that he still has a minor injury that ought to have healed if so much time has really passed.
* The 1990 ''Film/{{Captain America|1990}}'' movie has the Captain suspect an inversion of this when he notices that the IntrepidReporter explaining things to him was driving a ''German'' car with a ''Japanese'' radio.
* Likewise, in ''Film/CaptainAmericaTheFirstAvenger'', Cap suspects an inversion is happening when he comes to in a hospital room with a baseball game "broadcast live" on the radio -- one he attended in person.
** The fact that the hospital room is a borderline-[[PaperThinDisguise paper-thin]] fake (complete with a WWII-era New York skyline outside the window consisting of a blown-up black and white photo that nobody bothered to colorize) doesn't help matters much.
* ''Film/DarkShadows'': At the second time Barnabas Collins got out of a coffin he was sealed in, he was ready to believe he'd been there for decades. (Justified in that it took him 196 years to get out last time) The trope is averted as a relative of his tells him he was only there for a few minutes.
[[/folder]]

* ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica|Reimagined}}''. Although not a strict version of this trope (as little time has passed), the episode "The Farm" when Starbuck is injured during an ambush, and wakes up in what she is told is a resistance hospital, is definitely in the same spirit. This was acknowledged in the podcast; the writers therefore played along with the audience's suspicions by making Starbuck equally skeptical, but too weak from her injuries to do much about it.

* [[http://www.brawlinthefamily.com/?p=128 "The Lesson"]] from ''Webcomic/BrawlInTheFamily''. {{Kirby}} wakes up after eating a Noddy. Another Noddy tells him that he's been asleep for years, and in that time King Dedede has conquered Dream Land [[BewareTheSillyOnes without Kirby to oppose him]]. Kirby, guiltily, sets forth to fix the problem. Turns out he's only been asleep for a few minutes -- as the title of the strip suggests, the Noddy was teaching Kirby a lesson. "Now maybe you'll think TWICE about eating one of us!"

* OlderThanPrint: An old Japanese story tells of a daimyo and his bodyguard who stop at an inn run by a six-fingered young woman and her brother. They sleep there overnight, only to be greeted in the morning by a six-fingered ''old'' woman and her "grandson", who inform them the spirits have drawn them into the future. The old woman tells them she can send them back, but requires money to fund the ritual needed. Before the daimyo can send a message for the funds, however, his bodyguard works out that they're still in the present day -- the nearby bamboo has grown only as much as one would expect it to in one day. The old woman was the young woman's grandmother -- six-fingered hands run in the family (or, in some versions of the story, the girl simply used make-up).

[[folder:Folklore]]
* OlderThanPrint: An old Japanese story tells of a daimyo and his bodyguard who stop at an inn run by a six-fingered young woman and her brother. They sleep there overnight, only to be greeted in the morning by a six-fingered ''old'' woman and her "grandson", who inform them the spirits have drawn them into the future. The old woman tells them she can send them back, but requires money to fund the ritual needed. Before the daimyo can send a message for the funds, however, his bodyguard works out that they're still in the present day -- the nearby bamboo has grown only as much as one would expect it to in one day. The old woman was the young woman's grandmother -- six-fingered hands run in the family (or, in some versions of the story, the girl simply used make-up).
[[/folder]]

Seemingly benevolent people appear and claim that the hero has been unconscious for many years, sometimes decades. To back that claim up, the hero is presented various evidence like [[NewspaperDating future dated newspapers]], futuristic looking appliances, and even people who say they are older versions of individuals the hero knows.

* In one ''WinnieThePooh'' comic book story, the other characters fake it for AprilFoolsDay by attaching a beard to a sleeping Pooh and pretending to be their own {{Identical Grandson}}s.

* ''Film/DarkShadows'': At the second time Barnabas Collins got out of a coffin he was sealed in, he was ready to believe he'd been there for decades. (Justified in that it took him 196 years to get out last time) The trope was averted as a relative of his tells him he was only there for a few minutes.

** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': "Future Imperfect" has Riker wake up to be told that he was recovering from an amnesia-inducing sickness some twenty years in his own future. The twist here was that the conspiracy was not, as it first seemed, an evil Romulan plot to find strategic information, but rather a lonely alien child who wanted someone to play with.

Contrast [[RipVanWinkle Not-Fake Rip Van Winkle]]. Compare LotusEaterMachine.

* [[http://www.brawlinthefamily.com/?p=128 "The Lesson"]] from ''Webcomic/BrawlInTheFamily''. "Now maybe you'll think TWICE about eating one of us!"

* ''ComicBook/TheSmurfs'' story "The Strange Awakening of Lazy Smurf" and its AnimatedAdaptation counterpart "Smurf Van Winkle", where Lazy is led to believe he has been asleep for a few hundred years and his fellow Smurfs have aged while Lazy somehow stays the same physical age. It's basically done to teach him a lesson about not being lazy all the time. In both versions Lazy figures out that he's been duped, but in the cartoon show he finds that out after he's used a potion to de-age them and they all become Smurflings, while in the comic books Lazy uses his knowledge to trick the other Smurfs into thinking he has given them a de-aging potion, which then leads them to Gargamel's lair in order to find the antidote.

** One time, they did it ''twice at the same time,'' a con within a con: They first faked a "futuristic" future, then let the suspected crook "discover" that he had only been comatose just long enough for the statute of limitations to run out, whereupon he went to his cache of loot.

** Inverted in the ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' episode "Stratagem". Captain Archer tries to get information out of an alien by convincing him that they are now friends and that years have gone by. The alien ship they have supposedly stolen is [[FauxtasticVoyage actually set up inside a small shuttle in the ''Enterprise'' landing bay]]. The small touches making the simulation seem real include tattooing both their arms with prison barcodes.

* ''Webcomic/SluggyFreelance'' uses this for comic relief. Torg is nearly killed when the demon K'z'k shows up unexpectedly, and he is unconscious for the entirety of a long fight. His friends decide that in addition to filling him in on the details of the battle once he wakes up, it'd be nice to break the tension by convincing Torg he had been in a coma for [[http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010319 five]] [[http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010320 years]].

** And they once convinced a retired [[WilliamShatner gangster]] that he had dreamed the previous thirty or so years and he was back in the 30s as a young man.

* ''ComicBook/TheSmurfs'' story "The Strange Awakening of Lazy Smurf" and its AnimatedAdaptation counterpart "Smurf Van Winkle", where Lazy is led to believe he has been asleep for a few hundred years and his fellow Smurfs have aged while Lazy somehow stays the same physical age. It's basically done to teach him a lesson about not being lazy all the time.

* Pranksters Tom Mabe and Jim Clark [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfvPPPc_UTs bring a drunk friend to a fake hospital room]] and tell him he's been in a coma for ten years to [[ScareEmStraight teach him a lesson about drinking and driving]].

* The 1965 film ''[[Film/ThirtySixHours 36 Hours]]'', in which German agents use a FakedRipVanWinkle on an American officer in an attempt to learn the details of the upcoming D-Day operation. It invented or popularised several common features including the "memory therapy" which is really a disguised intelligence debriefing, and the hero's realisation that he still has a minor injury that ought to have healed if so much time has really passed.

* Taken to extreme in ''Anime/BloodC''. And poor Saya isn't a hero either, she's more akin to a monster.

* ''FXTheSeries''

* Happens in the animated series ''WesternAnimation/BuzzLightyearOfStarCommand'' when Buzz is captured by Zurg and made to think he's in a museum hundreds of years later. Zerg plays him by having the "museum" get all manner of details hideously wrong, including his catch phrase (properly "To infinity and beyond!"), so of course he starts fixing details and soon is telling little kids stories about how he defeated Zurg on this or that occasion and how Star Command's weapons and security work. He only realizes the truth when he finds out that the museum's "copy" of his laser-equipped suit is the real thing (the laser destroys part of the set).

!!Examples:

[[AC:{{Anime}} and {{Manga}}]]
* This is the plot of an episode of ''Anime/ScienceNinjaTeamGatchaman / BattleOfThePlanets'', used to get the main hero to give the baddies some important information.
* ''ElementalGelade'': the female lead is led to believe that she was sealed away (for the second time) for decades and everyone she knew has passed away. Rather than gathering any information, it's supposed to discourage her from leaving the facility and putting herself in danger, since she's part of a protected species of super weapons.
* Kurama and Kuwabara do a weak version of this in ''YuYuHakusho'' when Yusuke wakes up after the Four Beasts arc, briefly allowing him to believe Keiko died before he could smash the bug-whistle or while he was unconscious, and that this was discovered in the interim while they brought him out of Maze Castle and put him in Kuwabara's spare room. Just because they're dicks. Let it never be said that Kurama is always a serious or sensitive person.
* Taken to extreme in ''BloodC''. And poor Saya isn't a hero either, she's more akin to a monster.

[[AC:ComicBooks]]
* This is the plot for a short ''MonicasGang'' comic. Monica is told about the story of Rip Van Winkle, and after she falls asleep under a tree, the boys set up everything to make it seem as if many years have passed. She is fooled for a while (she's 6, after all), but finally figures out the plot when she sees Maggie, who wasn't in on the story and acts completely normal.
* A story in Panini Comic's ''Batman and Superman'' magazine features this where {{Superman}} flies back to Metropolis and is engulfed in a white vortex. He finds himself in a now-ruined Metropolis and finds Jimmy, who tells him he was responsible for destroying Metropolis. It turns out really that Lex Luthor captured Superman by putting him into a simulation tank.
* Huey, Dewey, and Louie pull one of these on DonaldDuck in [[http://disneycomics.free.fr/Ducks/Barks/show.php?s=date&loc=1950/W_WDC_112-02 an old CarlBarks story]], as part of a ZanyScheme to get out of a tropical vacation. It works.
* An early post Byrne reboot story had {{Superman}} returning to Earth to learn that he was regarded as a monster, Lois was crippled because of him and eventually he starts to lose control becoming more violent and horrified at his own actions. It turns out, the whole scenario is a nightmare triggered inadvertently by telepathic contact with a crystalline alien entity who was trapped on the moon. The nightmare was the manifestation of Superman's worst fear, that he would lose control of himself or his powers and cause untold death and destruction. This fear has been a recurring theme for the character ever since.
* ''TheUltimates'': When CaptainAmerica first wakes up in the modern era in issue #3, he thinks this trope has happened to him due to the "colored" general (Nick Fury) standing in the room telling him 60 years have passed (Fury here is black and Cap met the highest ranking black person of his time, a captain), and immediately starts beating the crap out of everyone in sight. Justified in that he was fighting ShapeShifting technologically advanced aliens before he was frozen.
** In fact he was fighting them when he was frozen.
* ''TheSmurfs'' story "The Strange Awakening Of Lazy Smurf" and its AnimatedAdaptation counterpart "Smurf Van Winkle", where Lazy is led to believe he has been asleep for a few hundred years and his fellow Smurfs have aged while Lazy somehow stays the same physical age. It's basically done to teach him a lesson about not being lazy all the time.

[[AC:{{Film}}]]
* The 1965 film ''[[ThirtySixHours 36 Hours]]'', in which German agents use a FakedRipVanWinkle on an American officer in an attempt to learn the details of the upcoming D-Day operation. It invented or popularised several common features including the "memory therapy" which is really a disguised intelligence debriefing, and the hero's realisation that he still has a minor injury that ought to have healed if so much time has really passed.
* The 1990 ''CaptainAmerica'' movie had the Captain suspect an inversion of this when he notices that the IntrepidReporter explaining things to him was driving a ''German'' car with a ''Japanese'' radio.
** Likewise, in the [[CaptainAmericaTheFirstAvenger 2011 version]], Cap suspects an inversion is happening when he comes to in a hospital room with a baseball game "broadcast live" on the radio - one he attended in person.

[[AC:Folklore]]

[[AC:LiveActionTV]]
* ''MissionImpossible'': The IMF used this plot several times. Sometimes combined with a FauxtasticVoyage, as a common excuse for the extended sleep was that the mark had been in an accident.

* ''FXTheSeries'' also faked one on a villain to coax him into revealing the location of a bomb the villain had planted.

* Done to SG-1 in the ''Series/{{Stargate SG-1}}'' Season 2 finale "Out of Mind" by the Go'auld Hathor.
* ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': "Future Imperfect" has Riker wake up to be told that he was recovering from an amnesia-inducing sickness some twenty years in his own future. The twist here was that the conspiracy was not, as it first seemed, an evil Romulan plot to find strategic information, but rather a lonely alien child who wanted someone to play with.
* Inverted in the ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' episode "Stratagem". Captain Archer tries to get information out of an alien by convincing him that they are now friends and that years have gone by. The alien ship they have supposedly stolen is [[FauxtasticVoyage actually set up inside a small shuttle in the ''Enterprise'' landing bay]]. The small touches making the simulation seem real include tattooing both their arms with prison barcodes.

** Also tried on BuckRogers in the 1950s series.
* It's only a few months, but this is done to Stringfellow Hawke in the "Echoes of the Past" episode of ''Series/{{Airwolf}}''. A fake news story is created- [[ReverseFunnyAneurysm involving the divorce of Charles and Diana]].
* Another small-scale version turns up on the 1990 ''{{Zorro}}'' remake, wherein the entire pueblo, led by Don Diego, works to buy time for an unjustly accused man by pretending that the Alcalde's been delirious for a week and the hanging's already happened. That this elaborate scheme is unravelled by the Alcalde noticing that a recent wine stain on his carpet hasn't dried yet does not speak well of Diego's scheming ability (especially since he-as-Zorro caused the stain in the first place).

* ''TheSixMillionDollarMan'' is led to believe he was somehow put in a suspended animation chamber, and several thousand years have gone by. He's outside at night with one of the people involved in the plot, and he knows astronomy; the stars should have moved for it to be as far forward in the future as they claim.

* In ''TheWayneManifesto'', Wayne's family pulls this on him to make him believe he's slept through Christmas and that it's the first day of school.
* One clip on ''AmericasFunniestHomeVideos'' had a twelve-year-old boy so tired from his first day of the seventh grade he came home from school and fell asleep. When he woke up at nine that evening, his dad tricked him into thinking it was the next day and he was going to be late for school. They were already driving before the kid learned from a neighbour it was all a prank.
* Inverted on ''Perception'', when the lone surviving victim of a serial killer from the '80s must provide information to help stop the killings when they resume. The survivor has anterograde amnesia and believes it's still the day before she was attacked; as such, memories of that time are as fresh for her as they were then. Using the bedroom her mother's kept unchanged for decades, Dr. Pierce arranges to humor the survivor's misconceptions and interview her as if she's a 17-year-old girl who might've noticed someone spying on her. It's implied that the mother will keep up the ruse for as long as they've both alive, so her daughter can keep contentedly re-living the same day rather than have to go back to an institution.

[[AC:Toys]]
* In ''{{Bionicle}}'', Sahmad is put into a LotusEaterMachine where people claim he has been asleep for 750 years.

[[AC:{{Webcomics}}]]
* Happens very, very briefly in [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0070.html this]] ''[[Webcomic/TheOrderOfTheStick Order of the Stick]]'' strip.
* A similar example occurs in [[http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1316 this]] ''QuestionableContent'' strip.
* And less briefly in ''KevinAndKell''. It starts [[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2007/kk0526.html here]]. The point was to get Fenton to see the future he was risking by becoming a thrill seeker. [[spoiler: It works...but Lindesfarne inadvertently accepted his marriage proposal in the process.]]
* ''SluggyFreelance'' used this for comic relief. Torg was nearly killed when the demon K'z'k showed up unexpectedly, and he was unconscious for the entirety of a long fight. His friends decided that in addition to filling him in on the details of the battle once he woke up, it'd be nice to break the tension by convincing Torg he had been in a coma for [[http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010319 five]] [[http://sluggy.com/daily.php?date=010320 years]].
-->'''Torg:''' "'Hey, our friend is in a coma, let's freak him out if-and-when he comes to!' What's '''wrong''' with you people?"
* CtrlAltDel: Ethan builds a "time machine". "Time machine" explodes. Roommates pretend to be in the future as a prank, 'cause Ethan's kind of a dick.
** Immediately inverted when it appears that the time machine actually did work, and a future version of Ethan contacts him with a "dire warning". He ignores... Err... Himself? assuming it's another prank.
* [[http://www.brawlinthefamily.com/?p=128 This]] Webcomic/BrawlInTheFamily strip. "Now maybe you'll think TWICE about eating one of us!"

[[AC:WesternAnimation]]

* In ''DanVs'' "The Fancy Restaurant", Dan is knocked unconscious and wakes up in a dungeon. When he asks what happened to him, one of the other prisoners tells him he's been in a coma for twelve years, but another prisoner informs him that it's only been ten minutes.
* An episode of the ''{{Diabolik}}'' animated series had Eva and Diabolik pulling this on an enemy of theirs after the latter two were involved in an accident which left the enemy unconscious. Part of the act had Diabolik pretending to have been rendered quadriplegic and catatonic after the accident so that the enemy would start taunting him with the information he was after.

** This was used as a RecycledScript in another DisneyAfternoon show, ''WesternAnimation/TaleSpin''. In "The Time Bandit", Baloo bumps Becky's calendar ahead a day so she'll think it's Saturday and he won't have to work. (He also gets a radio show host to play along with the deception, running the Saturday show on Friday morning.) Thanks to FinaglesLaw, the consequences of the prank spin out of control quickly with the end result that Becky almost ends up shot by a Thembrian firing squad made up of [[NoKillLikeOverkill tanks]].
* This happens in the ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'' episode "A Fishful of Dollars" - in ''reverse''. After being drugged, Fry awakens in a shoddily constructed pizzeria set, where "employees" have him convinced that he is back in the year 2000 in an attempt to get Fry's PIN number. Given Fry's [[strike:guileless]] brainless nature, it works.

* An episode of ''{{GI Joe}}'', "There's No Place Like Springfield," thrust Shipwreck into the future where he was happily living a life of civilian retirement with Cobra long defeated. He can't remember any of the apparent past six years and seeks out medical help. Turns out, he's not in the future, it's all an elaborate setup by Cobra, and the "treatment" he's receiving for his amnesia is actually an attempt by Cobra to get him to reveal the plans for a chemical-based superweapon.
* Played with in one episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons''. Jasper uses the Kwik-E-Mart's freezer to [[YouFailBiologyForever cryogenically freeze himself]] so that he can see the wonders of the future. At the end of the episode, he thaws out (much to the chagrin of Apu, who was making huge business out of displaying him like some sort of freak show) and mistakenly thinks he is in the far future. ("Moon Pies.... what a time to be alive.")

* ''BionicSix'': When one of the heroes is knocked unconscious, the villains trick him into thinking it took him 30 years to wake up. He was then tricked into think Dr. Scarab and his gang [[HeelFaceTurn reformed]] and went separate ways (Each one was looking older) and that he and his family didn't look any older because they were bionic. He was also tricked into thinking the other Bionic Five [[FaceHeelTurn became villains]]. In the end, he told his real family [[spoiler:he had figured out because the baseball glove he had with him before being rendered unconscious looked just as new as before.]]