History Main / FakedRipVanWinkle

* 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 -- [[HilariousInHindsight involving the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Diana]] and a man impersonating his brother is produced, so he'll think Archangel has kept their promise to rescue him, so Stringfellow can now give up the location of Airwolf. As it turns out, Stringfellow was suspicious from the start as he woke up with the same callus on his hands as when he "crashed," meaning it can't be nearly a year in the future.

* 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 -- [[HilariousInHindsight involving the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Diana]]. As it turns out, Hawke was suspicious from the start as he woke up with the same callus on his hands as when he "crashed," meaning it can't be nearly a year in the future.

* In ''WesternAnimation/Nimona2023'', Nimona tells Ballister that he's been asleep for 15 years before telling him not to be so gullible and that it was only a couple hours since he was knocked out.

[[folder:Web Comics]]
* Happens very briefly in the [[http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0070.html "That's Just Mean"]] strip from ''Webcomic/TheOrderOfTheStick'', done solely as an chance for Nale to [[ForTheLulz be a dick]].
* A similar example occurs in [[http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1316 "Number 1316: The Familiar Boot Screen"]], a ''Webcomic/QuestionableContent'' strip.
* [[http://www.kevinandkell.com/2007/kk0526.html And less briefly]] in ''Webcomic/KevinAndKell''. 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.]]
* ''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/comics/archives/daily/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?
* ''Webcomic/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... er... himself? assuming it's another prank.

* Ellen in ''Webcomic/ElGoonishShive'' [[http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2004-09-27 wakes up]] after dreaming the first six years of [[CloningBlues memories of her alternate universe counterpart]], and is momentarily scared that she slept through six years. (Elliot's "you're finally awake" comment doesn't help.)

* ''WebComic/SaturdayMorningBreakfastCereal'' [[https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/time-prank suggests]] doing it to strangers via an app that makes the viewer look much older.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/ScoobyDooMysteryIncorporated'' episode "The Man in the Mirror", Fred wakes up in a post-apocalyptic town with [[DemBones animated skeletons]] and an elderly Daphne. The whole thing was a plot to try to trick Fred into revealing where he hid the [[MacGuffin Planispheric Disc]]. [[spoiler: Fred reveals he saw through the ruse immediately and led the fake Daphne (actually his mother) on a wild goose chase while finding a way to warn his friends.]]

* This is the plot of an episode of ''Anime/ScienceNinjaTeamGatchaman'',[[note]]also used in ''Anime/BattleOfThePlanets''[[/note]] used to try and get the scientist G-1 is protecting to give Galactor some important information. Problem is, if it's been so many decades, why hasn't that [[spoiler:exposed bolt rusted over]]?

* Taken to extreme in ''Anime/BloodC''. And poor Saya isn't a hero either, she's more akin to a monster.
* One of the ''Franchise/LupinIII'' Red Jacket episodes, [[Recap/LupinIIIS2E3 "To Be or Nazi Be"]], had an inverted example of this. The gang is interrogating an old Nazi from WWII, but he refuses to tell them where Hitler's treasure is. When the guy next wakes up, it's the invasion of Berlin, again. Hitler is ready to die, and it's his turn to say goodbye to the Furher. Even Zenigata gets involved in this con! (He's pulling a different one on the gang)

* Huey, Dewey, and Louie pull one of these on WesternAnimation/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.

* ''ComicBook/TheSmurfs'' story "The Strange Awakening of Lazy Smurf", which is actually an adaptation of the cartoon show episode "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 [[GoneHorriblyRight 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.]]

* The ''ComicBook/{{Spyboy}}'' one-shot "A Manchurian Candy-Date" has Bombshell waking up years in the future in a hospital, her legs atrophied and her long-distant parents happy to see her awake. Comic relief Butch, his face scarred, says she's been in a coma for almost a decade after a raid that went bad, killing Alex's father. Alex reverted to his Spyboy persona full-time and has since become a ruthless crime boss. After physical therapy, Bombshell is sent to kill Alex...but when she looks at her aged face in the mirror, we see her true form as it turns out she's been brainwashed by an enemy to kill the real Alex in the present. Her mind sees everything as part of the delusion (attempting to "fire" a sheet of papers like a gun) before Alex is able to get through to her.
* One issue of ''ComicBook/RichieRich'' had an {{Homage}} to ''Film/ThirtySixHours1965'' when he realizes he's being conned when a paper cut on his finger hasn't healed.
* Inverted in ''ComicBook/TheTwelve'' when the titular twelve (superheroes who were put into [[HumanPopsicle suspended animation]] during the final push on Nazi Germany) are woken up in a post 9/11 world. To preserve their psyches, they're at first placed in a reconstruction of a 1940s hospital, but they quickly figure out what's going on (the nurses have more than one piercing per ear and don't need garters to keep their stockings up, the radio plays music but no commercials, the guards' poker game uses 2008 coins) and demand to know what's going on.

* Inverted in ''Film/GoodbyeLenin''. Alexander's mother suffers a heart attack, falls into a coma, and wakes years later. Doctors recommend making sure she does not receive any severe mental shocks, as they could cause her to suffer a second heart attack. Before the coma, she was a dedicated supporter of the East German government, and the Berlin Wall fell while she slept. Alex and the family friends proceed to build a complete simulation of East German life around her.

* In "The Inn of Lost Time", a short story by Lensey Namioka, set in his ''Zenta and Matsuzo'' setting, the above Japanese folklore entry is told as if it had happened to Zenta, when he was the bodyguard to a merchant.

** In "The Execution," a hitman is tricked into believing that he's forgotten the last two years of his life, with him awakening on Death Row awaiting execution later that evening for the murder of two people
* ''Series/FXTheSeries'':
** The show also faked one on a villain to coax him into revealing the location of a bomb the villain had planted.
** Also done in reverse when an imprisoned assassin develops a brain tumor that is causing him to lose his memories of the last few decades. He still vaguely remembers the time when he killed a US senator so the team takes him back to the small town where it happens and stages things to look like the day before the assassination and make him think that he dreamed of the killing and still has to complete the job. They do this so he is tricked into revealing the identity of the BigBad who hired him to kill the senator. The assassin's deteriorating mental state makes him very confused and gullible and he does not figure this out till the BigBad tells him.

* ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'':
** Captain Archer suspects this trope in "[[Recap/StarTrekEnterpriseS03E08Twilight Twilight]]" -- unfortunately he really ''is'' in a BadFuture.
** In the episode "[[Recap/StarTrekEnterpriseS03E14Stratagem Stratagem]]", Captain Archer tries to get information out of an enemy by convincing him that years have gone by, during which they became friends. 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]].
* Done in reverse on ''Series/AdamAdamantLives'' in the MissingEpisode "A Slight Case of Reincarnation". The villains try to convince Adam, a HumanPopsicle, that he's back in 1902 and that his adventures in the 1960s have been a dream. They force his friends to play bit parts in this scheme under false identities, and even bring in a lookalike for his 1902 girlfriend. The telltale clue that it's a setup comes when he mentions Harold Wilson, the 1966 Prime Minister, and is told that he must be thinking of Woodrow Wilson. This is a slip because in 1902 Woodrow Wilson hadn't gone into politics yet.
* Also tried on ComicStrip/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 -- [[HilariousInHindsight involving the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Diana]]. As it turns out, Hawke was suspicious from the start as he woke up with the same callus on his hands as when he "crashed," meaning it can't be nearly a year in the future.
* Another small-scale version turns up on the 1990 ''Franchise/{{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 unraveled 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).
* ''Series/HardyBoysNancyDrewMysteries'': "Sole Survivor", where Joe wakes up in a hospital room with no clue where he is or how he got there, only to be told that he's not only been in a coma for a year, but that his father and brother are dead. Cue fake newspapers, fake newscasts, and forged letters from all his surviving relatives and friends. Of course, [[spoiler: Frank and Fenton are very much alive, and the whole thing is a MindScrew to get Joe to reveal information on a defection attempt. He caught on when a shirt that had supposedly been hanging in his closet for 10 years still smelled of his girlfriend's perfume.]]
* ''Series/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.
* Also reversed in an episode of ''Series/{{Alias}}'', where, in order to obtain vital information, Jack Bristow is made to think he is back in the 1980s. Sydney plays her mother (and his then-wife, before she turned out to be a DeepCoverAgent), then has a {{Squick}} feeling when he attempts to get frisky with her- as he thinks she's his wife.
* ''Series/BattlestarGalactica2003'': Although not a strict version of this trope (as little time has passed), the episode "[[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E05TheFarm 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.
* ''Series/DoctorWho'': In "[[Recap/DoctorWhoS11E2InvasionOfTheDinosaurs Invasion of the Dinosaurs]]", Sarah Jane is knocked out and then told she is on a spaceship which has been travelling for months to a new world. She realizes that this is not true because she still has a fresh bump on her head.
* In a short-term heroic variant, the team on ''Series/CriminalMinds'' used clock-shifting and a fake news broadcast to get a captured terrorist to think his co-conspirators had already unleashed a [=WMD=], so he'd boast about it and reveal the intended target.

* One clip on ''Series/AmericasFunniestHomeVideos'' has 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 ''Series/Perception2012'', 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.
* Inverted in ''Trick of the Mind'', where Creator/DerrenBrown plays a trick on an American kid in a desert by promising to make the sun disappear ("an old Native American Indian trick", as he claims). He has the kid check his watch and then put on a warm jacket. Then he starts drawing on the ground and counting. The real purpose is to put the boy in a hypnotic trance. Derren then lies him down on a mat and leaves for several hours until it's dark (the boy is watched all this time). Derren then sits the boy back up, sets his watch back to the same time, and snaps him out of the trance. As far as the kid is concerned, only a moment has passed, and he confirms it by checking the time. They tell him everything later.
** Also, in his ''Series/{{Apocalypse}}'' special, Derren tricks a guy into thinking that days or weeks have passed since he has been knocked unconscious by a meteorite (it's been a few hours at most) and that England is in the middle of a ZombieApocalypse, mostly through a fake news broadcast and actors.
* ''Series/{{V 1983}}''. In "The Deception", the Visitors make a captured Mike Donovan think he's woken up ten years on when humanity has defeated the alien invaders. Holographic technology is used to make the Visitors appear as his friends, but Mike sees a newspaper with the Star Child who, unknown to the Visitors, has undergone a PlotRelevantAgeUp, meaning she'd be much older than the picture shown.
* In a ''Series/MrYoung'' episode, Slab falls asleep in class and the other students decide to prank him into thinking he woke up in a future {{Dystopia}} by putting up futuristic signs in the classroom, for example, one advertising the cafeteria's FoodPills.
* ''Series/BrooklynNineNine'': In the SeriesFinale HeistEpisode "[[Recap/BrooklynNineNineS8E09TheLastDay The Last Day]]", Jake is knocked out by fireworks and awakens in a hospital room, where he's told he's been comatose for seven years. His wife Amy emotionally tells him his best friend moved to Arizona and she's become FriendsWithBenefits with her ex-boyfriend Teddy, who also helping raise Jake's son. This was all a ploy to get Jake to reveal where he hid the prize; once she has this information, Amy handcuffs him to the hospital bed and collapses the fake hospital room around them.
-->'''Jake:''' ...It's not the future, is it?\\
'''Amy:''' No. It's only been about...forty minutes? And this isn't a real hospital. ''[presses a button to collapse the walls around them]''\\
'''Jake:''' You ''Mission Impossible'''d me! Uggghh, I am ''so'' happy you're not having sex with Teddy!

* Inverted in ''ComicBook/TheTwelve'' when the titular twelve (superheroes who were put into SuspendedAnimation during the final push on Nazi Germany) are woken up in a post 9/11 world. To preserve their psyches, they're at first placed in a reconstruction of a 1940s hospital, but they quickly figure out what's going on (the nurses have more than one piercing per ear and don't need garters to keep their stockings up, the radio plays music but no commercials, the guards' poker game uses 2008 coins) and demand to know what's going on.

* Inverted on ''Series/{{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.

* ''Series/FXTheSeries''

** Subverted in "Future Imperfect", where Riker wakes up to be told that he is recovering from an amnesia-inducing sickness some sixteen years in his own future, where he is now Captain of the ''Enterprise'' and has a wife and son. He realises something weird is going on because his "wife" is a woman who only ever existed as a fictional holodeck creation, and discovers that he is actually being subjected to a VirtualRealityInterrogation by the Romulans. [[spoiler:The twist here is that this is just a second layer of VR - he is actually in a simulation created by his "son" from the first layer, actually a lonely alien child who wanted someone to play with - the apparent Virtual Reality Interrogation plot was the simulation trying to adjust to his suspicions of what was really happening]].
*** Interestingly, many of the things Riker found odd (though not impossible) in the first fake scenario came true as the franchise continued.
** 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.

** In the episode "Stratagem", Captain Archer tries to get information out of an enemy by convincing him that years have gone by, during which they became friends. 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]].
** Captain Archer suspects this trope in "Twilight" -- unfortunately he really ''is'' in a BadFuture.

* ''Series/{{Battlestar Galactica|2003}}''. 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.
* ''Series/DoctorWho'': In "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", Sarah Jane is knocked out and then told she is on a spaceship which has been travelling for months to a new world. She realizes this is not true because she still has a fresh bump on her head.

* In one episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheSmurfs'', appropriately titled "Rip Van Smurf", the Smurfs decide to teach Lazy Smurf a lesson with his habit of sleeping all the time by making him think he slept for over twenty years, during which they had become old and decrepit and Papa Smurf has passed away[[note]]He was actually away from the village during the prank[[/note]], forcing Lazy to take care of them all. [[DeadlyPrank It backfires on them]] when Lazy gives them a FountainOfYouth potion to make them young again, resulting in them turning into Smurflings.

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

* With the ''massive'' {{Cerebus Retcon}}s ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'', it's heavily implied that the whole "A nuke sent tore a hole in space-time and sent us 200 years into the future" plot was really just [[spoiler: Vic and Gary screwing with the Blood Gulch Crew]]. Either way, this trope was in effect to some extent, as it would SERIOUSLY muck up continuity if it had been a true RipVanWinkle.

* ''Literature/DiaryOfAWimpyKid'': In the first book, Rodrick wakes up Greg (the protagonist) at 3 am, claiming that Greg has slept through the summer holidays and it's the first day of school and he's late, and GET UP! HilarityEnsues. In the movie he doesn't explain why the summer has ended, he just counts on Greg being too sleepy to know.

* ''Series/BrooklynNineNine'': In the SeriesFinale HeistEpisode "[[Recap/BrooklynNineNineS8E09TheLastDay The Last Day]]", Jake is knocked out by fireworks and awakens in a hospital room, where he's told he's been comatose for seven years. His wife Amy emotionally tells him his best friend moved to Arizona and she's become FriendsWithBenefits with her ex-boyfriend Teddy, who is now helping raise Jake's son. This was all a ploy to get Jake to reveal once she has this information, Amy handcuffs him to the hospital bed and collapses the fake hospital room around them.

* 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. (It turns out that an inversion ''is'' happening with the intent of [[BreakingBadNewsGently giving him more time to recover]] before he has to face the fact that he's been frozen for over seventy years.)
** 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. A common Fanon explanation is that Nick Fury deliberately made the illusion flimsy, to test Cap's mental sharpness after decades of being frozen.

* The 'Spyboy' one-shot "A Manchurian Candy-Date" has Bombshell waking up years in the future in a hospital, her legs atrophied and her long-distant parents happy to see her awake. Comic relief Butch, his face scarred, says she's been in a coma for almost a decade after a raid that went bad, killing Alex's father. Alex reverted to his Spyboy persona full-time and has since become a ruthless crime boss. After physical therapy, Bombshell is sent to kill Alex...but when she looks at her aged face in the mirror, we see her true form as it turns out she's been brainwashed by an enemy to kill the real Alex in the present. Her mind sees everything as part of the delusion (attempting to "fire" a sheet of papers like a gun) before Alex is able to get through to her.

* This is the plot of an episode of ''Anime/ScienceNinjaTeamGatchaman / Anime/BattleOfThePlanets'', used to get the main hero to give the baddies some important information.

** This happens in the 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 brainless nature, it works.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/ScoobyDooMysteryIncorporated'' episode "The Man In The Mirror", Fred wakes up in a post-apocalyptic town with [[DemBones animated skeletons]] and an elderly Daphne. The whole thing was a plot to try to trick Fred into revealing where he hid the [[MacGuffin Planispheric Disc]]. [[spoiler: Fred reveals he saw through the ruse immediately, and led the fake Daphne (actually his mother) on a wild-goose chase while finding a way to warn his friends.]]

* ''Series/HardyBoysNancyDrewMysteries'': "Sole Survivor", where Joe wakes up in a hospital room with no clue where he is or how he got there, only to be told that he's not only been in a coma for a year, but that his father and brother are dead. Cue fake newspapers, fake newscasts, and forged letters from all his surviving relatives and friends. Of course, [[spoiler: Frank and Fenton are very much alive, and the whole thing is a MindScrew to get Joe to reveal information on a defection attempt.]]

* An episode of the 1970s ''Literature/TheHardyBoys'' TV series had the bad guys do this to one of the boys. They dyed his hair to make him look older, but he caught on when a shirt that had supposedly been hanging in his closet for 10 years still smelled of his girlfriend's perfume.

Contrast [[RipVanWinkle Not-Fake Rip Van Winkle]]. Compare LotusEaterMachine, MistakenForApocalypse, DreamDeception, and BaitAndSwitchTimeSkip. May appear as a part of a FauxtasticVoyage.

Contrast [[RipVanWinkle Not-Fake Rip Van Winkle]]. Compare LotusEaterMachine, MistakenForApocalypse, and BaitAndSwitchTimeSkip. May appear as a part of a FauxtasticVoyage.

Contrast [[RipVanWinkle Not-Fake Rip Van Winkle]]. Compare LotusEaterMachine and MistakenForApocalypse. May appear as a part of a FauxtasticVoyage.

There's also a [[PlayedForLaughs lighter version]] where there's no elaborate hoax (and no harm done or attempted), just a prank that's quickly exposed with either a "just kidding" on the part of the perpetrator, or a "stop messing with him" from some third party.