History Main / LongRunnerTechMarchesOn

* ''[[WesternAnimation/InvaderZimEnterTheFlorpus Enter the Florpus]]'', the BigDamnMovie of ''WesternAnimation/InvaderZim'' which aired in 2019 (nearly 20 years after the original series ran and ended) now features smartphones and apps, and a joke about how no one reads newspapers anymore, all of which wouldn't have been possible when the show was first on the air. Similar references and jokes have also been present in the ''Zim'' comic series, which began publishing in 2015 and once dedicated a whole issue to Zim and GIR getting obsessed with binge-watching a show.

This is a SubTrope of ComicBookTime, {{Long Runner|s}}, and TechnologyMarchesOn. Sister Trope to NotAllowedToGrowUp, and WebcomicTime where the passage of time in-universe does not keep up with the span of publication in real life. See also {{Zeerust}}, where a "futuristic" design element is outdated by the real-world march of technology, materials science, aesthetics and/or social values, and CosmeticallyAdvancedPrequel, where a chronologically-earlier instalment in a series looks better than its predecessor(s) due to advances in [=VFX=]. Compare UnintentionalPeriodPiece.

This is a SubTrope of ComicBookTime, {{Long Runner|s}}, and TechnologyMarchesOn. Sister Trope to NotAllowedToGrowUp, and WebcomicTime where the passage of time in-universe does not keep up with the span of publication in real life. See also {{Zeerust}}, where a "futuristic" design element is outdated by the real-world march of technology, materials science, aesthetics and/or social values, and CosmeticallyAdvancedPrequel, where a chronologically-earlier instalment in a series looks better than it’s predecessor(s) due to advances in [=VFX=]. Compare UnintentionalPeriodPiece.

This is a SubTrope of ComicBookTime, {{Long Runner|s}}, and TechnologyMarchesOn. Sister Trope to NotAllowedToGrowUp, and WebcomicTime where the passage of time in-universe does not keep up with the span of publication in real life. See also {{Zeerust}}, where a "futuristic" design element is outdated by the real-world march of technology, materials science, aesthetics and/or social values. Compare UnintentionalPeriodPiece.

* Averted in ''Manga/HunterXHunter'': Shalnark's [[WeaponSpecialization weapon of choice]], a brick-type cell phone that could mind-control people and instructions given out via texting, was not changed over the years the manga has remained in publication. That being said, hand gestures for texting today remain similar to back then, and the phone itself is unusually flat and rectangular for a brick phone, so when the phone reappeared in a story arc in 2015, the manga depicted as few shots of its front as possible, with most shots of the phone from behind and the user rapidly tapping the front of it. That being said, it's played straight with other people's phones, with smartphones popping up with increasing frequency, though a few other characters still have the phones they originally had. The internet has also become far more accessible and not just the domain of specific characters like [[{{Otaku}} Milluki]], as it was at the start of the series.

But wait, that episode that came out fifteen years ago ''was set only a year or two ago in the series' storyline''. How is it that the characters were touting tape decks as the next big thing, yet only a short time later older members of the cast are reminiscing about their old Walkmans, and younger members have no idea what a cassette ''[[WhatAreRecords even is]],'' even though they were the ones lugging them around back in the first few seasons?

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

** The manga has a particularly hard time of this, due to suffering from an extreme case of ComicBookTime. The series has run since 1994 for about three decades, but WordOfGod claims that only ''about six months'' have passed in the story. (There's a ''lot'' of trouble with that statement, including the number of holidays we've seen, and the changing of the seasons. And that's not even considering the sheer number of important cases that have occurred. Even condensing the series down just to its plot and character relevant episodes and ignoring repeated holidays/seasons renders enough time passage to fill well over a year.) Either way, the widespread use of cellphones and personal computers became adapted into the stories concurrently, which created some interesting problems. An early episode had a lunchbox-sized portable fax-machine qualify as an awesome gadget, while a more recent episode had a writer's lack of familiarity with cellphones used as proof that he hadn't left his attic in years. And canonically, those two incidents were - at most - 3 months apart.

* Played with in ''Manga/NagasareteAirantou.'' When Ikuto was shipwrecked in 2002, he brought with him a Gameboy Advance which had to be powered by AA batteries. His sister later arrived on the island, which in-universe took only around 4 months, but happened over 10 years into the manga's serialization. When she locates her belongings, she mentions bringing a smartphone and a 3DS, prompting Ikuto to ask what smartphones and 3DSes are.

** Not to mention, Marvel's use of ComicBookTime isn't ignored in the stories. Every so often, a story from decades ago will be referred to as having been five or ten years ago. Hank "Beast" [=McCoy=] was in his late teens in the sixties and celebrated his 30th birthday in the nineties. The technology seen and real-world events referenced in the Silver Age that are later established as recent would seem to set all things Marvel in a version of the late seventies that happens to have smartphones and such ([[FridgeBrilliance perhaps due to having people like Peter, Tony, Reed, and Hank hanging around.]] Maybe [[ReedRichardsIsUseless Reed Richards isn't useless]] after all...?)

* ''Literature/TheHelmsmanSaga'' was started in the 80s. In the fifth book, Wilf was stated to have a pager. In book 7, he had a mobile phone. In book eight (written in 2011, after a fifteen-year hiatus), he sends SMS messages.

* A subtle example in John Marsden's ''Literature/TheTomorrowSeries''. Despite its NextSundayAD title, derived from that of first book ''Tomorrow, When The War Began'' (1993), there is no evidence the story is set in anything other than the present day -- and the plot of the whole series takes place over a matter of only months. The 7 books appeared at annual intervals, though, and over the period of publication there was a real-world revolution in electronic communication. Partway through the series a mention of a character using "E-mail" ''[sic]'' is casually dropped in, with this formatting of the name however immediately dating it to the mid-[[TheNineties Nineties]] when it was a novelty. In another mention nearer the end of the series (and decade) the concept is quietly updated to "email".

* The lead character's brief ''aversion'' to this was played for laughs in the first episode of the 2018 PostScriptSeason of ''Series/MurphyBrown'', which chronologically takes place twenty years after the original series finale. Brown still preferred using a Motorola [=v60=] flip phone (circa 2002) rather than smartphones like everyone else ([[TechnologicallyBlindElders praising it as being perfect for "making actual calls to people"]]), and had never used Website/{{Twitter}} before. [[AlphabetNewsNetwork CNC]]'s social media intern Pat insists on upgrading her to an [=iPhone=] from the current decade, but not before gazing in awe at Brown's vintage phone (and being disappointed when he realizes it doesn't have Siri).
* ''Series/RedDwarf'': In this sci-fi SitCom long-runner's original heyday during the late-'80s/early-'90s, Holly the ship's computer was seen as a face on a screen -- and was occasionally brought along for the plot on a bulky cathode ray tube TV rig. The aesthetic (eventually) evolved so that by the time of the show's belated {{revival}} as a regular series from 2012 the ''Red Dwarf'' comes equipped with flat-screen monitors, despite the ship having been 3 million years into deep space since episode 1. The "just go with it" nature of the chronology means that it isn't too distracting.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': The technology in the early episodes definitely reflected that the show took place around the same time they were produced, the start of the 90s. Bart used a typewriter to write a paper in an early episode, and the kids in the series played video games on what appeared to be a SNES/NES mashup. Later episodes reflected the 2000s/2010s period, though it took until the show's 2009 HD conversion for the family to have a flatscreen rather than the dials-and-rabbit-ears cabinet TV they had. It gets even more bizarre in an episode where Homer remembers his teenage times which happened in "[[Recap/TheSimpsonsS19E11That90sShow That '90s Show]]"; Homer mentions VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog as his idol. The show started 2 years before the first Sonic the Hedgehog game so the game should be a novelty even for Bart.

* Averted in ''Manga/HunterXHunter'': Shalnark's WeaponOfChoice, a brick-type cell phone that could mind-control people and instructions given out via texting, was not changed over the years the manga has remained in publication. That being said, hand gestures for texting today remain similar to back then, and the phone itself is unusually flat and rectangular for a brick phone, so when the phone reappeared in a story arc in 2015, the manga depicted as few shots of its front as possible, with most shots of the phone from behind and the user rapidly tapping the front of it. That being said, it's played straight with other people's phones, with smartphones popping up with increasing frequency, though a few other characters still have the phones they originally had. The internet has also become far more accessible and not just the domain of specific characters like [[{{Otaku}} Milluki]], as it was at the start of the series.

* Series/{{NCIS}} started in 2003, when there were absolutely no smartphones, [=LCD=] flatscreen [=TVs=] or tablets and some characters have 1990s hairstyle/clothing looks. As the show progressed, the cast started to use flip phones...ESPECIALLY the character Leroy Jethro Gibbs. And then iPhones, iPads, Samsung smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi, and computers start to update, and most of the cast upgraded to smartphones and [=LCD=] flatscreen [=TVs=]. Except Gibbs, who still uses a decade-old Motorola flip phone since he has a distaste for the high-tech stuff. His house has 2 old box-shaped CRT TV sets, one of them literally came from the 1980s and is still working.

* ''ComicStrip/HiAndLois'': Look at the photo on [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]] [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi_and_Lois here,]] and compare the TV to the modern TV the family has now, not to mention the other conveniences that they have.

* Likewise, post-uncancellation, ''{{WesternAnimation/Futurama}}'' was 'updated' with the latest [[WereStillRelevantDammit Eye-Phone]] and more recent scientific gadgets and theories about TimeTravel and Evolution, which didn't exist in 1999 in RealLife. In one episode aired in the early 2000s, Amy's cell phone was shown to be humorously tiny -- the real-life trend at the time was to make cell phones as small as possible and this was the logical progression. In the 2010s, however, the focus shifted towards touchscreens, which led to cell phones getting much ''larger'' than they were in the 2000s.

** The manga has a particularly hard time of this, due to suffering from an extreme case of ComicBookTime. The series has run since 1994 for about two decades, but WordOfGod claims that only ''about six months'' have passed in the story. (There's a ''lot'' of trouble with that statement, including the number of holidays we've seen, and the changing of the seasons. And that's not even considering the sheer number of important cases that have occurred. Even condensing the series down just to its plot and character relevant episodes and ignoring repeated holidays/seasons renders enough time passage to fill well over a year.) Either way, the widespread use of cellphones and personal computers became adapted into the stories concurrently, which created some interesting problems. An early episode had a lunchbox-sized portable fax-machine qualify as an awesome gadget, while a more recent episode had a writer's lack of familiarity with cellphones used as proof that he hadn't left his attic in years. And canonically, those two incidents were - at most - 3 months apart.

** Parodied in a comedy spinoff of ''Case Closed'', ''Manga/DetectiveConanTheCulpritHanzawa'' starring the shadowy figure that represents the killer. In the first chapter, he attempts to use the train, but the ticket turnstile keeps changing with the times ''as he is using it'', so he cannot figure out where to put his ticket.

** Parodied in a comedy spinoff of ''Case Closed'' starring the shadowy figure that represents the killer. In the first chapter, he attempts to use the train, but the ticket turnstile keeps changing with the times ''as he is using it'', so he cannot figure out where to put his ticket.

** Parodied in a comedy spinoff of Case Closed starring the shadowy figure that represents the killer. In the first chapter, he attempts to use the train, but the ticket turnstile keeps changing with the times ''as he is using it'', so he cannot figure out where to put his ticket.

** This became ridiculous when recently there was a ''flashback case'', ergo, a story that's supposed to have happened prior to the series beginning, that required the use of a phone that had ''video recording capabilities''. Meanwhile we're supposed to believe that chapters containing characters in possession of pagers happened afterwards. Right.

* ''Series/DoctorWho'': While the time travel-based premise allows the series to avoid this trope for the most part, it still pops up in the form of the TARDIS itself. The interior of the ship was originally designed based on early '60s conceptions of what futuristic technology would look like, and as 26 years passed, the set would incrementally change in accordance with real-world technological changes and accompanying new predictions. The baubles on the TARDIS console would grow more simplified and less {{Zeerust}}-y before being replaced in the '80s with a design rooted heavily in the nascent personal computer market, and the scanner would go from a ceiling-mounted CRT to a giant flatscreen with the display added in via ChromaKey in the late '70s. Come the Revival Series, and the TARDIS would switch to a mix of smaller flatscreen monitors and controls based on changes in personal computer technology and aesthetics during the 21st century.

* ''Series/DoctorWho'': While the time travel-based premise allows the series to avoid this trope for the most part, it still pops up in the form of the TARDIS itself. The interior of the ship was originally designed based on early '60s conceptions of what futuristic technology would look like, and as 26 years passed, the set would incrementally change in accordance with real-world technological changes and accompanying new predictions. The baubles on the TARDIS console would grow more simplified and less {{Zeerust}}-y before being replaced in the '80s with a design rooted heavily in the nascent personal computer market, and the scanner would go from a ceiling-mounted CRT to a giant flatscreen with the display added in via ChromaKey. Come the Revival Series, and the TARDIS would switch to a mix of smaller flatscreen monitors and controls based on changes in personal computer technology and aesthetics during the 21st century.

* ''Series/StargateAtlantis'' (set in the present day), where the expedition had a seemingly limitless supply of gadgets, which mysteriously kept updating with rather recognizable new models which hadn't even shipped yet at the show's premiere, in spite of being cut off from Earth until the Dædalus showed up in season 2.
* ''Series/RedDwarf'':
** In this sci-fi SitCom long-runner's original heyday during the late-'80s/early-'90s, Holly the ship's computer was seen as a face on a screen -- and was occasionally brought along for the plot on a bulky cathode ray tube TV rig. The aesthetic (eventually) evolved so that by the time of the show's belated {{revival}} as a regular series from 2012 the ''Red Dwarf'' comes equipped with flat-screen monitors, despite the ship having been 3 million years into deep space since episode 1. The "just go with it" nature of the chronology means that it isn't too distracting.

* ''Series/LazyTown'': In seasons 1 and 2, Sportacus can only be contacted by writing a letter and launching it in a tube to his airship. In seasons 3 and 4, he and Stephanie have digital wrist communicators.

* ''Manga/YotsubaTo'' is very guilty of this (it has run for over twenty years and its protagonist has yet to have a birthday). Most notably, Yotsuba visits an electronics store full of flip phones in September, and her father buys a smartphone two months later.

* The [[WesternAnimation/ThePowerpuffGirls2016 2016 revival]] of ''WesternAnimation/ThePowerpuffGirls'' turns the girls' hotline into a cordless phone and an app on their individual smart phones.

* [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]] in ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants''. The show largely retains the technology it started with. However, a few episodes of the modern seasons (such as "Karate Star" in Season 8 and "Goodbye, Krabby Patty?" in Season 9) have featured smartphones, flatscreen [=TVs=], and some other high-tech stuff.

* ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' is a pretty jarring comparison between the first season in 1999 and its later seasons, though numerous episodes address this issue by introducing new technologies to the family (mostly because they were still new technologies in real life, and ripe for parody). The series starts off by mentioning using a VCR to tape ''Monday Night Football'', singing about how owning a cellphone was status of great wealth and importance, having a home computer and the Internet was completely unheard of. Later, taking advantage of modern technology for the sake of jokes, everyone has a smartphone, the old tube TV was replaced by a Hi-Def LCD, the VCR was replaced by a Blu-ray player and [=TiVo=], there was a three-part arc focusing on Brian and Twitter, Lois has a Facebook account, etc etc.

* ''ComicStrip/HiAndLois'': Look at the photo on [[Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} The Other Wiki]] [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi_and_lois here,]] and compare the TV to the modern TV the family has now, not to mention the other conveniences that they have.

* The Franchise/MarvelUniverse is actually more prone to this than DC, which {{Cosmic Retcon}}s its continuity every couple of years nowadays, making it so that whatever 1940s Batman or Superman stories that currently still count might have happened last year. Marvel has it particularly bad with those characters -- [[Franchise/SpiderMan Peter Parker]], [[ComicBook/IronMan Tony Stark]], [[ComicBook/FantasticFour Reed Richards]] -- who work with fantastic technology, the earliest issues of whose comics involved technology which often wasn't so fantastic 10 years ago or so, when the ComicBook/FantasticFour took their ill-fated space flight to the Moon ([[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp to beat the Russians]]), and contemporary Marvel continuity began. A prime example? Reading the original Iron Man appearance, one might be amused to discover that the secret to his suit's power was "highly miniaturized transistors", and he had a phone built into the suit... with a rotary dial on the chest.

* ''Manga/DetectiveConan'':