Critical Research Failure

Even (most) first graders know this one.

"The London 2012 opening ceremony is going to be called Isles of Wonder, but there can be no wonderment more wonderful than the fact that Olympics organizers wanted Keith Moon to perform. Moon has been dead for 34 years."

— The Guardian

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This is a particular instance where a story or character features something — a statement, the depiction of something — that is so egregiously off-the-scale in terms of inaccuracy that anyone with a high-school education (or less) and/or a cursory knowledge of the subject realizes the writers made the whole thing up.

Many of these will be disaster movies or action movies and will use state-of-the-art computer effects to keep your interest. This can be Played for Laughs by having a Book Dumb character make such an error so that a smarter character can spot and react to it.

Also see Didn't Think This Through, which is less about research failure and more about planning failure. Contrast with the MST3K Mantra, which tells us not to worry about these little details; Accidentally Correct Writing, which is when non-experts think the creators are wrong, but experts know the creators are right by complete accident; and Like Reality Unless Noted, where what appears to be a research failure can be written off as the result of an Alternate History or Alternate Universe.

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For examples of research errors regarding media, see Cowboy BeBop at His Computer. See also Dan Browned, for situations when an author falsely claims he did the research. For downplayed inaccuracies that require more in-depth knowledge to notice, see Artistic License and its subpages. If it's specifically math that is off, see Writers Cannot Do Math.

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Example Subpages

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fanfiction
• Film — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Web Original
• Western Animation

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Unintentional Examples

Advertising

• A commercial for Oscar Meyer Franks has a father come home and see his three kids on those electronic gizmos kids use these days. Wanting to spend quality family time, he trips the circuit breaker of his house, knocking the power out and shutting off the older brother's computer, the younger brother's game console, and the sister's cell phone.
• Mitsubishi once ran an ad for the Eclipse, discussing mankind's desire to harness the awesome power of an eclipse, and showed a literal one, suggesting the ad agency had no idea that an eclipse was just the moon briefly blocking direct view of the sun.

Comic Strips

• An early Garfield strip featured Garfield reciting a short poem about spiders. Problem is, he refers to them as insects, when they are actually arachnids. This was pointed out in the author's notes for one strip of Square Root of Minus Garfield.
• One The Far Side cartoon caught fire for its inaccurate depiction of mosquitoes. In the cartoon, the hardworking (mosquito) husband comes home after a long day at work and comments to his homemaker (mosquito) wife how he 'must have spread malaria all over the country'. The problem is that only the females suck blood and spread malaria. However, the comic depends on the depiction of stereotypical suburbia, so swapping the genders around wouldn't have worked either.
  • Gary Larson's visual depictions of historic figures or celebrities are often so strikingly off the only explanation is he could not be bothered to even glance at a photo or paining of them for reference before drawing. A cartoon depicting Albert Einstein playing basketball as a young man, for instance, portrays the famously bushy-haired scientist as balding, while one depicting "Henry VIII on the dating scene" depicted the king, who is probably one of the most visually recognizable monarchs in British history, as a generic, bald cartoon king with a crown and robe but no hair or beard (a simple beard was later sketched in for some later reprintings).

Film — Animation

• An American Tail has Tiger, the vegetarian cat. Cats are obligate carnivores, unable to survive without meat proteins. (Though he does mention that he has a little fish now and then.)
• The Emoji Movie:
  • The phone would not have been deleted, but given a factory reset.
  • Most phones do not have "firewalls" in the traditional sense.
  • Trolls aren't malware like viruses or Trojan Horses. They're actual people.
  • A factory reset can be performed by the user, using the phone itself, and it doesn't need to be taken to a repair shop for that to be done.
  • An emoji has no code; it's an image (which is internally stored as a Unicode character), therefore, it can't be reprogrammed. What can be reprogrammed is the code that puts the emojis in a text, but even then, it's already in the phone and there's no need to go to the cloud to change any code. In fact, the cloud wouldn't be housing any sort of code necessary for the use of emojis, as they already come pre-installed in phones as Unicode characters.
  • Guessing random words until you get the correct password is not a form of hacking. You’d think that Sony would know this after their infamous hack.

Music

• Michael Jackson's "Liberian Girl" not only opens with Swahili, but with a South African singer singing it. They speak Swahili in East Africa, Liberia is in West Africa. The main language of Liberia is English.
• Singer Mitsou wrote a song called "Les Chinois" which describe how the Chinese know how to make love and we should do the same as them. It obviously reference the Kama Sutra, which is actually Hindu, not Chinese.
• Neil Young has a song called "Cortez the Killer", in which he praises the pacifist and egalitarian... Aztecs!? Yes, he says "Hate was just a legend, / And war was never known" while he's talking about one of the most bloodthirsty civilizations in human history. He also says they "lifted many stones" and "built up with their bare hands / What we still can't do today." Suffice to say, 16th century Aztec stone buildings are far surpassed by 1970s technology.
• There is a Dutch DJ who, as of October 2011, claims to get phone calls from Madonna and Frank Sinatra on a regular basis. His phone bill must be through the roof, because Sinatra died in May 1998. ^note Maybe he's talking about Frank Sinatra, Junior?
• The song "The Legend of Xanadu" by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch sets the named city in a desert land, and has a Spanish/Mexican feel, especially the intro. Xanadu (modern preferred transliteration: Shangdu) was the summer capital of the Khans (the winter capital was what is now Beijing) hence is in China, a mostly temperate country.
• The entire song "King Midas in Reverse", about a character who has the Midas talent but "with a curse" ("everything he touches turns to dust"). When he wrote that song, Graham Nash missed the Aesop of the Midas legend, that the ability to turn things into gold at a touch is itself a curse if not controllable; how would such a person eat or drink?
• In his song "Peek A Boo," Lil Yachty includes the line, "She blow that dick like a cello." He explained on the Genius lyrics website that he mistakenly thought a cello (string instrument) was actually a woodwind instrument, so ergo, you can't blow it. He waves it off by saying he did it thinking Squidward played it, but of course, he was wrong. He says Squidward actually played a flute, which brings his Critical Research Failures to two, as Squidward actually - and famously - plays the clarinet. Nevermind that you don't even "blow" in the sense of the phrase. It's actually light sucking.
• The Los Dos Grandes de la Sierra album Chevrolet 4 X 4 has a Ford Ranger on its cover. Not only is it the wrong car, Ford is also Chevrolet's arch-rival. It'd be like naming your album after the Boston Red Sox and having the New York Yankees on the cover.
• Kanye West's "Black Skinhead" features the line "I keep it 300, like the Romans" - a reference to the 300 Spartans, who were Greek.
• Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Jump on It" insinuates that prostitution is legal in Las Vegas, when it is not.
• In the song "Buggin' Out" by A Tribe Called Quest, Phife Dawg raps the line "I float like gravity", even though gravity actually prevents you from floating.

Pinball

• Earthshaker! is about earthquakes but designed with the assumption that earthquakes are like wind-based natural disasters, like tornadoes or hurricanes: People are encouraged to go into underground "earthquake shelters" when they feel one coming, even though this would be much more dangerous than remaining above ground.^note The safest place to be during an earthquake is in a wide, flat, open area. The danger of an earthquake isn't the quake itself, but falling objects. A wide, flat, open area has the least amount of things that can fall on you, whereas an underground bunker can have something falling on you from anywhere. Not that you get much time to run somewhere safe. In addition, the player character works for the "Earthquake Institute," traveling up and down fault lines in California to gather data—that should be the work of the U.S. Geological Survey.

Pro Wrestling

• Wrestling Hockey Players, The Ballard Brothers, took up a valet to serve as their Cheerleader, even though hockey doesn't make use of cheerleaders. This could be excusable in that Canadian hockey has some people that resemble cheerleaders, they just don't call them cheerleaders...
• WCW boasted that an album of a group known as Three Count had gone Platinum. Fair enough. Then Evan Karagias claimed an upcoming second album of there would be more successful than that, going not double platinum but gold, to the amusement/bewilderment of anyone who knows anything about album sales.
• Vince McMahon, pleased with the success of Rey Mysterio on SmackDown, decided he wanted another high-flyer luchador. So he hired Ultimo Dragon and then got upset when he discovered Ultimo Dragon really was not a high-flyer at all, which shoud've been obvious to anybody within the wrestling business (such as McMahon) with a knowledge of wrestling outside the United States, as Ultimo Dragon is a Japanese wrestler, and Japanese wrestling, or puroresu, is bound to entirely different dynamics to those of Mexican lucha libre. This is despite the fact Ultimo Dragon had wrestled under the WWF banner before and won a WWF championship, suggesting Vince did not even watch his own product.
• During WWE's Monday Night War series, The Miz inadvertently took a shot at his own company by suggesting the women of the 1980s did nothing interesting, conveniently forgetting Wendi Richter was almost as big as Hulk Hogan during the time and subterfuge involving The Fabulous Moolah had to be used to stop her.
• Damien Sandow's character was that of 'the intellectual savior of the masses', a highly-cultured Insufferable Genius who claimed that he was superior to everybody else. His merchandise included a T-shirt with the slogan 'I > U: The Sandow Equation'. Unfortunately an equation, by definition, must include an equals sign. Sandow should have been smart enough to realize that his mantra was an inequation.
• In a story similar to the title quote, Dave Meltzer reported that, for the WWE Greatest Royal Rumble in Saudi Arabia in 2018, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman requested that Vince McMahon bring some of wrestling's top stars to the Kingdom, specifying names such as Ultimate Warrior (who had been dead for four years at the time) and Yokozuna (who had been dead for 18 years)

Radio

• An episode of Fags, Mags and Bags centering around the local rabbi, imam and priest all sitting in the same bath of baked beans for charity includes the priest's disappointment that as the representative of the newest Abrahamic religion, he has to take the traditional youngest sibling place at the tap end. This line should really have gone to the imam.

Tabletop Games

• The Dark Sun setting was originally designed as taking place on an icy frozen world. During development, it was changed to a desert world because the developers thought that a warm climate would justify fanservicey art with Stripperiffically dressed characters. Showing that much skin is just as dangerous in a desert as it is in the cold because it leaves the body open to sunstroke and allows for more water loss from perspiration, as evidenced by how actual desert-dwelling peoples traditionally dress in long, flowing robes that cover the entire body.
• Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes, a spinoff of Tunnels & Trolls from 1983, cites certain 'military' guns as only available by capture or issue. Note that this includes the M1911 pistol, as well as M1 Garand rifle; both are relatively easy to find for civilian use.
• The first Rifts sourcebook, printed in the 1990s, had an animal/monster race called the Ostrosaurus. In the description, they note that despite the name, it's not a lizard like a dinosaur, but closer to a featherless bird. The irony kicks in with the realization that Theropods, which the Ostrosaurus resembles, essentially were featherless birds. Or more accurately, birds are feathered dinosaurs. Or, even more more accurately, birds are dinosaurs with (perhaps) a few more feathers.
• The Top Trumps card game has Flavor Text that attempts to be informative and educational, but the creators don't seem to have done very much research. There's a particularly monstrous error on the "Life" card in the "Wonders of the World" pack:
  The first known animals to roam the Earth were dinosaurs, over 65 million years ago.
  • Particularly infamous is the Space Phenomena themed deck. Amongst other glaring errors, it states that the Moon was spotted in 1651, Ganymede was discovered before the Sun, and asserts that Halley's Comet has negative mass. Somehow.
• The Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition core rulebook states that vampires are unable to use touchscreen devices unless they have Blush of Life active, as their biologically dead bodies don't have the proper conductivity for touchscreens. This has a number of problems that even a layperson should see including the fact touch screen styluses don't require body heat so why would vampire fingers not work?
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse:
  • The evil Black Spiral Dancers have one of their largest bases in the power plant at Chernobyl, implying that the site has been abandoned by humans. But even after the 1986 disaster, Chernobyl continued producing electricity for Ukraine until 2000. To this day, thousands of workers regularly visit and maintain the site and there are even a couple hundred people still living in the exclusion zone. Not only that, but much of the former city has been reclaimed by nature; animals (including wolves) have returned to the area after decades of absence.
  • One sourcebook describes the Ajaba werehyenas as serving the function of werewolves in a continent without wolves. Not only does Africa have at least two wild canines that are often described as wolves due to their size and pack units, but they're even acknowledged within the game as having ties to the Garou: The Silent Striders are bred from Abyssinian wolves, and the Red Talons have a large African offshoot tribe, the Kuchu Ekundu, bred from African wild dogs aka painted wolves. One could make the case that hyenas are far more numerous in Africa than canines, but saying wolves don't exist there at all is right out.

Theatre

• William Shakespeare, as the son of a glove-maker whose schooling mostly included Latin and classic literature (written in Latin), was prone to making these when discussing geography. His plays also include a healthy dose of Anachronism Stew—allusions to Christian themes are frequent even in stories that took place before Christ was born, there are references to contemporary English clothing and culture regardless of setting, etc., so how much of those errors are just stylistic choices is debatable.
  • In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare committed a Critical Research Failure and was called out on it by his contemporary, Ben Jonson. Shakespeare had his characters shipwrecked on the coast of Bohemia (which is now the Czech Republic) "where there is no sea near by one hundred miles." Shakespeare's mistake was likely an artifact from his original source, which took place in Sicily, not Bohemia.
  • In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra suggests playing a game of billiards, a game which wouldn't exist until about 1000 years later.
  • In Julius Caesar, Caesar proclaims himself to be "constant as the Northern Star". As was well-known to educated people by Shakespeare's time, the Northern Star isn't a constant (which star it currently is, is affected by the precession of the equinoxes) and there are even long periods when there isn't a Northern Star — such as Caesar's time. Isaac Asimov called out Shakespeare on this in his essay "Constant as the Northern Star" — partly as evidence that the plays (or at least Julius Caesar) couldn't (as some people suppose) have been written by Francis Bacon, as Bacon was well-educated and would have known this.
• The Book Report song in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown is a fairly blatant example of this, as Linus's overly-detailed analysis on The Tale of Peter Rabbit has very little to do with what's actually going on in the book. When he goes on a long explanation on "the sociological implications of family pressures so great as to drive an otherwise moral rabbit to perform acts of thievery which he consciously knew were against the law," and claims that "Peter Rabbit is established from the start as a benevolent hero," anyone who's actually read the book knows he's talking out of his ear here — Peter is a rather amoral protagonist, the entire story happens because he refuses to go along with his family, and his first action in the book is a willful act of disobedience; nowhere in the story does he display any sort of benevolence or heroism.

Webcomics

• This episode of Neko the Kitty is set in a museum, near the Giant Slug exhibit. The author admits to doing no research on museums for this sequence.
• This Eddsworld comic introduces us to Edd's..."brothers", Ed and Eddy, obvious expies of the titular trio from Ed, Edd n Eddy. Anyone who's seen the show will notice that the character expies are actually of Ed and Edd ("Double D")—Eddy is the short one in the yellow shirt.
• In the "CWC's Love Quest Saga" sub-episode of Sonichu, while Chris-Chan is talking with a girl named Hanna, said girl mentions that she enjoys reading Chuck Palahniuk among other things. The problem is with the footnote at the bottom, which states that Chuck Palahniuk was the director of Fight Club - the director of the film adaptation was David Fincher; Palahniuk was the author of the book^note if Chris-chan had said that Palahniuk was the original creator of Fight Club, it would be accurate. To be fair, Fight Club is a case of Adaptation Displacement^note to the point that it's not uncommon to find people who don't know that there was a book, but one can't help wonder how Chris knew about Chuck Palahniuk's involvement, yet didn't know he was an author.

In-Universe and Invoked examples

Advertising

• A TV spot for the film Gamer became an Internet hit when it claimed that "the last time Gerard Butler kicked this much ass was 300 years ago." ^note Amusingly, Gerard Butler has done quite a few other historical epics and at least one time travel story, covering damn near every period but the early 18th century.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • Calvin has to do a report on bats, but being the typical lazy six-year-old that he is, he does absolutely no research on them. He assumes bats are bugs because "they fly, right? They're ugly and hairy, right?" Despite literally everyone who hears this telling Calvin that bats aren't bugs, he refuses to listen (“Look, who’s giving the report, you chowderheads… or me?”). Predictably, he fails the assignment. Bill Watterson said in a commentary that one of the nice things about writing this strip is that he didn't need to know more than a lazy six-year-old, and after writing the story got sent more information on bats than he ever wanted to know.
  • Calvin and Susie are assigned to be partners on a project about the planet Mercury. The following is Calvin's only contribution, which he wrote the morning before class despite having a week to work on his report:
    Calvin: The planet Mercury was named after a Roman god with winged feet. Mercury was the god of flowers and bouquets, which is why today he is a registered trademark of FTD florists. Why they named a planet after this guy, I can't imagine. *sees Susie ready to pound him* ...Um, back to you, Susie.

Live Action TV

• In the May 17, 2019 episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, in-house bandleader Jon Batiste (dressed as Purple Rain-era Prince) comes up with his musical ode to/recap of the Game of Thrones....despite never seeing a single episode and only "knowing" it from memes. The results are....interesting....

Music

• MC Historical Inaccuracy's verse in Jon La Joie's WTF Collective 2 is based on this trope. It's better heard than read, but here are the lyrics:
  Yo, I'm MC Historical Inaccuracy
  I drop lyrical bombs like Hiroshima in '73
  I write rhymes like Shakespeare when he wrote Anne Frank's Diary
  Which is about the Civil War of 1812 in Germany
  I'm like the Spanish Inquisition when they killed Jesus
  And Abe Lincoln's suicide was the theme for my thesis
  Like Moses when I focus, I can split the Red Sea
  Which he did in 1950 with the Chinese Army
• The Pink Floyd song "Have a Cigar" has the singer (evidently a recording industry executive) sing the lines,
  Well I've always had a deep respect
  And I mean that most sincere
  The band is just fantastic
  That is really what I think
  Oh by the way, which one's Pink?^note  The joke is that the band name is Pink Floyd; none of the members are named "Pink."

Radio

• A Bob & Ray sketch has Bob interviewing the author of a History of the United States. It turns out that the 1,100-page tome contains numerous glaring errors, including Abraham Lincoln driving to his inauguration in an automobile, the Civil War breaking out in 1911, and the nation's original capital being located in Bailey's Mistake, Maine. The author readily admits it's "a shabby piece of work", but quickly adds that it's leather-bound.
• In the episode The Big Big Big Ben Bungle of the British political satire The Men from the Ministry Mr. Lamb refers to the "Hunchback of Amsterdam"

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer40000: The Imperial Guardman's Uplifting Primer is hilariously filled with these, presenting the enemies of man as easy to defeat by the common soldiery. Features gems such as "Ork tusks can easily be pulled out of their jaws", "the Tau are evolved from cattle and will spook at loud noises", and a magnificent illustration of a Guardsman looking around a corner like a guy who showed up early for a Scooby Stack. Those are actually partially true, though. Orks have shark-like teeth that are constantly being shed and could conceivably be pulled out fairly easily while the Tau are descended from grazing ruminants and display many vestiges of that past (spooking at loud noises NOT being one of them). It also includes a few nods to the series' Gameplay and Story Segregation; for instance, the entry on Orks mentions that despite being musclebound and much bigger the typical Ork is inexplicably no stronger than a typical human (hilariously false in the fiction, completely true on the tabletop). Indeed, a common theory is that the Primer is lying to you on purpose ("Genestealers are slow and sluggish") in order to raise morale. Any company worth even half its salt has a few units of Veterans who know what fighting in a Cosmic Horror Story is really like (and one Ciaphas Cain line notes that some of the Guardsmen are reading their primers "for inspiration or amusement").

Web Animation

• Terrible Writing Advice suggests writers to do this to the point that it's a Running Gag. Some examples include not researching the issues surrounding environmentalism when attempting to write a Green Aesop, and basing an evil empire off of Nazi Germany since picking another empire would require the author to open up a history book.

Webcomics

• This episode of Closet Gamers contains a literal example, when a Dungeons & Dragons character informs the party that a "Purple Worm" is a tiny creature eaten by harmless, flightless birds, as opposed to the giant, nasty Sand Worm monster it actually is.
• From Loli Loves Venom #32 — why you should not ask Venom for homework help:
  "In nature, spiders have many natural enemies. There is one main predator they always have to watch out for. The mighty octopus. Their tentacles of sheer fury are fierce opponents. Only through agility, resolution, and quick banter can the amazing spider atone for the danger he faces."
• Misfile: Rumisiel, a slacker angel, claims to be from Canada while on Earth. Normally it's not a big deal, but when he's ecstatic about seeing snow for the first time, Dr. Upton is understandably confused.
  Dr. Upton: This is the first snow you've ever seen? [...] Aren't you from Canada?
  Rumisiel: Yeah... but I'm from, like, the tropical part of Canada. The vast Canadian Empire ranges all far and wide, you know, eh?
  Dr. Upton: ...there's something desperately wrong with that sentence, but I'm too tired to care. Remind me in the future never to talk to you until after I've had my coffee.
  Rumisiel: The Emperor of Canada told me the same thing once.

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