What people know about depends on their time and place, and the access to education they have. Sometimes writers forget this, and include characters having knowledge of something nobody would know about in the time or place where the work is set.
Supertrope to Animals Fear Neutering, Inexplicable Language Fluency, and Instant Expert. See also Orphaned Etymology, where someone uses a word that wouldn't exist where the story is set. May overlap with Amplified Animal Aptitude or Wise Beyond Their Years. Not to be confused with Third-Person Flashback, when a character remembers things that happened when they weren't even in the room.
Examples:
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Comic Strip
- Garfield: Played for laughs in one strip. Garfield pushes an antique vase off the edge of a table. Jon angrily yells at him that he doesn't know what he just did. Turns out Garfield actually knows more about the vase than Jon, despite the fact that Wikipedia didn't exist when the strip was made. Sure, he could have learned it from a history book, but it's unlikely that Jon would just keep a history book lying around and not even read it.
Film - Animated
- Chicken Run: The chickens know how to craft a plane. Even if this weren't physically impossible for a chicken to do, one would wonder how chickens living in a rural idea have any idea how to do this.
- The Little Drummer Boy: At one point, several of the animals pretend to be other animals, which include an alligator and a caribou. The special is set in Judea, where neither of those animals are found.
- Madagascar
- Madagascar: The penguins know how to drive, despite having spent their entire life in a zoo.
- Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa: The penguins also know how to fly a plane. And they built it themselves, too.
- Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted: Not only do the animals understand what French people are saying, Marty the Zebra knows how to drive a car.
- Tarzan: One of the elephants worries about piranhas in the river, upon which another says that piranhas only live in South America. One would wonder how an elephant in Africa would even know either of those things exist. They don't know what humans are, though, since young Tarzan is mistaken for a piranha.
Films — Live-Action
- Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey: Sassy knows how to unlock a pound door even though she's never been to a pound before.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: Homer is shown to know things he's never learned across various episodes — he knows languages he's never seen or heard, can name every Ayatollah, understands Hindu philosophy better than Apu, and knows what proposition 305 is. He even knows oddly specific things, like the phone number of the men who built the Berlin wall.
