Unintentional Period Piece needs a threshold.

It's cute that they think Trump became magically no longer relevant to us after the election even though he's still president for three more weeks.

Also didn't we decide that examples aren't automatically UPP just because they take place in 2020 and feature physical contact / no masks / etc?

That's why we have the term "lame duck". Once it's clear that you're leaving, all attention turns to your successor.

I don't think there is a consensus on how to treat the mass of COVID examples, hence the separate thread I started four days ago.

Bringing up the following example from Friends S 4 E 3 The One With The Cuffs:

• Unintentional Period Piece: Yeah, we don't see many paper encyclopedias anymore, much less traveling salesmen selling them. Nowadays, we have Wikipedia.

And this example from Friends S 4 E 18 The One With Rachels New Dress:

• Unintentional Period Piece: One of the reasons Chandler objects to Phoebe naming the triplet after Joey is because, according to the former, there would never be a President Joey. It turns out that in 2020 the American people elected a Joey for President.

I think the first one is valid. I don't know the context of why encyclopedias are important to the episode, though, so maybe that could be expanded upon slightly.

As for the second, I was surprised to learn that the perspective isn't even exclusive to Friends. People were saying it earlier this year. However, this is a rare time I'll suggest that an entry better belongs in Hilarious in Hindsight.

Don't know if this is where I should bring this up but I found this on the Nineties subpage:

• The View Askewniverse, specifically the original "New Jersey trilogy" of Clerks, Mallrats, and Chasing Amy. Kevin Smith admits as much at the beginning of this interview, when he says that Clerks "...could only exist in the era that it was created." Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (itself listed under 2000s Film) and Clerks II, made respectively in 2001 and 2006, are both homages to the era.

This entry does not explain how these films are an "Unintentional Period Piece" at all. What makes them so dated, that they could have only been made in The '90s?

My question is: is the example invalid enough to cut, or is it valid and just needs to be expanded? Because I have never watched these movies and I couldn't expand it. What should be done?

I've never seen any of them, but you're right in that the example is a ZCE. If the link still worked we may have been able to rescue the example. (This is why Weblinks Are Not Examples is a thing!)

Y'know, I'm starting to wonder why this is Trivia. It's hard to objectively call things Period Pieces if the creator didn't intend them to be, explaining this thread's very existence.

NVM

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Jan 13th 2021 at 8:15:16 AM

From Lupin (2021)

• Unintentional Period Piece: Some parts of the series were clearly filmed in 2019 just a couple of months before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the populations to wear face masks and shut down normally crowded places and businesses, as none of that is seen at any point (some scenes have a lot of extras, which is very difficult to pull off in pandemic conditions). The situation still wasn't back to normal when the series started airing.

Cut. The work is within the last ten years and the premise of the work isn't significantly impacted (which is what I believe we agreed on for the "special circumstances" clause.)

The fact that people have taken to call UPP works that dont involve people using facemasks and antibacterial gel is face-palm worthy and just convinces me of the fact that this trope should just be cut.

Can this thread be moved to Long Term projects and renamed to "Unintentional Period Piece Cleanup Thread"?

I feel like the current title the trope needing a threshold is an artifact now, given that there's already a 10 year threshold set for this (unless it's a special case), and this thread basically turned into a cleanup thread.

So, before saying to make a new cleanup thread (which to me adds more server space), why not convert this into a cleanup thread then?

This was just added to Trivia.Songbird:

• Unintentional Period Piece: Even with discussion of possible new strains, the development of a COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021 quickly relegated the idea of COVID-19 as an unstoppable Captain Trips-style superplague to the dustbin of history.

Edited by Anddrix on Feb 10th 2021 at 12:16:19 PM

No.

Too soon and shoehorning.

I'm asking this again.

I was going to add this to one of the sub-folders but does this clearly fit as an Unintentional Period Piece:

• A car dealer in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, England still had its website from 2004 Frozen in Time to May 2004 on the Internet until August 2019 when it disappeared permanently from the web; the website showed its age in terms of design and cars available - hatchbacks, sedans and sports cars, when nowadays it'd be crossover SUV, hybrid and pickup trucks. The pre-HTML 5 design and color scheme also dated it to the 2000's as well, plus promos for Strictly Come Dancing 's first season as pop-up adverts.

"A car dealer" isn't specific enough. We need a name.

That this is apparently not verifiable because the website is gone (did you try the Internet Archive?) makes me wary of adding it at all.

There is no such thing as notability but there is such a thing as verifiability.

I found some examples on Recess recap trivia pages that mention a specific and inevitable time (in the cases, I saw so far, 2006 and the Turn of the Millennium in general). If it's that specific a timeframe, can it even be considered 'unintentional'?

Edit: to clarify, I mean said dates were mentioned In-Universe, not just in the entry

Edited by PPPSSC on Apr 19th 2021 at 6:33:43 AM

No, it can't.

Should this be moved to Short-Term Projects? This seems like more of a cleanup at this point anyway.

(Also thanks to bwburke94 for removing the example I was going to bring up here)

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 9th 2021 at 11:13:22 AM

Eh. I feel like UPP needs TRS more than cleanup. I've said it before, but I'm not even sure how it's not YMMV, but it all feels very subjective to me, and make it trivia forces us to try and take an objective stance on something the writers didn't even intend to do.

I was wondering whether this trope needs TRS, given the misuse.

Maybe I'll start a wick check for it at the Wick Check Project.

EDIT: Wrong thread

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on May 9th 2021 at 1:38:22 PM