More context for the particular example would be needed. Having a retroactive Outdated Outfit doesn't count just by existing, but it would need to be depicted as the height of modern fashion. The Zoolander films have a lot of fun with the absurdity of the fashion industry, showing styles that NEVER make it to regular society, and as a result became much more difficult to apply to the era it was made. There are a number of things that pin point the original The Terminator to the 80's, but showing Sarah and her friend getting ready for clubbing and proclaim themselves "Better than mortal man deserves" definitely contributes to it.
Trivia.Daredevil 2015 S 1 E 1 Into The Ring
- Unintentional Period Piece: A minor one, but Karen is wearing a Brooklyn Bolts t-shirt when Matt and Foggy are talking to her at the office, and then when Matt takes her back to his place. The Bolts were a team in the short-lived Fall Experimental Football League that ran from 2014 to 2016.
Uh that is one of the worst I've seen. A work is apparently a UPP for having a t-shirt in two brief scenes.
Doctor Who S35 E4 "Before the Flood"
- Unintentional Period Piece: The Doctor's admonition to viewers to "google it" will only be effective so long as the term "google it" remains in vogue and Google remains in place as a search engine. Any future discontinuation - or renaming - will render the episode a period piece.
Impressive. Every possible misuses in a single entry. It's a single line of dialogue about something that has been launched 21 years ago and is still popular nowadays and it's Speculative Troping.
Edited by Silverblade2 on Apr 9th 2019 at 9:16:01 PM
This is why I feel that in order to qualify as this trope, the work should be dated to a specific decade. If the example dates the work to a period of 21 years (And it will probably be years before the phrase falls out of popularity) calling it an Unintentional Period Piece doesn't really say much. By that logic, anything that was written before cars were invented should count as examples, because it dates the work to a period before the automobile.
With how meme culture works now, things that date a work don't last a 'decade' they can last only a few months. Especially when whats dating the work is politics or other pop culture things.
Shows are so desperate to make themselves current that they can date themselves so quickly.
Then there are disasters and technological developments that basically dictate eras but IMO those are a completely different trope, especially when you use Comic-Book Time and other things.
Decades are arbitrary, any given decade will bleed into another as the trends of one era dissipate. The trope simply has a long problem with the fact it is such a general observation trope. Adding any rules to the description won't help with this kind of misuse, though I think a clean-up project could be useful. Basic rule of thumb is that any given example should be specific (what in the movie reflects its era) and descriptive (why it is tied to that era).
I did make an Instantly Outdated
trope proposal, if anyone wants to contribute.
Don't forget unintentional. A movie deliberately evoking imagery and themes from a particular period is a Period Piece, not this trope.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I guess my issue is that this trope should apply to a specific time period. Dating a work to "When Google was a thing" is just too vague.
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I don't know how effective creating a new trope would fix the problem. I can easily see it becoming a dumping ground for bad Unintentional Period Piece examples and it could have the same problems as before.
"In the future Google may not longer be a thing" is speculative, and simply a bad example. Instantly Dated is basically it's own trope separate from Unintentional Period Piece, I got the inspiration from this discussion it's not merely to help clean up another trope.
Absolutely. We cannot know now what memes people in the future will distinctly and particularly associate with this decade.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Policy is that ten years has to pass before we can even consider it an example, so you're four years early.
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.I'm not sure I would call that policy so much as a recommendation, one that even notes exceptions. The problems we seem to be cataloguing have little to do with examples being recent and more to do with vagueness ("they talk a lot about pop culture from x period"), obscurity ("those shoes are obviously x year Jordans") or just plain bad examples (speculating about the future fall of the term "google it").
Most of the examples listed in the 2010's section (admittedly not doing a wick check) are comparable to all other decades, the one about Broad City having a story arc working for the Hillary Clinton campaign is pretty much identical to the Murphy Brown Gulf War references.
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I'm inclined to agree. The majority of misuse I see for this page is assuming absurdly minute details obviously date a work; that's not a problem limited to recent years.
Although I suppose it might be worse because people are more likely to recognize recent passing fads, even if they're just referenced in a single line or whatever.
The ten year rule was put in place to prevent Speculative Troping. Too many people were adding examples of works that would reference modern trends and assuming it would be this trope eventually. I agree that the biggest problem with this trope is that too many of the examples focusing on minute details or one off references. The references should be blatant or impossible to ignore.
Looking over the earlier discussion, I would suggest also applying a rule that the dated elements must be an integral part of the work, and not something that could be removed leaving the work in essence intact. A background sign can be digitally edited, a line of dialogue can be redubbed, but the premise, the language, the creative choices in what to emphasise (and what is taken for granted) are all things that would have to be remade to update it.
And I agree that it should be possible to pinpoint it to a specific decade or less, or every historic work would count.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.I kind of agree.
This trope is a work that so heavily features current events, tech, or pop culture from it's day that it SCREAMS it's production era. Like the X-Files and all the "cutting edge tech" it shows the characters with as FBI agents that's old junk by modern standards.
Not things like minor background details that are more like Trivia
Wow, this almost slipped past my radar.
Agreed. If it's just hair or clothing, it just means that the movie was made in a particular era, not that it's a period piece.
As for the strict ten-year rule, it never actually received consensus and appears to have been unilaterally added by HighCrate. Some works are in fact instantly dated from the point they're initially released, i.e. A Thousand Words, where critics referred to this trope by name.
HighCrate created the No Recent Examples, Please! page after less than 24 hours of discussion in this thread
; a strict ten-year wait on Unintentional Period Piece was shot down by the thread.
The current rule is actually "ten years except in exceptional circumstances." I'll be changing the rule on the Administrivia page to that.
The problem with "ten years except in exceptional circumstances" is that it is exactly the same as "list any valid example", since anyone who tries to add this year's work will be calling it an "exceptional example".
Post from two years ago about UPP
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Edited by crazysamaritan on Apr 24th 2019 at 8:53:29 AM
Link to TRS threads in project mode here.The point is that UPP should never be speculative about what might be considered "period" at some point in the future.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Why are these "Especially Unusual"?
- Anime-Gataris: Despite going for a timeless feel in its anime references, the series is firmly placed in the late 2010s. Most of the parody shows mentioned go up to the Winter 2016 season. References to idol series, a genre that wouldn't get into full swing until 2011, are prominent; Nakano is a fan of idol anime, and the club's idea of an ending theme is a 3D Dancing Theme performed by the main girls. Kai Kai and Miko are walking references to the boom in chuuni anime and light novels, and a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress is mentioned as a "new series". Even the fact that it was a School Club Story was a cash-in on the popularity of both the genre and the Improbably Female Cast that populated them at the time.
- Osomatsu-san is filled to the brink with Shout Outs to anime released in the first half of the 2010s (2010-2015) such as Attack on Titan and Haikyuu!!. It also has a lot of focus on mid-2010s Japanese culture.
- The Bling Ring. Even discounting the fact that it's Based on a True Story, the film is very much a satire of the celebrity worship and youth culture of the late '00s and early '10s, complete with a cameo by Paris Hilton As Herself.
- Bullet to the Head: Jimmy's refusal to drink anything but Bulleit Bourbon, which is treated as an obscure brand, so he brings a bottle to bars and pays for a glass to drink it with. Shortly after the film's release, the brand's distribution greatly expanded, causing it to become quite common. Today, it seems a bit odd for Jimmy to be so obsessed with a mainstream brand and have such a hard time getting it.
- The Irish film Dive was filmed in 2017 and released in 2018, but became dated immediately after its first week. The reason? The plot deals with a champion swimmer who becomes pregnant. Abortion was illegal in Ireland since the signing of the 8th Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland, which gave the unborn fetus the same rights as a living human, thereby making abortion illegal, in September of 1983. That amendment was repealed exactly one week after the premiere of the film.
- Found Footage 3D was released in 2016, but due to its long production cycle, the film inadvertently dates itself to no later than 2014 in a few ways. The plot revolves around the making of the first 3D found footage film; in real life, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension took that crown in 2015. Scott Weinberg, the journalist interviewing the cast and crew, is also stated to come from FEARnet, a website and cable network which shut down in late 2014 after being acquired by Comcastnote and merged with the TV network Chiller. The opening crawl also explicitly establishes the Film Within a Film Spectre of Death 3D as taking place in 2014.
- God Bless America, an example of the '00s hanging over into the early '10s. Among the (literal) targets of this pop culture satire are a Pompous Political Pundit in the vein of Bill O'Reilly, a Spoiled Brat featured on a My Super Sweet Sixteen-type show, a militant fundamentalist church in the vein of the Westboro Baptists, and everybody on the set of a reality singing competition based on American Idol.
- The New Zealand-made film The Holy Roller
has sadly become this, thanks to the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.
- The 2015 Live-Action Adaptation of Jem and the Holograms, which updates the story of Jem to depict the protagonists' rise to fame as occurring chiefly through social media and YouTube. A common theme in many reviews was how "of the moment" the subject matter was in how it built itself entirely around its portrayal of New Media.
- L.A. Slasher is a horror-comedy parodying the celebrity culture of the late '00s and early '10s, particularly Reality TV stars that the titular slasher killer views as having no talent or worth to society. What makes it particularly notable is the fact that, while it was shot in 2012, it was only released in 2015, by which time most of the targets of its satire (such as Teen Mom, Paris Hilton, and a young Justin Bieber) had long since ceased to be relevant.
- The Nut Job also dated itself right out of the gate by using "Gangnam Style" (complete with an animated Psy in the credits!) nearly two years after the song's heyday (the movie came out in January 2014).
- Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a feature-length parody of Justin Bieber and early-mid 2010s pop culture in general. Many of its protagonist Connor's tribulations are exaggerated versions of real things that Bieber did during that time that helped make him a tabloid punchline. There are also jokes about smart devices, hoverboards, Macklemore's "Same Love", the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, and Apple's heavy-handed promotion of U2's album Songs of Innocence, while Connor's girlfriend Ashley Wednesday is the star of a film franchise adapted from a series of dystopian YA novels.
- Zoolander 2, much like the aforementioned A Thousand Words, was criticized as this for the previous decade when it was released in 2016. Its merciless mocking of the fashion world seen as not only mean-spirited, but fairly dated at a time when the "supermodel culture" was experiencing a huge comeback, thanks to the rise of social media (Instagram especially) as a major self-promotion platform for models.
- Kire tries so hard to be cool and hip it ultimately falls into this trope. The main character has a Darth Vader alarm clock (it's not unusual, but it does give him a distinctive "90s kid" vibe) and a superfluous amount of "Justin Bieber is totally lame!" comments
- The book Alice in tumblr-Land, a modern retelling of fairy tales, which relies on the existence of Tumblr, OKCupid, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. for most of its humour. It's painfully dated to the mid-2010s and as such will fail to be relevant within a couple of years.
- OMG Shakespeare is a series of books that attempts to modernize the works of William Shakespeare by making everything into text. The constant use of slang and emoji will likely quickly date them to being released circa 2015.
- The Origami Yoda series is full of early-mid 2010s pop-culture references and views. Examples include Ambiguously Gay Murky receiving homophobic bullying, the much-disliked FunTime program showing an educational parody of Gangnam Style (though to the book's credit, the characters do mention that the song came "a few years back"), and Professor FunTime's actor receiving a role in "the upcoming Star Wars movie" (meaning that the events in the book took place sometime before December 2015, when The Force Awakens came out).
- In season 2 of The Middle, Frankie obsesses over the "Royal Wedding" of William and Kate, firmly fixing the episode in 2011.
- While Broad City has a semi-gentrified aesthetic that could date it badly, there are a few moments that stand out as very 2010s:
- In a Season 1 episode, Lincoln tells a gay character "I'm not getting married until everyone can get married", dating it to before 2015.
- The montage in the first episode of Season 3 features Abby wearing a white and gold dress at the same time as Ilana wearing a blue and black dress, referencing the meme from 2015.
- A Season 3 episode shows Ilana temporarily working at Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign headquarters, instantly dating the episode to 2016.
- A couple of episodes in Season 4 immediately date to 2017: Ilana gets upset when she has to remove her impractical Obama themed nails ("It's like they're leaving office all over again!") and realizes in a later episode that she hadn't been able to have an orgasm since Trump was elected. And Trump's name is censored every time it's spoken aloud for the entire season.
- In Warehouse 13, practically everybody's cellphone is a Blackberry, and there's a noticeable shift from using the ones with tactile switch keypads to touchscreen phones between seasons 3 and 4, firmly rooting the series in the early 2010s when Blackberry began to abandon its flagship product. There are more intentional references to the time period, like the "Got Your Six" lapel pins, Pete and Claudia's fondness of internet memes, and of course newspaper dates, but the transition from cellphones to smartphones was something the writers couldn't have planned for.
- One of the questions on QI was "what has twenty legs, five heads, and can't reach its own nuts?" Jeremy Clarkson answers "Westlife", a reference outdated enough not to get the klaxon; Jimmy Carr's answer, One Direction, does. In time, both answers will be equally outdated.
- The Rise Against song "Make It Stop (September's Children)", which is about homophobic bullying and makes reference to a number of high-profile gay teen suicides.
- "#SELFIE" by The Chainsmokers is ingrained with early-mid 2010s culture, with lyrics about taking selfies with Instagram, "Summertime Sadness", and referring to another girl as "ratchet". Todd in the Shadows, when placing the song on his list of the worst songs of 2014
, used this as his justification, saying that, "There was nothing else as painfully 2014 in 2014".
- "Gun Fight" by Sick Puppies references the American presidents Bush and Obama, which pins the song firmly from the late 2000s to early 2010s.
- "Cost of Livin'" by Ronnie Dunn (2011) fell into this, as the hook mentions "Three dollars and some change at the pump / The cost of livin's high and goin' up", and even has an edit that says "four dollars". The song's premise of an older man pleading for a job is clearly a reflection of the zeitgeist of the Great Recession. In addition, the national US average for a gallon of gas fell into the $2.00-$2.50 range soon after.

In a sense, even if a UPP has more than enough references, does "With those hair and those clothes, [work] screams [decade]!" still not count and the syntax remain generalized?
Edited by alnair20aug93 on Sep 13th 2018 at 1:29:01 AM
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