Note: This OP was made using portions of the OP of the TRS thread, which was written by The Mayor of Simpleton.
Unintentional Period Piece is a ridiculously misused trope. The trope is supposed to be for when a work is full of things that make the work firmly dated to its era, such as fashion, technology, societal attitudes, etc.
Instead, it is used for anything even remotely dated in a work, along with merely dated settings and, in some cases, intentionally dated things. It is ridiculously misused. The trope is supposed to be for when a work is so ridiculously dated and full of culture at the time it was written, that it becomes a Period Piece despite not intending to be one. However, it instead gets used for anything that is dated in a work, as well as sometimes intentional Period Pieces. It was also moved to YMMV by TRS because of its subjective nature.
Cleanup work for the TRS thread
was deferred here, with the following work to do:
- Examples are only valid if a work is full of things that make the work firmly dated to its era, such as fashion, topical references, societal attitudes, etc. Example need to be moved thusly:
- Valid examples on Trivia/ subpages need to be moved to the corresponding YMMV/ subpages due to Unintentional Period Piece being reclassified as an Audience Reaction instead of Trivia.
- Examples that take place in Present Day without being particularly dated should be moved to the work's main page under Present Day.
- Examples that revolve entirely about the technology present in the work being dated should be moved within Trivia as an example of Technology Marches On.
- Works that take place in either an Alternate History or a completely fictional world do not count for either Unintentional Period Piece or Present Day and should be removed.
- Since this is YMMV, examples are only allowed on YMMV pages, per What Goes Where on the Wiki.
- Progress is being tracked using the Intentional Wick Cleaning Piece sandbox.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Feb 27th 2023 at 8:17:45 AM
I think Breaking Bad is decent, but a few entries within it stands out as really odd:
- At one point, Walt delays Hank from finding the laundry superlab by pretending to misunderstand his verbal directions. Many cars now come with GPS inside them, and if Walt's car didn't then his cell phone definitely would, which is a lot harder to intentionally misunderstand.
- The most blatant example: in the age of smartphones, Hank most likely would've never realized that Walt was Heisenberg - he would have sat on the toilet, pulled out his phone, and messed around with it until he was done, not look through the books Walt has in the bathroom.
- Characters are shown using the internet on desktop and laptop computers, when those were still the main way for home users to do so. Nowadays, it's more common to surf the web on smartphones and tablets away from work for those who aren't serious gamers.
Edited by Dramatic on Jun 18th 2024 at 3:44:06 AM
I agree, all of those examples are poor and assume that new technology will supplant anything people did before that. GPS cars were also common back in the late 2000s. Plus, Breaking Bad
is a period piece (set between 2008 and 2010).
A show like Breaking Bad is in a bit of a grey area regarding the "unintentional" part given that the show started in 2008, and even if production took longer than the in-universe timeline, 2013 still isn't so far away from 2010 that it represents a completely alien technological and cultural world. I lean towards the side of thinking that Breaking Bad wasn't trying to be overtly entrenched in its time period beyond just being set in 'the present day', so it is possible to single out things as representing that 2010 era. Just not when it's "Walt didn't search how to make meth on a smartphone"-tier observations.
Here's a quick pair, from Futurama S 3 E 12 The Route Of All Evil:
- The plot revolves entirely around Dwight and Cubert working as paperboys. As of The New '20s, a combination of child labour laws, broader concerns about child safety, and the decline of print media in the face of the Internet means that paperboys basically don't exist anymore.
- Unintentional Period Piece: Paperboys are a rather uncommon sight in contemporary times, when newspapers are usually delivered by people in cars and vans - or read online. It doesn't hurt the experience of the gameplay at all, but its premise can come off as rather dated nowadays.
Edited by Dramatic on Jun 18th 2024 at 7:06:43 AM
There was also a local state newspaper where I grew up which is still being delivered through similar means (except the people doing said paper route weren't necessarily teenagers - in my case, it was a little old lady who would do it as a way of keeping fit and earning some cash.). I've also seen teenagers doing a variant of this with junk mail (a quick google search confirms that this sort of thing is still going). So it may not be as common in some parts, but it's definitely still a thing in others.
Also, "when paperboys were a thing" is too big of a timeframe. I thought there was a rule that UP Ps had to be dated to a specific time period?
Here's an example I added to "Possibly Instantly Dated":
- The song "Fake Fine"
by Robert Grace dates itself to the first half of the COVID-19 Pandemic by including the line "I'm feeling great like Carole Baskin / Hope you know it's all an act / 'Cause it's so much easier to lie", referencing the then-current popularity of Tiger King and the conspiracy theory regarding the disappearance of Baskin's husband that gained steam around this time. The chorus contains the words "it's a pandemic, it's a fucking disease", which would sound like a simple metaphor rather than an explicit comparison to the pandemic had the song been released earlier. Similarly, there's also the line "'Cause when you're sober, you just wanna stay at home", which can also be intepreted as referring to the pandemic.
Do you guys think I should cut or rewrite this, or leave it as it is? Personally looking back, I feel I shoehorned in the pandemic interpretation of the "stay at home" line.
idk what to put hereRemember that the requirement is ten years after release or exceptional circumstances. Some stuff in that last section (most obviously the Some Jerk with a Camera example, because it got dated on the very day of release) would qualify as exceptional.
That section also has yet another QEII-related example, which I'm about to cut. A specific person being referenced, then dying within the ten years, obviously isn't exceptional.
2025: the year it all ends?~DarkSteel02 went and readded data removed
on the Dumbo example, saying that this was fine the way it is. It appears to have been reduced here
. Is there record in this thread of this being cleaned up? It's all data that really doesn't fit the trope or is word cruft.
I want to bring this example from The Simpsons.
This seems like the typical "since this is possible now, OBVIOUSLY it wouldn't be done today" cut, right?
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100% a removal.
From YMMV.The Baby Sitters Club:
- Setting aside the technological advancements, the series has instances of this.
- The books were written from the late 1980s to 2000, so many pop culture references, fashion trends, etc. would confuse modern readers. One such example is Claudia's new friend Ashley, who is treated as "totally weird" for wearing long dresses and flared jeans; both of these articles of clothing started to come back into style in the late 90s and early 2000s and, while not fully mainstream, remain in style.
- The reason Claudia is vice president is largely because she has her own landline in her room from which the girls take calls. Nowadays every teenage girl would have her own cell phone, with fewer and fewer households having more than one landline, if one and all. Clients could contact members at any time of the day from any of their phones.
- In Kristy's Big Day, it's mentioned that Kristy's brother Sam has taken a job at the local A&P (a supermarket chain). The last A&P store closed its doors in 2015.
- In Boy-Crazy Stacey, the Pike family (plus Stacey and Mary Anne) travel to Sea City, New Jersey for a two-week vacation, and on both the way there and the way home they stop roughly halfway for lunch at a Howard Johnson's. The last Howard Johnson's restaurant in the United States closed in 2022.
The last two are the ones I'd like to remove and fix the second one. Stores closing couldn't be anticipated, and the land line one doesn't fully work as not every 13 year old has a cell phone. The 2020 series addresses this as them wanting a reliable line they all can be reached at once a week, and the land line is part of the discounted internet package for Claudia's older sister so they get a retro phone and use that to be called on.
The first point is semi-accurate.
I focus on obscure 1990s or graphic Middle Grade Literature novels and dolls. (She or zie, not they.)I looked briefly at UnintentionalPeriodPlace.Arthur (great, the page even gets the trope name wrong!) and there are a bunch of things that I think should be cut.
- "D.W. Goes to Washington" has D.W. meeting the President of the United States, who is modeled after Bill Clinton, who was president when the episode was produced but is obviously not any longer.
- In "Poor Muffy" from 1996, Muffy is shocked and horrified that Francine doesn't own a VCR. It was a status symbol back then to show Muffy's spoiled nature, but watching it now seems laughable, as VCRs were phased out in the 2000s.
- "The Squirrels" has Arthur renting videos from a video rental store, which is a business that had gone extinct by the time the show ended in 2022 thanks to the rise of streaming services.
- "Arthur's TV-Free Week" aired during a time where the most technology kids had, aside from TV itself, were video games, and probably computers. With technology such as smartphones and tablets, not to mention the Internet, becoming near-ubiquitous, kids struggling to merely not use a television set seems pretty quaint, as they could easily distract themselves from a TV with these things. Each of these also allow a person to watch anything they want at a whim. These days, the concern is that kids (and society) are often too addicted to technology in general, so a more modern take on this episode would likely be something along the lines of "Arthur's Screen-Free Week".
- "The Contest" is a pretty blatant example as of the four TV shows spoofed in the episode, such as Dexter's Laboratory and Beavis and Butt-Head, only South Park, which itself is a Long Runner, would still be airing by the time Arthur ended in 2022.
- Arthur - It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, guest starring the Backstreet Boys. One of the top boy bands in the late 90's and 2000's (though unlike others from their time they have occasionally reunited and released new material in later decades); it's little wonder that it hasn't been re-aired since the early 2000s (except for the Arthur marathon in 2022).
- In "Play It Again, DW", DW loses her Crazy Bus CD and is upset about not being able to listen to the song as a result. These days, DW could likely find the song on the Internet for free, as sites like YouTube and Spotify allow people to listen to specific songs this way.
Most of the ones I listed here feel like stretches.
I restored the "possibly instantly dated" section that was unilaterally removed. (My opinion on it is known, but it's part of UPP as it is right now.)
Discussions of whether these examples belong in UPP can go to the Trope Talk thread.
Edited by RallyBot2 on Jun 21st 2024 at 12:19:52 PM

From YMMV.On Her Majestys Secret Service:
This is a stretch, isn't it?