Unintentional Period Piece cleanup

I feel like that one's a good demonstration of how one of the other reasons this page has issues is the unintentional part. Like, I think Iron Man was pretty clearly meant to be set in the present of its release, not a nebulous Comic-Book Time "The Present".

It's hard to tell the difference sometimes, especially in comic book adaptations!

From YMMV.Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Stardust Crusaders:

• Unintentional Period Piece: The series takes place in the then-current year of 1989, the same year of the manga’s release. As such it features your typical late 80s technology and fashion. Notably, there's also a scene early on where Avdol needs to identify a fly's species, and uses the Kujo family's library to find an encyclopedia to look it up. These days a quick Google search would get him the information he wants.

This basically reads like "characters don't use the internet in a story written and set before the internet was widespread."

As mentioned above, posts that are solely about technology should go under Technology Marches On.

As written, you could apply that example to anything.

"Characters in this series go to a library and look at books, but if it took place now, they'd just use their smartphones."

I want to see if these on Die Hard with a Vengeance can be removed:

• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The riddle referencing America having 42 presidents inevitably gets more and more outdated every four to eight years.

• The film is firmly dated to an era when cellphones weren't in mass circulation, as much of the plot could have been avoided had any of the main characters possessed one. Instead, they are forced to rush from phone booth to phone booth in order to prevent several bombs from going off. As of 2022, all phone booths in New York City have been removed, except for certain locations like prisons.

Edited by Dramatic on Jun 23rd 2023 at 8:28:01 AM

Yeah looks like a safe cut. The one about pay phones is just Technology Marches On, and the first one is the opposite of unintentional.

It'd be like saying "the first explosion in the film takes place at a Bonwit Teller store, and that company later went out of business."

It's certainly accurate, but its hardly enough to yank the average audience out of the film by its shocking trappings of the past.

I've deleted the entry. If it helps people track down odd UPP examples, this is just a small list of what I think are the most common pitfalls the trope enters:

• Not Unintentional - The media is a deliberate period piece, or is already explicitly set in the time period that it represents
• Easily Predictable - The example deals with something that will predictably become dated (for example, an elected politician will leave office eventually, so "X is mentioned to be the President" is not a valid example)
• Too Broad - The example deals with something that spans a range of time too wide to be considered period-specific
• Too Minor - The dated element is not noteworthy enough to pin the work as a whole as representative of its era
• Not Obsolete - The supposedly dated element is still plausible today (people still go to libraries, companies still make brand new non-smartphones)
• Technology Marches On - Examples that deal with technology that is now outdated yet is treated as normal within the context of the work falls under this trope instead

• Unintentional Period Piece: All Bond films are a product of their time, but this one stands out as being particularly dated to 1995, featuring a mid-1990s plot laden with computers, Hollywood Hacking, and the early Internet. Plus, there are a lot of post-Cold War themes unique to the time period.

I think this fails both the "Not Unintentional" and "Easily Predictable" tests; the film is explicitly set in 1995, and the post-Cold War geopolicial status quo is a major theme of the film. 'The years directly following the Soviet Union's collapse' isn't an infinite span of time, so any film about that period obviously isn't aiming to be completely timeless.

Edited by Dramatic on Jun 23rd 2023 at 11:05:21 AM

I'll run down those criteria you mentioned.

• Not Unintentional: This one's fairly straightforward, though care should be taken to distinguish "explicitly set in the then-current year" and "intended to be a timeless 'now' but has to include a year somewhere and naturally uses the then-current year."

• Easily Predictable: Every reference will become dated eventually; we care about whether the creators know it will become dated in the near future.

• Too Broad: Again, fairly obvious. If it can't tie the work to a specific time period, it doesn't count. One of the more common misuses of UPP for a while was "the USSR exists" in any Present Day work from The '80s. That detail ties the work to a period of about seventy years.

• Too Minor: A throwaway pop culture reference does not a UPP make. If it could be replaced by a contemporary reference with no impact to the work, it's probably not enough for a good example.

• Not Obsolete: "Obsolete" is probably the wrong word, but just because something is less common than it used to be doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore.

• Technology Marches On: It's another, more specific trope^note Okay, fine, one's trivia and the other's YMMV. You still obviously get the point.. Use that one instead. (Also applies to Failed Future Forecast, especially when dealing with the USSR/Cold War.)

I'll add three more criteria.

• Out Of Universe: Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

• Clothing/Fashion: There are far too many examples relying on "the characters wear then-current clothing" when that was never the intent of the trope. Besides, there's a trope for that already.

• Political Stuff: Specifically leaders (which change all the time, especially if it's an elected position,) borders (history called, it wants its trope back,) and flags (almost certainly falls under the "too minor" category as well.)

Edited by RallyBot2 on Aug 10th 2023 at 7:55:46 AM

That's a good reference to have! Thank you.

Just taking a stab at the trope's related page, here's an example on Cloverfield I think is invalid.

• Unintentional Period Piece: The film looks modern enough but the fact that it's being filmed on a camcorder that still uses tape places it to the late 2000s before most home cameras would use SD cards instead. The characters use the 2000s flip phones, and only use them for calling, with no mention of the internet at all; they have to crowd around a TV to get information on the news about what's happening, and use a subway map to get to Beth's house. Superficially, there are also several swooping fringe haircuts on the boys at Rob's party, instantly placing the setting to the late 2000s.

Most of this is Technology Marches On with a bit of Not Obsolete thrown in (TV news and subway maps still exist).

YMMV.Oliver And Company

• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Far more than most of Disney's animated films (which are either timeless or set in the far past). This film is undeniably set in The '80s, and obviously made in the '80s. The clothing, hairstyles, and general environment drive home the era the film is from. As mentioned on the main page, this could be a reason why Disney didn't release it on video until the late '90s. Also, since municipal animal control cracked down on them in the '90s, street dogs are much rarer in New York now than they were when this film was released in 1988. Cats, however, are still everywhere.
  • The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center are shown prominently in the intro and a scene following Fagin's bedtime story, dating this film as pre-2001.

The first example might be legit but the second one is basically "The Twin Towers appear in a film released prior 2001".

And the first example sounds pretty close to Present Day?

• 2013's Man of Steel has a brief scene where a vehicle crashes through a Sears location. Sears, already struggling at this time, began the 2010s with over a thousand locations but dropped to around 600 by 2017 before plummeting to just 17 by January 2023.

Nitpicking about a detail in a single scene. I'd vote cut.

That's an almost scarily exact match for the example that convinced me this page needs to die - something about a shoe store that closed in 2017 being visible in the background of one scene.

• Escape Room (2019) was produced at the height of the late-2010s escape room fad— a fad that would come to an abrupt end in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic making many people avoid most forms of indoor gathering. Escape rooms, which involve multiple participants solving a puzzle to find their way out of a locked room, were hit hard by this, and while they still exist they are nowhere near as popular in the years immediately before the pandemic.

I find this entry dubious as the entry itself acknowledges, escape rooms still exist today.

Yeah, that's an easy cut.

On Doctor Who S29 E10 "Blink":

• Unintentional Period Piece: This came out during the last hurrah of video rental stores. Of course, given that this is a show about time travel that always treats the era the episode is filmed in as the "present", it can afford to be this.

This example argues with itself and more interestingly, it brings up whether or not Doctor Who should even be eligible for UPP.

Given that the plot wouldn't work if it was set any later (to the point where it was set in its broadcast year instead of the usual Next Sunday A.D.), it's a valid example.

This isn't Technology Marches On because it's the whole plot which is affected, not just the technology in use.

The plot takes place over different time periods, and has nothing to do with video rentals. The episode could have taken place anytime DV Ds were a thing, not to mention that designing and writing an episode that way is the exact opposite of what "Unintentional" means.

It's a poorly written example, that also happens to be wrong. Cut.

While I'm at it, I decided to review the 1950s section.

• The Honeymooners, though the show was always slightly more realistic than other sitcoms around at the time.Zero Context Example
• Roger Ebert wrote that starting in the 1950s, television made it possible for pop-cultural fads to spread like wildfire and then burn out just as quickly as other, "cooler" fads replaced them. He could swear to this since he was an adolescent during that decade and watched quite a lot of TV, and he could date his childhood pop-culture phenomena — Davy Crockett, The Mickey Mouse Club, Zorro — not just to the mid-1950s, but to the exact year and sometimes to the exact month. Examples Are Not General
• The original version of "Santa Baby" as sung by Eartha Kitt refers to a "[19]'54 convertible", changed in some covers to "I want a new..." or even "outer space convertible." In the 1960s or 1970s, it'd be closer to this trope, but 1954 isn't a particularly sought-after year for any mainstream American car since styling tended to be at an awkward stage between the flowing Art Deco of the first postwar generation and the long, low finniness of the late '50s, and wheezy old flathead engines and flaky first-generation automatic transmissions proliferated. Nitpicking about a single line of the song
• In the Clovers' 1959 song "Love Potion Number Nine" the lyrics go: "I told her that I was a flop with chicks / I've been this way since 1956". Wow, that guy's been a flop with the girls for a looooong time... Nitpicking about a single line of the song. The mention of the date is also likely not unintentional
• The R&B song "Kansas City" mentions the 12th Street and Vine intersection which no longer exists in that city due to redevelopment. In its place is a park with a commemorative plaque and parking spaces painted like piano keys. Again, nitpicking about one line

Edited by Silverblade2 on Aug 22nd 2023 at 11:52:26 AM

I wanted to get some feedback on these entries on YMMV.The Star Wars Holiday Special:

• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Let's just say this part of the Star Wars saga hasn't aged nearly as well as the original trilogy. Basically, if you ever doubted that Star Wars began in The '70s... this should prove it. Conclusively.
  • The versions which retain the original commercials and news segments add to it. The toy commercials have to be the nadir of this - the "Trailtracker" and "Tobor" were probably innovative when they debuted, but to children of today they might as well be old Marx tin toys. Not that the other commercials (Union-made underwear! Ma Bell! Fake-wood-paneled Mercury station wagons!) are any less dated.
  • The special also aired the same night William Kampiles was sentenced for espionage, and Leonid Brezhnev admitted the Soviet Union had tested a Neutron Bomb (in violation of a treaty) but never put it into production. The news report about these events is included with other commercials on some versions of the special.

The first bullet is a ZCE, not giving any specifics. The other two bullets are about things that aren't actually part of the special. Should I just cut the latter two and hide the first bullet?

Cut the entire thing. The ads entirely separate works, and Star Wars is set in a whole other galaxy.

Cut it!

Specifically it's set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

From King of the Hill

• Unintentional Period Piece: "Lost in MySpace" from 2008 focuses on MySpace as the primary social media platform, without any mention of other platforms, when MySpace was still at its height but just approaching the precipice of being overtaken by Facebook in the next couple of months.

This one has bugged me for a while now. Like the Iron Man entry, it's just "MySpace exists". Not sure if it's a valid example.

At least it's critical to the plot this time...

The Simpsons S14 E6 "The Great Louse Detective":

• Among the Long List of people that are enemies of Homer is one of the Dixie Chicks. This sets the episode as made before 2020, when the group renamed itself as just "The Chicks".

Offhand reference to a now renamed band