Anachronism Stew

"Tyrannosaurs in F-14s!"

Kung Fury: What year is this?
Barbarianna: It's The Viking Age.

Kung Fury: That explains the laser Raptors.

— Kung Fury

Stories often add elements to two or more time periods, be it through the appearance in a story set in Charlemagne's empire showing a character in Renaissance dress, Imperial Roman troops having machine guns, or cavemen fighting Dinosaurs to survive. This is not only a modern trope. Medieval artists, for example, routinely painted Biblical figures in contemporary fashions, and the Greek myth of Theseus features similar confusion. Some critics think the very first writer to actually try to reconstruct past times as different from the current era was Sir Walter Scott.

The more academically approved name for this sort of thing is uchronia, a variation on Utopia, which means "not-place", "Uchronia" means "not-time", suggesting it takes place in no real time.

This can also be done deliberately. A work might combine large numbers of anachronisms to create a timeless or surreal setting, where the exact era of the story (or the era the fictional world is supposed to be imitating) is both ambiguous and irrelevant, allowing the work's creators to freely introduce further anachronisms whenever doing so would make for a good plot or a good joke.

Sometimes, this can become so culturally embedded that it actually becomes difficult to tell a story accurately without confusing the audience. This is particularly true with peoples and settings that had already been stewing for centuries, such as Vikings or the Arthurian legend.

This is a Super-Trope to a number of more-particular variations:

• Alternate History: Speculative fiction where the entire central idea is an anachronistic departure from our main timeline.
• Ambiguous Time Period: The work is set in no particular time period, so everything clashes intentionally.
• Anachronistic Animal: The work features animals that weren't known to humans in its time setting.
• Anachronistic Orphanage: A traditional orphanage in a first-world setting.
• Anachronistic Soundtrack: Modern day music in a Period Piece, or vice versa.
• Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Important characters wear fashions way out of date in the setting.
• Cosmetically-Advanced Prequel: A chronologically earlier installment features more advanced technology because it was made later.
• Egypt Is Still Ancient: Egypt is the same in modern times as it was thousands of years ago.
• Fantasy Counterpart Appliance: For putting certain anachronisms in fictional settings that primarily resemble certain time periods, but aren't meant to fully represent said time period accurately.
• Font Anachronism: When creators use fonts in their works that weren't even invented yet.
• Future Imperfect: When fictional historians from the future can't get their history straight.
• The Genie Knows Jack Nicholson: Anachronistic cultural references from a supernatural character.
• Hollywood Prehistory: This trope on the grandest scale.
• Low Culture, High Tech: Low tech culture using far advanced technologies it doesn't understand.
• Period Piece, Modern Language: When the modern language is completely at odds with the posh-seeming historical fiction production.
• Purely Aesthetic Era: When the blatant anachronisms are the joke. (There are other contexts Purely Aesthetic Era shows up in, but the most common is comedies using Schizo Tech (or other blatant anachronisms) for a laugh.)
• Present-Day Past: Works set in the recent past that reference contemporary pop culture.
• Politically Correct History: Portraying society in the past as more tolerant than they actually were.
• Schizo Tech: The mix of technologies purposefully makes very little sense.
• Steam Never Dies: The predominant use of steam power in a setting where it would otherwise be considered obsolete.
• Weird Historical War: When real historical wars' depiction in stories use advanced technology that comes much later than it should.

Compare Artistic License – History, where the historical inaccuracy is the result of fictionalization, not a combination of actual historical details from different eras.

Please note that this is not a place to pothole any anachronism you find in a work. Those examples belong on the Trivia subpage of that work. This Trope is about the setting/environment of the work, and as such, requires multiple anachronisms affecting how the viewer of the work sees the setting.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works
• Films
  • Films Using Rule of Funny
  • Films With No Good Excuse
    • Indiana Jones
    • The Patriot (2000)
    • Pirates of the Caribbean
    • Sherlock Holmes
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Theatre
• Video Games
• Western Animation
  • Archer
  • Batman: The Animated Series

Other examples:

Advertising

• The Great Crunchie Train Robbery: What starts off a Train Job in the Wild West,ends up involving Arab bandits, Nazi soldiers, WWII fighter planes and artillery,and a 1970s New Zealand police officer.

Art

• The "Marine" scene from The Apotheosis of Washington has the Roman goddess Venus emerging from the ocean as she did in the time of ancient Greece so she can complete her godly duties... to wire transatlantic telegram cables. Behind her and Neptune's mighty horsemen, you can see a smoke-stacked industrial factory.
• Raphael Rooms: "The School of Athens" depicts an adult Aristotle in the same building as Socrates, who was executed when Aristotle was 15. Then there's The Cameo from Raphael himself and the Muslim philosopher Averroes, none of whom had access to enough Time Travel to make it to the school on time.
• Much religious art from The Renaissance on. This had a solid Real World justification, though. Religious paintings, especially on the walls of churches were designed for the masses, and the goal was not to depict a scene exactly as it was, but to tell the story for everyone to understand. Through the use of contemporary clothing, armor, and styles, even the common people could instantly recognize "that's a soldier, that's a fisherman, that's a shepherd, that's a tax collector, that's a nobleman, that's a commoner" etc. instead of "WTF are those people in those silly clothes?"
  • This got completely out of hand by the 18th and 19th centuries, when both Pontius Pilate and Herod were depicted in extravagant Persian-type robes.
  • Historians can and do judge when forks reached different parts of Europe by looking for them in paintings of the Last Supper. Judging military equipment is a little trickier, as you can never quite predict when someone's depicting the cutting edge and when he's depicting a suitably "old-fashioned" type of armor, but that tends to be well-attested elsewhere.
• This astronaut on a cathedral built in 1102 is another example.
• An entire style of painting, the classical landscape, was dedicated to this. It incorporated classical, medieval, and contemporary architecture while showing biblical or historical characters.

Asian Animation

• The Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf series is supposed to take place in 3513, but the season Around the World in 20 Days has the goats visit the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

Audio Plays

• The Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama Invaders from Mars actually has some deliberate anachronisms, such as a character saying there was 49 states in 1938, when there was only 48, and someone repeatedly referencing the CIA when it wouldn't be founded until nine years later. This was due to the influence of "anti-time". Other mistakes, however, were less deliberate, like Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds broadcast being on October 31 instead of October 30.

Blogs

• Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog has this baked into its very concept, and that's not even getting into all the pop culture references...
• Renegade Rhetoric, a Character Blog for Cy-Kill from Challenge of the GoBots where the Renegade leader used many of his posts to describe the events of episodes from a non-existent second season to the cartoon, had a flagrant case of this in the answer given to a question asked about the fictional episode "Darkest Before the Dawn" in regards to what costumes Cy-Kill and his Renegades wore when they infiltrated the sci-fi convention, as most of them are described as dressing as fictional characters who couldn't possibly have existed during the mid-1980's (where the fictional second season of Challenge of the GoBots is said to have aired). Examples include Crasher being stated to have dressed as Tomb Raider protagonist Lara Croft (when the first Tomb Raider game wasn't released until 1996), Cop-Tur described as wearing a costume of Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII (a video game that didn't exist until 1997, with the first game of the series it came from not coming out until 1987) and Decker Decker said to have gone as Deadpool (a Marvel Comics character who didn't debut until 1991).

Comic Books

• Comic books from the major publishers DC and Marvel are prone to this in general due to Comic-Book Time and the desire to keep memorable stories as canon. For example, the New 52 has established that the Batman story The Killing Joke is still a part of Barbara Gordon's history happening sometime in the past five years but the original story was written in the late 1980s. Batman: The Animated Series even invoked this as an intentional design decision, featuring Art Deco architecture alongside 1950s-looking television alongside almost science-fiction-level technology such as virtual reality and bionic eyes.
• The eponymous character of Léonard le Génie is an inventor living in the 14th century. However, he has electricity, modern tools and a Cool Car available, and his inventions include computers and robots, among others. Somewhat justified by him being a genius inventor, but still... Lampshaded at least once; Léonard invents a photo camera and, on having put the film into an envelope, realizes there's nowhere to mail it to. "Do I have to invent everything myself?"
• Hellblazer occasionally falls into this, the most egregious example being issue #186's Anvilicious portrayal of the Black War as a one-sided Nazi-style genocide, completed with a barbed-wire-fenced extermination camp in 1833 (30 years before the actual invention of barbed wire).
• Asterix is a mixture of this and Purely Aesthetic Era. The albums set abroad in particular include lots of elements for which the countries in question are famous now: bullfighting and flamenco dancing in Hispania, anonymous bank vaults and fondue in Helvetia, rugby and afternoon tea in Britannia, etc. Likewise, the regional specialties from different parts of Gaul in Asterix and the Banquet are all based on modern French cuisine. On the other hand, a lot of the stuff is actually well researched and Uderzo, for instance, later was quite embarrassed about some unintentional anachronisms, such as the appearances of a fiddle and a wheelbarrow in two early stories.
• The Sandman (1989):
  • Hob Gadling has been alive since the 13th century and now will not die unless he chooses to. In the 20th century, his girlfriend dresses up to visit a Ren Faire. He has several criticisms about the realism of the place (mostly that nothing is covered in shit the way it should be), and when he sees her in wench costume, she attempts to talk Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to him. His response: "Thou lookst passing fair, milady. Save thou manglest the Queen's good English and thy tits are hanging out."
  • Delirium is this on legs. She turns up in ancient Greece wearing a fishnet vest and miniskirt.
• The newspaper comic strip B.C. had lots of these. Despite supposedly taking place, um, in the years B.C. (specifically, in prehistoric times), there were often references to modern times, especially as the strip went on; at least one strip had a character refer to the United States. It turns out that the series actually takes place After the End, with mankind reduced to the same level of technology as was had in prehistoric times.
  • Plus, especially in later years when Johnny Hart became more religious, they celebrated Christmas and made other Christian references. Which is kind of the definition of anachronistic in a strip named B.C.^note Though one of the major characters is named BC, and the strip could be named after him rather than the other way around. Later strips sometimes feature an Italian-esque character who lives across the sea named Anno Domini.
  • "The Wizard of Id" by the same creators is another case of this. It supposedly takes place in medieval times, but it has plenty of modern-day references.
• Deliberately used in Alias to lampshade the Marvel's floating timeline. For example, a flashback to Peter Parker's teen years uses fashion and slang straight out of a 1960s Silver Age comic, despite the fact that it was actually set in the late 1980s.
• Lampshaded again in All-New X-Men, another Brian Michael Bendis work. The original X-Men likely started off in the early 1990s or late 1980s thanks to Comic-Book Time, but still dress and act as though they came straight from the 1960s, when the original X-Men comics were published.
• Scion took place on a world which combined medieval European fantasy trappings (kingdoms, castles, dragons, etc.) with sci-fi elements (holograms, bioengineering, computers, etc.).
• One of the stories in Captain Marvel Adventures #95 (1949), History Goes Wild, has an invisible version of Earth in space with history different to Earth, long ago the twin worlds branched apart in space. The North Pole has just been discovered, people are using rocket ships to return from holiday in Antarctica, people with different eras' clothing style are together, and cats and dogs are extinct. Also, President George Washington is on holiday in Antarctica and Julius Caesar is attacking America. Captain Marvel shoves the world away to another star system.
• Opal City from Starman (DC Comics) was deliberately designed to have a retro Golden Age aesthetic, despite taking place in the 1990s. The series' protagonist, Jack Knight, runs an antique shop and is quite fond of using dated slang and clothing.
• Iznogoud:
  • Space rockets in the 9th century?
  • The story "Calculated Risk" features a magical computer invented by a character named I-Bee'Em.
    Iznogoud: If there's a pun there somewhere, I don't get it.
• DC Comics' Golden Age Funny Animal character Nero Fox was described as the "Jive-Jumping Emperor of Ancient Rome". As such, his two shticks were being emperor of the Roman Empire and being obsessed with playing (poorly) his "gobble pipe" (saxophone). His appearance in a Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! story also showed him using anachronistic 1940s-era music slang, to a time-travelling Capt. Carrot and Pig Iron's bewilderment.
• An odd case of In-Universe Anachronism Stew is Marvel Zombies, where the original stories took place in a somewhat bizarre Broad Strokes version of the standard one. Among other things, the majority of the Avengers are still wearing their 70s getups, Magneto has his Acolytes, which implies the 90s, and characters from 2000s teams like Young Avengers or Runaways pop up.
• Mortadelo y Filemón: Whenever historical events are portrayed, expect some out-of-place item, usually a contemporary one like a cardboard-made TV in old Rome. Other characters will invariably call it a fleeting style which will be out-of-fashion soon.
• Wizards of Mickey is set in a standard medieval fantasy setting, but the communicating stone is called the Amulet Cellphone (an "amulettophone" in the original version), even if regular cellphones do not exist, there are multiple references to things such as magical credit cards, and Fethry Duck builds a disco palace in the fourth arc. In the third arc, Fafnir starts dressing and behaving like Fonzie, of all things. Various robots are also seen throughout the series.
• In a Superman storyline in which the villain Dominus was trapping Superman in four contradictory realities (based on The Golden Age of Comic Books, The Silver Age of Comic Books, The Bronze Age of Comic Books, and the old "Superman of the 30th century" back-up strips), there were frequent suggestions that things weren't quite right. The most obvious was the Silver Age, which not only had Modern Age characters like Maggie Sawyer and Professor Hamilton but had things like Lois telling Jimmy to download his digital photos, while talking to Perry on her "cellphone" (a 1960s phone receiver with an ariel sticking out of it).

Comic Strips

• In Scary Gary, it's not clear how technology progressed over the years, but Gary has home video recordings of himself as a five year old kid in 14th century Romania. There weren't any iPhones at that time though.
  Beatrice: What did you have?
  Gary: The Plague.

Eastern European Animation

• Krisztofóró: Though set in the magical Middle Ages, random technological conveniences do appear. Krisztofóró takes advantage of this in the very first episode, where he defeats a steam horse by making it fall in love with a locomotive, causing the horse to try and find the machine that hasn't been invented yet.

Music

• Happy Days: Most of the time, the series was true to its roots and played 1950s music in the background. Enter Suzi Quattro (Leather Tuscaredo), who – when she performed – always performed in her late 1970s style. This included her ballad "Find Strength in Your Friends," which she sang using a very 1978 music bed in the episode "Richie Almost Dies" (under which clips of Richie played), an episode that was set in 1959.
• P.D.Q. Bach ignores the fact that what we think of today as "classical" music actually happened over several centuries and is divided into distinct stylistic periods. Peter Schickele is quite aware of this, but ignores it in favor of parodying as many different things as possible, and lampshades the eclecticism of PDQ's style many times. Then there are the anachronisms which are more obvious to the layperson, such as "Iphigenia in Brooklyn" or the "Bluegrass Cantata" or "Classical Rap" (though Schickele claimed to have altered the original lyrics of that one).
• The Brazilian song "Samba do Crioulo Doido", or "the crazy negro's samba", composed by Stanislaw Ponte Preta for a play's soundtrack. It is about a composer that had to learn Brazilian history because law dictated all carnival music had to be based on it (Truth in Television). When required to write one about current politics, he goes insane and writes a samba whose lyrics mix several historical figures from different periods in a completely nonsensical tale. The title of the song is still a slang for an absurd situation or a piece of fantastic, badly reasoned writing.
• The video for ''Glukoza's Schweine'' is all over the place. The Pig Army (clearly a Nazi parody) is armed with G43's, MP40's, MG34s, Zeppelins, Triplanes, Sd.kfz 250's, and Renault FT's. Meanwhile the Rebel Army Leaders use a G36, a Kalashnikov, an RPG-7, 2 MPL's, a Vickers MG, giant War Elephants, and Pterodactyls. The Rebel Army itself is comprised mainly of Samurai with some Ninjas using swords and pistols respectively.
• The Italian progressive rock group Jacula has one weird example - in the mid 1980's they re-released their debut album In Cauda Semper Stat Venenum, supposedly originally released in 1969. The audio production however is very consistent with that of mid 80's Doom metal, and the album also includes the use of samplers (which did exist in the 60's, but their use certainly was not widespread), most notoriously a loop of flowing water that was also used in former band member Doris Norton's 1984 album "Personal Computer".
• Not even Satan is immune to this trope. The Rolling Stones' Sympathy For The Devil from Beggars Banquet includes the Badass Boast "I laid traps for troubadoures/Who get killed before they reach Bombay" presumably in a TARDIS.
• The novelty song Grandad (a 1970/1 UK hit for Clive Dunn) has the titular grandad reminiscing about his memories of growing up in the old days. Judging by the mishmash of references, his childhood lasted from about the 1840s to the 1940s.
• 'Hail Caesar' by AC/DC- The lyrics clearly refer to the assassination of Julius Caesar, but apparently the killing started in the Colosseum despite the fact that the Colosseum wasn't built until more than 100 years later.
• The video for Stand And Deliver by Adam Ant mostly has a 17th or 18th century look, but with several unexplained modern elements. The song itself is also an anachronism stew, referencing highwaymen but also modern things like records and old age pensions.
• In Paint's song, After Ever After, a heavy amount of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome in the Disney films, which for the most part take place centuries before said surprisingly realistic outcome happened. Examples include Ariel's kingdom being affected by the BP Oil Spill, Elsa taking action over the global warming crisis, or even Aladdin got nabbed by the CIA during the War on Terror. The only cases where the anachronism is justified or averted is during Tiana's segment, where she suffers the consequences of Hurricane Katrina (The Princess and the Frog took place in the 1930's, so it wouldn't be any stretch of the imagination for Tiana to go through that in her old age) and Pocahontas, where the Fridge Horror of colonialism is fully realized.
• David Byrne and Fatboy Slim's 2010 album Here Lies Love is a rock opera about Imelda Marcos, first lady of the Philippines. It ends, with her political career, in 1986. The song "American Troglodyte" describes the Americanization of the Philippines after it gained independence from the USA, but it has some blatant references to culture circa 2010: "Americans are surfing the internet. / Americans are listening to 50 Cent."
• In Five Iron Frenzy's video for "Zen and the Art of Xenophobia", the band members stage a gleefully absurd play. It involves Abraham Lincoln (who has Wolverine's claws for some reason), the native Americans and first white colonizers of America, and modern-day Arabs all brushing shoulders. At the end, Jesus shows up and kills them all with a semi-auto rifle.
• The novelty song "Walk the Dinosaur" by Was (Not Was), takes place "40 million years ago" (or 25 million years after the Cretaceous) and describes the singer not only interacting with dinosaurs, but meeting a cave-painting woman, watching Miami Vice, and something about Elvis landing in a rocket ship. Arguably, the lyrics cross the threshold from anachronistic to surreal.
• Johann Sebastian Bach is portrayed in the presence of a Moog synthesizer on the album cover of Switched-On Bach by Wendy Carlos.
• The dog in 16th century clothing on the cover of Frank Zappa's The Perfect Stranger and Francesco Zappa wears Cool Shades.
• Falco combines 1980s fashion with 18th century style clothing in the music video of "Rock Me Amadeus".
• A parody of The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" once hosted by AmIRight, a music fansite for mondegreens and original parodies, stated in the very first verse that the Game & Watch series of games from Nintendo was started after The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and the release of the Macintosh took place. That's not the only thing it gets wrong, either—in the very same verse it's not just assumed that the Apple II and the Macintosh were one and the same (when in fact they were very different product lines offered by Apple), but also that Game & Watch itself was intended to compete with Apple's computers.
  It was 20 years ago today
  Gunpei Yokoi taught the world to play
  'Cause Atari and Mattel were through
  Only thing left was the Apple II
  But it cost a little too damn much
  So to compete with the Macintosh
  Nintendo released the Game & Watch
• Heilung play "amplified history." They use texts from all over pre-Christian Northern Europe, some of their stage outfits are historically correct reproductions of Nordic Bronze Age clothing, and their music mixes traditional instruments with electronic effects. See the start of this live video, where one of the band blows down a buffalo horn, then loops it to set up a drone.
• The video for Sabaton's "The Unkillable Soldier" consciously leans on Rule of Funny as a deliberately slapsticky interpretation of Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart's military service. Among other things, Sir Adrian actually lost his eye putting down a native uprising in Somaliland (he used the injury as an excuse to return to Britain so he could be reassigned to the Western Front, World War I having broken out shortly after he was sent to Africa), the Hospital Hottie's uniform is completely inaccurate to what British Army nurses wore at the time, and the Tommygun wouldn't be introduced until after the war ended. According to Joakim in the associated Sabaton History video, the director wanted the band members, who were playing German soldiers, to all wear Stahlhelms for historical accuracy, and the band pointed out that very little else that was going on was historically accurate and went helmetless.

Mythology and Religion

• The Bible, especially in some versions/translations, has been known to contain a few anachronisms since often the "books" composing it were written some time after the events were supposed to have taken place. For example the descriptions of armor, especially that worn by Goliath, in 1 Samuel 17 are typical of Greek armour of the 6th century BC rather than of Philistine armour of the 10th century BC.
  • The original Hebrew text is, however, a surprisingly accurate description of the 11th century BC maryannu.
  • The Tribes of Israel are Retconned as having extensively used iron weapons - Deborah is given a battle chariot protected by iron plates - even though bronze would have been universal for all peoples - including mighty Egypt - in this time period. And ignoring that in another passage Israel was unable to defeat an enemy army because the enemy possessed iron chariots.
  • All of the Hebrew Bible from Genesis through 2 Kings wasn't written down and in its final form until around 500 BC or later, so descriptions such as the above would be based on contemporary examples.
  • The Apocrypha— books written between the Old and New Testaments not found in Protestant Bibles (but found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, and considered inspired Scripture) often have these. Whether or not this is deliberate is debated. Some, like Judith, are so riddled with anachronisms that they are essentially the Israelite equivalent of a Tarantino film (only with more morals).
    • The book of Tobit takes place in the 8th century BCE but uses quotes from the books of Chronicles (which many scholars date to the 4th century BCE.)
    • The Book of Judith begins by declaring Nebuchadnezzar as the king who "ruled over the Assyrians", though he actually ruled over the Babylonians. A Catholic Bible commentary suggests that this was an Assyrian king that went by this name that was a contemporary of King Manasseh of Judah, and thus should not be confused with the Babylonian king.

Podcast

• The Adventure Zone: Balance: Quite a few actually:
  • A story about magic, swords, and dwarves wielding giant hammers includes elevators, Epcot-style buildings on the Moon, elevators, train stations, elevators, space stations, automobile-like "battle wagons," and industrial mining equipment. At least some of this is justified in-universe by the influence of the Miller family, who had looked into the Plane of Thought where advanced technology is commonplace.
  • As the nature of the podcasting style, it is often difficult to separate the pop culture references made in-game and made out of character.
  • An entire town is populated by animatronic Tom Bodetts, who all have a friendly, open attitude.
  • Taako is dedicated to discover the Eldritch Mystery of TexMex food.
  • Merle the Dwarf's favorite musician is Kenny Chesney, Johann the Bard plays elevator jazz, and the gang shops at Fantasy Costco.

Pinball

• Medieval Madness plays the absurdity of medieval pinball for laughs throughout the game.
  Rioting Peasant: "They've taken our pinball machines!"
• Inadvertently invoked by Eight Ball Champ, which mixes an Edwardian Era theme with computerized sound effects and a Machine Monotone voice.

Radio

• The Castle: Is nominally set in the Middle Ages but deliberately invokes this trope, with characters, headlines and events being obvious references to the present day, for example the aggressive chef Sir Gordon De Ramsay and the Italian knight Antonio Soprano. Sometimes they don't bother to hide it at all and reference the figure or event directly. In additional, all of the music is modern pop music performed on lutes, recorders and other contemporary instruments.
• Dead Ringers: One sketch has the cast of Downton Abbey pouring scorn on The Crown for its historical inaccuracies. But before Lord Downton can take his Tesla to London to complain at the House of Lords, he's informed he has to stay and entertain the Beatles, who are jamming in the living room with Oasis.
• Bleak Expectations runs on this, especially after the first series, almost always for the purposes of humour.
• The BBC Radio 4 sitcom The Castle set in Medieval Britain, works purely on the Rule of Funny, whether it's the lord's daughter using textspeak, or a group of archeologists led by a No Celebrities Were Harmed Tony Robinson digging up the castle grounds.
• Riders Radio Theater is a wild west Radio Drama that acts as if riding, roping and cowboying it up still exist alongside nuclear reactors and the internet.

Roleplay

• The Gungan Council features an in-universe example, where an Imperial I Star Destroyer can be in the same fleet as a Sith battlecruiser, and no one minds.
• Celestial Refresh: The Multiverse is it. While each world in the Multiverse is separated from each other with cosmic void, each world's inhabitants may know about other worlds, what can and WILL lead to Anachronism Stew.
  • Currently it was smoothed out a bit, after introducing the Rings system, where each planet with similar technological progress are placed in one Ring to separate it from Lower-tech worlds and Higher-tech worlds. Terran type planets (different iterations of The Earth) are not separated, however.
• Destroy the Godmodder: Due to the style of play (Read as: a great lack of style of play) this forum game is a great example of this trope, from dinosaurs and lasers, to spacemen fighting knights.
• Dino Attack RPG:
  • As a result of Medieval Stasis and Schizo Tech, the LEGO Planet and Dino Attack Team is a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot Anachronism Stew.
  • During the 1957 flashback, characters notably spoke with modern slang words and phrases such as "bro", "my man", and "dude". However, this was intentional. PeabodySam wanted the characters to seem much younger than their 2010 counterparts, and so chose these words and phrases since readers would associate them with youth; however, PeabodySam did not want to use slang from The '50s such as "swell" or "golly", fearing that they would distract readers with their "corniness" and thus detract from the point of the flashback.
    • In the same flashback, "Duplo School" was mentioned, but Duplo did not exist until 1973.
• Roll To Dodge: Savral is set an ancient-medieval fantasy world, yet it has several elements which come from notably different time frames. The witches in particular tend not to blend in with the ancient-medieval aesthetic, especially with regards to their clothing.
  • The Witch Grimhilde dresses like a cowgirl and wields colt-45 revolvers. Her minions wield muskets even though most of the world uses spells, bows, or crossbows for ranged weapons.
  • The Witch Beatrice wears an SS-officer’s uniform.
  • The Witch Schierke wears a lab coat and safety glasses. She also has an industrial facility in her lair complete with forges, lathes, mills, and power generators.
  • The players are not immune to this either. One player becomes a bike-riding cavalier while another one uses a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

Tabletop Games

• Even Dungeons & Dragons and its derivatives have this. Many settings (and many more DMs) don't allow firearms, but will gladly allow many weapons that, in real life, came about after, and sometimes as a direct consequence of, the invention and proliferation of guns in real life. Rapiers, a longtime standard of Bards and Rogues, are just one example.
  • Armour also falls into this, with all types of armour being portrayed as available in the same time period and simply being a matter of personal choice to balance weight and protection. In reality, full plate armour did not exist until around the 15th century, by which time many other types of armour were obsolete (particularly scale), at least in Europe. In addition, most armour has historically been a mix of various types, frequently mail or scaled on limbs with plates or scales covering the torso, which is rarely represented in such games at all. Helmets are possibly even worse, generally all being treated as identical despite a huge amount of development over thousands of years.
  • An oft-overlooked example is the fact that one of the standard units of currency is the platinum piece (worth more than the gold, electrum, silver, and copper pieces) but platinum wasn't seen as anything but an impurity in gold until the eighteenth century.
• Space 1889 well, it is Victorians in Space meeting canal Martians which have a pre-industrial society with some leftover technology from a much more advanced era, stone-age Hill Martians and High Martians on Mars and stone-age lizardmen and dinosaurs on Venus.
• King Arthur Pendragon takes a mix of all the main Arthurian myths, mostly Malory, and sets it in sub-Roman Britain. The appearance of medieval technology later in Arthur's reign is explained by magic and it all fades away after the Battle of Camlann with history re-asserting itself.
  • Pendragon is not above shout outs to later history either, including Merlin prophesying that the Pope would live in Avignon, and King Arthur quoting John F. Kennedy "ask not what your country can do for you..." before the Battle of Badon Hill.
• Parodied in the Tabletop Games Diana: Warrior Princess and Elvis: The Legendary Tours, which take the Anachronism Stew approach to modern-day pop-culture.
• Quirkily lampshaded by the Sourcebook GURPS Middle Ages. Its opening chapter includes a sidebar that actually explains the concept of Anachronism Stew by pointing out all the historical mismatches in its own cover art.
  • Also acknowledged in GURPS Camelot, the Arthurian sourcebook. There are three Arthurian settings mentioned - the Mythic one (Geoffry of Monmouth style, with plenty of anachronism), a Realistic one (as close as research can get us), and the Cinematic one (based on movies, with chrome armor and French castles and all the other goodies - not so much Anachronism Stew as an Anachronism Smoothie).
• Mythic Russia has a few that are pointed out and justified in the book. The Russians drink vodka even though it hadn't yet become popular historically, because "what is a game in Russia without vodka?" The Mongols are Tengrist pagans even though the Golden Horde had converted to Islam by the time it was set, partly because it's easier to handle in the game's Religion is Magic system and partly because of plain old Rule of Cool.
• The Pirates Constructible Strategy Game by Wizkids is a naval combat game set sometime before, during, and after the American Revolution/War of 1812 era. When the first set came out, things were fine, but with each new expansion, they seem to be intent on adding a new crazy mechanic. They get alright justifications/Handwaves most of the time, but it is still silly. They are currently halfway between this and Fantasy Kitchen Sink. Some of these include:
  • Sea Monsters/Titans
  • Cursed pirates
  • Submarines (based off Jules Verne)
  • Vikings (Handwaved as being northerners who believe Norse Mythology)
  • Bombardiers (Ships with long-range and flame cannons attached to their decks)
  • Turtle ships (which at least existed around the time)
  • "Switchblades" (metal ships with giant pincers attached to the sides)
• Visigoths vs. Mall Goths is anachronistic by nature, due to Time Travel bringing some antiquity-era Barbarians to 1990s Los Angeles. That aside, most of the references are true to the time period, but some of the names are more modern references for the Rule of Funny. For instance, the store Big Disc Energy plays off a 2019 meme that also has the acronym BDE.
• The old Atlantean Trilogy by Bar Games mixed Anachronism Stew with All Myths Are True, and came up with an alternate Earth where Atlantis coexists with Avalon, Amazons rub shoulders with gypsies, and you can sail from Hyperborea to Nazca. Never mind it's supposed to be set in 15,000 BC, and the continents' geographies are radically different?
• The defunct trading card game Anachronism was built on this trope. The idea was that you could play as, say, Ivan the Terrible while wielding a claymore, wearing Japanese armor, and with Aphrodite on your side.
• The Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG name for the Chronomaly archetype, "OOPArts", is an acronym for "Out-of-Place Artifact", a term used to describe artifacts that make no logical sense given the technology available at the time they were created. The TCG name, "Chronomaly", is a portmanteau of the word "chronology" which is the sequential order in which past events occur and "anomaly" as in an irregularity or something odd. Put together these monsters are "chronological anomalies" or "chronomalies" since these objects deviate from what would have been possible to create given the resources and technology available at that time.
  • Note that this isn't even the most notable example. From the very start, there were magicians, knights, dragons, and the like along side stuff like tanks, military infantry, and both ridiculously human and Super Robots.
• Warhammer
  • The one most people have pointed out in Fantasy Battles is Bretonnia, which is an Arthurian-style Feudal Kingdom with your traditional knights, bows, and trebuchets, right next door to the Empire, which is nearly 2-3 centuries ahead with cannons, guns, and tanks.
    • In fact, the Empire has knights and archers (and crossbowmen!) of its own, deployed right alongside the cannons, guns and tanks.
  • Other examples in the game (there are many) include the Skaven, who have access to Gatling- oh wait - Ratling guns and Lightning cannons, while other races, such as the Elves or the Tomb Kings, still use ballistae, bows and chariots.
  • Note that these are actually justified in the lore- the Bretonnian elite are protected by the Lady's blessing against firearms, while Bretonnian law forbids the use of "cowardly" gunpowder weapons on their soil (and as a result, have the most guns on their navy), because the Lady they worship is actually worship a Wood Elf goddess who deliberately keeps them at a pre-industrial level so they won't start massively chopping down her forests.
• Warhammer 40,000 has this as well, with many troops (especially Orks) being armed with bladed melee weapons such as swords, axes, and warhammers, while others have machine guns, lasers, automatic bazookas, and space ships.
  • A prime example being the Imperial Guard, where you can have tribals with axes & bows, horse cavalry, World War I-style tanks, Chicken Walkers and Future Copters all in the same force. And a whole line of 20th-century weaponry classified as stubbers & autoguns like M1911, Uzi, AK-47, & M2 Browning are still in service with them.
  • Characterized even farther by the fact that the lore states there are planets that have slid back technologically to a Medieval Stasis from being cut-off from other worlds, which may have been used at one point in early source books to try and incorporate the Warhammer Fantasy Battle universe into that of 40k.
• Hoyle's Rules of Dragon Poker: The author never bothers to explain why a game played at ancient Pompeii has rules for surge protectors and Weird Al.

Visual Novels

• Shikkoku no Sharnoth can't do this with technology as it's Steampunk Victorian Britain, however, portrays multiple real and fictional characters as contemporaries. For example, Charlotte Brontë and Heinz Heger were separated by a good half century.
• Higurashi: When They Cry is set in the early eighties but has multiple references to products that won't exist for over a decade. Mostly due to Rule of Funny.
• Actually averted by Katawa Shoujo: despite popular misconception that the game takes place essentially in the present, Word of God says that it actually does several years in the past (around 2007)^note Which is around when the project started. Fittingly, for example, nobody has access to the ultra-ubiquitous smartphones of today - using old "flippables" instead.
• Yo-Jin-Bo has a bunch of 1850s ronin who like to Shout-Out to modern pop culture. The technology is generally consistent with 19th century Japan, but it's never explained how they know about things like Back to the Future and Mr. T.
• In Corpse Party D2: Fatal Operation, while the closed space surrounding Divine Blessing Hospital was created in 1982, various pieces of state-of-the-art technology can be found within. Since the cursed dimension has the ability to draw in and trap victims, this is Justified by Naomi speculating that whatever consciousness created the closed space is really interested in this tech and deliberately stealing it.
• Aviary Attorney, set in the 19th century, likes jokes and throwaway lines that play on if they aren't outright lifted from more modern sources.
  How does that American proverb go, Falcon? Don't hate the player. Hate the game.
  Merde's about to go down, yo.
• Ace Attorney takes place during or after 2016 (with the exception of certain flashback cases), making the appearance of phones with physical keypads and basic LCD screens all the more jarring, rather than smartphones which are extremely commonplace in developed countries. One character in Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney does possess what's clearly a smartphone, however. In addition, many photos in early games are in black and white, but later games start involving color photos.
• Burly Men at Sea is, according to Word of God, set in the early twentieth century, but has Dark Ages Norse monsters and wizards and a very twenty-first century coffee shop.
• Detective Hank and the Golden Sneeze features a steampunk mobile phone!
• Aquarium: For a standard late medieval setting, Aqua's casual clothes and swimsuit are quite modern.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus: "Candy Carrier Chaos!": The Candy Canyon Kingdom is a medieval-esque land, but it also has Old West bandits and modern-day trucks.
  Pomni: What time period is this supposed to be, anyway?
• The Gaston Trilogy (another case of Rule of Funny): Xbox 360s (and Batman: Arkham Asylum), Taco Bell, at least McDonald's if not Burger King, Billy Mays, Justin Bieber, "I’m a Scatman", Six Flags, Babar, and raves with glowsticks and electronic music exist in 18th century France and no one cares. Also it's apparently both directly after and contemporary with pre-Islamic Arabia.
• Homestar Runner: The "Old-Timey" era is supposed to take place in the 1930s, but makes reference to any number of events ranging from the 1800s to the 1950s.
• My Story Animated: Amara from "After 30 Years I Am Still 16" fell into a coma in 1990 at the latest, but at one point in the pre-coma part of her story, she's shown using a 21st-century smartphone.
• OverSimplified: Played for Laughs.
  • For example, a 2019 French Yellow Vest protester is seen among the Yellow Turbans during China's Three Kingdoms period.
  • King Louis giving Porsches to his nobles. They ask if they can have Lamborghinis next year.
  • Alois Hitler (Adolf Hitler's dad) makes a cameo in the Three Kingdoms era (way before he was born) to spank an eunuch. (This happens at around 6:14, if you're wondering.)
  • In the first American Civil War video, George Washington shows up in a meeting held by Abraham Lincoln to discuss his strategy and claim he's the best president of the US. In the second American Civil War video, the Confedarates are seen with a BTS-themed calendar, and Wilmer McLean's wife Martha is seen using a vacuum cleaner.
  • Young Henry VIII's toys included Power Ranger and Ninja Turtle action figures, a Game Boy, and an Etch-a-Sketch.
  • The Russian Tsars have late 20th-century rocket launchers with which to dispose of annoying ministers, and Emperor Meiji has a Gundam. Later, when Stalin and his gang launch his "quiet" heist, they're all armed with Cold War-era AKs and grenades in late 19th/early 20th century Russia.
  • When talking about how Napoleon married the Duke of Austria's daughter to try and get a male heir, Henry VIII can be seen wiggling his eyebrows outside Napoleon's window as the narrator quips "At least he didn't behead anyone".
• In RWBY, people who fight with swords and other antiquated melee weapons are seen also making use of portable music players, digital tablets and VTOL aircraft. Demonstrated in the "Black" trailer, which pits a ninja and her katana-wielding partner against a horde of robotic mooks on a futuristic-looking Cool Train.
• From Stardust Crusaders But Really Really Fast which canonically takes place in the late 1980s:
  Cameo: Have you watched Aladdin?
  Polnareff: That ain't out yet.
  Cameo: Uh, then this might take a hot minute to explain.

Webcomics

• The Paul Reveres takes place during the American Revolution, but features electric guitars, modern drum kits, blue mohawks, and somehow they know who David Bowie is, among other modern music references.
• No Need for Bushido, while technically set in imperial Japan, cheerfully features a hodgepodge of ninjas, Taoist monks, an order of scantily clad female assassins, giant anime-style swords (well, ok, one giant sword), Hong Kong kung-fu action movie fighting styles, and modern-day references. And TWO blind kick-ass fighters. Also, birdfish. (The NNFB fanmixes take this anachronism with modern day references even further, to absurd but often hilarious extremes)
• Arthur, King of Time and Space gleefully throws the anachronisms into the "fairy tale" arc (the standard Arthurian romance with the standard medieval trappings) with two justifications: the author (and to a lesser extent, the characters) knows the sources are flawed and anachronistic in and of themselves, and half the anachronisms are Merlin's fault, since he has the gift of foresight (at one point, for example, using a fly swatter to kill a fairy spy).
• Dinosaur Comics. While inherently unrealistic (talking dinosaurs), they oftentimes reference human events, which obviously would take place many millions of years in the future. This is often lampshaded.
  • There's anachronisms in every strip: The third panel has T-Rex about to step on a house that's next to a car, and the fourth panel has T-Rex about to step on a person.
  Utahraptor: History for you is a big party where everyone just hangs out together, isn't it?
• The Perry Bible Fellowship: this strip◊ shows a technologically advanced future civilization for whom the history of the second millennium seems to be a big blur.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • In Azure City, not only are there sewers, but there are three tunnels, clearly labeled "Ocean," "Anachronistic Sewage Plant," and "Obligatory Sewer-Themed Labyrinth." Such things have been lampshaded.
  • And in Cliffport, there's a municipal park. Amid high-rise buildings.
    Vaarsuvius: I'm simply saying that the architectural motifs found here in the city of Cliffport are inconsistent with the presumed medieval time period.
    Durkon: It be magic.
    Vaarsuvius: Yes, fine, I grasp the premise that any sufficiently advanced - and in particular, reliable - magic would be indistinguishable from technology, I merely find the implementation here haphazard, at best.
    Durkon: Meh. It could be worse, ye know.
    Vaarsuvius: Oh?
    Durkon: They could have magic trains.
    Vaarsuvius: Point taken.
    • And it's then played straighter by Redcloak here.
      Redcloak: (...) but I'm the one who has to make the magical lightning-powered trains run on time.
  • The C.C.P.D. are a modern day police force with swords and plate armor, complete with sirens (on the horses), sketch artist and mayor yelling at Da Chief for failing to catch the murderer when elections are coming up, and underlings being yelled at by said cigar-smoking, coffee downing chief.
  • It's subtle, but look at this comic. Where did Hayley get a metal detector? And more importantly, where was she keeping it? (Same questions apply to Roy and his sextant...)
  • When the High Priest of Hel tries to find a memory of Durkon's about Belkar that isn't related to the latter insulting the former in some way, what shows up is a modern-style search engine result saying the memory he was looking for was unable to be found. Similarly, when Vaarsuvius tries to scry for Haley's location, they instead receive a 404 error.
• In Gunnerkrigg Court, Ms. Jones' students watch a documentary hologram about the founding of the Court. The characters in the hologram include a guy who looks like he stepped out of The Cavalier Years or The American Revolution, and another fellow wearing a modern trench coat, an article of clothing which wasn't introduced until World War I. Shortly afterwards, Jones points out that "this simulation is an artistic representation". Although she said that in regards to an indistinct glow, represented as such because they didn't know what it was. And present was also the man who designed robots. Maybe the others just liked to dress that way.
• The idea of anachronism stew was theorized, later defictionalized, and generally slammed in this xkcd comic.
  • And again here and in the title text here.
• Hark! A Vagrant! is all about this.
• Hellbastard Comics starts with an alien war that interrupts Satan's viewing of Bridezillas in what is later revealed to be the pre-Napoleonic era and just gets better from there.
• Blade Bunny takes place in a historical mashup of feudal Japan and ancient China, with robots one of which has futuristic guns and a BunnyGirl in a microskirt. Justified in that it's revealed that the robots and the BunnyGirl come from different dimensions.
• San Three Kingdoms has no problem using modern machine guns.... in 208 AD. Or sniper rifles (Cao Cao is sexy...)
• This Penny Arcade comic has a flashback to 1988 showing characters using a Powerglove (introduced in 1989 and quickly flopped), reading Nintendo Power #31 (December, 1991), talking about Thunder Cats (ran from 1985-89), and drinking a New Coke (introduced in 1985 and quickly flopped). To be fair, the date is only implied, and everybody didn't immediately quit drinking New Coke, playing with Powergloves, or referencing cancelled cartoons. But the overall impression is a mishmash of things associated with the '80s, regardless of which part of the '80s (or early '90s) they actually came from.
• Problem Sleuth is theoretically set in the Prohibition era, but the main characters play board games from the 50s, have 90s murals celebrating ethnic diversity on their walls, and use computers to check GameFAQs to solve the hardest puzzles.
• NIMONA often sees combinations of fantasy-medieval and sci-fi themes. The secondary main character, Ballister Blackheart, is a Black Knight with a robotic arm.
• Knights of Buena Vista is a anachronistic as the Disney Animated Canon films it takes place in. Such as Haagan-Dazs existing in Frozen (2013) despite taking place over a century before that company was founded.
• PepsiaPhobia is set in Ancient Greece and has things like banks, dining-and-dashing, XP points, and quotes of Friedrich Nietzsche. This is lampshaded in a gag strip when Philia calls Klepto's drink, a Beijing Peach, anachronistic. The comic also parodies this trope by having the map of Greece◊ be a recolored map of Texas. Some parts are justified due to the machinations of the cast's Time Travel-capable characters ( Lord Nightsorrow explicitly claims to have brought back Halloween with him).
• Bruno the Bandit is set in a vaguely-medieval fantasy kingdom, yet features television, cell phones, fast-food joints and several other fairly modern inventions, heavily played for Rule of Funny.
• Power Of Ether In what world would genetic manipulation predate ocean travel? One where humanity is too busy fighting wars to bother with ocean travel. The author explains it in more detail in the commentary for this page.
• While Saffron And Sage takes place in a fantasy setting there are still very noticeable non-fantasy elements such as modern looking swimsuits and spas.
• Deliberately invoked in Never Satisfied. Motorboats and polaroid photos exist alongside archaic clothing and pre-industrialization town square marketplaces. To quote the author, "Sometimes they dress like Tudors. Sometimes there's a car."
• Present Lady gives Willa a toy train for Xmas in Latchkey Kingdom, which has a pre-industrial setting. She notices the anachronism and asks Willa to act surprised if a real one is invented.
• Poison Ivy Gulch: Some of the characters, namely Ace and Lorraine (a saloon girl), are shown chewing bubble gum and even blowing bubbles. Bubble gum wasn't invented until 1928; the time period is The Wild West of the 19th century. But this modern inclusion is due to the Rule of Funny.
• Hobbits And Hole Dwellers: #22 parodies this by Bailey using it as an off-the-cuff excuse for Balin being able to find Dwalin so quickly (Dwalin called Balin's cellphone-in a pre-medieval setting). Ted seems to be about to hang a lampshade on this, but he's interrupted.
• The Princess's Jewels supposedly takes place in vaguely medieval fantasy kingdom, but features color-print magazines, polystyrene coffee cup, and mishmash between Victorian era and modern-day clothing.
• In Koan of the Day, it appears to be a peaceful ancient village, but hashtags and cars exist.

Web Videos

• DougDoug A.I. Invasion: Doug tries to keep the options limited to the campaign's time period, but anything the AI comes up with becomes fair game. As such, the American Revolution eventually devolves into the Americans and French fielding Humongous Mechas against the British, The Incredible Hulk being published in the 1700s, Hamilton being on tour with the original cast, and the Americans inventing nuclear warheads but not planes to drop them from.
• Jimmy Fallon's web series Downtown Sixbey combines a Downton Abbey spoof with a backstage drama of Late Night joke writing. As a result, they communicate with each other via telegram and observe tea time, yet they're sitting around writing Kardashian jokes.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • In "Episode of Bardock," Chilled is seen holding a Canon camera, yet the special takes place ages before the invention of cameras. Doesn't matter though, since the whole thing was just a Dream Within a Dream.
  • The strangeness of super high-tech scientist Bulma using a fax machine in the Android/Cell arc is Lampshaded by Krillin. Krillin was surprised to learn that Future Trunks had never heard Country Music before (since the Androids had destroyed all of the Country radio stations). When they then get a fax, Future Trunks says that doesn't know what a fax machine is; Krillin comments that this makes a lot more sense.
• Epic Rap Battles of History. A lot of times, this explains how the contestants know each other, period.
• The Evil Empress Guide seems to be this with the various different guidelines. So, our Empress has a blaster at her disposal (guideline 10), can contact the men in her thrall via radio (45), considers hiring a PR firm (48), uses webcam sites to manipulate the population (49) and forbids her Beautiful but Innocent Daughter from shoppng at the mall (56)... but still equips her Amazon Hordes with such "sophisticated weapons" as 10' pikes and longbows (24). As it's a genre-savviness guide meant to cover multiple settings, as well as not meant to be taken too seriously this is perfectly justified.
• During GrayStillPlays' Wildlife Park 3 playthrough, he's able to drop a Tyrannosaurus rex into the same enclosure as modern-day animals. It even gets killed by a lion.
• This is one of the points of Hitler Rants (in this case it's used for the Rule of Funny), which in their classic form feature Hitler, in his bunker during World War II, using Internet-age technology and complaining about some modern-era controversy (like Donald Trump's election).
• The Irate Gamer:
  • In the first episode, after reviewing the Back to the Future game for NES, IG goes back in time to kill the CEO of LJN, preventing the game from ever being created; apparently they already had cordless phones and flat-screen TV's back in 1987.
  • In a joke, IG claims that one obstacle to dodge in Space Race were Imperial TIE Fighters. Space Race came out in 1973, and the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, came out in 1977.
• Jim Sterling's Commentocracy series features Jim dressed as a Victorian aristocrat, talking about video games, interspersed with silent-film style title cards and film grain.
• TMK is set in 1996, shortly after the release of Kirby Super Star, but certain episodes use material from Kirby Super Star Ultra, a remake released in 2008.
• Used as a gag in a Todd in the Shadows review where Todd points out a pay phone is an anachronism in 2012, yet 2012 saw a song about this "antique" item.
• Unwanted Houseguest is a downplayed example. Crossovers and some of the stories the Houseguest reads imply the series takes place in the modern day, but Aberfoyle Manor's most advanced technology appears to be a landline phone. That said, the Houseguest has said he rarely ventures out, and Aberfoyle does seem to be fairly inaccessible, so it makes sense newer technology hasn't been installed.

Other

• WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK.: "Emergency Broadcast Anomaly (2011)" shows that the TeleBlue boxes were still transmitting in analog signal despite the FCC-mandated transition to digital television two years prior.

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