In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous

So you finally get your time machine working, and decide to visit some out of the way town in a quiet year. You hit the Big Red Button, step out of the machine, and trip over Shakespeare. Cue the Historical In Jokes. And probably the discovery that Beethoven Was an Alien Spy.

It seems that time machines and real life famous people have a very strong attraction. Even when you manage to avoid everyone in the history books (both real and in-verse), you'll probably run into an ancestor. (And if it's your grandfather, 9 times out of 10 you'll end up killing him. Or shagging him. Or he will look just like you.)

This means that as soon as you step out of your time machine, a well known historical figure will show up shortly. This can either be someone who was famous in the real world, or, if the series takes place in The Future, someone who became famous in the Future History.

Shows up in historical fiction too. A good deal of historical fiction is about famous people, but even the stories that aren't tend to spend a lot of time running into celebrities.

Note that this only "counts" if you're not specifically aiming for the famous person (e.g. Bill and Ted don't exactly count because A: they were actually trying to find Genghis Khan and Sigmund "Frood," and B: they had the help of a magic phone directory to find them). Though, even then, other well-known personages from the same period may crop up unexpectedly.

If you meet a famous figure before they did anything to earn said fame, it's a case of Young Future Famous People. If you don't find out who they are until the end of the story, it's a Historical Person Punchline.

Anime and Manga

 * The Dagger Of Kamui takes place at the end of the 19th century, and has Jiro happening to meet Mark Twain (who calls himself by his pen name) for no reason.
 * In Rose of Versailles, Oscar, besides working with Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, randomly bumps into Robespierre and Louis Saint-Juste on many occasions. The manga is even more egregious, and name-drops Napoleon for zero reason, and only a few pages, in a later chapter.
 * Subverted in Inuyasha: Kagome and company run into a traveling man named Nobunaga, and Kagome immediately busts out her autograph book, thinking she'd found the young Oda Nobunaga, the famous warlord. Turns out it's just someone with the same given name (don't forget, these are Japanese names—Oda is the clan name, not Nobunaga), who doesn't think fondly of the person who will end up making the name (in)famous.

Comic Books

 * In The Once and Future Duck by Don Rosa, Donald Duck and Gyro Gearloose are testing a rather temperamental time machine at Stonehenge, because they know that even if the traveller ends up millennia in the past, there will be no buildings or the like inside the ancient structure. They all end up in the past, and immediately run into the brutish real-life King Arthur and his men. Ultimately it's their visit that inspires the legends of the Knights of the Round Table.
 * Again by Don Rosa, Scrooge McDuck's life brings him to meet many real life famous people, such as Teddy Roosevelt, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse and Frank James, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Roy Bean, Geronimo, and many others.
 * In The Kents, a 12-issue miniseries detailing the lives of Clark Kent|'s adoptive ancestors, this comes up a lot; In the first page of #1 alone, we get Harriet Tubman! Over the course of the story, we then get Franklin Pierce, Wild Bill Hickok, Charles Quantrill, John Wilkes Booth, Jesse James (and his brother Frank), a young John Wesley Hardin, Susan B. Antony's brother, General Custer... this is more or less Justified, given that the family does get involved with both pro-abolitionists and gunslingers.

Fan Fiction

 * In Jesus and Hitler: A Romance (NSFW) Hitler literally runs in to Jesus the second he steps out of his time machine.

Films

 * In Time Bandits, the titular bandits manage (through completely random time-jumping) to run into Napoleon, Agamemnon, and Robin Hood.
 * Although sort of justified in that they all wanted to go to places to get lots of treasure, and kings and conquerors fit the bill. Still doesn't explain how they kept ending up in the general vicinity though.
 * Marty of Back to The Future managed to avoid anyone more famous than the cousin of Chuck Berry (although the Novelization of BTTF III claims the kid who asks him what a movie is was D.W. Griffith), but he bumped into relatives without trying in both the first and third movies (and let's not even get into the Animated Adaptation). Everything did take place in the same town in California, though.
 * He also ran into a black busboy at a diner in 1955 who responds to his boss telling him to get back to work by stating that he's going to be someone. Marty, recognizing him, states that he's going to be mayor. The busboy thinks its merely a motivational suggestion, while his boss laughs off the idea of a black man being mayor.
 * He also helped save Clara Clayton from falling into the ravine and having it named after her. Additionally, 'Mad Dog' Tannen was pretty well known for his gunslinging.
 * Although we only hear about Tannen's modern day fame in the alternate timeline Biff created, where it's pretty clear his history was embellished or outright fabricated simply because he was Biff's ancestor.
 * In Shanghai Knights, the main characters create the personas of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, freely give the idea to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and take on a young Charlie Chaplin as a sidekick.
 * And the Action Girl kicks Jack the Ripper off a bridge.
 * Also, Shanghai Noon reveals that Roy O'Bannon's true name is "Wyatt Earp" at the end of the first movie. The main character, Chon Wang(pronounced 'win'), remarks that Wyatt Earp is "a bad name for a lawman". Chon's nickname, given by Roy, is John while he pronounces Chon's last name as "Wayne". At the end of Shanghai Knights, Chon and Roy set off back to America, taking the young Charlie Chaplain with them, while Roy proposes that he and Chon go to Hollywood, where "they're setting up a new motion picture project". In reply, Chon thoughtfully says "John Wayne: Movie Star"...
 * The Man From Earth has the titular 14,000-year-old character (John Oldman, har har) recall close meetings with Christopher Columbus, Vincent Van Gogh, Buddha, in addition to.
 * Not quite a time travel example, though, he'd been around the whole time. Encountering a few famous people over the course of 140 centuries is not especially unlikely.
 * Western film American Outlaws does an especially hamfisted job of this. The central characters are Frank and Jesse James, and the film repeatedly has them name famous Civil War era characters, groups, and incidents as the director's way of demonstrating that they really are in the Old West.
 * The (animated) film Anastasia had the title character and her entourage going shopping in Paris. Not only do they meet a few historical characters (Maurice Chevalier, Sigmund Freud, Charles Lindbergh, Josephine Baker, Claude Monet, Isadora Duncan, Auguste Rodin, and Gertrude Stein), they're all going shopping on the same night in the same street and all happen to know the words to the song. The movie features a singing Gertrude Stein.
 * Incredibly, that might be the most historically correct part of the movie. Both Hemingway and Bennett Cerf wrote of Gertrude's inability to walk by someone playing a piano without sitting down and singing along.
 * The Stupids. Buster ends up at the prehistory exhibit of a museum and believes he travelled back in time. He goes a little mad when he writes his name on a "cave" and wonders out loud what people from the future will think when they discover his name.
 * In Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, Jean Cocteau pulls the time-travelling protagonist into a car and takes him to a party where Cole Porter is sitting at the piano. The first people he meets are Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who introduce him to Hemingway, who takes him to Gertrude Stein's place where she's arguing with Picasso...
 * Given, those people were all in Paris at the same time, and interacting pretty closely, which is one of the main reasons that the protagonist is so in love with that period of time. However, the speed with which he runs into them all is rather hard to believe . ..
 * The upcoming Men in Black III will feature a time travel plot with an appearance by Bill Hader as Andy Warhol, the very man who predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous.

Literature
"Artemis: "You've got some mosaics planned for the roof. You might want to rethink those. Very derivative.""
 * An example of how old the historical fiction version of this trope is, is that the Victorian novelist Thackeray complained about how contemporaries like Sir Walter Scott wrote novels where the main characters bumped into famous figures left and right.
 * A novel which could be considered a subversion is Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. The time traveling main characters encounter only ordinary upper middle class Victorians, and the overall message seems to be that the "little people" affect history as much as more famous figures.
 * The main character does happen to spot the author of one of his favorite books out boating on the Thames, but it's just a cameo. And while the time travelers do meet the ancestor of someone they know in the future, it's because they were specifically aiming for her.
 * The Sherlock Holmes pastiche The West End Horror mainly seems to be an experiment by Nicholas Meyer to see how many famous historical figures he can cram into one novel. In the course of the story, Holmes runs into Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, Bram Stoker, and numerous others.
 * Justified by the fact he is investigating a crime in the West End, where all these people worked and played.
 * Averted in the short story Child of All Ages, where a child claims to be hundreds of years old. When someone wishes to test their claim, they ask the child about famous events and people. The child replies that they can give the answer, but only because they can read history books, too. Seems she was too busy just surviving and that not many famous people invite random peasant children to stay with them with the foreknowledge that something important is about to happen.
 * In E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime famous people aren't just bumped into, they're full-blown characters who also keep bumping into each other. These "famous people" range from still-famous magician Harry Houdini to all-but-forgotten tabloid darling Evelyn Nesbit. It gets slightly more confusing when only one fictional character, Coalhouse Walker Jr., has a full name (the other fictional characters are referred to as "Mother", "Tateh", etc), which leads most readers to believe that he is just another forgotten celebrity.
 * M.J. Trow's Lestrade novels are full of historic characters. Given the premise (a Deconstruction of Sherlock Holmes using the Literary Agent Hypothesis but telling the "true story" behind Watson's accounts) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is justified. Having Lestrade point at a baby and tell Watson he'd make a better Holmes than William Gillette, before revealing this is the infant Basil Rathbone, somewhat less so. Then there's Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, Jack the Ripper, Florence Nightingale...
 * George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman books are a non-time travel example, in which Magnificent Bastard Harry Flashman travels around the Victorian world, accidentally getting dragged into major historical events (and one or two contemporary fictional ones). There are too many historical cameos to list here, but some of the more notable ones include the Duke of Wellington, Lily Langtry, Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, Otto von Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, Sam Grant, Sherlock Holmes, John Brown and Benjamin Disraeli.
 * Harry Turtledove's Alternate History books are fond of this too. We get things such as a protagonist female senator in the 1940s being invited to the office of Franklin Roosevelt, the assistant secretary of the Navy, on a regular basis. And of course another protagonist general defeats the Confederate general Patton, leading to them having a civilized conversation in the middle of a ruined city. And that's only one of his many books.
 * A standard trope for Turtledove, who likes to put famous people in unfamiliar roles. Like a George Armstrong Custer who's still around for World War I, and invents what for all intents and purposes is the blitzkrieg (there's even a young Heinz Guderian in that scene).
 * More boggling yet is the sheer number of famous people who still exist in a 1980s where the American colonies remained part of Britain.
 * The Case Of The Toxic Spell Dump has a cameo by a very stern US federal judge of Muslim origins. His name: Judge Ruhollah Khomeini.
 * Orson Scott Card's Tales of Alvin Maker is set in an alternate history of America in a world where supernatural powers are real and effect history, and does this a couple of times, perhaps most notably with Napoleon, who keeps turning up. The two historical figures who appear as main characters are William Blake (as an itinerant story collector called Taleswapper) and Tecumseh, as something of a tragic hero, though he isn't the main character. Taleswapper also knew Ben Franklin, and Washington and other familiar names have come up, though in unfamiliar places. Justified in that Napoleon doesn't turn up until he has a good reason to, Taleswapper's position as Blake is blink-and-you'll-miss-it, and Tecumseh isn't on the usual lists of 'famous people.' Also in that it carries the idea that certain people are destined to make an imprint on history, so even if the circumstances change it'll happen anyway.
 * Other famous people who show up: William Henry Harrison and Honoré de Balzac, and a recurring role for Tecumsah's brother Tenskwatawa.
 * Plus Denmark Vesey, Mike Fink, and John James Audubon.
 * In Robert A. Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset, alternate universe novel, it is remarked that one of the characters knows a Harry Truman, who couldn't be related to another universe's politician because he was a haberdasher (the real Truman was indeed a haberdasher before entering politics). In the alternate universe, Truman never entered politics.
 * Like the Turtledove examples above, it's alternate history rather than time travel, but in Robert Harris' Fatherland, the Beatles (with five members!) apparently still become a musical force in the early-to-mid sixties, even with Britian conquered by Nazi Germany and Hitler still in charge.
 * That's actually somewhat less implausible than most of the examples given: all of the four Beatles in our timeline (and presumably the fifth one in this timeline) would have been alive during World War 2, albeit as infants or toddlers. Their musical talent would remain intact, and since the Beatles had no formal musical training in our timeline the matter of education doesn't even come into play. The kind of music the alternate Beatles are playing, and the circumstances under which they can perform, on the other hand, would be completely different.
 * In The Time Garden, the children occasionally do this. Though they do wish for some of the things, a lot of meetings are still entirely accidental. For example, at one point they wish to see "the Queen of England" (Elizabeth) and wind up meeting Queen Victoria (who is not amused).
 * The very first person Artemis Fowl runs into in turn-of-the-century Spain in  is the renowned architect Antoni Gaudí. Needless to say, he feels immediately compelled to give him unsolicited advice.


 * Occurs several times in The Magic Treehouse series of books. Usually justified as the famous person is related to Jack and Annie's current quest, but sometimes it's done gratuitously.
 * Averted in In the Keep of Time. Other than King James II, who is only viewed from afar, no one of historical significance appears in the story, with all the characters the children meet being original characters, or at most archetypes and positions likely to be expected in the time period. The exception might be the Laird of Smailholm who may have been a real person, but since none of the children had heard of him prior to their adventure, meeting him doesn't fully hew to this trope either. Sir Walter Scott is mentioned as having stayed at Smailholm Cottage, but this tale seems to be included simply for historical flavor (and accuracy—not only is this story true, Scott wrote of the tower, including it in his poems The Eve of St. John and Marmion).
 * Subverted in The Anubis Gates, in which the only Real Life historical figure the protagonist meets is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom his employer deliberately sought out. For a while he thinks he's also encountered Lord Byron, but.
 * Neal Stevenson's novel Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle trilogy are full of this. The former includes, for example, Alan Turing, Douglas MacArthur and Hermann Goering. The latter includes Newton, Leibniz, Hooke and just about every other important 17th-century natural philosopher, plus Blackbeard.
 * Justified in that the primary protagonist of the Baroque Cycle was a member of the Royal Society (which included most of the prominent natural philosophers of the English-speaking world at the time) and therefore it makes sense that he would interact frequently with other Royal Society members and possibly even their rivals (Leibniz, who was encountered before he was famous).
 * The spirit of this trope is present in the Riverworld novels. Every human who has ever lived is resurrected on an alien planet, upwards of 10 billion people, and yet the protagonists keep running into notable historical figures, like Alice Liddel, Hermann Göring, and Mark Twain.
 * Justified in the Never Again series of novels, as the time travelers' whole objective is to change the past, so of course they will run into famous people. It's really only played completely straight in the first book, because later books include people in the past who never existed in Real Life as major characters.
 * Averted in the short story "The Gnarly Man" by L Sprague De Camp. The title character is a 50,000 year Neanderthal who has managed to live a quiet, normal life over the millenia. The only famous person he ever encountered was Charlemagne, who he saw giving a speech in Paris.
 * The Roman Mysteries series has its main characters meet Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Emperor Titus, Emperor Domitian, Flaccus, Bernice, Josephus and others.
 * Mostly averted by the Time Scout series, but while investigating Jack the Ripper, the Ripper Watch Team runs into William Butler Yeats at a social club. Cue massive fangasm by the time guide in charge.

Live Action TV

 * The new series of Doctor Who has done this quite a bit, with Charles Dickens fighting off an alien invasion in "The Unquiet Dead", werewolves trying to infect Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw" and Madame de Pompadour falling in love with the Doctor in "The Girl in the Fireplace".
 * Not to mention William Shakespeare battling alien witches ("The Shakespeare Code") and Agatha Christie solving a murder mystery with the Doctor (along with a giant alien wasp, in "The Unicorn and the Wasp").
 * To be fair, the Doctor was aiming for Shakespeare that time, and possibly Agatha Christie too.
 * Also, earlier Doctors have done the same thing. The Doctor standing in for Doc Holliday in the OK Corral, meeting Nero and giving him the idea of burning down Rome, riding with Marco Polo, meeting King Richard Lionheart... We don't see him, but Leonardo da Vinci was a good friend of the Doctor, and H.G. Wells got his ides for the term 'Science Fiction' from the Doctor - all in the 'old' series.
 * Possibly justified in that the TARDIS is sentient, and purposely takes the Doctor where he needs to go. If the Doctor isn't aiming for an important point in time, chances are the TARDIS is.
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation visited 19th century San Francisco in "Time's Arrow", and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) tried to stop their "invasion". (He also gives a spot of writing advice to an ambitious bellhop who just happens to be named Jack London.) Later, in The Movie, they went back in time and ended up protecting the creator of their Applied Phlebotinum. (Justified, in that the time travel was initiated by the Big Bad. Naturally they picked an important place and time to attack, namely the first test flight of a Terran ship warp drive that would attract the attention of the Vulcans to begin open interaction with that planet.)
 * This is justified in the Star Trek RPG by saying that spots where history has a chance to change drastically, also called Nexus Points, tend to draw unintentional time travelers, and intentional ones have to take them into account when performing the calculations.
 * In City on the Edge of Forever, Spock gives a similar explanation of why they wound up in the same place that Dr. McCoy would soon arrive.
 * Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has done this twice, both times running into famous characters from their own 'Verse. They ran into a martyred civil rights activist in "In Past Tense", and the original crew in "Trials and Tribble-ations".
 * Justified in Tribble-ations because they were there/then to stop a bad guy who had gone to that place and time specifically because he knew the original Enterprise and Kirk were there.
 * "In Past Tense" is more a case of.
 * This is the driving premise behind the Blackadder: Back and Forth special. The time machine used by the characters (which had been invented by accident thanks to Baldrick having a Genius Ditz moment) was somehow "attuned" to the frequencies of Lord Blackadder's ancestors—who just so happened to be big historical players in the eras they visited.
 * As the show creators themselves have noticed, Blackadder's intelligence seems to rise as his fortunes fall. The Blackadder in Rome is scarcely above a grunt. However, the trope is affirmed and indeed parodied when you take into account the amount of times those same people are hanging around Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie....
 * The "Soldier's Heart" episode of New Amsterdam contains a particularly glaring example of this. Throughout the episode, the 400-year-old main character John Amsterdam flashes back to an incident that happened when he was an army surgeon in the American Civil War, and a patient whose leg he had to amputate took drastic and violent action. The understanding Amsterdam gained of the "soldier's heart", which he discusses with his orderly Walt, helps him understand the current-day mystery he faces concerning psychologically troubled veterans. None of this has anything to do with what happens in the episode's last flashback, where Walt out of nowhere tells John "I want to give you a copy of this book I wrote" and hands him a book whose title page reads Leaves of Grass, revealing "Walt" to be famous poet Walt Whitman.
 * Young Indiana Jones did this constantly, because of the show's educational nature.
 * Mostly averted in Quantum Leap, where the majority of the characters Sam becomes are ordinary people—but he does run into Buddy Holly and become Lee Harvey Oswald (not in the same episode).
 * He also becomes Elvis Presley and Dr. Ruth in other episodes. And there were plenty "cameos" of famous people, like a young Michael Jackson or Sylvester Stallone.
 * As well as a teenage Stephen King, who decides to become a horror writer thanks to him.
 * And Marylin Monroe. Most of the celebrity encounters happened in the last season when they were doing everything they could to boost ratings.
 * The ancestor variant shows up when Sam leaps into his own great-grandfather, a Union general near the end of the Civil War. At the end of the episode, he talks with a newly freed slave who declares that, since being emancipated has made him feel like royalty, he will be taking the surname King. You can probably guess where this one's headed...
 * Played with in an episode of Bewitched, where Endora threatens Samantha that she'll tell Darrin about her relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh if she doesn't comply. Samantha protests that she never even met Sir Walter Raleigh, but Endora reminds her that Darrin wouldn't know that.
 * Pretty much the entire premise of Voyagers.
 * Also the entire premise of The Time Tunnel.
 * Happens fairly frequently in Forever Knight, mainly because the characters have been around for so long. In one episode, Nick encounters Joan of Arc; in another, Lacroix contemplates turning a young German soldier into a vampire, but decides the man has too much darkness in his soul (you can probably guess who he turns out to be).

Video Games

 * In Day of the Tentacle, a character gets stranded 200 years in the past. Without even leaving the house, he runs into George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Betsy Ross.
 * Which is really silly given that Jefferson wasn't even in the same country as the others at the time that this was implied to be occurring in. This is just one of the many historical errors in that game, which the programmers were aware of, They Just Didn't Care.
 * The Shadow Hearts series features a degree of the historical fiction version, with the heroes bumping into such famous historical personages as Kawashima Yoshiko (As a note, the little girl in the second game is supposed to be the historical one—the one in the first game is a wholly fictional character, who, according to the series, is the namesake of the real one), Al Capone, H.P. Lovecraft, and the Great Gama (yes, he was a real person - ask The Other Wiki). Party members over the series include Mata Hari (under her actual name, Margarete) and Princess Anastasia Romanov.
 * Lionheart, a game set in an Alternate History version of 1588, manages to have Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Tomas Torquemada, Cervantes, Nicolo Machiavelli, Hernando Cortez, and Jacques de Molay all living within a few blocks of each other in Barcelona. Nostradamus, Queen Elizabeth I, and Joan of Arc also turn up later in the game.
 * In Star Control II, a member of the Pkunk alien race (think happy-go-lucky Space Gypsies) explains why psychics always tell you that you were someone famous in a past life—only important people reincarnate. If you weren't important, influential, or otherwise historically notable, "you just kind of... cease. Isn't the universe a wacky place?" Sort of an Everyone's Past Is Someone Famous.
 * The Animus is not technically a time machine, but in Assassin's Creed Altair/Desmond winds up meeting In the interests of remaining historically accurate, he's a bit of an asshole.
 * The sequel, set in Renaissance Italy, features Leonardo da Vinci as a frequent ally, repairing your assassin tech and decoding messages from your ancestor. Ezio rubs shoulders with the likes of Lorenzo de Medici, Caterina Sforza and Niccolo Machiavelli!
 * Justified, since, according to the game, just about every famous inventor/artist/mind of the era was either an Assassin or a Templar.

Web Comics

 * We learn something interesting about Bob the Angry Flower in the strip "More Romantic Problems", concerning risky time travel, antimatter, and Julius Caesar. And a bag of chips.
 * Narbonic explained Dave meeting people he knew when he time-traveled by having him travel to his own body in the past and future—for example, when he went back twenty years, he became himself as a six-year-old.
 * Lest you think Shaenon Garrity deserves all the credit, remember that the whole arc was largely inspired by Slaughterhouse-Five.
 * Kimiko is on the receiving end of this in Dresden Codak.

Western Animation
"Professor: Where could Farnsworth have minted such a high quality fake? Benjamin Franklin: Not here, but you know, i have a friend in Boston who's an expert silver smith, they could be connected.... there's only like 40 people who do anything around here."
 * Totally describes an episode of Jem where the Misfits send the Holograms back in time to keep them from performing at a concert. The girls get sent back to the 1700s, the 40's, then the 60's, where they just happen to meet Mozart, Glenn Miller, and Jimi Hendrix (though for legal reasons, the last two are referred to as "Ben Tiller" and "Johnny Beldrix"). The Agony Booth did a recap of this one.
 * Almost every episode of the series Time Warp Trio, on the Kids' Discovery Channel, is based on this trope. Somewhat justified since they time-travel via a magic history book, which a magician uncle gave one of the trio—apparently with the idea that the kid would eventually (1) learn a lot of history and (2) learn how to steer the book.
 * This is the same for the series of stories the cartoon was based off of.
 * Lampshaded in Futurama episode "All the President's Heads".

Other

 * Combine this trope with Reincarnation, and you get Everyone From The Past Was Famous, in which a suspiciously-high proportion of believers in past lives insist that they were once famous people, or closely associated with somebody famous. Cleopatra is a classic one for women to claim as a previous incarnation.
 * The number of people who claim to have been passengers aboard the Titanic exceeds the actual passenger manifest of that ship considerably and is a MAJOR subject of contention on Titanic message boards.