In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous: Difference between revisions

** 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.

** 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 . . . {{spoiler|unless it's all in his head.}}

* 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.

* 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.

** 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.

** 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.

** 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 [[Edward Eager|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).

{{quote| '''Artemis''': "You've got some mosaics planned for the roof. You might want to rethink those. Very derivative."}}

* 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.

* 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 [[wikipedia:Alice Liddell|Alice Liddel]], [[wikipedia:Hermann G%C3%B6ring|Hermann Göring]], and [[wikipedia:Sam Clemens|Mark Twain]].

* Justified in the ''[[Never Again]]'' series of novels, as the time travelers' whole objective is to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong|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.

 

 

== Live Action TV ==

** 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").

** 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.

** This is [[Justified Trope|justified]] in the [[Star Trek]] [[Role Playing Game|RPG]] by saying that spots where [[Butterfly of Doom|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. [[Mc Coy]] would soon arrive.

** 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 {{spoiler|[[You Will Be Beethoven]], as Sisko takes the place of the martyred civil rights activist and makes the demands that lead to reforms of the Sanctuary Districts}}.

** 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.

* ''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]].

** 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. [[Civil Rights Movement|You can probably guess where this one's headed...]]

* Pretty much the entire premise of ''[[Voyagers]]''.

 

 

* 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 {{spoiler|[[Richard the Lion Heart|King Richard I.]]}} In the interests of remaining historically accurate, he's a bit of an asshole.

*** Justified, since, according to the game, just about ''every'' famous inventor/artist/mind of the era was either an [[Ancient Conspiracy|Assassin or a Templar.]]

 

 

== Western Animation ==

* 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.