Newspaper Dating: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:NewspaperDateDrMN-scaled.jpg|link=The Adventures of Dr. McNinja|frame|[[Worst News Judgment Ever|Slow news day much?]]]]

 

A [[Time Travel]]er may not want to confuse random passers-by by asking them [[What Year Is This?]]. So they'll find a newspaper or other conveniently dated artifact instead. A standard joke has one character using the architecture, the fashions, the technology and the incidents on TV to come up with a guess at the year, only for someone else to correct them after reading the paper.

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' does a somewhat serious take on the joke version of this: In order to demonstrate the extent of her remaining memory after waking from a cold-sleep, Faye identifies a series of slightly futuristic-looking objects on the table next to her. Her lawyer then makes a point of showing her just how far into the future she's been thrown by demonstrating that the items are not a TV, a water pitcher, and a phone but rather a miniature washing machine, a device for washing faces, and a thermometer.

* A more short term version appears in ''[[Mahou Sensei Negima]].'' {{spoiler|Chao}} sends Negi and his friends a week into the future to the point that she has already won the battle. They realize something is up (the massive [[School Festival]] has disappeared), but they don't figure out what happened until Yue sees the date on a newspaper. Chisame finds out separately over the internet.

 

* Played with in the ''[[Blake and Mortimer]]'' book ''The Time Trap'': Mortimer finds himself alone in a post apocalyptic future. He finds an inscription in some ruins reading "2015-2050" and thus believes himself to be in the mid 21st century...until he meets someone else and mentions the date only to be informed he's actually in ''5060'': the ruins he was in were of a city destroyed in 2075.

* The protagonist of ''The Big Lie'' from [[Image Comics]] (a book about the events of 9/11) does this at the start of the story, discovering she has arrived several days earlier than she intended.

 

 

* In ''[[Idiocracy]]'', Joe (and the viewer) finds out what year he's in by seeing a magazine cover<ref>(''Hot Naked Chicks & World Report'')</ref> dated 2505 (which he thinks is a misprint), and then a receipt that confirms the date on the magazine.

* Marty does this in the first and second ''[[Back to The Future]]'' movies.

* A variation occurs in ''[[Field of Dreams]],'' where Ray figures out he's walked back into 1979 by checking the registration date on a Minnesota license plate.

* In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it [[Funny Background Event]] in ''[[Hot Fuzz]]'', one of the security tapes Nicholas Angel is reviewing has a suspect hold up a newspaper, quite blatantly showing it to the camera to establish that it wasn't filmed later, despite the [[Fridge Logic]].

* In ''[[50 First Dates]]'', a character with short-term memory loss doesn't know what year it is, until she sees a newspaper. This is the result of her father arranging for hundreds of copies of the newspaper from the day of her accident, to keep her from having to deal with it for as long as possible

 

* Played with in ''[[To Say Nothing of the Dog]]'' by [[Connie Willis]]. The main character needs to find out the exact date he landed in order to correctly fulfill his [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]] mission. He finds a newspaper, but doesn't realize that it's several days old...

** Connie Willis does this again in ''Blackout''. A time traveler finds half a newspaper and tries to use it to figure out the date. First it turns out to be the half that doesn't have the date printed on it, so he has to use his knowledge of history to correlate the stories in the paper with the date. After he manages to figure it out, he starts talking to people, and through a series of conversational missteps realizes that the paper is again several days older than he thought it was.

* Used in novels 5 through 7 of [[Stephen King]]'s [[Dark Tower]] series

* Variation in ''[[Animorphs]]'': Jake, while trapped in a post-apocalyptic New York City, tries to determine when humanity lost by the dates in a bombed-out magazine stand.

* ''[[Around the World in Eighty Days]]'' has what might be considered a non-time-travel aversion, in that Phileas Fogg apparently never checks the date on a newspaper after crossing the Pacific. Had he done so he would have realised that {{spoiler|he had gained a day after crossing the International Date Line}}.

 

* In the ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'' episode "Spectre of the Gun", Captain Kirk finds a copy of the Tombstone Epitaph dated October 26, 1881. On YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP03eWhP-vI here], starting at 5:30.<ref>On Blu-Ray, you can read the articles. They're not from 1881. Given that they're not ''really'' in the Old West, this kinda works.</ref>

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'':

** He also does it when he is raised from the dead in "Lazarus Rising" due to time flowing much slower in Hell than on Earth.

* An episode of ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' has a variation. A group think they have been transported to an alien planet, but gradually figure out they are in the distant future. A look at the expiration date of a discarded candy bar wrapper confirms this. (By no means accurate, but close enough for their purposes).

* Subverted in an episode of ''[[3rd Rock from the Sun]]''. Dick, who already thinks he's losing his mind, is in a doctor's waiting room filled with, of course, old magazines. After rifling through them, he panics, declaring "Oh my god, it's 1994!" (The episode aired in 1997 in case you were wondering.)

* Subverted in ''[[Red Dwarf]]'', "Backwards" - the date on the newspaper was 3991, but by that point Kryten had realized that everything was backwards, so the actual year was 1993.

* This shows up in the ''[[Charmed]]'' episode "That '70s Episode", when the protagonists time-travel [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|back to the 1970s]].

 

* In ''Timesplitters: Future Perfect'', Cortez picks up a photo of the [[Big Bad]]. The [[Mission Control]] proposes a complex scheme to determine when/where to send Cortez to, regarding the building heights and designs. Cortez waits through the speech, then reads out the date, time and place from the back of the photo.

* Deliberately subverted in ''The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure'', because newspapers only say what day of which month it is, not the year. Other documents that do suggest dates by year are wildly contradictory (e.g. a book given as a signed gift in the 1950s, yet published in 1978).

 

* Parodied in ''[[The Adventures of Dr. McNinja]]''. The time traveler in question looks at a newspaper to see what year it is, and, well... [http://drmcninja.com/archives/comic/17p29/ see for yourself.]

* Invoked in [http://superredundant.com/?comic=1192-brave-old-world this strip] when the [[League Of Super Redundant Heroes]] are time travelling uncontrollably.

'''Alex''': In my defense, [[Star Wars]] doesn't have time travel ''or'' newspapers, so how would I know?}}

 

* In ''[[X-Men (animation)|X-Men]]'', when Bishop time-travels he simply picks up a newspaper and reads the date off the front page.

* On the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short "The Old, Grey Hare", Elmer is sent to [[Zeerust|the far-off year of 2000 A.D.]], which he figures out from a conveniently placed newspaper. He also learns that, among other things, television has been replaced by smellovision.