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{{trope}}
{{quote|''"Scientists are saying that the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted!"''
|'''Krysta Now''', ''[[Southland Tales]]''}}
You're making a movie set in a recent time, say [[The Nineties]]. Well, that's not long ago enough to make for a period film, is it? This apparently means it's okay for Alice to listen to Miley Cyrus on an iPod and for Bob (or more likely, someone in the background) to drive around in a 2006 Honda Accord. After all, it's ''practically'' [[The Present Day]], right?
This trope is when, while making a story set during the recent past, the contemporary culture of the production seeps in, creating an [[Anachronism Stew]]. It varies whether this becomes more obvious or less in the ensuing years. Most period works are [[Anachronism Stew
The [[Bellisario's Maxim]] can sometimes be applied with regard to location shoots and incorrect background details. Sometimes there just isn't time or money to get ''everything'' right. Still, it's fun to spot them...
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Contrast [[Popular History]] and [[Two Decades Behind]].
{{examples}}▼
▲{{examples}}
== Comic Books ==
* ''[[Superman: Birthright]]'' (2003) was supposed to be the [[Retcon|new canonical]] [[Super-Hero Origin]] of the Man of Steel, who in the ongoing books has been Superman for "[[Comic Book Time|about ten years]]". It includes instant messaging and the Department of Homeland Security.
** Of course, [[Comic Book Time]] can smooth these problems over. When John Byrne wrote [[The Man of Steel|the previous origin]], he had Jonathan Kent talking about Sputnik in 1956. By the time it got retconned this had
== Fan Works ==
* Frequently found in fics for older properties written by younger fans. The classic example from anime fandom would be a ''[[Ranma ½]]'' fic in which Nabiki has a laptop computer with Internet access. (''Ranma'' is set circa 1989, plus or minus about a year -- the closest thing Nabiki has to a computer is a pocket calculator.)
* ''[[In The Dark]]'', [[Spice Girls]]/[[Backstreet Boys]], has the usage of Skype and TMZ despite the story taking place in 1998.
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* ''[[Behind Enemy Lines]]'' is at the end of the Bosnian War, which was in late 1995. However early in the film there was a reference to wanting to be with [[Britney Spears]], who had not yet risen to prominence at the time, and a character yells out "WILSON!" when a football flies off an aircraft carrier deck, a reference to ''Castaway'' which also had not yet been released.
* ''[[The Hurt Locker]]'' was made in 2009, but set in 2004. The movie features, among other things:
** [[Gears of War]] (released in 2006) being played on an [[
** References to [[YouTube]] (which launched late in 2005)
** Soldiers wearing new digital pattern camouflage uniforms (introduced in 2005, didn't really become standard until 2007).
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* ''[[Milk]]'' has a bit of an inversion, the film is mostly set in 1978 and includes a scene at a baptism at a Catholic church where all the women are wearing some type of ceremonial headcovering. While this used to be common place for women in a Catholic church, this practice largely went away in the early 70s and is unlikely to have been the case at this event in 1978.
* ''[[The Social Network]]'' takes place in late 2003 and 2004, yet many of the visible laptops clearly are from the modern day. Somewhat ironically in a bit of an inversion they mostly appear to be Windows 98, even though XP had been out for several years at that time and would no doubt be more standard among such a tech-savvy crowd.
** Considering however that [https://web.archive.org/web/20100220125042/http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-nov03.html about 30 percent of devices accessing Google in late 2003 ran on Windows 95/98], its not unrealistic to assume many computers around this time would still be running the OS, to some this may be a case of [[Reality Is Unrealistic|unrealistic reality]].
** Also in one scene students are shown clearly playing ''[[Fallout 3]]'', which in 2003 was trapped in [[Development Hell]] and was widely believed to have been [[Lost Forever]], and ultimately wasn't released until 2008.
* On the DVD commentary for ''[[The Godfather]]'' director Francis Ford Coppola points out two longhaired hippie-looking men in the background inside the hotel when Michael arrives in Las Vegas in what's supposed to be the early Fifties.
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** Although considering the [[Mind Screw]] nature of the film, this is probably deliberate. Or it might not be the 60s after all, it's never outright stated.
* ''[[The Big Lebowski]]'' was made in 1999 but takes place in 1990, mainly so there can be [[Faux Symbolism|meaningless allusions to the Gulf War]] like the Dude saying "This aggression will not stand" and having a dream with Saddam Hussein as a bowling alley attendant. There's a possible flaw in this; there's a scene where Jesus Quintana, a registered sex offender, has to identify himself to his neighbors as such. While California did have a sex offender registration at the time, notifying the public of local sex offenders wasn't made a big deal until the passage of various forms of Megan's Law in 1994 onward.
== Literature ==
* In the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' books, the internal chronology dates the events of Harry's time at Hogwarts to the 1990s. The only notable anachronism in the books is a mention of Dudley owning a [[
** The fifth movie, when Harry is taking Dudley home, clearly shows the car numberplate "MA 06 KBH" in the background, and the "06" means it's part of the February 2006 issue ("56" would have meant August 2006). A little later, flying to his trial at the Ministry of Magic, Harry passes a completed Canary Wharf development (in the book's year of 1995, even 1 Canada Square (the skyscraper with the pyramidal roof) hadn't been built yet) and the London Eye (not erected until autumn 1999). Oyster Cards (2003) also featured briefly. According to which fans you believe, these are either glaring anachronisms which detract from the film, or evidence that the film has been updated to our time.
** The movies are also filled with noughties fashion- what the characters wear when dressed as Muggles - it's not glaring, and hard to describe, but an obvious example would be the wide-horizontal-stripes jumpers (a bit like [http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:l7gsiEBXaPSSkM:http://www.couturecandy.com/store/assets/fashionchateau/generra/GEN0148-fnt.jpg&t=1 this]{{Dead link}}) that Hermione and Ron kept wearing in the sixth one - hot at the time of filming, not really around in the nineties.
** The main issue with these inconsistencies is Voldermort's father's grave in ''The Goblet of Fire'' has a death date of 1944, which ''is'' in line with the book canon; Voldemort killed Riddle Sr. "50 years ago [before 1994]".
** This is taken to incredibly ridiculous levels in [[
* [[Charles Dickens]]' ''[[The Pickwick Papers]]'' was set in 1827-28, but was written in 1836-37. Dickens seemed to forget this at times. (At one point Mr. Jingle mentions he has written an epic poem about the July Revolution in France; in the next edition of the novel Dickens added a footnote to the effect that Jingle must be a prophet, since the Revolution happened in ''1830''.)
** Likewise ''[[The Old Curiosity Shop]]'' is set around 1824-26 and was written 1840-41. At one point a lawyer is described as "one of Her Majesty's attornies", but [[Queen Victoria]] wasn't crowned until 1837; it should have been "His Majesty", referring to George IV.
* The novel ''Brat Farrar'' by [[Josephine Tey]] was published in 1949, and mentions British characters going on holiday to France eight years
* Silvia Avallone in his best-selling (in Italy at least) debut novel ''[http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acciaio_(romanzo)-link Acciaio]'' ("Steel" - about two girls growing up in a decaying industrial town) does this constantly, forgetting that the events take place in 2001, and the book is thick with annoying anachronisms (which could have been averted with some simple internet checks) like the presence of [[wikipedia:Porsche Cayenne-link|Porsche Cayenne]] (distributed only since 2003), a famous (real) steel company that was not sold to Russian investors till 2004 and many others.
* As pointed out by [[Kim Newman]] in the afterword to ''[[Anno Dracula]]'', [[Bram Stoker]]'s ''[[Dracula (novel)|Dracula]]'' (1897) is an [[Epistolary Novel]] set seven years before Harker's coda ("Seven years ago, we all went through the flames"), and yet uses 1890s terms like "New Woman", and has a somewhat anachronistic phonograph (they existed, but weren't common, and most still used tinfoil cylinders rather than wax).
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* ''[[Happy Days]]'' is a borderline case. It never quite forgot that it was set in [[The Fifties]], (and had made it into the early [[The Sixties|Sixties]] by the end) but they got ''really'' lazy about not letting [[The Seventies]] seep in.
** Ditto its spinoff, ''[[Laverne and Shirley]]''.
* ''[[
** Additionally, haircuts that were in style in the 1970s and 1980s appear in the show, but these haircuts were not what the characters would have worn, or by anyone in the Army at any point in the twentieth century.
*** Not to mention the constant use of trucks from the 1954 model year.
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** This is especially odd because ''The Sims 1'', which takes place in between the two games, has a distinct 1970s aesthetic (and still with then-modern technology).
** ''The Sims 3'' seems to be trying to go for the [[World War 2]] era feel, however everything is distinctly late 2000s. Considering the world is set in a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]], we can let it mostly slide.
* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker]]'', set in 1974,
== Web Original ==
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