In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

* ''[[The Dagger Of Kamui]]'' takes place at the end of the 19th century, and has Jiro happening to meet [[Mark Twain]] (who [[Did Not Do the Research|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.

 

* 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.

* In ''[[The Kents]]'', a 12-issue miniseries [[Retcon|detailing]] the lives of [[Superman|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.

 

 

* 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.

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

 

* 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.

* 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 [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"|"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...

* [[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, [[Richard Nixon the Used Car Salesman|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).

* Averted in the short story "The Gnarly Man" by [[L. Sprague de Camp|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 [[wikipedia:Pliny the Elder|Pliny the Elder]], [[wikipedia:Pliny the Younger|Pliny the Younger]], [[wikipedia:Emperor Titus|Emperor Titus]], [[wikipedia:Domitian|Emperor Domitian]], [[wikipedia:Gaius Valerius Flaccus|Flaccus]], [[wikipedia:Berenice (daughter of Herod Agrippa I)|Bernice]], [[wikipedia:Josephus|Josephus]] and others.

 

* 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 [[The Virus|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").

* 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 [[Adolf Hitler|turns out to be]]).

 

* 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]].

*** 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.]]

 

* We learn something interesting about ''[http://www.angryflower.com/ Bob the Angry Flower]'' in the strip [http://angryflower.com/morero.gif "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 [[Mental Time Travel|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]]''.

 

* Totally describes an episode of ''[[Jem]]'' where the [[Reed Richards Is Useless|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 [http://www.agonybooth.com/tv/Jem/Journey_Through_Time.aspx 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''.

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. }}

 

* 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.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]