This is a thread to discuss anarchronisms in period tv shows and films, as well as the times in which a tv show gets it right and portrays their respective time period dead-on. We can also discuss the rather hilarious off( and sometimes uncomfortably dead-on) predictions that tv shows had about the future, e.g. where we are now.

I suspect Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, Mash, and Little House on the Prairie have to be neck-to-neck on historial inaccuracies. Like, seriously, whenever I watched Mash I seriously thought it was supposed to be Vietnam. Hot Lips's feathered hair did nothing to dispell that.

I thoroughly enjoy how the Jetsons portrayed the 21st century...but man, I hope to god that flying cars never, ever happen. Could you imagine the amount of crashes into buildings if it did? I think 9/11 probably killed that idea for good.

We're also getting pretty close to the year 2015, which was portrayed in Back to the Future II...they were off for the most part, but what they did get right? Re-habbing old buildings for new use, as the old town hall became a shopping mall. Digital cameras. TV's where you can watch more than one screen at a time. And of course, 80's nostalgia.

Cold Case is usually pretty dead-on with portraying whatever time period they're showing. What comes to mind was an episode called the Sleepover, which was set in 1990. The clothes, slang, and attitudes were pretty dead-on for what kids were like in the early 1990's, particularly when one of the characters echoes the "Go tell a grownup" PSA ads of the late 80's/early 90's when she finds out a girl is being abused by her parents.

Anytime you look into the costuming from a show with a period episode (such as a flashback episode of Angel, guaranteed you'll get a big ole' anachronism stew. Granted the vast majority of us couldn't tell the the difference between what was stylish in the 1760's vs. the 1780's, but it was there none the less.

But my favorite anachronism (absurdism?) of all time has to be one from years ago, when I was a little kid. It can be summed up in two words: Colonial California.

The Simpsons episode Lisa's Wedding, set in 2010, mostly hasn't come true yet but there is the possiblity of a Jim Carrey film festival with his move into films like The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine, something that couldn't possibly have been imagined back then. Plus, it's hard to believe now that the Rolling Stones reunion tour was supposed to be a joke.

I was looking at Lisa's Wedding too for things. We do enjoy soy-based snacks now (though they don't come with gag-suppressants). We can use a phone to talk with someone with pictures through the internet. Most celebrities are criminals. The big things they don't get right are the robots that melt when they cry, Big Ben going digital . . . and showing Maude Flanders alive.

Don't forget camera phones, either.

I'm still waiting for us to be walking around in silver jumpsuits like they promised we would be by the year 2000 on countless tv shows. Of course, like I said before, there's no way, with our fear of terrorism, that we'd allow cars to be able to fly in the air now.


Qauntum Leap is so hilariously off-base with how they depict 1995-1999. I mean, nobody is supposed to know that time travel is possilbe, that's for sure, but the outfits are so flamboyant and veeeerrryyy 80's, which stands in stark constrast to what late 90's fashion really looked like, which tended to be much more low-key.

Boy Meets World did an episode where the gang comes back in 2006 to celebrate Feenie's retirement...they didn't dress them up all wacky, and for the most part, they didn't look like they would stand out like a sore thumb in real 2006. It could just be a testament to how well the majority of late 90's fashion stands up, though. I do think alot of what's fashionable now will look ridicolous by 2012, unlike how a person from 1999 won't really stand out all that much in 2007.

California Colonial? Somewhere, the native Americans and Spanish who inhabited Calfiornial during that time period are muttering.

The most recent Jane Eyre film, from Masterpiece Theater.

There's a scene where Jane and Rochester are lying in bed together -- on top of each other even. They were fully clothed, but still. Now, once I got past the "stupid hotness" as they call it of the scene, I was like "I wasn't aware that was allowable in Victorian times."
But I'm totally willing to forgive it because of the hotness factor. Yes, I'm shallow.

I saw some like, stupid kid tv movie about a bunch of kids who travel back in time to Old West and have an adventure. It was an enjoyably empty piece of fluff...but there was this little subplot about this teenage white guy falling for a teenage black girl....and *no one* reacts to it.

Right. In the 1800's, everyone was just fine with interracial teenage couples. Sure.

I know it was just a kid fluff piece, but that seriously pissed me off. I know the West was little more edgy than the East, and people tended to go over the social mores of the time, but there's no freaking way that people wouldn't have been horrified at the thought of a white guy dating a black girl.

Plus, they also kissed, which is something that no self-respecting girl would have allowed with a boy she just met. It just did not happen.

In most upper class marriages in the Victorian era, it was ill-advised to even see your marriage partner naked, so ... well, there you go. And yet, babies still got made.

However, I wanted to comment on the use of a sort of Quiji Board type thing in one scene. Weren't Quiji boards invented by the Spiritualist movement in the very late 1800's/early 1900's?

And as far as flying cars go, stop with all the negativity about them! If we do not have flying cars, then how the heck will we know when the future has arrived? Well, perhaps by the video phones everywhere ... oh wait ... cell phones have replaced that idea, huh?

Yeah, they were.

Okay, I finally got around to seeing all of Shakespeare in Love...and wow. I had no clue that Shakespheare was hottie with a nicely defined body, a perfectly manicured beard, a full head of hair, and such.

It makes me appreciate the fact that Mary McDonell was willing to go for realism by not shaving off her underarm hair when she did Dances With Wolves, but then again, she also had this nicely feathered 80's hairdo.

And in the immortal words of Alison Anigram from LHOTP, "Yes...Micheal Landon was a poor dirt farmer...with a $137 Beverly Hills Haircut."

Don't forget that magical salon that must have existed in Walnut Grove, as pratically every young boy and man had perfectly feathered hair that in no way would be possible to maintain without lots of shampoo, conditioning, and blowdrying.

Oh, the '70s were awful for period hair -- Joanie Cunningham and Hot Lips Houlihan would have you believe feathering was all the rage in the '50s.

(psst - MA05, theatrical movies are off-topic, that's why the mods changed the thread name)

On the other hand, Quantum Leap was right on the money with costumes and setting in the past. Even with a couple of anachronistic missteps (like having the Twin Towers exist during the Sixties), each episode was its own period piece with appropriate soundtrack.

Well, the Twin Towers were being built, but yeah, they weren't finished until 1973.

And you're right. One thing I thought was *really* cool was when they would do episodes from the early/mid 80's. You would think, because it was a recent era for them, that they would probably slack off a little and not pay as much attention to detail, but the 1981 episode called Another Mother really nailed early 80's fashion, I think, especially with the daughter's hair, and the son's love interest's look. Of course, you can't watch the DVD's and hear the orignal music now, so that detail gets lost.

Now it seems to have been passed on to Cold Case...which doesn't involve time travel, but it does involve flashbacks to different time periods. I also think the show is good at showcasing subltle little differences in time periods that are a little bit before ours- like a 1997 episode called Rampage. They *nailed* the late 90's teen queen look with the sweater set and the pagent hair ala Cordelia Chase. And they did a good job of showing the Grunge era in an ep called Detention...the "grungey kids" with the flannel and the grunge girl in messed up eye makeup was dead-on like my sister and her friends in that era, and the summer dress and turtleneck/a-line skirt with tights look they had one girl in seemed just about right for a preppy in 1994.

On the other hand, I thought Reunion was absolutely horrible in showcasing what the 80's looked like, and they didn't really seemed to get dead on with the period they were setting it until the last episode they aired, which was set in 1994. One thing I noticed the most about it would be that they would jettison some of the more unflattering aspects of late 80's fashion in favor of getting something that was a little more neutral, but far less authentic to the period.

Seriously, wearing a polo with its collar popped or leggings, a cropped tee, and a side ponytail do not instantly make you look like you're in the 1980's.

I remember an episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody where they moved the characters to colonial times. Of course, no one commented on the presence of a Hispanic man, a Black man, and an Asian girl, and they weren't treated any differently because of their race.

Also: I had always assumed that since London is clearly of Asian ethnicity, either her family was Asian (either whole or in part) or else she was adopted. But according to this episode, she has an ancestor who looked just like her and lived in colonial America, which strikes me as, well, highly implausible.

The pilot of Will & Grace had the main characters on the phone with each other discussing that they couldn't believe ER was still on and that George Clooney was coming back. In the last episode, they fast-forwarded 20 years in the future ... and included a conversation in which they were discussing that they couldn't believe ER was still on and that George Clooney was coming back. I thought that was pretty clever.

And if you think about it, it's looking more an more plausible that ER could be on for thirty years. Ugh. That show will not.freaking.die.

I was okay with the fact that they didn't really try and go overboard with making the characters look all futuristic in the last episode. They just dressed them in "classic clothing", avoided name brands, and I bet in 2025 or whatever, they probably won't look all that bad. Just like how okay the Boy Meets World characters looked when they flashed to 2006.

One really nice touch in the short-lived Century City was how they had their characters have rather plausible names for the time they were born in. One character was named Hannah, and that's a pretty damn good choice(but not the obvious one) for a woman who would have been born in the late 1980's. Names like Lukkass(funky spelling) and Taylor also seemed in keeping with trends that are popular with babies now. I wish the show had lasted longer...it would have been a kick to see senior citizens with names like Jason, Amy, and Jennifer, and middle aged people with names like Tiffany, Amber, Ashley, Caitlyn, Meghan, and Heather.

And would also occasionally give a man-perm to a rugged individual like Isaiah Edwards.

You were kind of supposed to think that. When the original movie was made (on which the TV series was based) there is a subtitle saying "Korea, 1950" right at the beginning but other than that they NEVER mention Korea again. Robert Altman wanted the movie to be a comment about the Vietnam War, but the only way he could get it approved was to make it about Korea... but he made sure Korea was never mentioned so people would subconsciously connect it with Vietnam. Later episodes of the TV series (mostly the ones in which Alan Alda had a hand in direction or writing) were said to be allegories for the Vietnam War or war in general.

MASH also has a famous anachronism in Season 1 - they had a black character named Spearchucker Jones, but got rid of him after a few episodes when it was discovered that there were no black doctors in MASH units in Korea.

I always found that interesting, since my grandfather is a Korean War vet, and he once told me that he thought MASH (the TV show) was pretty representative of his experiences there. I think it was partly all the episodes about cold weather (he says Korea is the coldest place he's ever been), and partly because his job was similar to Radar's, and they spent so much time on all the crazy paperwork and regulations. So even with some of the anachronisms, they seem to have the general feel right.

Is there a different thread for best flashbacks? I don't want to confuse the two topics.

Well, as someone mentioned, Cold Case is 95% accurate with it's flashbacks--the music, the clothes, the hairstyles, the sociopolitical environment and trends (which no doubt contributed to the victim's murder). Even the flashbacks are presented in a manner that represents the time period--the hand-held home movie look in the early 90's sleepover, the sepia-toned 1920's, etc.

At the same time. . .

Every so often, they mess up with the "future" casting. The episode "Sandhogs" centered around a murder from the 1940's, but only one of the present-day characters looked 80-something (as they would have to be). The killer looked barely into his 60's!

And the problem with the more "recent" episodes--where the murder was only 1-5 years ago--is that the principle characters haven't aged much, so we get these completely unnecessary and ineffective "then & now" flashbacks.

Good point. I watched Cold Case the other day, and the flashbacks were so recent that I kept getting confused as to whether or not I was seeing the character today or earlier. It hardly seemed worth the trouble. (Finally I figured out with one character that flashback-character had messier hair. Big difference!)

One thing that's always really annoyed me in movies/TV shows set in the past is the assumption that all people in that decade dressed in up-to-date styles, when in reality, in every era there are lots of people who dress years behind the times. Right now I could go out in my area and find you people dressed in 80's clothing they've held onto for years. Some of them are still wearing their 80's hairdos! Granted, these aren't usually young people, but still... and if that's true today, it was probably even more true years ago when the average person was far less likely to be up on the latest trends.

When I say this, I'm thinking of 50's shows, where all teens wear poodle skirts and bobby skirts. (If they're girls.) All women walk around their homes in shirtwaist dresses and stockings, and all young men have slicked-back pompadours. I'm positive that plenty of 50's people were dressing like it was still 1939. And plenty of people in 1899 were dressing like it was 1849. (Not that I was there. I'm just guessing, you understand.)

That's very true, but the purpose of flashbacks on shows like Cold Case is to get a feel on that time period, and a very "this is what was contemporary" for the time. Yeah, you have people wearing 1986 stuff in 1993, but if the episode is set in 1993, having people walk around in popped collars and feathered hair kinda kills that "we're in 1993" feeling.



There might be, but I'm not sure. This isn't really about "best flashbacks", though flashbacks can be brought in. It's about how shows have depicted either the past or the future, through either flashbacks, flashforwards, or being a period show, and whether or not they got certain things right. Like whenever Quantum Leap would depict what was then the "future" year of 1999= wrong, or when Cold Case does an episode, it's usually dead-on.

Any American Dreams fans? I thought the show was pretty awesome with how well they depicted the 1960's, but they did have issues with playing songs that weren't released in whatever year they were supposed to be playing. The original pilot had them playing "Let It Be" during an montage set to JFK's funeral. Also, American Bandstand wasn't in Philly by 1965. Helen, though she told a co-worker that he should seek help with being gay , which was wrong, the fact that she didn't shun him completely seemed weird for a middle-aged devout Catholic woman in 1965.

Also, I remember around the mid/late second season, Meg got her hair straighted out into this style...kinda layered...that looked totally inaccurate for the period. I remember there being alot of bitching in the American Dreams thread about how un-period Meg looked.

That really drove me nuts. Did they get the date right for the arrival of the Beatles? I'm afraid I missed that ep.


I didn't like that either. They should have styled it like Roxy's.

The girls on Happy Days had 70's hair. I spotted Dorathy Hamil haircuts and a few with angel wings.

That reminds me of a bit I appreciated in Deadwood, after Alma Garrett and Seth Bullock have finished gettin' it on. She's lying back on the bed, looking like the proverbial cat after the proverbial cream, with her arms over her head. And her armpits are decidedly hairy. At first I went "Whoah!", then I realized "Duh, even ladies probably didn't shave back then, especially in the Old West."

I think in the TV series they weren't really trying for the 'social commentary on Vietnam' angle; and it was only after Alan Alda took over that it became very 'preachy' about the evils of war. Prior to that it was just a comedy. - admittedly, a black comedy with some pretty serious moments, but a comedy nonetheless. I remember reading somewhere that Altman didn't like what they did with the TV series. (I, on the other hand, loved it...)

When I read this, "MASH also has a famous anachronism in Season 1 - they had a black character named Spearchucker Jones, but got rid of him after a few episodes when it was discovered that there were no black doctors in MASH units in Korea," I thought, eh? I swear I've seen mention of a black doctor in a M*A*S*H while doing some Korea War research.



http://www.koreanwar-educator.org/memoirs/...arold/index.htm

Let's hope the real issue was having an African American man called 'Spearchucker'.

All war is hell; don't need to hide Viet Nam in Korea. But I think they used the Korea War, as an earlier 'containment of Communism' to show how damn stupid and life-wasting the next attempt was in Viet Nam.

It wasn't just Hot Lips' hair. There was Hawkeye's tossled long '70's hair, BJ's '70's porn star mustache, etc. I've always wondered if the stars had it put in their contract that they got to do whatever they wanted with their hair. After all, how'd you like to go around with a typical hairstyle of the '50's for 10 years, particularly during the floppy hair era that was the late '70's?

Apparently he was (in the novels) called 'Spearchucker' because of his javelin throwing skills. Uh huh. According to this article they got rid of the character because there were no African-American doctors in the US Army in Korea... but PaintStickConvert's link would suggest otherwise. Don't tell me this is one more bit of trivia I'll have to lose?? My store of useless information is decreasing...

Yeah, along with the lovely late 70s/early 80s hair, Loretta Swit also had her teeth capped somewhere along the way. Her smile changed completely - man, those Army dentists are good!

This just in ... Wikipedia is sometimes not accurate. (A good place to start, but not perfect.) And I believe they referred to the javelin expertise in the TV show as well.

Both the movie and the tv series MASH were based on the book. The author was a surgeon from Maine who served in Korea. He has writing credits on both the movie and the tv series. The first few episodes of the series follow the book incredibly closely (that's where the character names originated, too), including the existence of Spearchucker Jones and the whole Ho-John plot in the pilot. (The book is a quick, interesting read; I recommend it.)

In the pilot, they even called Father Mulcahey "Dego Red", and got him to "put a fix in", which is straight from the book. (Not to mention the later episode with Ned Beatty as Mulcahey's superior, who wrote a letter to a patient's family saying how well he was doing just before he dies of his wounds. (The patient's wounds, not Beatty.) That was straight from the book, although it was the Protestant chaplain who sent the letter.)

Anyways, back on track....

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the flashbacks on The Simpsons. The timeframe kept changing, but I thought they were fairly accurate. (And I loved the way Dr. Hibbart's hair kept changing every time.) :)

I've heard a rumour to that effect... ;-)

Larry Gelbart has mentioned the Spearchucker/no African-American doctors thing in interviews too, as have members of the cast (although they probably got the information from Gelbart); I just couldn't find any of them online. They're probably floating around on a commentary somewhere. But anyway, looks like he was wrong.

Yeah, Marge and Homer went from having had their courtship in the mid-1970's to having it in the latter '80's, right? I remember the one ep where Lisa was a baby in 1986 or something, and Homer starts a barbershop quartet, and he tries to get an idea for lyrics. Marge shows him a Baby on Board sign, and that gives him an idea...I didn't know it then, but that was apparently a huge craze for the parents of us mid-80's babies.

That 70's Show was a treasure chest of anachronisms. One that jumped out at me was when Fes was saying something about his "juice box". Juice boxes didn't come out until 1982. Also, their use of the word "so" was much more 90's+, as in "That language is so not 70s!"

I loved the "Six Feet Under" finale. Claire lives to be 102 and she's not living in a spaceship.

No, I'm positive juice boxes had to have been around at least by the late 1970's. In the original "When A Stranger Calls", which was filmed in 1979, there's a little scene where the babysitter takes out a juice box.

But yeah, I thought the show was hilariously inaccurate in the way they talked. They said "like" way too much...a little too Valley Girl-like, which would have been around in the very late 1970s, but not in Wisconsin. Valley Girl talk wouldn't catch on with the rest of the country until at least 1982-ish. I was always waiting for one of the gang to say, "Like..wow. That was totally awesome!"

Speaking of inaccurate late 70's vernacular, I remember 2 different episodes of Cold Case, set in the late 1970's. In both, they use the word "hot" to mean sexy, such as 'you're really hot' or 'that dance was really hot', and I'm pretty sure that wasn't a popular way to use the word 'hot' in the 1970's. I could be wrong, though.

Another major Cold Case anachronism I can think of was the 1995 episode called "Rampage". One of the subplots is that these group of boys were online gaming this violent simulation game...in 1995. Right. I'm pretty sure online gaming rpg didn't really hit until 1997 or 1998. It would have made more sense if they were talking about Mortal Combat or something, or just set the episode in 1998.

As best I could find, juice boxes were introduced in the US in or around 1980, although some other products were packed in aseptic brick-shaped boxes before that. But they weren't terribly common until the early 80's.

'Hot' was definitely already in use to mean 'sexy' by the mid 70's, but 'foxy' was about equally as common.

Online gaming goes way back; the very first MUD was put out in 1978! Neverwinter Nights was introduced in 1991 and Wolfenstein 3-D (a first-person shooter) in 1992; Doom came out in 1993; Quake and QuakeWorld were both released in 1996. If the characters in Cold Case were geeky, online RPGaming was time-appropriate.

You're quite right about Valley-speak, Method Actor. While it may have been in use in California in the 70's, it didn't really spread to the rest of the country until 1982, when Frank Zappa released "Valley Girl".

I grew up in Wisconsin and was 14 in 1979. Juice boxes didn't appear until the early '80s. (Was "When a Stranger Calls" made or produced in Europe? They got juice boxes much earlier, and milk in aseptic boxes a good decade or more earlier than in the US.) Valley Speak had started to crop up by 1981, at least around me, but that may be because we had a California "exchange student" at my high school. Hot meant hot already in the '70s -- but there was also a real shift in slang in the late '70s, around '77, that shifted again by '81 at the latest, though I'll need time and some yearbook crawling to nail down specifics :)

I'm finally getting around to transferring old soaps onto DVD--yeah, yeah--and I came across this hysterical scene from General Hospital in early 1990. Rich boy Ned Ashton receives a cell phone call in the local diner, Kelly's. Now mind you, it's a huge, regular sized receiver in his briefcase, but it's still a mobile phone. All the salt of the earth characters laugh and point, one even says, "Who'd want to have your phone calls following you everywhere? Who needs to talk to everyone so much?"

If only she knew, if only she knew.

One that gets me on That 70's Show was the fact that they had a plastic--PLASTIC--bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's! Now, having lived through that time (although I don't remember it), plastic bottles were quite uncommon for pancake syrup, soda, etc. As recently as 7 or 8 years ago, you could still buy Karo Syrup in glass bottles.

What year was it supposed to be when Red bought the VCR? 1977? (I'm assuming it was, since they wanted to tape "Roots"). If I remember correctly, I've seen a VCR from 1977. It was a top loading machine, but it also had to weigh at least 30 pounds and you changed the channels by turning a DIAL! You most certainly couldn't put it on top of the TV as I think they did. Hell, the one we got in 1982 weighed in at a mere 25 pounds and came with an "ultra-modern" WIRED remote. Nothing like taping a show and having someone come by and trip over the remote wire. Good times, good times.....

Details, people! Details! It's not that hard to look up things such as slang, what things looked like, etc. Isn't that something they pay people for?

I was 21 in 1979, so things like Hi-C and Ssips had already long fallen off my radar, which is why I can't be certain exactly when boxed drinks came out. And I was in Alabama, so, not much California influence.


Here's what a late 70's VCR looked like This one is a Panasonic, but they all would have been roughly the same size, shape, and weight. (Here's a print ad for the RCA that came out in October of '77 -- technically, it was the very first home VCR in the US.)

There are two things that make that whole plot anachronistic, though. One can be quibbled: the RCA was $1000 new, the Panasonic, 5 times that much. Where did those kids scrounge up a grand for a VCR? The other one can't be: The first VCR for home use was sold in October of 1977. Roots aired in January of 1977. Houston, we have a problem, and it can't be fanwanked away...

Reminds me of something else I saw on "Cold Case". The detectives were reviewing the notes on a murder from the late 80's/early 90's and one of the younger guys wondered why whoever reported the murder called from a pay phone. One of the older detectives (the oldest in the group, in fact, able to remember some of the cases from when they actually happened and even investigated one of them himself), laughingly reminds him that cell phones either didn't exist back then, or that only the rich could afford them.

Where I was living at the time, those suitcase-sized mobile phones were seen as a highly desirable status symbol by some people (to the extent that there were fake antennas sold that you could stick to your car's roof to make it look like you had one even if you didn't,) and unbelievably pretentious by lots of others.

That's funny. In '03, I was getting interviewed by a guy in his mid/late twenties who owned the resturant I was trying to get a job in. I gave him my cell number, and he was all, "Wow, high school kids have cell phones?" I was like, "Man, I got my cell phone in 8th grade, around 2000/2001. Everyone in 8th grade had cell phones." lol

I just got done watching an episode of Cold Case set in 1996. In a flashback to 1996, you see police type up a report on a typewriter...like an old-fashioned, manual typewriter. That just seemed...wrong. I know they don't get the best of budgets, but you would think they would have at least had one of those old mac's from 1989 or something.

Were you living in an area with a big Asian population? When I was 10 or so (circa 1990), I saw like three guys with huge cell phones at a Chinese restaurant (and the phones were tucked in their belts too)

On hairstyles on TV: You seem to be able to tell what decade a period tv show was made by the hairstyle.

A lot of places would still have typewriters then, since the cops would be more familiar with them rather than a computer. I worked at OSHA several years ago and while I had a computer, they still had typewriters for some people.



If the Discovery Channel program 2057 is to be believed, not really. They had a futurist on there talking about how everyone would have flying cars in 50 years (yeah right) and that not only would they be able to fly, but humans wouldn't have to operate them at all. It would all be done by a computer and there would be some set course they would follow.

Its not even about cost. When I first started law school in 2001, there were still many things that you had to type up on a type writer to file because those documents did not exist electronically.

Yes and no. University city, seat of government, lots of big corporation headquarters. Good-sized Asian population, too, but it was more the chasm between mostly university-affiliated, very green, very much tree-huggers and mostly corporate, very money- and class- conscious conspicuous consumers.



Yeah, right. There's no such thing as a computer malfunction and nobody will ever want to go anyplace that isn't in the program. Hah. (Not directed at you, brighid. Directed at the "futurist".

Assuming this fits the category:

When a show does a "let's fly into the future" episode, they risk harming their own canon, so I have to give The Simpsons props for the "Lisa's Wedding" episode they did set 20 years in the future. On two occasions, Maggie is about to speak but both times she is prevented from speaking -- once because Marge scolds her for talking with her mouth full, and another time because the wedding is interrupted before she is about to sing. I thought that was very clever of the writers.

Litigious lawyers did it long before then. :-)

I always get a good laugh about clean everything is depicted in the Old West on TV.

Sort of like Prue still being alive in the one of the many "future" episodes, right? And I could have sworn that they said Piper's first child would be a girl.

Or Albert growing up to become a doctor after he got addicted to morphine, but before Micheal Landon forced Melissa Gilbert to scream, "My brother is going to die! My brother is going to die!"

Of course, we could go all, "The future isn't set in stone!" ala Doc Brown.

Getting back to Little House on the Prarie....

Wow, it sure it nice that they were able to get telephones out there, in the 1870's and early 1880's. Or Nellie getting her hands on a phonograph, as the daughter of small merchant in the middle of nowhere.

There's gotta be more(I won't even get into how they made up Mary getting married and have a baby that gets charboiled), but eh.